The Case of the Missing Employees
CEO's letter to shareholders gives workers no credit for Amazon's success
Amazon’s CEO released his annual letter to shareholders earlier this week.
You can read it here if you have 28 minutes to spare. Alternatively, you can absorb the core meaning here in far less time.
Interpreting this letter accurately isn’t about understanding what it says. It’s about the deafening silence of what it doesn’t say.
Here’s a relevant excerpt detailing the headlines of Amazon’s massive 2023 success.
Notice the absence of human imagery.
Revenue grew.
Free Cash Flow improved.
Customer experience improved.
And it seems, magically, as though it all just sorta happened.
No discussion of how those results were generated.
No mention of who generated those results.
Apparently, it all just materialized with no human intervention.
This must be why Jassy is cool with freezing base salary for managers and individual contributors comprising the brain and spine of his workforce.
On this evidence, he clearly doesn’t think they did anything.
A keyword search of the annual letter helps clarify its meaning by showing us what else is missing.
The letter does not mention employees.
The letter does not mention associates, the word used by Amazon for frontline employees who make up the vast majority of its 1.5 million person workforce.
The letter does not mention trust, nor by any means whatsoever create the impression that relationships between humans exist within Amazon and create its outcomes.
Perhaps most revealing is that the letter does not thank anyone. The words thank, thanks, gratitude, and appreciation are totally absent.
I gotta hand it to Mr. Jassy.
You have to require a personal wheelbarrow to cart around your ego if you’re able to big up tens of billions in revenue without thanking anyone. The sheer sociopathy of it is actually impressive.
Something else which caught my notice.
Not a single Amazon Leadership Principle is mentioned in this letter.
I’ve been opining recently that since Jeff Bezos stepped away from actively leading Amazon and Jassy took over, the company’s value system has been rapidly dying on the vine.
This letter all but proves it.
Amazon was once a company that could be relied upon to stick to its values, sometimes maddeningly so. The daily experience in its operations network, the tools employed to get things done, the processes for standard work, people development, reporting. Everything reflected and exemplified those values.
They were ways of working and they were also self-imposed limits, with one often serving as a corollary for another. As in, for example, thou shalt not expect others to Deliver Results unless s/he first Earns Trust with teammates.
All of this kept the Leadership Principles central to daily life, with every action and decision tethered in some way to a set of core propositions.
This helped stabilize expectations. A lot might happen, a lot might change, the environment could be so dynamic and choppy as to seem shapeless.
But you could always feel that steady heartbeat of unified beliefs pumping out those value signals.
Now we’ve arrived at a place where the CEO makes no mention of them in his biggest communication of the year.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not as though a gazillion references of particular principles would be appropriate in this particular venue.
But for not even a single mention to bubble out of a 28-minute exposition of company success and corporate strategy reflects that the author isn’t thinking about such values much at all. They’re not in his pen, and therefore likely not in his mind.
So if you’re an Amazon skeptic and ever needed proof that its leadership principles are merely an internal control device used to pacify employees and not a true article of company culture, here’s your evidence in black and white.
It seems Jassy does want shareholders to see him as cost-conscious. The word cost is mentioned 19 times. It basically replaces “people” in the narrative, which is maybe a totally conscious gesture.
Maybe Amazon’s people are just another cost for Jassy and his fellow executives to control.
Embarrassingly, Jassy decides to follow tradition by including Jeff Bezos’ first letter to shareholders from 1997 as a closing flourish.
Doing so provides a damning contrast, as Bezos went out of his way to make sure shareholders knew why the company was doing well:
I can’t tell you what you should take from this letter, even if I kinda have.
I can definitely tell you what I think when I read it.
It’s as though tens of billions of dollars of commercial success spontaneously occurred with no human effort required. It all just appeared.
Andy Jassy wants shareholders to look no further than his personal genius for an explanation. We know that since he didn’t mention, credit, or recognize anyone else.
I think that’s gross and shameful.
Andy Jassy should want shareholders to understand that they’re only getting wealthy from Amazon holdings because of the effort and ingenuity and commitment of Amazonians.
He clearly doesn’t think so, and/or doesn’t want the people who sign his checks to think so.
At some point, the failure to credit how value is created results in that value stream breaking down.
But way before that, we will have agreed that failing to give credit where due is just flat wrong.
Which is exactly what we should expect from a CEO of a company with no value system.
TC is an independent writer, speaker, coach, and consultant on organizational leadership. He is a former Amazon senior manager and 23-year veteran officer of the US military.