In their fascinating report on working conditions at Amazon, Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld mention a speech that Jeff Bezos gave at Princeton in 2010:
Jeff Bezos turned to data-driven management very early.
He wanted his grandmother to stop smoking, he recalled in a 2010 graduation speech at Princeton. He didn’t beg or appeal to sentiment. He just did the math, calculating that every puff cost her a few minutes. “You’ve taken nine years off your life!” he told her. She burst into tears.
He was 10 at the time. Decades later, he created a technological and retail giant by relying on some of the same impulses: eagerness to tell others how to behave; an instinct for bluntness bordering on confrontation; and an overarching confidence in the power of metrics . . .
It’s a shame that Kantor and Streitfeld don’t return to this speech, because it doesn’t stop there. Bezos goes on to describe something he learned that day about the limits of data-driven criticism:
I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. “Jeff, you're so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division.” That's not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever.”
The Times report doesn’t leave room for the possibility that Bezos would be this self-aware (little surprise: being “vocally self-critical” is an Amazon leadership principle). Accepting that he is, what are we to make of a management philosophy that leads to employees being punished for caring for the dying, welcoming the newborn, and otherwise performing the most basic acts of human duty and love?
Put simply, I think the cruelties of Amazon’s corporate culture simply reflect the seriousness with which Bezos takes the progressive technological faith so many others only profess. If one assumes that the world is to be improved mostly through increases in efficiency (rather than acts of inefficient and gratuitous love), then the supreme duty of kindness is to advance technological progress. This is a quasi-religious “mission” (Amazon’s term) that demands heroic asceticism. Like the Society of Jesus, it may not be for everyone, but those who persist will have the pleasure of knowing they are serving the highest purpose. Ruthlessness may haunt the office culture, but kindness—understood by a certain technological logic—is the overarching goal.
Successful organizations will demand hustle and produce disgruntled employees: that is nothing new. What is different is the conceit of business as a kind of religion. (It is telling that Bezos’s speech was given as part of Princeton's religious baccalaureate service.) Bezos rightly sees that taking seriously a certain notion of progress and commerce requires treating the corporation like a church—and not as one of those nice, friendly mainline denominations, but as a missionary order or doomsday cult. Sacrifices that it would be unreasonable to demand for a mere business look very different when they are expected in the service of a religious cause. The question remains whether the religion is true or false.
Matthew Schmitz is deputy editor of First Things.
