Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

While the brutal leadership style and distinct culture was enervating to many employees, it was also proving unmistakably effective.

AWS execs and engineers typically describe this remarkable session with a combination of awe and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Amazon leadership principle that stipulates leaders must be “vocally self-critical.” “That’s when I learned a lesson that regardless of whether you just delivered the biggest revenue day in Amazon’s history, your first sentence is, ‘We fucked up.’”

Now Wulff joined the ranks of a crowded club: she was a disillusioned former Amazon employee.

The reporters, Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, described an environment of combative meetings, unreasonably high standards, eighty-hour workweeks, and employees who regularly wept at their desks.

They reported that some workers who suffered from critical illnesses, miscarriages, or other personal crises were penalized professionally.

And they described the practice of “stack ranking,” or regularly dismissing the least-productive workers, amounting to “purposeful Darwinism” that created an environment of fear.

“People thought it was a mean-spirited process and to a certain extent it was,” Niekerk said. “But in the big picture, it kept Amazon fresh and innovative.”

“He once told me, ‘If we ever appear in the “100 best places to work in America,” you’ve screwed this place up,’” Niekerk said. (Alas, Amazon would soon become a mainstay of those lists.)

Though it sounded innocuous, the directive, dubbed “span of control,” set off the equivalent of a neutron bomb inside the company. Senior managers with only three, four, or five direct reports had to reach into their organizations and appropriate employees from a subordinate to get to six direct reports, leaving the underling without the necessary number.

The informal, musical chairs–style reorganization allowed Amazon to avoid the internal and external stigma of announcing layoffs.

It was a typical Bezos move—brilliant, and rather cruel.

“A couple of folks used to joke, ‘Dude, we are working in a labor camp.’"

“disagree and commit,” after Amazon leadership principle #13, which says employees who disagree with a decision must put aside their doubts and work to support it.

In reality, the opposite was true. That year, AWS had a 70 percent growth rate and 19.2 percent operating margin, compared to the North American retail group’s 25 percent growth rate and 2.2 percent operating margin.

“It’s better to assume trust and find out that you are wrong than to always assume people are trying to screw you over,” was essentially [Bezos's] philosophy, according to a friend.

Toyota’s proven Lean ideology and argued for “treating people fairly,” building “mutual trust between managers and associates,” and empowering leaders to inspire employees rather than act as disciplinarians. Bezos hated it.

“I feel like I should have moved much faster and more aggressively. I bought into a narrative that all sellers were good.”

one of the biggest threats to the company was a disgruntled and entrenched hourly workforce—like the unionized workers that impaired U.S. automakers with strikes and onerous contract negotiations. (Amazon later denied that Bezos said this.) He encouraged Niekerk and Onetto to focus on ensuring that FC workers who weren’t advancing within Amazon stayed for a maximum of three years.

“We respect the right for all employees under federal and state law to organize if that is what they so choose” was the legal boilerplate that Huseman should have recited—but...Instead, he blundered with “No we would not agree to that,” and the battle was lost.

Clark had proven himself a true Amazonian, putting loyalty to the company above personal friendship while pursuing Bezos’s vision of an independent supply chain.

In other words, Dave Clark had proven himself to be nearly every bit as creative and ruthless as Jeff Bezos himself.

Along the way, the former middle-school band teacher had busted through obstacles of every kind, fractured a major friendship, squeezed additional productivity out of Amazon’s low-wage workers, and levered the significant costs onto society at large. And Amazon’s reputation was only slightly grazed in the process.

They applied the same precision to his daily movements as they might for a state leader—and made certain his speeches and social media posts were always harmlessly anodyne.

Idealism largely pervaded the effort. Members of the HQ2 team earnestly believed that any city had an opportunity to win.

“We genuinely thought we were working on the most important economic development project in a generation and were going to change the lives of hundreds of thousands of people,” said one of the HQ2 employees.

“They were all outraged,” Grella said. “And then they fell into line.”

With that, the public turned against the city council in voter polling and sided with their local companies and largest employers; stunned council members were now outmaneuvered.
Eighty business officials, union leaders, and politicians signed a full-page letter to the company, a docile apology begging for a second chance, which was published as an advertisement in the New York Times.

Their infallible and righteous leader was, after all, a flawed human.

MBS again texted Bezos, writing a message in English replete with typos: “Jeff all what you hear or told to it’s not true and it’s matter of time tell you know the truth. There is nothing against you or amazon from me or Saudi Arabia.”

His personal wealth was larger than the gross domestic product of Hungary; larger than even the market capitalization of General Motors.

“I’m all for competition, but I did not start my business and go sell on Amazon so that I could eventually become fertilizer for Amazon’s growth as I am buried and destroyed,” he told me. “It’s apparent this is happening to a lot of sellers, and I don’t believe it’s right. What Amazon does is analogous to being invited over for Thanksgiving dinner, then finding out as you sit down to dine that you’re the turkey.”

“Amazon doesn’t give a shit about brands,” said Aarstol, who by 2020 was almost completely off Amazon and focusing on sales over his own website. “They don’t care whether you live or die.”

The listing finally returned after four days and $100,000 in lost sales—and only then because Thompson paid Amazon $60,000 a year for a premium service to engage the attention of an account manager, which “feels a bit like a protection racket,” he said.

“In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be thirty-plus years, not a hundred-plus years.”