Piranha-ville
Piranha-ville
The marketing moguls tell us all press is good press, but I never quite believe them. For instance, the recent dispatches on Amazon couldn't have been too good for the company's image, despite the sudden high volume of attention. In the news was the New York Times exposé, which described the company as a "bruising" environment, where management goes well beyond just asking employees to work hard. The report describes a culture of long hours and conflict, in which employees inform on one another anonymously and workers with health problems are summarily marginalized.
The marketing moguls tell us all press is good press, but I never quite believe them. For instance, the recent dispatches on Amazon couldn't have been too good for the company's image, despite the sudden high volume of attention. In the news was the New York Times exposé, which described the company as a "bruising" environment, where management goes well beyond just asking employees to work hard [1]. The report describes a culture of long hours and conflict, in which employees inform on one another anonymously and workers with health problems are summarily marginalized.
Jeff Bezos responded in a letter to his employees [2], assuring them that Amazon isn't supposed to be the way it is depicted in the NY Times article and encouraging them to report to him directly with any stories of management misbehavior. In truth, he really might not know about this kind of behavior going on in his company. (Who would take the risk of telling him?) Still, corporate culture is vastly complicated, and one memo from the boss can't change it any more than one newspaper article can define it. What is Amazon? It's a high-tech company, but it's also the modern-day Sears catalog. How would one operate such an empire?
In fact, Amazon has enshrined a bit of its philosophy in a document called "Our Leadership Principles," which is available online [3]. The principles are much like the nuggets of new age wisdom one encounters in other corporate personnel handbooks, with no hint of the barbarism depicted in the Times article, save for a few ever-so-slightly menacing flourishes in the commentary (e.g., "Leaders do not believe their team's body odor smells of perfume").
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