'He would find a hole in the data and then explode'
“I would see people practically combust.”
"There are so many people running for the door not just because the ship is sinking, but because the captain of the ship is screaming at them, blaming it on them, and telling them it's their fault"
“The joke in the office was that when it came to work/life balance, work came first, life came second, and trying to find the balance came last.”
“You learn how to diplomatically throw people under the bus”
You might be excused for thinking these quotations stem from some terrifying, corporate Ayn Rand winner-takes-all hell-hole where fear, intimidation and bullying ruled the day.
Ironically these quotations come from employees of two of the most famous retailers on the planet.
And despite the (alarming) similarity in the quotations, one is in stratospheric ascent while the other is, by all accounts, about to become a sad footnote in the retail history books.
Of course, I’m talking about Amazon and Sears
No prize for guessing which stock ticker belongs to Amazon and which belongs to Sears. Case in point, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is purported to have made over a billion dollars in one day from all the Alexa hoopla at CES in January this year. Not too shabby for a place where employees practically combust.
To further highlight the dichotomy, many consider Amazon to be on an enviable track to become a trillion dollar company and it’s certainly rolling out a rapid-fire slew of innovations (Dash, Alexa) and PR-worthy concepts (GO, Blue Origin). Also, in the type of folklore usually reserved for Silicon Valley start-ups not billion dollar companies, it hasn’t shied away from “failing fast” (Fire) either. Conversely, at Sears, sales are down 37% since early 2013, its debt load has spiked to over $1.6 billion, and the company is losing well over $1 billion annually**
So on the surface you could read these employee comments and conclude both organizations have toxic cultures.
But if the cultures are equally “toxic”, how is one organization a leader while the other is undoubtedly a laggard?
Perhaps the issue is that we’re using the culture term haphazardly. And, perhaps, we’re not acknowledging some key nuances and learning between Amazon and Sears.
For example when we discuss Culture, we often point to phenomenon like remote working, open plan offices, bring your pet to work environments, sushi Fridays and a proliferation of foosball tables as reflective of an open and progressive culture, add in employee engagement surveys and you’re really rocking, but Culture is more nuanced and complex than this. The good folks over at Culture University talk about the differences between “climate” and “culture” and, you guessed it, all those attributes above aren’t culture cues, they’re measures of organizational climate. Just because management insists on trust falls at the annual picnic, doesn’t mean you working in a trusting culture.
Cultures where the founder still walks the halls (Amazon) operate with an entirely different dynamic than one’s where the founders passed away decades earlier. When the guy whose name is figuratively on the door still presides over who gets blessed and who gets banished, there is little incentive to change the way things are gonna get done. Less than zero if the organization has a history of success. Look at how people describe the vaunted culture of innovation at Apple under Founder Steve Jobs versus under CEO Tim Cook – and that’s only in the space of five years!
Then there’s the issue – as I did myself at the start of this post - of evaluating and labeling a culture “good”, “bad”, “progressive” or “toxic” without evaluating it against the fundamental business criteria that matters - Is the Culture accelerating or impeding the execution of the organization’s strategy?
After all, as acclaimed Culture expert Edgar Schein points out, “The purpose of a company is not to create a nice workplace culture but to function in the economy, to provide goods and services” There is no debate that cultures that tolerate employee abuse or engage in unethical behavior have no place in a civilized society but equally, I would argue, a culture of civility where strategy execution grinds to a halt because of consensus building and bureaucracy is equally bad. Peter Drucker was never more insightful, nor eloquent, than his famous quip “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast”
Perhaps the final word is best left to Jeff Bezos who, in trying to counter the scathing New York Times article, had this to say in defense of the Amazon culture:
"The reason cultures are so stable in time is because people self-select. Someone energized by competitive zeal may select and be happy in one culture, while someone who loves to pioneer and invent may choose another. The world, thankfully, is full of many high-performing, highly distinctive corporate cultures. We never claim that our approach is the right one — just that it’s ours — and over the last two decades, we’ve collected a large group of like-minded people. Folks who find our approach energizing and meaningful."
What are your views on the difference between Amazon and Sears?
How significant, or insignificant, is the Cultural aspect in the success of one and the failure of the other? Is it appropriate to use the “toxic” word in describing both?
