Inside the world of Amazon

Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon has told staff to speak with him directly about bullying – following claims the relentless cutthroat culture at his company turns employees into perennially depressed individuals. 

Bezos, who ranks as the world’s sixth richest man with a fortune of $46.9 billion, according to Forbes, sent an internal memo to staff in which he denied the ‘shockingly callous management practices’ in a New York Times article, titled ‘Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace’.

In the report, published on Saturday 15^th August 2015, former employees were quoted as saying that they regularly see workers crying at their desks and others were judged harshly by bosses after not putting in long hours because of illness diagnoses or miscarriages.

‘The article doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day,’ Bezos said in his email to his 180,000 plus employees.

‘Even if it’s rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero.’

‘You can also email me directly at jeff@amazon.com’

The Times reportedly spoke to more than 100 current and former employees at Amazon, where bosses are said to push staff so far past breaking point that they ‘practically combust’. Regular sackings to keep workers on their toes were described by one manager as ‘purposeful Darwinism’.

When new recruits join the company, they are told to forget the ‘poor habits’ they learned at previous jobs, as one employee recalled. When they ‘hit the wall’ from the unrelenting pace, there is only one solution – ‘Climb the wall,’ according to others.

According to the expose, the company’s best workers are known as ‘Amabots’ – because they are so ‘at one with the system’.

The company’s culture is described by Bezos to be ‘friendly and intense, but if push comes to shove we’ll settle for intense.’ Thanks in part to its ability to extract the most from employees, Amazon is evidently even stronger than ever as it is now said to be worth an estimated $250billion – and last month surpassed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the country. 

Read the full story here: http://goo.gl/lZjbhV