Amazon is a challenging place to work. Also a uniquely exciting one to develop a career. It has such a strong focus on maintaining a very differentiated culture, a set of #principles that enable amazing speed, ownership and innovation that sometimes (often even) it really makes people behave in ways that we are not used to in our past corporate experience. It is a polarizing place. You love it or you hate it. It is not a place where you can just switch on/off on Mondays & Fridays. If you do not “embody” the way of working, it will eat you alive. But boy, how much fun it can be if you learn how to ride the beast! Reading “Exit Interview” by Kristi Coulter has made me re-experience my first 5 years in the company, and the difficult yet obvious decision to leave at some point. It has also made me reflect and deep dive on why I decided to come back after 3 years away. I love the working culture of Amazon, because of what it enables me to achieve, to learn and to grow as a professional. From all the opinions in the book, the one I totally agree with and want to actively work to change is the lack of diversity and promotion of strong women to make the company less of a boy’s club, alpha-led environment. I’ve been very lucky to know probably one of the strongest women in Amazon from my very first day in 2016, when I joined Kara Hartnett Hurst sustainability team. I am now also very lucky to work for an amazing expert and leader such as Lindsay McQuade. But we still need to do much more to have a leadership that is representative of our customers, diverse and inclusive. #Diversity #WomenLeadership #Change #Principles #Values
I really appreciate your well-balanced take on working at Amazon. It is indeed a challenging place to work, but I try to avoid labeling it with a unilateral judgement of value. I especially like your “ride the beast” metaphor; I see it similarly. Enjoy your second tour. 👍🏻 Also thank you for using your platform to lift up female leaders. 👏🏻
What a wonderful post. Love seeing we're increasing our male allies in the workplace. We definitely still have a long way to go, but it's always refreshing when men come to support the change!
Thank you so much for the shout-out and this thoughtful post, Alex! It is a complicated, maddening, but also thrilling place for sure, in ways that are hard to understand from the outside.
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Well said.
Thank you Alex!! We’re so lucky to have you back at Amazon 🙏
Principal Thermal-Fluids Analyst at TerraPower
8moThis honestly reads like a defense of “The Squid Game”. “Sure, Squid Game can be brutal. But if you win the Squid Game, it makes you rich beyond your wildest dreams.” You admit that it’s an environment that can be challenging and can “eat you alive.” I’m not sure why someone would defend that culture. But I would challenge the claim that the “brusing culture” (as the NY Times labeled it) is a component necessary for Amazon’s success. There are many companies who are just as commercially successful but don’t have the hard edges.