I've found a very strong correlation between high amounts of very powerful kool-aid and terribly negative team dynamics. Microsoft in the mid 1990s was not gre

I've found a very strong correlation between high amounts of very powerful kool-aid and terribly negative team dynamics. Microsoft in the mid 1990s was not great, but it doesn't hold a candle to Amazon in the mid 2000s (and to this day) which is a highly emotionally manipulative cult with terrible backstabbing politics, stack ranking and incompetent leadership. One early signal of this is if the company has a book that everyone is supposed to read. (For amazon it was required indoctrination for new employees)... though there are exceptions-- one startup required everyone to read "Crossing the Chasm" and while that company wasn't well run, that book wasn't part of the problem. OH, the book thing may not be obvious-- a company must be run in a dynamic fashion. If everyone is mindlessly quoting cult slogans (e.g.: amazons "IT's day one!") or citing chapter and verse in a bible then it shuts down reasonable thinking. The book becomes a source of thought terminating cliches. I think this kind of cult ideology may be taking root at places like Google and Mozilla and Facebook where they seem to be forming a rigid homogenous ideology (though I haven't worked there, so that's just speculation from an outsider)