Jeff Bezos' management rules are slowly unraveling inside Amazon

I'm a long time Amazonian. The big problem is legacy employees run every part of the company. Almost any manager of managers has been at Amazon a long time, in that same job for a long time. There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have been in some org 5+ years. In Alexa, the people running the core ML teams have been in Alexa since it started. Most people in decision making positions just got there first (10-15 years ago)

The software engineering paradigms used within the company create brittle rube goldberg machines of events flowing everywhere in the company. Almost all of them are on maintenance mode, where the oncall burns out the engineers and prevents them from creating new products. There is no knowledge sharing between team members. Legacy team members guard their technical platform knowledge to solidify their place on the team.

The engineers themselves are not students of computer science, but just crunch out tickets.

If Amazon wants to change they need to remove a significant amount of tenured employees, and actually promote young engineers into decision making positions.

AWS hasnt released an innovative product in a really long time

The article brings up the two new LPs that were added, one being "Strive to be the world's best employer".

The biggest slap in the face about this LP is that the word "strive" used to be a bad word at Amazon. If you ever said you were going to "strive" to do something, you would be told that's not good enough. If you put it in a doc, you would be told to remove it. "Strive" was a weasel word. We never accepted "striving" as part of our tenets or our goals. Our goals never were to "strive to build a good service", our goal was just "build a good service"!

And then they went and made the new LP "Strive to be the world's best employer". Why isn't it just "Be the world's best employer"?

It may seem like a small thing, but it's an example of the ethos that has been chipped away inside Amazon. That particular LP has always been the butt of jokes because it's been clear over the last 5 years that leadership isn't actually serious about it, but the use of the weasel word "strive" really just put the cherry on top.

"I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt," Jeff Bezos.

One of the most surprising things in my brief experience at Amazon was how much of a shitshow it was. The two-pizza rule and self-sustainability for each team led to huge overlaps, with teams doing the same thing.

With such a huge organization, you had to go through 15 different stakeholders to get a single thing done, and there was an ingrained middle management whose only function was to connect you to the right person.

Just figuring out who was responsible for what and how to get things done was a challenge in itself.

Despite all this, Amazon still succeeds, and their process of PR/FAQ, leadership principles, and one-pagers is one of the best I've ever seen.

But I wonder if at some point, like with any philosophy and just like Bezos predicted, it will become too much and the whole thing will cave in on itself.

Something that seems to be implicit in modern day criticisms of Amazon is the idea that it succeeded because of its leadership principles.

I'm not saying that's not true, but we shouldn't take it at face value that Amazon's internal values drove its success. The values stuff seemed to me to be mostly propaganda when I was onboarding at Amazon.

Could it just be basic market forces that caused Amazon to grow, attracting the best talent due to high compensation, which caused a (to borrow terminology from Bezos) "virtuous cycle"?

People talk about Amazon's corporate culture in a way that I don't see them talk about Google, Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft. Which makes me inclined to believe that it's mostly hocum used to justify where they ended up, instead of just attributing it to being in the right place at the right time.

> the two-pizza rule: teams focused on a specific goal or project should be lean enough that two pies could suffice as a team meal.

Today I learned that teams in Amazon should contain no more than 2 people.

Amazon management ethos is famous. I've always wondered if it's actually effective. Traditionally, power follow these rules:

De Mesquita, B. B., Smith, A., Siverson, R. M., & Morrow, J. D. (2005). The logic of political survival. MIT press.

Which is echoed in the article:

> One current Amazon senior manager said they’ve consistently observed bosses new to the company use the principles “as weapons to put those who aren’t favorites in their place,” while employing other principles to build up their favorites.

I'd assume that the older management style that the article points out (from Bezos) was similar, but with different words; As these rules about power are consistent from governments, to companies, to home owners associations, etc. But the article paints a rosy picture of them, so it's not clear if there's something novel there, or just a dressed up version of the same old rules.

