On Lattices and Ladders

I was intrigued by this weekend’s NYT piece on the working culture at Amazon, and even more intrigued by Jeff Bezos’s reply to it.

Both the criticisms and Bezos’s reply to them raise a question that has been puzzling me since I first learned to ask it in Divinity school: to what extent is excellence dependent on competition, and can it flourish in an entirely collaborative environment?

While I could critique the tone-deafness and willful ignorance of Bezos’s letter,* I’m more interested in what it says rather than what it reveals. Bezos makes frequent reference to markers of excellence: “best of the best,” “world-class,” “brilliant.”  He also notes the “highly competitive” employment market. His instructions regarding “callous management practices” are to “escalate” the incident to HR.

The culture of excellence at Amazon is one that depends on, values, and inculcates differentials of power and success. The language is hierarchical and competitive, and intentionally so.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Or, rather, it is only within a culture with specifically anti-competitive values and virtues that one could see why callousness is a bad thing.

If success is necessarily hierarchical and competitive (as even the word “excellence,” which I use frequently in the context of intentionally non-competitive virtues, suggests), then a certain callousness is inevitable. It doesn’t matter that the second person to invent a thing and patent it is a better person than the first; it’s the first that’s awarded the patent. “First come, first served” is an attempt to be fair, not to be cruel, right?

It doesn’t matter which team played better basketball; it’s the one with more points when the buzzer sounds that wins. The clock is an impartial judge, and the rules are the same for both teams. How can there be a question of callousness? The possibility of losing is what makes the winning meaningful.

If there is such a thing as success with multiple “winners,” if excellence (and deficiency) is measured according to something other than standard deviations from the norm, then there is a chance that collaboration without competition can produce excellence.

Some organizations (yes, even for-profit companies) have staked their reputation on a collaborative business ethic: Malcolm Gladwell profiled one such company in The Tipping Point. If Gore isn’t perfectly non-hierarchical and non-competitive (they still have to deal with the winner-take-all patent system), it has structures in place to create productive collaboration among its employees. It even has a catchy visual metaphor to replace the all-too-familiar, all-too-accurate “ladder” metaphor: theirs is a “lattice” structure.

A signal contrast between the two approaches?** Amazonians are instructed to “escalate to HR” and (according to the NYT article) to leave anonymous critiques of co-workers. Gore associates are encouraged to deal directly with the person with whom they have a problem.

Anyone who has read the comments section on a popular article or YouTube video should know what happens when anonymous commenting is encouraged. And when did “escalation” become a desirable conflict-management strategy? How such an atmosphere can possibly foster productive innovation is beyond me.

* “The article doesn’t describe the Amazon I know”? Of course it doesn’t. Those at the top of the ladder have a vastly different view than those at the bottom. “I don’t recognize this Amazon”? Of course you don’t. You don’t work at the same Amazon the people quoted in the article do. The boss never does.

**Disclaimer: I have no evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that anything said about either of these companies in the NYT or on their own company websites is true. I would love to speak to actual employees, present or former, disgruntled or . . . gruntled, about their experiences.