Amazon and the NYT: when journalists try to shoot down a successful business
A highly critical and lengthy article in the New York Times about Amazon, called “Inside Amazon: wrestling big ideas in a bruising workplace”, the result of three months’ research, paints a terrible picture of the company’s business culture, and above all, labor relations in one of the leading companies in what at one point was known as “the new economy”, but is now simply “the economy”.
The image of an “evil company” or a place where “you probably don’t want to work” contradicts most of what I have learned after many years studying of Amazon, an innovation case I use in every single course. I have crunched its numbers, I know a number of senior managers and employees, I have visited their facilities, and where I even worked briefly as a picker, packer and shipper in the warehouse. It’s a tough place to work, where the focus is constantly on how to improve service, but that has also created values that have little to do with the image the NYT is painting of it. What’s more, I’m not the only person to feel like this: you can even read the opinion of someone who works at the company.
A business’ culture is made up of two main elements: the doctrine supposedly handed down from the board room, written up in internal manuals and that is given to new hirings during training. The other is the result of the interaction of this doctrine with the staff and their culture, of how they interiorize it, of how the doctrine is composed and what aspects of it are used or not, of the delicate shades of grey that make up the psychological contract that we all sign with the companies we work for.
Reading the New York Times article leaves a feeling of vendetta against a company whose founder became a representative of “the new eating the old” when he decided to buy The Washington Post.
The article is written by two journalists who arrive at the company, get the relevant permissions — not easy in an environment like Amazon’s, characterized as it is by secretiveness, and who have brought with them a set of pre-determined ideas and who then set about interpreting everything they see in accordance with those ideas. Amazon’s culture is many things, and the company is doubtless a high-pressure place to work, but quite simply has nothing to do with the picture painted by the New York Times.
The company has overstepped the mark when it comes to how some workers in the warehouse do their jobs — although of course those workers are most of them destined to be replaced by robots sooner or later, and has been commented on many times, but that seems progressively to have been corrected. To not do so would simply be unsustainable, and it would also have prompted the appearance of additional information that simply hasn’t happened. During my visit to the warehouse a couple of months ago, I spoke to several employees and most of them said the job was hard, but not harder than in other warehouses where they have had previous working experience — and undoubtedly with a bigger focus on the individual.
I have also taught senior managers from the company, and talked to them in confidence, and also with former employees, along with people who would give their back teeth to work for Amazon, some of whom ended up finding a place there. I would say my sample is far from slight, and reasonably representative. And nobody I have spoken to has given any indication of brutal competitiveness, or having to spy on colleagues, or having to work long hours; all of which the NYT article talks. Make no mistake, working for Amazon is not easy: it is a tough, competitive environment where the focus is primarily on results. It is very difficult to build a company that has made itself a prototype of e-commerce while enjoying a 30,000 percent increase in its share price since it was launched in 1994 without being aggressive. But I simply cannot believe that all the people I talked to had been brainwashed or part of some sadomasochistic cult.
It isn’t hard to portray what goes on in companies out of context, to deliberately misinterpret things, or to make generalizations about things that are not representative. I’ve seen that in many occasions when journalists talk about business schools. And this article, for anybody that really knows something about Amazon, is a textbook example of that. My relationship with Amazon is that of a customer and that of an academic who uses the company for case studies and who has documented its practices to the best of my ability: that doesn’t mean I would defend it unconditionally. I’m no white knight and this company doesn’t even need one.
All that has happened here is that two journalists have looked into the company over the last three months or so; and what they have written bears no resemblance to the company I have spent much longer than three months studying. But needless to say, you are free to draw your own conclusions…
UPDATE: Jeff Bezos’ answer to the article
(En español, aquí)
