Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions. At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. The company’s top performers dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarterbillion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Non-performing staff leave or are fired in annual retrenchment of the staff. Some workers who suffered from serious health issues including cancer and other personal crises said they had been evaluated unfairly or edged out rather than given time to recover. The company, founded and still run by Jeff Bezos, rejects many of the popular management approaches that other corporations at least pay lip service to and has instead designed what many workers call an intricate machine propelling them to achieve Mr. Bezos’ ever-expanding ambitions. “This is a company that strives to do really big, innovative, ground-breaking things, and those things aren’t easy,” said Amazon’s top recruiter. “When you’re shooting for the moon, the nature of the work is really challenging. For some people it doesn’t work.” A staff member in a book marketing role lasted less than two years and later said that his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.” Thanks in part to its ability to extract the most from employees, Amazon is stronger than ever. Last month, it eclipsed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the USA, with a market valuation of $250 billion, and Forbes deemed Mr. Bezos the fifthwealthiest person on earth. Tens of millions of Americans know Amazon as customers, but life inside its corporate offices is largely a mystery. Secrecy is required; even low-level employees sign a lengthy confidentiality agreement. More than 100 current and former Amazonians described how they tried to reconcile the sometimes-punishing aspects of their workplace with what many called its thrilling power to create. Some employees said they thrived at Amazon precisely because it pushed them past what they thought were their limits. Many employees are motivated by “thinking big”. They later realized they had become addicted to Amazon’s way of working. Amazon has just been quicker in responding to changes that the rest of the work world is now experiencing: data that allows individual performance to be measured continuously, come-and-go relationships between employers and employees, and global competition in which empires rise and fall overnight. Amazon is in the vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving. One of Amazon’s new hire explained how he left his old company for a faster, grittier one. “Conflict brings about innovation,” he said. A Philosophy of Work Jeff Bezos turned to data-driven management very early. He created a technological and retail giant by relying on his eagerness to tell others how to behave; an instinct for bluntness bordering on confrontation; and an overarching confidence in the power of metrics to get the most out of workers. According to early executives and employees, Mr. Bezos was determined almost from the moment he founded Amazon in 1994 to resist the forces he thought sapped businesses over time — bureaucracy, profligate spending, lack of rigor. As the company grew, he wanted to codify his ideas about the workplace, some of them proudly counterintuitive, into instructions simple enough for a new worker to understand, general enough to apply to the nearly limitless number of businesses he wanted to enter and stringent enough to stave off the mediocrity he feared. The result was the leadership principles, which describe the way Amazonians should act. Amazon has rules that are part of its daily language and rituals, used in hiring, cited at meetings and quoted in food-truck lines at lunchtime. The guidelines conjure an empire of elite workers who hold one another to towering expectations and are liberated from the forces — red tape, office politics — that keep them from delivering their utmost. Employees are to exhibit “ownership”, or mastery of every element of their businesses, and “dive deep,” or find the underlying ideas that can fix problems or identify new services before shoppers even ask for them. The workplace should be infused with transparency and precision about who is really achieving and who is not. Within Amazon, ideal employees are often described as “athletes” with endurance, speed, performance that can be measured and an ability to defy limits. Mr. Bezos stated that when he interviewed potential hires, he warned them, “It’s not easy to work here.” While the Amazon campus appears similar to those of some tech giants, with its dog-friendly offices, on-site farmers’ market and upbeat posters, it offers no pretence that catering to employees is a priority. Workers are expected to embrace “frugality”, from the bare-bones desks to the cell-phones and travel expenses that they often pay themselves. The focus is on relentless striving to please customers, or “customer obsession”. “I work hard at helping to maintain the culture,” Mr. Bezos said last year. Of all of his management notions, perhaps the most distinctive is Mr. Bezos belief that harmony is often overvalued in the workplace — that it can stifle honest critique and encourage polite praise for flawed ideas. Instead, Amazonians are instructed