This is my story of working with and for Amazon for a quarter of a century, as a small publisher, an author, a top reviewer, a former stockholder, and eventually an associate at one of the company’s delivery stations. It is a story about working with and for a corporation who is “too big to fail,” and therefore can afford to operate in ways I’d call “rigid.”
But it wasn’t always like that. For sure, Amazon’s first two decades of doing business were better than great. Jeff Bezos revolutionized the entire publishing and bookselling industry and for a time it seemed as if the company invented something new every six months; thereby giving thousands of small entrepreneurs the opportunity to start a business.
At that time, Jeff Bezos’ famous “Day 1”-principle seemed omnipresent in everything the company proposed and did.
But I didn’t see Amazon sticking to it. In fact, while I worked at the warehouse, I was wondering if the people who were in charge of Amazon’s logistics operations ever heard of “Day 1”-thinking.
This was so baffling that eventually I penned ‘Inside Amazon: My Story,’ in which I compared what Amazon said about themselves with what I experienced at one of the company’s warehouses.
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Still more surprising was what happened after I published ‘Inside,’ on May 1, 2021. I didn’t even know about it for the longest time, until an unexpected issue and – maybe – fate brought me back to that warehouse. Amazon took heed and adopted all of my ideas (with the exception of anything relating to more money or recognition) but never contacted me. To say that I was stunned doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Indeed, if I hadn’t published ‘Inside,’ many people might not even believe that this story is true, but I published it and Amazon sold it on their ecommerce platform.
That’s why I integrated two sections from that book into this book. Today they are a document frozen in time which might show that some of the troubles Amazon experienced in 2022, such as becoming the first company to lose $1 trillion in value, might have been foreseeable.
Because consistently ignoring the input from clever, hardworking, dedicated people and – seemingly – perceiving them as “irrelevant little cogwheels in a big machine” is a bad habit.
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Maybe you, dear reader, will recognize yourself in this story. One of the urgent care clinic doctors I saw because of a minor but aggravating medical issue I acquired at the warehouse, told me, “My life is just yours. I also have to ‘hit my rate of patients’ every hour.”
If you too feel about your work this way, you’ll be happy to learn that ‘Winning @ Amazon’ also reveals how I wiggled myself out of this frustrating situation, and what exactly I did.
