Well written piece. I research and invest in large, publicly traded companies for a major bank for a living and the culture are you describing at Amazon is all too common among Fortune 100. Nothing pleases investors more than cost cutting and expanding margins. As long as a stock price outperforms the market, senior managers will keep their jobs and continue to get bonuses. But eventually the music stops and you wake up to find yourself losing market share to smaller, more nimble competitors and your stock tanks. Economic moats are a tricky thing. Investor love them but if they are high enough, eventually, you get a corporate culture as you describe at Amazon. A recent example is Boeing. It was long, slow decline over decades. No one is too big to fail and it started with corporate culture shift from workers and safety to rewarding shareholders. Boeing is going through a crisis of their own making. Sounds like Amazon is headed down a similar path.
There's always that moment when a corporation turns away from its core competency, its distinctive offering. When American automakers turned their focus to making money as financiers, they lost their edge in building the world's best automobiles. When Boeing realized it could make more money as a supply chain manager than a true aircraft manufacturer, we started down the path of dubious (787) or downright bad (737 Max) designs. The engineering focus was nearly hunted to extinction, and might yet be depending on how this most recent crisis gets navigated.
Amazon was always known for customer obsession. These days, its customer service is mediocre and being squeezed by the c-suite to levels triggering a mental health crisis across the entire division. The FTC suit vs Prime is a parade of customer manipulation ... making it easy to subscribe accidentally and near impossible to unsubscribe on purpose. This is the moment we will look back upon when we pick at the embers of this once fantastic company. The founding vision left the building with the founder, I suspect.
Well written piece. I research and invest in large, publicly traded companies for a major bank for a living and the culture are you describing at Amazon is all too common among Fortune 100. Nothing pleases investors more than cost cutting and expanding margins. As long as a stock price outperforms the market, senior managers will keep their jobs and continue to get bonuses. But eventually the music stops and you wake up to find yourself losing market share to smaller, more nimble competitors and your stock tanks. Economic moats are a tricky thing. Investor love them but if they are high enough, eventually, you get a corporate culture as you describe at Amazon. A recent example is Boeing. It was long, slow decline over decades. No one is too big to fail and it started with corporate culture shift from workers and safety to rewarding shareholders. Boeing is going through a crisis of their own making. Sounds like Amazon is headed down a similar path.
There's always that moment when a corporation turns away from its core competency, its distinctive offering. When American automakers turned their focus to making money as financiers, they lost their edge in building the world's best automobiles. When Boeing realized it could make more money as a supply chain manager than a true aircraft manufacturer, we started down the path of dubious (787) or downright bad (737 Max) designs. The engineering focus was nearly hunted to extinction, and might yet be depending on how this most recent crisis gets navigated.
Amazon was always known for customer obsession. These days, its customer service is mediocre and being squeezed by the c-suite to levels triggering a mental health crisis across the entire division. The FTC suit vs Prime is a parade of customer manipulation ... making it easy to subscribe accidentally and near impossible to unsubscribe on purpose. This is the moment we will look back upon when we pick at the embers of this once fantastic company. The founding vision left the building with the founder, I suspect.