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"Employees with experience negotiating deals around the country anticipated problems, but their red flags were ignored by those eager to please Bezos" ... this

"Employees with experience negotiating deals around the country anticipated problems, but their red flags were ignored by those eager to please Bezos" ... this is eerily similar to one of the major drawbacks of an authoritarian regime, where everyone tries to please the Great Leader while no-one dares to express any unpleasant truth.

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
One person's "ignored" is another person's "accounted for." It could easily be that the folks who made the decision recognized this risk, but decided it was worth it. That looks about the same as ignoring the risk to someone who is not privy to the machinery that makes the decision. I see this happen all the time in the organization I work for. Some folks say that X won't work, product team tries X, and if it ends up not working, they say, "You ignored our feedback on X!" But you just can't really know whether they ignored your feedback, or whether they considered it and decided not to act on it for any of a number of reasons. IMO, the "ignored" narrative is pretty uncharitable, even if it is the natural and easy one to assume. It feels good to be vindicated. It feels less good to think about how teams are dealing with vast numbers of competing constraints, and sometimes have to take gambles (a central feature of which is the possibility of loss). It seems like this type of thing happens all the time. Almost every time something bad happens, there was some naysayer who predicted it. But you never hear about the cases where the critics were wrong. The classic Slashdot comment r.e. the iPod is the counterexample that proves the rule. It's such a notable comment because naysayers are almost never so blatantly and visibly cited for their incorrect calls. Anyway, it's not even clear that the team was wrong to discard this feedback. They got their tax break, didn't they? Along with a bunch of bad PR at the time. But I had totally forgotten that this thing even happened until this article brought it up. I'll probably forget again by next week, and so will most everyone else.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  Naysayers can CYA by saying “X will be difficult because of A, B, and C” rather than “X is impossible.” Seriously, it isn’t just CYA, but the former provides useful and perhaps actionable context while the latter doesn’t. The main issue with discarded feedback is when someone said X would be a problem, it was ignored, and X turned out to be a surprise problem (rather than an unsurprising one). And then there is the opposite CmdrTaco comment, where he thought the lack of X (WiFi, larger storage) would be a problem and it wasn’t.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    That's also true. In a transparent decision-making machine, hopefully the response is, "We think A will be a small problem, and B and C won't be a problem at all." Of course, we can still be wrong, no matter what form our decision-making process takes. Perhaps the group that set up this contest expected some PR risk, but didn't expect it to be as severe as it was. If they were not aware of the possibility of PR risk, that would indicate a pretty severe error in their thinking. But we just don't really know whether that's the case or not. It's not observable from outside the system.
- Eliezer 7y ago
  There’s a standard solution for this problem, namely numeric probabilities and prediction markets. If an internal prediction market had given an 80% chance of this happening, that’s meaningful in a way that individual ambiguous naysayings are not.
  - Psyladine 7y ago
    Then you're only as good as your source data, which unsurprisingly can go back to expert appraisals, i.e. "this won't work".
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    I'm aware of the existence of prediction markets, but I'm not aware of much evidence that they are actually good oracles, especially for events that will happen in the medium to long term. Do you happen to have any evidence you'd like to share about this? Practically speaking, I don't think this can really work, because I don't think employees will necessarily feel good about betting on things like this. You also have some pretty severe moral hazards when you have employees who stand to gain financially if things go badly for the company. If I take a significant short position on NYC accepting an Amazon headquarters, I now have an incentive to leak negative things about the employer or otherwise sabotage the deal in order to get my contracts to close in my favor.
  - dmurray 7y ago
    Are there any examples of corporations running internal prediction markets? That sounds fascinating and I'd love to read about exactly how they made it work, because I can see about 100 problems with this being the "standard" solution.
    - splonk 7y ago
      Google ran one internally for some time maybe 10 years ago. (Maybe still does, for all I know.) IIRC it was for points, maybe transferable for massage credits or something, so no huge economic incentive. I have no idea if it was in any way effective, actionable, or even seen by executives with decision making power. Based on the quantity of discussion on the mailing list I suspect it was mostly used by a pretty small set of people, so I'd have some doubts about its predictive power.
- knightofmars 7y ago
  "But you just can't really know whether they ignored your feedback, or whether they considered it and decided not to act on it for any of a number of reasons." Considering feedback and not truly taking the time to understand the risk and to discuss the decision with the origin of the feedback is ignoring the feedback. People with the power to make decisions in an organization often follow this pattern. It's the mindset of a fool to think that they know better than the people closest to and most impacted by a decision. Good leadership enables those who are closest to the problem to make the decision or minimally discuss the pros and cons of the decision providing any missing information before making it. I can't begin to count the number of times that those in leadership roles have made decisions only to walk back on them after they failed citing the exact same reason of feedback they received prior to making the decision. Often the language is spun to obfuscate this but when pressed the reality is made clear. Worse case, I have witnessed vindictive measures taken by leadership against those who, correctly after the outcome of the decision was realized, criticized the decisions being made. It's not always about a single naysayer. It's also the bizarre perception that one needs to "have all the answers" when they make it to leadership. We should not ignore the reality that incompetent leadership is real and happens more often than people think.
- natmaka 7y ago
  There are, indeed, many different cases. The article states that "red flags" raised by "Employees with experience" "were ignored" by court jesters. If objective, it states that knowledgeable folks critics were not neglected as "OK but let's go ahead anyway in order to check the limits". I only see 2 contexts where it may be adequate: A/ periodically poking the limits may be useful in order to be sure they didn't disappear, B/ to search for a way to overcome them. If active experts immediately "raise red flags" one may think that A/ isn't pertinent, because by definition they (right now) cope with the limits and therefore know that they aren't changing/crumbling down (for any reason). B/ is only really pertinent if there is at least a vague new idea about the approach, about a way to tackle the challenge. "Let's try because if we succeed our Great Leader will be happy" isn't a plan, not even wishful thinking.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    > if objective There's where the whole chain of observations breaks down. People whose desired course of action was rejected can rarely be objective about the folks who rejected their advice.
    - natmaka 7y ago
      In such a case either the journalists didn't do their job (because they should have interviewed those folks, to obtain an explanation about the red-flag rejection), or those folks didn't provide any explanation (it seems probable to me, as the article seems solid and also as I'm unable to find such an explanation in the comments here or even online).
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
        "I, a close adviser to one of the richest men in the world, will given an interview about the failure of my advice to him." Hrm. I wouldn't expect someone in such a position to be eager to be interviewed. It doesn't provide evidence either way in my accounting. Even if they did give an interview, what do you think they would say? "Yeah, we totally ignored the feedback about political risks. Didn't even read it. And it blew up in our faces. Aren't we dumb?" There's no way that it would be admitted. It would be framed as a calculated gambit either way.
protomyth 7y ago
You need the court jester one way or another.
jrd259 7y ago
Amazon's internal principles explicitly demand expressing disagreement until a decision is made. While I'm seven levels below Jeff, in five years at Amazon, I have never seen any hint of people being reluctant to express disagreement with leadership. I have seen people at my level contradict VPs in company forums, and be thanked for it. Unwarranted generalized cynicism does not advance our understanding.
- SQueeeeeL 7y ago
  You are too low to really experience any harem politics... People who negotiate these deals are in a completely different camp to the average employee, they are basically direct hires/fires of the CEO

