Jeff Bezos Is Brilliant, But What Is Jay Carney Doing @ Amazon?

Business, Regulation, Technology

The real news is not that Amazon is a “‘bruising” and grueling workplace, but that former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was given a job in such a fabulous firm. The nature of an over-regulated, often treacherous business environment is such that, instead of hiring a worthy senior vice president for corporate global affairs—Amazon is forced to invest in a crony to politicians, Carney. A ponce that’ll be able to read the political tealeaves is worth more to the company than someone with real skills. Hence the revolving door between politics and business.

Actually, Jeff Bezos’ work philosophy sounds magnificent, the exact opposite of The Other Soft, Social-Worker Oriented Software Company We Know All Too Well.

… Of all of his management notions, perhaps the most distinctive is his belief that harmony is often overvalued in the workplace — that it can stifle honest critique and encourage polite praise for flawed ideas. Instead, Amazonians are instructed to “disagree and commit” (No. 13) — to rip into colleagues’ ideas, with feedback that can be blunt to the point of painful, before lining up behind a decision.

“We always want to arrive at the right answer,” said Tony Galbato, vice president for human resources, in an email statement. “It would certainly be much easier and socially cohesive to just compromise and not debate, but that may lead to the wrong decision.”

… According to early executives and employees, Mr. Bezos was determined almost from the moment he founded Amazon in 1994 to resist the forces he thought sapped businesses over time — bureaucracy, profligate spending, lack of rigor. As the company grew, he wanted to codify his ideas about the workplace, some of them proudly counterintuitive, into instructions simple enough for a new worker to understand, general enough to apply to the nearly limitless number of businesses he wanted to enter and stringent enough to stave off the mediocrity he feared.

The result was the leadership principles, the articles of faith that describe the way Amazonians should act. In contrast to companies where declarations about their philosophy amount to vague platitudes, Amazon has rules that are part of its daily language and rituals, used in hiring, cited at meetings and quoted in food-truck lines at lunchtime. Some Amazonians say they teach them to their children.

The guidelines conjure an empire of elite workers (principle No. 5: “Hire and develop the best”) who hold one another to towering expectations and are liberated from the forces — red tape, office politics — that keep them from delivering their utmost. Employees are to exhibit “ownership” (No. 2), or mastery of every element of their businesses, and “dive deep,” (No. 12) or find the underlying ideas that can fix problems or identify new services before shoppers even ask for them. …

READ “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace.”

Immigration Occupation Map

IMMIGRATION, Labor

This immigration occupation map is all over the place, in the sense that it seems to address only illegal migrant labor participation, but fails to make distinctions in said population. The other option is that all immigration is crudely conflated, and that high-tech immigration forms a very small part of the immigrant population. We knew that.

BUSINESS INSIDER.

Wait For This: Trumps Too White, Wealthy & Pretty To Win

Elections, Race, Racism

When in the ascent of The Donald do you think we will be told by the politico-media strumpets that the Trump family is too white, wealthy and pretty to win America’s affections? Just wait for it.

… Settled down (maritally speaking) for now, Trump has two sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, and a daughter, Ivanka, with first wife Ivana; a college-age daughter, Tiffany, with second wife Marla Maples; and a 9-year-old son, Barron, with current wife Melania.

Having grown up in the spotlight, his three eldest children manged to find success and happiness while sidestepping the usual celebrity kid drama. Meanwhile, 21-year-old Tiffany, an aspiring pop star who was raised in LA, is attending business school on the East Coast and hitting the town with Manhattan’s so-called “Rich Kids of Instagram.” And young Barron is busy just being a fourth-grader.

Here’s everything you need to know about each of the Trump heirs …

MORE @ BUSINESS INSIDER.

GOP Media Marionettes George Will And Michael Gerson Rise Against Trump

Conspiracy, Elections, Media, Republicans

As this column has been pointing out, “Trump could send the system’s sycophants scattering,” and those sycophants are rising like hissing cobras.

GOP Media marionettes George Will Michael Gerson, of “The Washington Post Conservative Club,” are intent on quelling the rebellion against their establishment. Over to the brilliant Pat Buchanan:

… there is a plot afoot in The Washington Post Conservative Club to purge Trump from the Republican Party before the primaries begin.

“A political party has a right to … secure its borders,” asserts the Post’s George Will, “a duty to exclude interlopers.” Will wants The Donald “excommunicated” and locked out of all GOP debates until he kneels and takes a loyalty oath to the nominee.

“Marginalizing Trump” carries no risk of “alienating a substantial Republican cohort,” Will assures us, for these “Trumpites” are neither Republicans nor conservatives. Better off without such trash.

The Post’s Michael Gerson says “establishment Republicans” must “make clear that [Trump] has moved beyond the boundaries of serious and civil discourse.” He loathes the Trumpites as much as Will.

Trump’s followers are “xenophobic,” Gerson tells CNN. They have a “resentment of outsiders, of Mexico, of China, and immigrants. That’s more like a European right-wing party, a UKIP or a National Front in France. Republicans can’t incorporate that.”

But if the GOP has no room for Trump’s followers, it has no future. For there simply aren’t that many chamber-of-commerce and country-club Republicans.

Gerson mentions with disgust the U.K. Independence Party and France’s National Front. What do those parties have in common?

Both are anti-New World Order. Both arose to recapture the lost independence and sovereignty of their nations from the nameless, faceless bureaucrats of Brussels, those EU hacks who now dictate the kinds of laws and societies the Brits and French are permitted to have.

What motivates these folks is not all that different from what brought the farmers to Lexington Green and Concord Bridge and inspired colonists to stand by the original Tea Party boys in Boston. …

READ THE REST.