Many people believe that CEO Jeff Bezos has created a monster ... while others feel that Amazon's dog-eat-dog culture is just what was needed to propel a small on-line bookseller into the most valuable retailer in the United States ... having just recently surpassed Walmart in its stock-market valuation.
Clearly, Amazon.com has taken the Darwinian corporate culling culture developed at General Electric a number of steps further ... to the point where it's high turnover rates (half of its employees last just one year and only 15% of its employees last five years) might eventually be its undoing. The New York Times has done a very long, fascinating and in-depth article on Amazon which exposes not just its many maniacal successes but also its disturbing ugly warts ... see: New York Times Story.
The older I get, the more I believe that capitalistic success is very often predicated on a Messianic vision on the part of corporate founders ... from John D. Rockefeller to Henry Ford to Thomas Watson to Steve Jobs to Jeff Bezos. And although there might be much personal employee suffering along the way, the end result is, for a time, an "insanely" transformative company. After you have digested the above article, see if you can't somehow forgive the tyranny that many of these corporate founders have engaged in to birth their visions. I may not like it, but I can forgive it ... such is "invisible hand" of capitalism.
1 comment:
Agreed. Those who are appalled likely never worked on bleeding edge technology although the undercutting of peers is crude at best. Cultures that are spawned by Jobs, Bezos, Musk, even Thomas Edison are based on that mojo juice of a "sense of urgency." And if you leave, you have some awesome credentials on Linkedin.
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