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago

One person's "ignored" is another person's "accounted for." It could easily be that the folks who made the decision recognized this risk, but decided it was worth it. That looks about the same as ignoring the risk to someone who is not privy to the machinery that makes the decision. I see this happen all the time in the organization I work for. Some folks say that X won't work, product team tries X, and if it ends up not working, they say, "You ignored our feedback on X!" But you just can't really know whether they ignored your feedback, or whether they considered it and decided not to act on it for any of a number of reasons. IMO, the "ignored" narrative is pretty uncharitable, even if it is the natural and easy one to assume. It feels good to be vindicated. It feels less good to think about how teams are dealing with vast numbers of competing constraints, and sometimes have to take gambles (a central feature of which is the possibility of loss). It seems like this type of thing happens all the time. Almost every time something bad happens, there was some naysayer who predicted it. But you never hear about the cases where the critics were wrong. The classic Slashdot comment r.e. the iPod is the counterexample that proves the rule. It's such a notable comment because naysayers are almost never so blatantly and visibly cited for their incorrect calls. Anyway, it's not even clear that the team was wrong to discard this feedback. They got their tax break, didn't they? Along with a bunch of bad PR at the time. But I had totally forgotten that this thing even happened until this article brought it up. I'll probably forget again by next week, and so will most everyone else.

