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The robots are the most visual example of Bezos’s obsession with automating whatever he can to free his employees to work on more creative tasks. “I don’t think I can remember a time where he wasn’t interested in using computing to help us achieve our mission,” Wilke said. “From the earliest days, he would look at a process, and if there was repetitive work being done by people who can be freed up to be more inventive, he would say, ‘How do we automate that process? How do we automate that routine so that our people can be as creative as possible?’”
i remember when i, too, believed this
Amid the change, one thing remains constant at Amazon: the determination to invent. Automating so much labor has freed Amazon’s corporate staff to concentrate on its invention process (they no longer have to work peak season, packing boxes). And it gives Amazonians inside the FCs the time to invent on their own. In EWR9, Virdi showed me a “continuous improvement” kiosk where employees enter ideas for new products, processes, and minor FC tweaks. Every Wednesday, Virdi and his senior staff review the best ideas for forty-five minutes. When they like what they see, they give their associates time and resources on their scheduled workdays—paid—and ask them to turn their ideas into reality. Associate feedback, to give one small example, led Amazon to make its bins yellow to help them more easily spot products and work more effectively.
this feels like corporate mythmaking rather than a realistic understanding of why corporate staff no longer 'have' to work peak season
Bezos’s joy in life comes from his work, specifically the inventive parts that make him feel like he’s back in the nineties, trying to figure out how to sell books on the internet. For many ultrasuccessful CEOs, living the good life means spending your days on private islands or coasting around the globe on a boat. For Bezos, the good life is work, and coasting is “excruciating, painful decline, followed by death.”
two things here:
- that does make sense: the dream of being the perpetual underdog in a big to stave off death
- is he not also living the good life? how many mansions does he have?
pano idea - N idolizes bezos because of this quote?
Microsoft faced a similar decision with Office. The Office suite was a main draw for Windows devices, which many people bought to use Word and Excel. Making it available across mobile devices and web browsers threatened Windows. Putting Office on the browser could also cannibalize its own healthy desktop sales. The asset milkers wanted Office to be available primarily via desktop installs. The future staters, looking ahead to the coming age of mobile and cloud computing, wanted it everywhere.
Microsoft’s strategy for Office during the Ballmer years generally followed the asset milkers’ desires. Instead of building Office for web when Google released Docs and Sheets, Microsoft kept Internet Explorer slow and held Office off-line. Some years later, Microsoft put a limited version of Office on the web and released it for mobile—but only on Windows devices. Even then, Microsoft kept Office’s web version so quiet that its employees didn’t even know it was live.
classic case of user needs != ms incentives (vendor lock-in)
The final element of Nadella’s plan to inspire collaboration at Microsoft was to change the way the company evaluated employees. Microsoft had a long history of performance evaluations called “stack rankings” that pitted its employees against one another. The dreaded system forced managers to rate their reports on a bell curve. No matter how good a team was, or how evenly talented its members were, a preordained number of people would get great reviews, and a set amount would get poor reviews.
“Let’s say your whole team was the same skill level; you still had to force it,” one former senior manager told me. “Somebody was going to get a huge bonus, and someone’s going to get borderline fired. Not that extreme, but it’s going to happen.”
Because of this, employees sabotaged one another. And the company’s most talented people went out of their way not to work with one another. “Microsoft superstars did everything they could to avoid working alongside other top-notch developers, out of fear that they would be hurt in the rankings,” the Vanity Fair article said. “Microsoft employees not only tried to do a good job but also worked hard to make sure their colleagues did not.”
psychotic system, clearly bound to inspire negative solidarity
[...] Counting the house was a habit of mine. The question of how many people were present in a particular place seemed important to me, perhaps because the recurring news of airline disasters and military engagements always stressed the number of dead and missing; such exactness is a tickle of electricity to the numbed brain. The next most important thing to find out was the degree of hostility. This was relatively simple. All you had to do was look at the people who were looking at you as you entered. One long glance was usually enough to give you a fair reading. There were thirty-one people in the living room. Roughly three out of four were hostile.
Quincy’s wife and my date smiled at each other’s peace earrings. Then I took B.G. into the living room. We waited for somebody to approach us and start a conversation. It was a party and we didn’t want to talk to each other. The whole point was to separate for the evening and find exciting people to talk to and then at the very end to meet again and tell each other how terrible it had been and how glad we were to be together again. This is the essence of Western civilization. But it didn’t matter really because an hour later we were all bored. It was one of those parties which are so boring that boredom itself soon becomes the main topic of conversation. One moves from group to group and hears the same sentence a dozen times. “It’s like an Antonioni movie.” But the faces were not quite as interesting.
[...] B.G. Haines, who was a professional model and one of the most beautiful women I have ever known, seemed to be enjoying Quincy’s routine. She was one of four black people in the room—and the only American among them—and she apparently felt it was her diplomatic duty to laugh louder than anyone at Quincy’s most vicious color jokes. She almost crumpled to the floor laughing and I was sure I detected a convulsive broken sob at the crest of every laugh. She needed more practice, I suppose. All evening, in fact, she had been smiling at everyone who approached and responding with grave nods to all the social insights directed her way by the scholars in the room. It was confusing. Finally I reminded her that we were supposed to be polite to her, not the reverse. Then I added a brief lecture on the responsibility she had toward her people. She speared a passing hors d’oeuvre and became elegant again.
In a little while I would ask B.G. where she wanted to eat. She would suggest that I decide. We would go to a small French restaurant way over on the West Side, on the rim of no man’s land, where the wind blows cold off the river and the low bleak tenements breathe decay; and where, at this time of year, there is a sense of total emptiness, of a place that has been abandoned before the boots of war. No one could live there but torn cats and children with transparent bellies, and those distant lights, crackling over Times Square, belong to another city in another age. B.G. would order the frogs’ legs. I would try to impress her by speaking French to the waiter with the warmth and intimacy of a hero of the Resistance greeting an old comrade-in-arms. The waiter would despise me and B.G. would see through my bluff. There would be nothing to do but finish the evening with one of those chain-smoking conversations about death, youth and anxiety. I remembered that I no longer smoked.
[...] There was a cult of the unattractive and the clever. There were points scored for ruthlessness. There were vendettas against the good-looking. One sought to avoid categories and therefore confound the formulators. For to be neither handsome nor unattractive, neither ruthless nor clever, was to be considered a hero by the bland, a. nice fellow by the brilliant and the handsome, a nonentity by the clever, a homosexual by the lunatic fringe of the unattractive, a bright young man by the ruthless, a threat by the dangerously neurotic, an intimate and loyal friend by the alienated and the doomed. I did my best to keep low. I moved quietly close to walls and up and down the stairwells. [...]
why is this so funny
I went around to Weede’s office. He was sitting in his restyled barber chair. For a desk he used a low round coffee table made of teak. Across the room was his three-screen color TV console. The barber chair, being an eccentricity permitted someone in Weede’s position, hadn’t bothered me much, but the coffee table was a bit frightening, seeming to imply that my titanic desk was all but superfluous. [...]