Essay: Amazon culture

Since the beginning innovation has always played a crucial role in Amazon’s business model. Amazon has developed a culture centered around constant innovation and its platform can be seen as disruptive innovation in the online retail sector. Despite all the changes in the market in recent decades, Amazon has remained the undisputed leader in a fast-paced environment. At its heart, Amazon still treats its business model as a startup constantly striving to remake itself and customer expectations. It has figured out how to combine the culture of a small company with the financial resources of a large one.
In regards to teams within Amazon, Bezos encourages a climate open to experimentation. He emboldens employees, regardless of their position, to pitch ideas to him whenever and without judgement. If it fails, it fails and then they move on. These ideas are developed either internally or based on what customers say they want or need; Amazon is constantly engaging with its consumers to see if they are meeting their needs, if not, they find a new way to do so. When an idea peaks Bezos interest, he employs a small team to experiment with the idea and find out if it is feasible. The philosophy of teams at Amazon follows the “two-pizza team” rule; it states that the team should be small enough to be fed with two pizzas. This enables a focus on innovating across different touchpoints efficiently and rapidly. Bezos also wanted teams to operate independently in whatever way they felt suited them best. He has developed Amazon to be a flexible organization with few company-wide policies.  These teams get limited funding and clear goals; if the team succeeds with their smaller challenges, then they are given more resources and larger obstacles to challenge. By doing this, employees feel a stronger sense of responsibility and in turn this encourages them to be more creative, open and brave; they have a need to succeed. Through this, it can be seen that Amazon puts a great focus on Idea Generation and Idea Conversion. However, they also believe in constraining the amount of internal testing. Amazon prioritizes launching early over everything, regardless of whether the product is completely ready. This enables Amazon “to learn as quick as possible whether an idea that sounds good on paper is actually a good idea in the real world” (Eric Ries, Vox). By getting a product on the market quickly, they can collect feedback from consumers, so Amazon can avoid wasting time and resources on a product that would not serve the needs of real customers.
Nevertheless, the culture at Amazon is not always easy to handle. Jeff Bezos as a leader is incredibly ingenious and innovative but according to many reports is tough to handle. He fostered an environment of innovation and independence, yet, is demanding and competitive. Managers and employees are held to unreasonably high standards which is used to drive teams to deliver increasing levels of new ideas to improve customer service. The leadership style of Bezos cannot be summed into one type of leadership. He’s an enigma, on one hand he tends to favor micro-management with rigorous standards and is extremely opinionated (Stone 2013). This has gained Amazon a title of being one of the most stressful companies to work for in the tech world; Bezos demands perfection. Conversely, he is also known as a transformational leader that promotes innovation through creating a creative vision of the future that draws employees in. Transformational leaders capture interest and commitment to company goals, driving team effort beyond ordinary possibilities (Howell and Avollio, 2013). Despite his lesser qualities, overall,  he still enables and encourages collaboration between employees, enhances diversity within his teams and has accepted the inevitability of failure and made it known that you cannot innovate without failure. This is why he is considered a successful leader and why Amazon has become what it is today.  Although, in the future Bezos should be aware of some of his leadership tactics because it may draw immense criticism and judgement which may lead to a loss of followers, customers and employees that no longer want to put up with the ruthless side of his leadership.