seanmcdirmid 7y ago
Naysayers can CYA by saying “X will be difficult because of A, B, and C” rather than “X is impossible.” Seriously, it isn’t just CYA, but the former provides useful and perhaps actionable context while the latter doesn’t. The main issue with discarded feedback is when someone said X would be a problem, it was ignored, and X turned out to be a surprise problem (rather than an unsurprising one). And then there is the opposite CmdrTaco comment, where he thought the lack of X (WiFi, larger storage) would be a problem and it wasn’t.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  That's also true. In a transparent decision-making machine, hopefully the response is, "We think A will be a small problem, and B and C won't be a problem at all." Of course, we can still be wrong, no matter what form our decision-making process takes. Perhaps the group that set up this contest expected some PR risk, but didn't expect it to be as severe as it was. If they were not aware of the possibility of PR risk, that would indicate a pretty severe error in their thinking. But we just don't really know whether that's the case or not. It's not observable from outside the system.
Eliezer 7y ago
There’s a standard solution for this problem, namely numeric probabilities and prediction markets. If an internal prediction market had given an 80% chance of this happening, that’s meaningful in a way that individual ambiguous naysayings are not.
- Psyladine 7y ago
  Then you're only as good as your source data, which unsurprisingly can go back to expert appraisals, i.e. "this won't work".
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  I'm aware of the existence of prediction markets, but I'm not aware of much evidence that they are actually good oracles, especially for events that will happen in the medium to long term. Do you happen to have any evidence you'd like to share about this? Practically speaking, I don't think this can really work, because I don't think employees will necessarily feel good about betting on things like this. You also have some pretty severe moral hazards when you have employees who stand to gain financially if things go badly for the company. If I take a significant short position on NYC accepting an Amazon headquarters, I now have an incentive to leak negative things about the employer or otherwise sabotage the deal in order to get my contracts to close in my favor.
- dmurray 7y ago
  Are there any examples of corporations running internal prediction markets? That sounds fascinating and I'd love to read about exactly how they made it work, because I can see about 100 problems with this being the "standard" solution.
  - splonk 7y ago
    Google ran one internally for some time maybe 10 years ago. (Maybe still does, for all I know.) IIRC it was for points, maybe transferable for massage credits or something, so no huge economic incentive. I have no idea if it was in any way effective, actionable, or even seen by executives with decision making power. Based on the quantity of discussion on the mailing list I suspect it was mostly used by a pretty small set of people, so I'd have some doubts about its predictive power.
knightofmars 7y ago
"But you just can't really know whether they ignored your feedback, or whether they considered it and decided not to act on it for any of a number of reasons." Considering feedback and not truly taking the time to understand the risk and to discuss the decision with the origin of the feedback is ignoring the feedback. People with the power to make decisions in an organization often follow this pattern. It's the mindset of a fool to think that they know better than the people closest to and most impacted by a decision. Good leadership enables those who are closest to the problem to make the decision or minimally discuss the pros and cons of the decision providing any missing information before making it. I can't begin to count the number of times that those in leadership roles have made decisions only to walk back on them after they failed citing the exact same reason of feedback they received prior to making the decision. Often the language is spun to obfuscate this but when pressed the reality is made clear. Worse case, I have witnessed vindictive measures taken by leadership against those who, correctly after the outcome of the decision was realized, criticized the decisions being made. It's not always about a single naysayer. It's also the bizarre perception that one needs to "have all the answers" when they make it to leadership. We should not ignore the reality that incompetent leadership is real and happens more often than people think.
natmaka 7y ago
There are, indeed, many different cases. The article states that "red flags" raised by "Employees with experience" "were ignored" by court jesters. If objective, it states that knowledgeable folks critics were not neglected as "OK but let's go ahead anyway in order to check the limits". I only see 2 contexts where it may be adequate: A/ periodically poking the limits may be useful in order to be sure they didn't disappear, B/ to search for a way to overcome them. If active experts immediately "raise red flags" one may think that A/ isn't pertinent, because by definition they (right now) cope with the limits and therefore know that they aren't changing/crumbling down (for any reason). B/ is only really pertinent if there is at least a vague new idea about the approach, about a way to tackle the challenge. "Let's try because if we succeed our Great Leader will be happy" isn't a plan, not even wishful thinking.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  > if objective There's where the whole chain of observations breaks down. People whose desired course of action was rejected can rarely be objective about the folks who rejected their advice.
  - natmaka 7y ago
    In such a case either the journalists didn't do their job (because they should have interviewed those folks, to obtain an explanation about the red-flag rejection), or those folks didn't provide any explanation (it seems probable to me, as the article seems solid and also as I'm unable to find such an explanation in the comments here or even online).
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
      "I, a close adviser to one of the richest men in the world, will given an interview about the failure of my advice to him." Hrm. I wouldn't expect someone in such a position to be eager to be interviewed. It doesn't provide evidence either way in my accounting. Even if they did give an interview, what do you think they would say? "Yeah, we totally ignored the feedback about political risks. Didn't even read it. And it blew up in our faces. Aren't we dumb?" There's no way that it would be admitted. It would be framed as a calculated gambit either way.

protomyth 7y ago

You need the court jester one way or another.

jrd259 7y ago

Amazon's internal principles explicitly demand expressing disagreement until a decision is made. While I'm seven levels below Jeff, in five years at Amazon, I have never seen any hint of people being reluctant to express disagreement with leadership. I have seen people at my level contradict VPs in company forums, and be thanked for it. Unwarranted generalized cynicism does not advance our understanding.

SQueeeeeL 7y ago
You are too low to really experience any harem politics... People who negotiate these deals are in a completely different camp to the average employee, they are basically direct hires/fires of the CEO