10 lessons I learned from Amazon
AKA things I don't have the heart to post on LinkedIn, so it'll go on my Tumblr instead
Working for a company that has a start-up mindset despite employing 3 million people has its upsides and drawbacks. And sometimes they mean the same thing. For example, you learn to be resourceful because there is no single way to doing things at Amazon. Everyone does their own thing, so you learn to adapt and be scrappy. A net positive, because you learn, but it's frustrating as hell.
The higher you are up the corporate ladder, the dumber you become at reading. Someone becomes a senior leader and he magically loses the ability to make sense of letters strung together, and when a phone tool award clearly says DO NOT EMAIL THE ADMINS, he will, in fact, email the admins and demand his phone tool award.
Silly little things like phone tool awards matter so much that people will fight tooth and nail to be given one, even when it has no real currency and no bearing to how people do work at Amazon.
There is always a pre-meeting prior to the real meeting, because we're all children and cannot be trusted to know to say the right thing at the actual meeting.
At Amazon, you are allowed to disrupt people's sleep for every non-issue and inconvenience plaguing your existence at the company. There is a paging mechanism (with a painful siren alarm to boot) which allows you to summon servants from their slumber by pressing a button, preferably going off at 3 in the morning for the full effect.
Everyone is required to read a document in meetings, after which people will need to comment on the doc and discuss them afterward, giving true meaning to "this could have been an email". Because, Jeff, you could have just forwarded the doc for us to read and mark up, and you could've scheduled a call if things need further discussion. But where is the fun in that?
Re-orgs are so frequent that I have had more managers than I have had years working for the company. And re-orgs are often done in a way that is disruptive to work, because there is no other way.
The more you weave Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles and use buzzwords like "Work backwards" or "It's always Day 1", the more chances you get of being inducted into their secret corporate cult.
You don't need to lift a finger. You just need to claim credit for someone else's work, et voila! Promotion.
They do stack-rank people, but don't disclose it. :)
