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You'll Never Buy Anything the Same Way Again The Secrets of Bezos: How Amazon Became the Everything Store Ever wondered what it's like to work at Amazon? Or to be one of its competitors or potential acquisitions? Or even to be related to founder Jeff Bezos? Look no further than this lengthy piece by Brad Stone, whose book on Bezos and his company comes out in later this month (natch, that's an Amazon link). On my first question, Bezos isn't a particularly nice boss. Amazon's culture is "notoriously confrontational," with Bezos regularly embarking on what employees call "nutters," which largely consist of him shooting off phrases like "Are you lazy or incompetent?" "I'm sorry, did I take my stupid pills today?" and "If I hear that idea again, I'm gonna have to kill myself." And yet many people who work there thrive in this environment and generally find that Bezos is right on target when he flippantly dismisses an idea or prioritizes a customer complaint over being civil to his underlings. And unlike many top companies that offer employees flexible working arrangements and other perks, Amazon gives new employees "a backpack with a power adapter, a laptop dock, and orientation materials," and reimburses only part of their public-transit passes. This is a huge jump from the 1990s, however, when "Bezos refused to give employees city bus passes because he didn't want to give them any reason to rush out of the office to catch the last bus of the day." As for my second and third questions, you're going to have to read the article. In particular, what happens when Stone tracks down Bezos's biological father is astonishing. How will established companies in the U.S., Europe, and Japan respond when companies from emerging markets invade developed economies with "good-enough" substitutes for what the incumbents have been successfully selling in the homeland? It's going to happen sooner or later. Tata Motors, for example, is expected to launch a full-scale attack on American markets with its ultra-cheap cars. When the assault comes, companies can take a lesson from Gillette, which dealt with a similar threat from Bic's cheap disposable razors in the 1990s. By introducing disposable-razor innovations such as lubrication strips, Gillette seized the initiative and essentially redefined the market, writes Costas Markides. Gillette "managed to convince consumers that they should expect more from their razors and that Bic was not really 'good enough' for them." This kind of nimble response from tough, wily corporations in the developed world will likely limit the invaders' success in wresting market share from the incumbents, Markides says. —Andy O'Connell Forming habits is one of the ways we become more productive. Essentially, our brains create shortcuts when it comes to things we do often, like turning off the lights, thereby saving our mental bandwidth for times when we need to make an important decision. This is all well and good, explains Leon Neyfakh, except when it comes to checking your phone while you drive. With distracted driving, which injured 387,000 people and killed 3,331 more in 2011, the impulse has been to increase public awareness (filmmaker Werner Herzog directed this 30-minute stunner of a campaign, for example). But that approach may not work. Your phone programs your brain to habitually check it. And when checking text messages or Twitter becomes a neurological shortcut, we may not even be aware we're picking up our phones, particularly because the act of driving preoccupies our prefrontal cortex, which controls inhibition. So how do we make ourselves, and others, safer? Some suggest social campaigns to make checking phones in certain situations socially taboo. Or we can fight habit with habit, teaching our brains that there are times when we should turn our phones off. Hope you like start-up soap operas. In this downright juicy excerpt from Nick Bilton's forthcoming book Hatching Twitter, we finally get to the bottom of the social network's origin story. And it ain't what developer and self-proclaimed Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey has peddled all these years (among other things, he supposedly invented Twitter on a playground, or when he was 8 years old, or because he was fascinated with trains and maps). There are far, far too many wonderful details to squeeze in here (like the time Ev Williams told Dorsey, “You can either be a dressmaker or the CEO of Twitter," but not both, or when Dorsey insisted that employees use Twitter rather than text messages, which resulted in a six-figure monthly bill). But the most resonant aspect of the piece is that after Dorsey was essentially forced out as CEO, he spun his own origin story, portraying himself as the heart and soul of Twitter in order to maneuver his way back to the top of a company he once struggled to run. In the end, Bilton reminds us that the creation of Twitter was truly a collaborative effort. Some people are making a ton of money because of it. Others, like Noah Glass (heard of him?), the man who actually came up with the name "Twitter," aren't. Self-Absorbed with an Open Wallet? Traditionally, American men between the ages of 18 and 34 have been a lucrative target for marketers. But, says Sam Theilman at Adweek, the recession and lingering underemployment have made the millennial generation a very different breed of youth from their counterparts of old. Collectively, millennials carry an eye-popping $1 trillion in student loans, even though only a quarter of the males among them managed to get a degree. Just 62% of millennial men have jobs; half of those work less than full time. And they’re not being paid much for their efforts. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the gap between productivity and real hourly compensation has never been wider, which means they’re doing a lot more work for a lot less money. The upshot: Millennials are poor, which is making them very frugal consumers. New cars are beyond them, and even cable is too expensive. More than a third still live with their parents. Unless the economy starts generating better-paying jobs, they’re unlikely ever to turn into the kind of consumers the Baby Boomers and Gen Xers were at their age. —Andrea Ovans Why It's So Hard for Companies to Make Digital Transformations (Sloan Management Review) This blog first appeared on Harvard Business Review on 10/11/2013. View our complete listing of Strategic HR blogs.
BusinessweekMaking the Leap Into Developed Markets
London Business SchoolWhy You Can't Stop Checking Your Phone
Boston GlobeAll Is Fair in Love and Twitter
New York Times MagazineThe Millennial Male Is Not Who You Think He Is
AdweekWhen Things Go Badly
Blackberry, Disruption, and Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda (Learning by Shipping)
The U.S. Debt Ceiling Crisis Explained (The Guardian)
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