They should stop making a cargo cult of Amazon's idiosyncratic management techniques and adopt the "GE Way" that is proven to be the best way to run a company by business school professors all over the world.

> Like the Leadership Principles, six-page memos (“6-pagers,” in Amazon lingo) are part of a unique work culture forged within the giant internet company over the years and considered as much of a contributor to Amazon’s world-beating success as any blockbuster product or individual, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos himself.

I have said many times, and will continue to say:

Amazon is a 2 trillion dollar company despite their policies, not because of them.

I still can't get over how bad Alexa is, how it barely even works to do the simplest tasks, gets so confused so easily, etc. They have spent so much money. They have so many developers. They have so much compute available. The technology to make it way better is just lying around and open source now, and has been for the past 1.5 years at least. If I were put in charge of Alexa, I really think I would lay everyone off and start with a tiny group of really good devs and move as fast as possible to get something approaching the voice version of ChatGPT with all the integrations working. It's just mind boggling how poorly managed the whole thing has been, and I think it's a real indictment of top management for letting it get so bad after so much effort and money.

I don't think the people quoting leadership principles are coming from a place of knowledge or worse: honesty.

Regardless of whether you think about the RTO mandate, internally Amazon leaves it quite clear that the whole point of these leadership principles is to reduce ambiguity, which means drive decision-making in the absence of a clear direction.

This is absolutely not the case with RTO. There was a very clear and specific diktat from the very top of the organization. There was no ambiguity or void to fill in the decision-making process.

For that, Amazon also has a leadership principle: disagree and commit.

Also, prior to the pandemic Amazon was very clear that remote work was the exception and not the norm. For example, L4s were explicitly barred from WFO, and L5s and above had to explicitly request an exception in order to work partially from home.

It's ok to frame the debate on whether it's in the company's interest to enforce RTO. It's complete nonsense and utterly absurd to quote leadership principles to justify their position.

Also, I should add that Amazon's RTO mandate was pushed when the company was trying to cull their workforce. The general feeling was always that RTO was designed to push people out without paying severance. Citing "hire and develop the best" when ignoring how the company was decimating teams doesn't build up the critic's credibility.

The article mentions LPs being used punitively.

That reminds me of the idea that "when a measurement becomes a target, it creates to become a good measurement". What's happening is that LPs started out a guidelines on how to make good decisions. It was explained to employees that LPs should be taken seriously and show that that people who genuinely apply the LPs get promoted more. Therefore, displaying LPs became an easier way to get promoted than actually making good decisions.

From TFA:

> The disruption caused by the pandemic, as well as the doubling of Amazon’s headcount in two years, was more to blame, they say.

> Those who joined right before the pandemic, or during the madness of 2020 and 2021, had little time to learn and adapt. Learning through meeting interactions over videoconferencing, for example, was much less conducive to osmosis than in-person interactions, either planned or serendipitous run-ins, several sources said.

Amazon's massive hiring spree during the pandemic seemed to be the biggest cause for the decline of it's culture internally, and it's something I've heard from friends as well.

I really like Amazon's LPs, but I think they're often stretched to accommodate whatever opinion one has.

> There’s also a rabid attention on so-called “input” metrics of a certain business—think selection or price—rather than output metrics such as revenue.

Anyone wanna comment on the distinction? Why are input metrics any more important than output metrics?

In fact I'm not even sure I understand why price is characterized as "input" and revenue as "output". Input and output to what exactly?

50 years is about the right age for any human organization. After that, dark patterns start to irreparably corrupt them.

Also stumbled on this yesterday which has had me really pondering a lot of my thoughts and assumptions too: https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=32392

Welcome to Day 2.... the founder is off building yachts and spaceships.

Consider Amazon's home assistant business - Alexa.

Its hard for me to imagine that customers are the focus of these products.

It appears that Amazon's commercial interests are the focus of Alexa.

Alexa could be awesome but its just not.

> There are 16 Leadership Principles at Amazon. Any Amazon employee can recite most of them by heart (those who can’t won’t last very long).

