Management Amazon case study ITM assignment 代写

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Management Amazon case study ITM assignment 代写
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ADAPTED FROM BUSINESS DAY, NEW YORK TIMES

By JODI KANTOR and DAVID STREITFELD, AUG. 15, 2015

USE OF THIS CASE STUDY IS LIMITED TO RMIT UNIVERSITY INTRODUCTION TO

MANAGEMENT STUDENTS ONLY.

Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace

The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push

white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions.

At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings,

toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why

they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are

“unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to

send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used

to sabotage others.

The company’s top performers dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-

billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Non-performing staff

leave or are fired in annual retrenchment of the staff. Some workers who suffered

from serious health issues including cancer and other personal crises said they had

been evaluated unfairly or edged out rather than given time to recover.

The company, founded and still run by Jeff Bezos, rejects many of the popular

management approaches 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, ground-breaking things, and those things aren’t easy,” said

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.”

A staff member in a book marketing role lasted less than two years and later said

that his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other

workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a

grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry

at their desk.”

Thanks in part to its ability to extract the most from employees, Amazon is stronger

than ever. Last month, it eclipsed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the USA,

with a market valuation of $250 billion, and Forbes deemed Mr. Bezos the fifth-

wealthiest person on earth. Tens of millions of Americans know Amazon as

customers, but life inside its corporate offices is largely a mystery. Secrecy is

required; even low-level employees sign a lengthy confidentiality agreement.

More than 100 current and former Amazonians described how they tried to reconcile

the sometimes-punishing aspects of their workplace with what many called its

thrilling power to create. Some employees said they thrived at Amazon precisely

because it pushed them past what they thought were their limits. Many employees

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are motivated by “thinking big”. They later realized they had become addicted to

Amazon’s way of working.

Amazon has just been quicker in responding to changes that the rest of the work

world is now experiencing: data that allows individual performance to be measured

continuously, come-and-go relationships between employers and employees, and

global competition in which empires rise and fall overnight. Amazon is in the

vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and

more productive, but harsher and less forgiving.

One of Amazon’s new hire explained how he left his old company for a faster, grittier

one. “Conflict brings about innovation,” he said.

A Philosophy of Work

Jeff Bezos turned to data-driven management very early. He created a technological

and retail giant by relying on his eagerness to tell others how to behave; an instinct

for bluntness bordering on confrontation; and an overarching confidence in the

power of metrics to get the most out of workers.

According to early executives and employees, Mr. Bezos was determined almost

from the moment he founded Amazon in 1994 to resist the forces he thought sapped

businesses over time — bureaucracy, profligate spending, lack of rigor. As the

company grew, he wanted to codify his ideas about the workplace, some of them

proudly counterintuitive, into instructions simple enough for a new worker to

understand, general enough to apply to the nearly limitless number of businesses he

wanted to enter and stringent enough to stave off the mediocrity he feared. The

result was the leadership principles, which describe the way Amazonians should act.

Amazon has rules that are part of its daily language and rituals, used in hiring, cited

at meetings and quoted in food-truck lines at lunchtime.

The guidelines conjure an empire of elite workers who hold one another to towering

expectations and are liberated from the forces — red tape, office politics — that keep

them from delivering their utmost. Employees are to exhibit “ownership”, or mastery

of every element of their businesses, and “dive deep,” or find the underlying ideas

that can fix problems or identify new services before shoppers even ask for them.

The workplace should be infused with transparency and precision about who is really

achieving and who is not. Within Amazon, ideal employees are often described as

“athletes” with endurance, speed, performance that can be measured and an ability

to defy limits. Mr. Bezos stated that when he interviewed potential hires, he warned

them, “It’s not easy to work here.”

While the Amazon campus appears similar to those of some tech giants, with its

dog-friendly offices, on-site farmers’ market and upbeat posters, it offers no pretence

that catering to employees is a priority. Workers are expected to embrace “frugality”,

from the bare-bones desks to the cell-phones and travel expenses that they often

pay themselves. The focus is on relentless striving to please customers, or

“customer obsession”.

