Today’s rain-drenched thoughts on the topic of this open letter/lawsuit, which was doing the rounds yesterday, and its relation to open cultures.
Note to self: next time have an umbrella, and pay better attention to the framing! On the good side, I now have some lovely shots of my chin, and a wonderful rain-halo effect going as well.
Summary:
- It’s raining. Really. I was drenched by the time this finished. And there was a cool halo effect.
- Thoughts on the Amazon announcement…
- An Amazon employee was mistreated by their manager, had their moved blocked by retroactive “backdated performance feedback”, was seriously penalised for raising important issues about a client being overcharged by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- Amazon manager wanted to spin it into a positive, even though the code for the promotion was totally broken.
- Interesting to me: Amazon is strange to me, because it’s clearly highly successful, but very, very top-down, hierarchical. Every bit of info that comes out shows that Amazon is a company that’s very centralised around Jeff Bezos.
- So my first thought was: well, this doesn’t surprise me very much! It seems like an inescapable result of a strong, secretive top-down culture that there will be bad top-down decisions hiding stuff.
- In an open culture, if people make decisions against the values of the company, this is very visible and obvious quite quickly. Either you deal with that decision, work through the problem, or it is obvious that the values are just lip service.
- In a secretive company like Amazon, it’s very easy to hide things under the carpet, punish people for making information flow. So when there’s a gap between the values of the company and its behaviour, it can just be hidden. The discord does not become widespread in the company. So the values can appear to persist even though they’re not being followed.
- Obviously this can happen in open cultures too. In AES’s case, for example, they had some ethics/transparency issues with one plant. At a certain scale, this becomes inevitable. But what is not inevitable is how it is covered up. The fact there was buy-in all the way to the top for defrauding a major customer of Amazon, however, would not happen in an open culture.
- Lack of transparency is always going to lead to this sort of stuff. Having the transparency to prevent this sort of stuff happening will naturally lead to other features of open cultures.