This stood out to me:
“So you end up with these people being in the pre-meeting, for the pre-meeting, for the pre-meeting, for the decision meeting, and not always making recommendations and owning things the way we want that type of ownership.”
Reminds me of my past life in corp america.
Meetings about meetings
As the years went on, we needed a bigger conference room for the same decisions.
This phone call/meeting/zoom could have been a one line email…
I’m sorry, but this is part of the overall problem. Do I agree that middle management is pretty useless-yes, but this “be accountable for yourself” jargon will be their downfall. Gen Z and Millennials are crybaby generations and, sorry, mostly lazy. They will do whatever they can to get out of doing work, which is why this model could be disastrous. Just my opinion.
Depends on who raised em…
We trained our Gen Zers well.
Surprised that a middle manager would want to “put their fingerprint on everything”?
How else are they supposed to “prove” they deserve advancement to upper middle management?
Having spent time in large corporations in the past, not just small ones, Big Tech has always appeared to me to have way too many levels of management and way too much useless fat.
That might be because founders were not thrown out for lacking managerial skills as they were in past generations.
The greater the number of layers, the less likely the goals set by top management are to reach the people who are doing the work, the greater managers are measured by numbers which do not contribute to the success of the company, and the more money spent on overhead.
There are certainly other types of organization which share the same problems. I need not remind anyone of that.
If Gen Z is troubled by this, I have been too harsh in my criticism of them.
Andy is a little later than some of his peers in mandating the change, but Andy is also a better manager than many of his more entrepreneurial peers and therefore may have had higher priorities.
I think some of us might have misread the article.
This change will free up mobility and put more onus on individual employees. “It’s going to allow us, for the people that are doing the work, they’re gonna have more ownership and they’re going to be able to move more quickly,” Jassy said. [emphasis added]
Reading the whole article, it sounds like individual staff will be more empowered independently, in order to reduce bottlenecks and micromanagement.
This will increase workload and accountability for non-managers, which it sounds like younger workers value as they prefer independence and decision-making power.
It also sounds like Amazon is trying to dial down the need for meetings, which is a big contributor to bottlenecks (and barrier to efficiency):
“So you end up with these people being in the pre-meeting, for the pre-meeting, for the pre-meeting, for the decision meeting, and not always making recommendations and owning things the way we want that type of ownership.”
I’m Gen X, but I can testify that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are alright. They see things in different ways, they see more possibilities, and they make more efforts, than either my parents’ Boomer generation and my own. We might not like or get it at first, especially when they are shifting paradigms and rethinking what we might have simply accepted, but they have sound reasoning and effective alternatives. I don’t mind giving them some room at the table to try new things.
I have said for years, the main purpose of meetings is to keep me from working.
I read an article around 5 years ago that said roughly 20% of US employees was some degree of manager. If that sounds reasonable to someone, maybe they can explain it to me because I think that sounds insane.
This article is almost 10 years old, so while the numbers may not be current, the point is still valid.
I’m a millennial, whatever spectrum of 
that is; haven’t complained in my life. Even if I did, who would listen? Genz, Millenials, Genz all 
and moan the same, just about different things… or the same things, from different socio/historico/economic and whatever other lens you wanna look at things from.
Often, when speaking about hard delineations it helps to look at things from the perspective of aliens invading the planet - could they really tell? The answer, is most likely not - cuz we all look alike in that sense.
The conclusion is prescient:
“Many of the world’s largest economies are in a prolonged productivity slump. In Europe and the U.S., stagnating incomes and diminished economic hopes are feeding a growing appetite for protectionism and spawning divisive, us-versus-them political forces. While some hold out hope that robots, genomics, and the internet of things will one day yield a productivity bonanza, we believe a concerted effort to reverse the rising tide of bureaucracy offers a more immediate and less speculative route to enhanced economic performance.”
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