What exactly is accomplished when corporate culture sits everybody down and has a power point about the strategy, business goals for the next year.
Stuff like saying “our new plan is focusing on areas like key player, resilience and fast resource adaption to better serve customers”. Stuff that seems super abstract and boil down to “worker faster or harder” or saying that whats important to the company are “customers, excellent products and people who make products” but said over an hour and mixed in with corporate jargon
It seems like a ton of work goes into these things but its all not usable information. So what is it that these scrum master project managers and higher executives hope to achieve at the end of these calls?
I’ve been at places where the corporate policies were just buzzword doublespeak and they are a waste of time. Everyone knows it’s bullshit.
I’ve also been at exactly one place where the leadership team gave serious thought to what their goals were for the organization. Then they wrote down a set of goals that were
- simple
- coherent
- actionable And that actually made it easier to do our jobs. When we had to make a decision, we could actually refer to these principles and use them.
It was crazy helpful!
…And then they hired a fuckton of Ex-Amazon managers into high-level roles and they promptly drove away all the best people and replaced the helpful principles with Amazon’s work-or-die philosophy. So I bailed. 😭
Is this a common thing? I’ve also noticed this with ex Amazon managers if encountered in the workplace. Horribly incompetent, generally unpleasant to work with, but some how get themselves to get hired.
The name of “Amazon” carries cachet. It sounds like impressive experience.
The thing is, Amazon famously treats its employees like shit - even the highly paid ones. There’s a sorta Stockholm Syndrome that develops, where you convince yourself that this misery is the cost of “doing great things” or you decide to bail while you can and go someplace that doesn’t suck.
Managers who spend any amount of time at Amazon tend to be the former. They end up with this mindset that if your team isn’t miserable, you just aren’t working hard enough and that having “tough” conversations means that you berate people until they break.
So beware Ex-Amazon managers. They’re not all bad, but a sudden influx is not a good sign.
(In fairness - One of the best managers I ever had was at Amazon. If he left that place, I’d be thrilled to work with him again. Just. Not there.
The hands-down worst manager I ever had was at Amazon as well.)
