Amazon

Amazon will not last Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos comes across to me as a psychologically deranged man. I am willing to punt Amazon will not outlast him. But before I get to that, take a few minutes off and listen to this video. 

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos gave the Baccalaureate address to Princeton University's Class of 2010. Bezos graduated from Princeton in 1986 with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. He was introduced by Princeton University President Shirley M. Tilghman. Bezos spoke to the Class of 2010 about the difference between choices and gifts.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon delivers the graduation speech at Princeton University in 2010

I discovered this very recently after I stumbled across a very compelling post on Medium by Julia Cheiffetz, an Executive Editor at Harper Collins Publishers. It had me stunned for a while. I had a baby and cancer when I worked at Amazon. This is my story, she wrote. 

She concluded: "Jeff: You asked for direct feedback. Women power your retail engine. They buy diapers. They buy books. They buy socks for their husbands on Prime. On behalf of all the people who want to speak up but can’t: Please, make Amazon a more hospitable place for women and parents. Reevaluate your parental leave policies. You can’t claim to be a data-driven company and not release more specific numbers on how many women and people of color apply, get hired and promoted, and stay on as employees. In the absence of meaningful public data — especially retention data — all we have are stories. This is mine."  

Until then, all I had heard were stories of what a great company Amazon is and the genius that is Jeff Bezos. If you listen to his speech above for instance, it is easy to think of him as a super intelligent human with a heart. And why not?

"What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy -- they're given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll probably be to the detriment of your choices," he tells the students.

But between Julia's essay and a pointer that led me to a long investigation by the New York Times on what really happens to people Inside Amazon, particularly white collar workers, I am compelled to once again reassess Jeff Bezos.

The New York Times writes, "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 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 laborers as they fell. After an investigation by the local newspaper, the company installed air-conditioning.)

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 Amy Michaels, a former Kindle marketer."

And then there is this little bit from the report that stayed in my head: Noelle Barnes, who worked in marketing for Amazon for nine years, repeated a saying around campus: “Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.”

Or for that matter consider this damning part from the New York Times story: 

A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”

A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover.

A former human resources executive said she was required to put a woman who had recently returned after undergoing serious surgery, and another who had just had a stillborn child, on performance improvement plans, accounts that were corroborated by a co-worker still at Amazon. “What kind of company do we want to be?” the executive recalled asking her bosses.

The mother of the stillborn child soon left Amazon. “I had just experienced the most devastating event in my life,” the woman recalled via email, only to be told her performance would be monitored “to make sure my focus stayed on my job.”

With this kind of relentless monitoring of its people,  An obsessive man unwilling to let go. There is a dichotomy between his public persona and how he runs the entity.

I'll be damned if I'm wrong. In the 20 odd years I have spent as a journalist, I have witnessed from close quarters Indian entrepreneurs build organizations ground up at the cost of pretty much everything else in the wake of liberalization. I am not at liberty to discuss their names right now. But as things are, and it is time to cede ground to their younger generation, they face resentment and unwillingness to take the baton up. It's their children's way of showing them the middle finger for the years of neglect they suffered. Eventually, these organizations will end up in the hands of Private Equity sharks who will not hesitate to divy it up in any which way that suits their interests. The first signs of fissures in the Indian context are already visible. But like I just said, more on that sometime later when I am at the liberty to talk names and people.

As for now, take it from me. The likes of Amazon will not last forever. My primary concern is what of all the e-books that I have accumulated. The only way I can think up is to save them as .pdf files at multiple places on various cloud platforms. Because the half life of technology and technology companies is getting shorter and shorter. 

Once upon a time whoever would have imagined Enron could go bust?