My friend urged me to apply to Amazon, I didn't want to but thought what the heck, let's sacrifice a day of vacation to give it whirl. But it was very bizarre experience. It felt like some communist party meeting having to learn the tenants and repeating them back and sing praises to the great Jeff. No doubt, most of those are good principles, but the cult-like attitude seemed strange.

> “Sometimes I’ll hear, ‘It’s amazing you had this ‘bias for action’…and other times when I believe I’ve had ‘bias for action,’ they will say you weren’t data-driven (from the leadership principle ‘Dive deep’) enough.”

That's brilliant. They've converged to selective enforcement one of the central pillars of corruption and control. Introduce just slightly contradictory rules, and with 16, that's already enough, and you can use them for anything.

Amazon is a shit hole of a company, in all divisions from the very top. The reason they pay so much is that they literally could not hire a single soul otherwise.

Amazon's retail problem is that it is failing the customer by using 3rd party sellers.

And in places where Walmart+ or Target circle are available I bet they are losing sales. I actually prefer Walmart+ and Target now.. but I am only N=1. I may do the whole foods delivery when it becomes available though so that would bring me back in to the Amazon fold.

As a former Amazonian (2017-2020) I was a big believer in the leadership principles partly due to how often they were referenced during my time there and partly due to the business world's obsession with Amazon's secret sauce. The company does a very good job at indoctrinating everyone by using them extensively throughout the hiring/performance management lifecycle. In fact, during the interview loop each interviewer is tasked with evaluating whether the candidate exhibits a specific leadership principle.

As many have pointed out, with time you notice the principles being used in all sorts of ways against you depending on the context. The management class is conditioned to tell you that "principles are deliberately in contention with one another"...which gives everyone the necessary cover to spin a particular guiding principle in whichever way suits them in that moment. Or you could buy the kool-aid and pretend that whoever architected these principles was so linguistically adept that they truly figured out the perfect way of articulating a set of contentious principles that taken together distill the exact cultural nuance that Amazon is all about. Wittgenstein is rolling in his grave.

In their current state, the leadership principles are simply a way of defining the lingo for work conversations and providing some sort of framework for decision making (emphasis on framework)...which still has a bounding effect on how things are done at Amazon, albeit in a very very limited way. I do think most people would have trouble coming up with their own decision-making framework if they had to, never-mind articulating or communicating it to their peers. However, it would be preposterous to claim that the Amazon principles have any significant cultural value, at least in the narrow definition that most people commonly ascribe to "business culture" (ie language is also culture, but in this context its more about unique behavior specific to a company).

What drives the culture more than anything at Amazon is the insane growth that the company has seen in the past couple of decades. People there have felt it very deeply and have the battle scars to prove it. Everyone that has been at the company long enough will point to the often counter-intuitive things that one should do to succeed at sustaining this type of growth. Bear in mind this is a different type of business than the other high growth behemoths of the industry and Amazon has its own peculiar aspects..

As far as the article goes, I think that the most important aspect that the author gets right is that. the decline is probably due to the influx of people in middle management that don't have any idea about what it really took to build Amazon into what it is today.

this is completely unrelated but amazon quality has gone significantly down over the past couple months

3 out of the 4 times I've ordered something from them it either didn't show up or the wrong thing showed up

most of these sellers seem to just be dropshippers with chinese goods employing "reputation management" tactics. can't say I trust the average amazon seller at this point

Time to sell all our $AMZN

> At Amazon these tenets, known as Leadership Principles, are much more than suggestions. They are a way of life that employees are judged on before they are even hired, steeped in from the moment they join, and scrupulously followed thereafter with the devotion of religious converts.

Just like most religious principles, these tenets are vague enough to leave incredible room for interpretation, managers can cite them to justify just about any policy. I have no doubt that the return to office was somehow justified with the same tenets that are cited in the objections. That's the way Amazon works, it's like a theology debate club.