“I work hard at helping to maintain the culture,” Mr. Bezos said last year.

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Of all of his management notions, perhaps the most distinctive is Mr. Bezos belief

that harmony is often overvalued in the workplace — that it can stifle honest critique

and encourage polite praise for flawed ideas. Instead, Amazonians are instructed to

“disagree and commit”, to rip into colleagues’ ideas, with feedback that can be blunt

to the point of painful, before lining up behind a decision.

Motivating the ‘Amabots’

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 labourers 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 a former Kindle marketer. Every aspect of the Amazon

system amplifies the others to motivate and discipline the company’s marketers,

engineers and finance specialists: the leadership principles; rigorous, continuing

feedback on performance; and the competition among peers who fear missing a

potential problem or improvement and race to answer an email before anyone else.

Many other staff said the culture stoked their willingness to erode work-life

boundaries, castigate themselves for shortcomings (being “vocally self-critical” is

included in the description of the leadership principles) and try to impress a company

that can often feel like an insatiable taskmaster. For example, making staff take

marathon conference calls on public holidays, criticism from bosses for not

accessing the Internet whilst on vacation, and hours spent working at home most

nights or weekends.

To prod employees, Amazon has a perpetual flow of real-time, ultra-detailed metrics

that allows the company to measure nearly everything its customers and staff does.

Amazon employees are held accountable for a staggering array of metrics, a

process that unfolds in what can be anxiety-provoking sessions called business

reviews, held weekly or monthly among various teams. A day or two before the

meetings, employees receive printouts, sometimes up to 50 or 60 pages long,

several workers said. At the reviews, employees are cold-called and pop-quizzed on

any one of those thousands of numbers. Explanations like “we’re not totally sure” or

“I’ll get back to you” are not acceptable, many employees said. Some managers

sometimes dismissed such responses as “stupid” or told workers to “just stop it.”

Employees talk of feeling how their work is never done or good enough.

A Running Competition

Many staff described feeling sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified

colleagues with whom they could not argue. In some cases, the criticism was copied

directly into their performance reviews. Employees say that the Bezos ideal, a

meritocracy in which people and ideas compete and the best win, where co-workers

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challenge one another “even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,” as the

leadership principles note, has turned into a world of frequent combat.

A senior developer said he admired the customer focus but could not tolerate the

hostile language used in many meetings, a comment echoed by many others. Each

year, the internal competition culminates at an extended semi-open tournament

called an Organization Level Review, where managers debate subordinates’

rankings, assigning and reassigning names to boxes in a matrix projected on the

wall. The practice — often called stack ranking, or “rank and yank” can force

managers to get rid of valuable and talented staff just to meet quotas.

The review meeting starts with a discussion of the lower-level employees, whose

performance is debated in front of higher-level managers. As the hours pass,

successive rounds of managers leave the room, knowing that those who remain will

determine their fates.

Many women at Amazon attribute its gender gap (it does not currently have a single

woman on its top leadership team) to its competition-and-elimination system. Several

former high-level female executives said they believed that some of the leadership

principles worked to their disadvantage. They said they could lose out in promotions

because of intangible criteria like “earn trust” or the emphasis on disagreeing with

colleagues. Being too forceful, they said, can be particularly hazardous for women in

the workplace.

When ‘All’ Isn’t Good Enough

“When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a

major weakness,” one former employee said. Other workers who had suffered health

crises also felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to

recover.

For all of the employees who are edged out, many others flee, exhausted or

unwilling to further endure the hardships for Amazon. Amazon, however, retains new

workers in part by requiring them to repay a part of their signing bonus if they leave

within a year, and a portion of their hefty relocation fees if they leave within two

years. Several fathers said they left or were considering quitting because of pressure

from bosses or peers to spend less time with their families.

New workers will strive to make Amazon the first trillion-dollar retailer, in the hope

that just about everyone will be buying Amazon products.

Management Amazon case study ITM assignment 代写