Even as the company tests delivery by drone and ways to restock toilet paper at the push of a bathroom button, it is conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable. The company, founded and still run by Jeff Bezos, rejects many of the popular management bromides 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, groundbreaking things, and those things aren’t easy,” said Susan Harker, 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.”
Company veterans often say the genius of Amazon is the way it drives them to drive themselves. “If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot,” said one employee, using a term that means you have become at one with the system….
In 2013, Elizabeth Willet, a former Army captain who served in Iraq, joined Amazon to manage housewares vendors and was thrilled to find that a large company could feel so energetic and entrepreneurial. After she had a child, she arranged with her boss to be in the office from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. each day, pick up her baby and often return to her laptop later. Her boss assured her things were going well, but her colleagues, who did not see how early she arrived, sent him negative feedback accusing her of leaving too soon.
“I can’t stand here and defend you if your peers are saying you’re not doing your work,” she says he told her. She left the company after a little more than a year.
Ms. Willet’s co-workers strafed her through the Anytime Feedback Tool, the widget in the company directory that allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management. (While bosses know who sends the comments, their identities are not typically shared with the subjects of the remarks.) Because team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year, it is in everyone’s interest to outperform everyone else….
Soon the tool, or something close, may be found in many more offices. Workday, a human resources software company, makes a similar product called Collaborative Anytime Feedback that promises to turn the annual performance review into a daily event. …
The rivalries at Amazon extend beyond behind-the-back comments. 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.
You see how what Wolin is talking about works? You can argue that people choose to work at Amazon, and they're free to leave if they're wimps who can't keep up. They are well paid, and there are some people who thrive in that kind of culture. Who are you to judge? Well, we're foolish if we don't think this only affects people who work at Amazon, or Walmart, or wherever. It slowly seeps into what the rest of us accept as 'reality'.
Here's the problem: The most dehumanizing practices can be justified in the name of striving for excellence. Competition and conflict bring the best out of us, right? That adrenal brain flush you feel when winning or losing is at stake energizes us to do things you never thought yourselves capable. If you're a winner, it's a rush. You're an elite warrior, and you crush those who think they can challenge you. If you're a loser, well, who cares? Go away.
There's a well-known dynamic in which you sink to the level of your enemy. The U.S., for instance, largely lost its soul during WWII and the Cold War as in subtle and not so subtle ways it began to look more like its totalitarian enemies in Germany and the Soviet Union. It's not that we're bad, it's that our enemies are, and we have to fight fire with fire. Our survival depends on it.
This is a logic we all accept as realistic. We're the good guys, but If they play dirty, so then must we. But then before you know it, we're not the good guys anymore. We're torturing and suspending habeas corpus and surveilling without warrants and drone assassinating citizens without trials, and it's all ok. It's justified, because we're the good guys and our security depends on it. And then we ask with astonishing naivete: Why do they hate us? Well, it's not our freedoms they hate; it's the jackbooted thugs that we've become.
The same happens in the business world, and as the ruthlessness that drives the Amazon model becomes better known as its studied in business schools, it will be emulated. Copy cats will talk about how it's all about striving for excellence, or if they want to be more honest, they'll just say that in order to survive they match or exceed the ruthless of their competitors. Anything is justified in the name of the survival.
Liz Pearce spent two years at Amazon, managing projects like its wedding registry. “The pressure to deliver far surpasses any other metric,” she said. “I would see people practically combust.”
But just as Jeff Bezos was able to see the future of e-commerce before anyone else, she added, he was able to envision a new kind of workplace: fluid but tough, with employees staying only a short time and employers demanding the maximum.
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