Can you go more in depth about the culture of Amazon?
It's a huge company -- I don't know how 99% of it operates. I worked in a fairly large organization (3000-5000) and got paid six figures to do almost nothing. Easily 95% of our work was complete, utter waste. Everywhere I looked, work was being slurped up by its own simulation.
- Wrote a training module that no one ever uses? Great, another bullet point for the promo doc.
- Some lackey from corporation X phones in (pay rate = .5x mine), asking about an unsupported product? No problem: spend an hour looking into it. Escalate. Get the product manager involved (pay rate = 3x mine). Loop in the engineers (pay rate = 2x mine). Bounce the inquiry across three messaging mediums, no, make that seven. Whatever you do, don't get a one-star response! Oh, he already rated? No matter, get it expunged after review from the "team lead" (read: intrateam censor). Have a senior engineer call him (pay rate = 1.5x mine) back -- nevermind that he hasn't a clue about this domain (and is at least 2-5 hours behind you in research), has no interest in the matter, and has a backlog of seventy more highly-prioritized tasks!
- Decisions are "data-driven", remember? That means: you find a number. You speak that number whenever someone challenges you. If they rejoin with their own number, bring out your second number. Whoever runs out of numbers first loses -- so have as many as you need, but no more. The other fifty relevant numbers? Forget about em.
- Use key performance indicators to motivate the most minute, impossibly removed requests imaginable. Need to produce a "subject matter expert" to hit your teams operational target? Ask your existing SME to clone himself. Difficult guy, this SME! He objects: "but our domain is quite saturated with experts?" "No matter," you say with a grin! You won't be here forever, friend. "Yes but the average tenure is three years, we need two experts, and already have four, only one of whom has been here more than six months?" Enough haggling with this idiot! We need two experts per quarter, per team, and they will each produce ten work items per week. Nevermind that we have purchasers for only twenty work items monthly! Down the list, find another sorry sap who will unquestioningly "mentor" some beaten and quivering new grad, who only hopes that by obtaining his expert-accreditation he can move onto "bigger and better" things (i.e., leaping sideways and landing squarely in the bottom-bitch bracket) ahead of the industry average retention doomsday deadline of eighteen months.
- When in doubt, blame individuals for group failures. As a manager, that means using group goals to supersede individual goals whenever convenient. And best of all, you can set the individual goals entirely independently. Don't get it?
Suppose your team has to move 500 units per month. Set the individual goal of fifty units per month. This is sane and agreeable: workers will be happy to do that much, having time to do a quality job within standard work hours. Now hire not ten (you precious idiot) but five workers.
"But," you object, "that will only produce 250 units per month, half of what is needed?" Half! Ha, tell them thirty percent! What does it matter. You'll have them sweating like mules to hang onto those green cards. And should the delightfully fungible "fulfillment officer" (everyone is an officer, or an engineer, or a magistrate at least) fail to hit seventy five units per month? Sack the bad apple!
Don't worry if he complains, just tell him that everyone else did 80. And, of course, to do only 75 in a "time of need" is quite "unamazonian" -- it fails, by definition, to "raise the bar". Now that his spirit is quite broken by unassailable evidence, pile on which and whatever leadership principles you will until his back, too, is bursting with weight. Man does not live on bread alone, but long inuring to "general principles" so long as they rest on good sense. And when the time comes for bad sense? It's perfectly obliging when the load leads to power!