to “disagree and commit”, to rip into colleagues’ ideas, with feedback that can be blunt to the point of painful, before lining up behind a decision. Motivating the ‘Amabots’ In Amazon warehouses, employees are monitored by sophisticated electronic systems to ensure they are packing enough boxes every hour. (Amazon came under fire in 2011 when workers in an eastern Pennsylvania warehouse toiled in more than 100-degree heat with ambulances waiting outside, taking away labourers as they fell. After an investigation by the local newspaper, the company installed airconditioning.) But in its offices, Amazon uses a self-reinforcing set of management, data and psychological tools to spur its tens of thousands of white-collar employees to do more and more. “The company is running a continual performance improvement algorithm on its staff,” said a former Kindle marketer. Every aspect of the Amazon system amplifies the others to motivate and discipline the company’s marketers, engineers and finance specialists: the leadership principles; rigorous, continuing feedback on performance; and the competition among peers who fear missing a potential problem or improvement and race to answer an email before anyone else. Many other staff said the culture stoked their willingness to erode work-life boundaries, castigate themselves for shortcomings (being “vocally self-critical” is included in the description of the leadership principles) and try to impress a company that can often feel like an insatiable taskmaster. For example, making staff take marathon conference calls on public holidays, criticism from bosses for not accessing the Internet whilst on vacation, and hours spent working at home most nights or weekends. To prod employees, Amazon has a perpetual flow of real-time, ultra-detailed metrics that allows the company to measure nearly everything its customers and staff does. Amazon employees are held accountable for a staggering array of metrics, a process that unfolds in what can be anxiety-provoking sessions called business reviews, held weekly or monthly among various teams. A day or two before the meetings, employees receive printouts, sometimes up to 50 or 60 pages long, several workers said. At the reviews, employees are cold-called and pop-quizzed on any one of those thousands of numbers. Explanations like “we’re not totally sure” or “I’ll get back to you” are not acceptable, many employees said. Some managers sometimes dismissed such responses as “stupid” or told workers to “just stop it.” Employees talk of feeling how their work is never done or good enough. A Running Competition Many staff described feeling sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified colleagues with whom they could not argue. In some cases, the criticism was copied directly into their performance reviews. Employees say that the Bezos ideal, a meritocracy in which people and ideas compete and the best win, where co-workers challenge one another “even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,” as the leadership principles note, has turned into a world of frequent combat. A senior developer said he admired the customer focus but could not tolerate the hostile language used in many meetings, a comment echoed by many others. Each year, the internal competition culminates at an extended semi-open tournament called an Organization Level Review, where managers debate subordinates’ rankings, assigning and reassigning names to boxes in a matrix projected on the wall. The practice — often called stack ranking, or “rank and yank” can force managers to get rid of valuable and talented staff just to meet quotas. The review meeting starts with a discussion of the lower-level employees, whose performance is debated in front of higher-level managers. As the hours pass, successive rounds of managers leave the room, knowing that those who remain will determine their fates. Many women at Amazon attribute its gender gap (it does not currently have a single woman on its top leadership team) to its competition-and-elimination system. Several former high-level female executives said they believed that some of the leadership principles worked to their disadvantage. They said they could lose out in promotions because of intangible criteria like “earn trust” or the emphasis on disagreeing with colleagues. Being too forceful, they said, can be particularly hazardous for women in the workplace. When ‘All’ Isn’t Good Enough “When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness,” one former employee said. Other workers who had suffered health crises also felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover. For all of the employees who are edged out, many others flee, exhausted or unwilling to further endure the hardships for Amazon. Amazon, however, retains new workers in part by requiring them to repay a part of their signing bonus if they leave within a year, and a portion of their hefty relocation fees if they leave within two years. Several fathers said they left or were considering quitting because of pressure from bosses or peers to spend less time with their families. New workers will strive to make Amazon the first trillion-dollar retailer, in the hope that just about everyone will be buying Amazon products.