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Michael Schrage
August 24, 2015
Should he desire, Jeff Bezos has a simple, powerful and culturally-compatible
way to combat accusations that Amazon is a soulless, dystopian workplace:
double down on being data-driven. Preempt bad employee vignettes with better
empathic analytics.
Amazon should explicitly measure for the care, compassion, and kindness that
Bezos justly celebrated in his 2010 Princeton commencement address. Monitor
workplace affect as thoughtfully and rigorously as business effect. No,
Bezos shouldn t embed a C@D Crying@Desk metric on his KPI dashboard. But Amazon
s CEO might understandably want greater (statistical) confidence that his
high-performance culture quantitatively reflects and respects the quality of
mercy.
If Amazon s culture of metrics truly cares about caring, in other words, it
will measure it. Data will eradicate ignorance and ambiguity. Bezos best
brains and hearts need to analytically define what they want empathy and
compassion to look and feel like at their company. That may sound bloodless.
But when your founder has declared data the lifeblood of his firm, it s truly
not.
There s nothing glib or tongue-in-cheeky in this. To the contrary,
data-driven compassion is completely consistent with the culture of metrics
Bezos has sought to create since he launched Amazon.
As the New York Times article observed, Amazon uses a self-reinforcing set of
management, data and psychological tools to spur its tens of thousands of
white-collar employees to do more and more. The company is running a continual
performance improvement algorithm on its staff, said Amy Michaels, a former
Kindle marketer.
Why shouldn t or wouldn t core values such as empathy and compassion be
actively monitored, measured, and analyzed? Explicitly excluding kindness from
managerial dashboards may send the wrong kind of message about the right kind
of behaviors. Continual performance improvement algorithms that minimize or
ignore behaviors the founder publicly cherishes are recipes for pathology and
dysfunction.
If Bezos who literally enjoys access to every bit of data that matters at
Amazon truly suspects or fears his metrics-obsessions have subverted the human
values he highlighted at Princeton, you can bet that empathy and compassion
metrics will soon be baked into Amazon s next set of people analytics. A
Culture of Metrics 2.0 becomes essential.
The most important insight here affirms that the roads to organizational hell
are paved not just digitally driven with good intentions. That s ultimately
self-destructive. Innovators defined and led by data-driven decision-makers
inspire schizoid enterprise cultures that bring out the best in people who want
to build on data, and the worst in those looking simply to follow it I was
just following the data/orders/metrics/KPIs, etc.
Why? Because more often than not data inspire affective, not just effective,
response. The key cultural quote from the Times story makes the point. Data
creates a lot of clarity around decision-making, said Sean Boyle, who runs the
finance division of Amazon Web Services and was permitted by the company to
speak. Data is incredibly liberating.
That raises an obvious question: Liberating for whom?
When cultures authentically commit to being data-driven, data can literally
dictate what you and your colleagues should do next. For many people, that s
not liberation; it s servitude. Data end up removing choices instead of
creating them. The clarity data supposedly bring eliminate excuses and
rationalizations for avoidance and delay.
As the Times fairly noted, Explanations like we re not totally sure or I ll
get back to you are not acceptable, many employees said. Some managers
sometimes dismissed such responses as stupid or told workers to just stop
it.
When a founder/CEO cherishes data, analytics, and metrics as corporate cultural
totems, then that becomes part of the enterprise DNA. You don t address it by
memos and charismatically appealing to people s good intentions and better
selves, you deal with it by yes! asking for and insisting upon better data and
metrics.
At Amazon s cultural core, however, data and meaningful analytics are fuel and
enzyme for innovation and inspiration. Outliers aren t artifacts or
aberrations; they re gateways to new markets, novel technologies, or
transformative insights that will knock Bezos s socks off. Yes, you must
respect and hit your core metrics but data truly liberates the enterprising
intrapreneur. You betray Amazon s principles and your commitment to the company
if you don t embrace data as your path and partner to the truth.
That s not a challenge to the mediocre to up their game; it s a declaration
that great talent and great effort and great vision with great data isn t good
enough for Amazon. If you ve got a problem with that, Bezos has a problem with
you.
But if great data and great analytics make it too easy for Amazon leaders and
managers to swap apathy for empathy, then maybe they re not so great. That s
exactly the kind of challenge a Jeff Bezos cares about.
Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School s Center for Digital
Business, is the author of the books Serious Play (HBR Press), Who Do You Want
Your Customers to Become? (HBR Press) and The Innovator s Hypothesis (MIT
Press).