For decades, General Electric was America’s breeding ground for corporate chiefs. Executives who rose through the conglomerate’s ranks in its heyday and passed through its rigorous management program went on to run behemoths such as Home Depot and 3M.
In the Big Tech era, Amazon has become the incubator for CEOs and entrepreneurs, The Wall Street Journal reports. At the core of Amazon’s ethos is a scrappy startup mentality that encourages employees to constantly innovate and challenge the way things are typically done.
There’s one element some ex-Amazonians are leaving behind: the harsher parts of Amazon’s culture, such as hiring practices that favor skills over collegiality.
Amazon is known for disregarding social cohesion in interviewing candidates, former employees say, elevating other traits over an ability to work well with colleagues. Will Gordon, a former Amazon executive who left to found home maintenance startup Latchel three years ago, says that he originally embraced that tenet.
“We approached hiring this way and it was a big, big mistake,” Gordon says. “We need social cohesion and to like each other because we have to put in lots of additional hours and time because it’s a startup.”.
Alums of the Seattle-based giant, which employs over 750,000 people, head companies including Tableau Software, Zulily, Groupon, and Simple, an online banking unit of Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA. Former Amazon folk also head a legion of startups.
Former employees say some of the aspects of company culture they’re leaving behind include an intense pace and a preference for blunt confrontation that can cause some employees to burn out. Read the full story.
