I haven’t really shared any thoughts publicly on the NYT piece about Amazon from earlier this summer. In many respects, it didn’t represent my experiences in my 4 years at the company. I had a great time and was able to do some of my best work there. On the other hand, I had friends who spent years there and did feel that the article had the right tone. The mixed response is largely why I expected the story to eventually fade into the constant stream of news. I assumed that Amazon would investigate the examples and if true, they would be resolved and we’d hear nothing again.
This morning Jay Carney penned a response piece to the NYT article. Before I add any additional thoughts, let me be clear: Amazon, just like anyone, has a definite right to defend themselves in the face of false claims or low-quality journalism. However, I think this response missed the mark.
Rather than share my thoughts on what a good response should have been. I will offer an example that Jeff Bezos himself shared in a 2010 Princeton Graduation speech. It’s a wordy story, but goes as follows:
“As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially “Days of our Lives.” My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. And every few summers, we’d join the caravan. We’d hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather’s car, and off we’d go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.
At that age, I’d take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I’d calculate our gas mileage — figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I’d been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can’t remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!”
I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. “Jeff, you’re so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division.” That’s not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”
I think that today’s response was clever, rather than kind. It was a bold choice to shut down the examples in the article. Not because they aren’t true, but because with all of the controversy and responses coming from current and former employees, the examples in the NYT piece do exist in some form or fashion.
It’s important to take the time as a company to better understand the needs of your employees. With the NYT article and Jay’s response, I hope that the right dialogue was opened for those who feel that they need change from the company.
Disclaimer: these thoughts are 100% my own and are not a reflection of any company I’ve worked for, past or present.
typingham 