Obsessive Ideas: Part 1
There exist obsessive ideas; they are never personal—Umberto Eco
In his book of collective writings, Invent and Wander (2021), Jeff Bezos titles one of his earliest (1998) shareholder letters, “Obsessions.” In it, he formally states to investors his intention to make Amazon “the world’s most customer-centric company.”
Jeff’s choice of the title, and its connection to a litany of concepts and practices he outlines in this and subsequent letters, is insightful. Taken to its logical limit, it could be argued, Amazon is an obsessive idea. An obsessive idea invented by an obsessive personality. An idea on a mission to destroy the world and recreate it in an image and likeness of itself. That’s damned obsessional.
I knew Amazon was different before arriving in Seattle to start work in June of 2018 as part of the Global Road Safety team—a group supporting the ramp-up of Amazon’s road logistics operations, the de facto final leg of the “Everything Store.” The job application process suggested a company built on a hyper-rational model, 180-degrees opposed to mulling over things. From my first contact with the recruiter, to interviews in Seattle, to job offer, the process was done in three weeks.
I was stunned. Amazon had turned a shadowy, odious exercise that often dragged on for months into a reasonably refreshing sprint. Get big fast! Even well-intended gatekeepers slowed innovation! Finally, I thought, a company that got it.
My first day, I pondered two stick-like sketches scribbled on a deskside white board representing partial workflows of the 15 or so compliance procedures I was tasked to write for processes that did not exist. In the near term, I had two 20-page onboarding documents to digest. Working my way through the first few pages, a call compelled me to briefly leave my desk. I left the Word document open and walked down the hall.
When I returned, I stopped in my tracks. There, on my computer monitors, was a bright, high-definition, diptych of flesh and hair; a garish montage of all-too-lifelike images of a guy—a guy named David Hasselhoff. I took a step closer, let out a loud chuckle, and glanced around the office. Five or six people were glued to their computers. Slowly easing into my chair, I frantically tried every trick I knew to force a restart and expunge the apparition of a former soap-opera hunk from my workspace.
It was a magnificent, welcome-to the-team punk job—yet not one without meaning. “It’s lock or be locked, bro,” my onboarding buddy, Jordan, intoned with a wry grin, releasing the screen freeze with a few keystrokes. (Jordan, an ex-serviceman with a life-or-death appreciation of the importance of rules in a large organization, was an invaluable orientation resource). Libby, my hiring manager, the only person in the office remotely aware of the episode, slid off her headphones and laughed sarcastically, “You should’ve known that.”
She was right, but only in time did I grasp all the layers of implications in her remark:
At Amazon, honest (passive) ignorance is no excuse because, 1) you are always expected to exceed expectations and, 2) it implies carelessness, at best, and sloth, at worst.
Always being resourceful reflected core, inter-related Amazonian concepts of scrappy and frugality, both of which have origins in the “door desk” story—one of the company’s several “founding myths” (the subject of an entire newsletter in itself).
At the tail of this train of logic was the notion that complacency in any form was reflective of the way a mercenary (here for the stock options), not a missionary (driven to make things better), behaved and, therefore, a breach of company etiquette.
Taken with the lock-computer mandate it was a Day-1, full immersion into the obsessive flavor of Amazonian culture. And it was just beginning!
The hard-boiled ethos underpinning Amazon’s foundation is right at the surface, breathing down the neck of every employee. In a company created on the results spawned by obsessions, it could be no other way.
Stride across the hallway to the breakroom, however, and you might encounter two people discussing Maxim Gorky’s “The Song of the Stormy Petrel” and it’s relation to the latest match between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana at the World Chess Championship; or run into a clone of Rufus (Amazon’s “First Dog”) whose adorable presence naturally leads to elevator chat with his equally charming owner, a software developer sporting a leather skirt, purple braided hair, and neon green, glitter-infused, horn-rimmed glasses.
Working at Amazon is a succession of fetching one-offs which stimulate the mind and spirit. It is the flipside of the company’s ball-busting, eat-or-be-eaten culture; one that politely belies the other with a genteel interest in the non-material, refined pursuits of life. Think high tea and lively debates about, well, chess strategy, game theory, and perfect information. This “above the fray” ambience is (purposely) collegial and elitist, announced by the celebration of “Pi (π) Day,” the slavish appearance of notable writers, artists, and influencers at “fishbowls,” live-streamed seminars on blockchain and machine learning, lunchtime chamber music recitals, and posters hawking the formation of “broomball” teams. Posters!
Employees even had a rough-hewn, plank-walled rathskeller-esque tavern at the spiritual center of its South Lake Union campus—the Brave Horse*. The joint was renowned for its spacious horseshoe bar (a rarity in Seattle), superbly greasy beer bites, and occasional closure as a suspected source of salmonella—an event which, without failure, served to renew one’s faith in humanity as patrons returned en masse upon its reopening.
*Alas Covid accomplished what salmonella never could—RIP dear Brave Horse, we knew you well.
Kicking back with a beer at the Brave Horse, life was good. Possibility was endless, tomorrow would follow today, and all the world’s stock options would come home to roost. Here, this time, this place, it occurred, was Xanadu, Camelot, and the Belle Époque all rolled into one. The shining city on a hill; a miracle—an ideal admixture of the sublime and the sumptuous, the timeless and the tangible, the mind and the mindless, Princeton and Wall Street.
“Obsessions,” I was discovering, was a many-hued thing. Looked at one way it was grim, grinding, and pointlessly unpleasant; looked at another, it was seductive, stimulating, fulfilling, fun. Peering at it long enough made it blur and fade into the fabric of reality. Perhaps that is what Mr. Eco means by a class of ideas that escape our grasp and become their own means to an end; a type of force setting off events that are fated to happen, and futile to resist.
In next week’s post, I’ll discuss how obsessions fuel another critical aspect of Amazon’s culture—control.