Amazon’s Culture: How to Shape an Enduring Organizational Culture

Jeff Bezo’s began Amazon in his garage in July 1995 with three Sun workstations setting on wooden doors for tables and extension cords running from everywhere (Academy of Achievement, 2010). Right from the beginning he was a visionary leaving his well paying job as a senior vice president with D. E. Shaw to begin Amazon.com (Academy of Achievement, 2010). Being the visionary that he is he saw an opportunity prompted by the huge growth rate of internet use in a single year and ran with it never looking back. Jeff realized that the internet had “no real commerce to speak of” so he began researching possible businesses (Academy of Achievement, 2010). “After reviewing 20 mail order businesses and deciding which

Another aspect of the Amazon's strong and steady success was that it devoted itself to becoming the most customer-centric online marketplace. Amazon always believed that shopping and searching for items had to be the simplest and easiest experience for customers and that via this ease and simplicity customers would continue to shop at Amazon. This philosophy has by and large been an enormous reason for Amazon's rapid growth and expansion. For example, the founder Bezos

Unfortunately, Bezos autocratic style has had profound effects on Amazons culture. Perhaps most importantly, Bezos has created a culture of metrics. Consequently, it has led to a competitive atmosphere, which has created an uncomfortable working environment for many employees. For example, some employees have sabotaged their cohorts

Due to the growing competition and diminishing market share, companies are opting for different strategies to achieve their survival objectives as well as growth. Companies are thus executing grand strategies to provide their businesses with a clear direction for its strategic actions. These strategies, therefore, aim at both short term and long term sustainability and growth, and they include innovation, market development, product development, and concentration.

Amazon.com is a customer centric company. They put more effort in improving their system to make the experience of customer more comfortable so that he keeps on returning to the website. Jeffery Bezos who is the founder of the Amazon.com started this company after seeing the use of internet increasing rapidly.

It provides a structure to capture the linkage of organizational activities that create value for the customer and profit for the organisation. It is particularly useful to get across the notion that operations and the other activities must work cross functionally for optimal organization performance(Chase et al. 2007).

Not only is a strong corporate culture good for business by increasing customer satisfaction, it also can help to decrease turnover and save on human resources expenditures. Internal integration should start the minute a new employee enters a company. Training of new employees should include some way of helping them to understand the company's culture. The new hire training program currently in use at Wal-Mart stores includes videos and other information about the founding of the company as well as other general and specific information about the company's culture as well as expectations related to this culture. This is important because a company's culture is not always easily apparent to newcomers and this is what keeps Wal-mart's culture strong (Berg, 2001).

The company I have chosen to write about is Amazon. Amazon, was launched on July 16, 1995 by founder Jeff Bezos in his two-car garage in Bellevne, Washington. When Amazon first launched as a website that only sold books, but Jeff Bezos wanted Amazon to be much more than a bookstore, he wanted it to be an everything store. This paper will answer the required questions listed below:

One of America’s greatest start-up success stories is Amazon. Jeff Bezos launched the website in 1995 and he is now having revenues of $61 billion. At the start of e-commerce, Amazon was an innovator of delivering supreme customer service, which at that times was very rare. Amazon is an illustration of massive organising skills, the company sells an enormous range of products, all day, every day, for 365 days a year and is able to maintain over 80 warehousing and fulfilment centres.

The case study detailing the dilemma faced by the organization known as Box, Inc., is one concerned with the challenge of maintaining organizational culture in the face of rapid growth. The organization began as a classic start-up company that evolved out of a garage by a few friends. Beginning as a simple organization with few team members paved the way for the successful culture that would permeate the company for years to come. The challenge facing Box, Inc. in the study is not one of loss, but, rather, one of gain. The organization has rapidly expanded in the last few years, now hosting multiple sites around the globe and over a thousand employees. This rapid change presents the top executives, such as CEO Aaron Levie with the difficult task of preserving their start-up culture that breeds ingenuity and success. One managerial solution the top executives implemented was their institution of a rigorous and highly selective hiring process. This solution was highly effective in maintaining the organizational culture within Box, Inc., in light of the multiple organizational behavior theories that describe the strong correlation between selective hiring and cultural sustainability within a company.

Unfortunately, there are some organizations that have weak culture, which means employees do not share the core values of their organizations. It is important for the success of an organization to hire employees that share the same core values and culture; the stronger the culture of an organization the better the organization will be (Bethel, 2011).

Amazon.com, Inc. was founded by Jeff Bezos out of his own garage in July 1994 under the name of Cadabra. It went online in as Amazon.com in 1995. Since that time it has never looked back and is now the world's largest online retailer. It is an American multinational electronic commerce company with headquarters in Seattle, Washington, United States. With a total revenue of US$ 61.09 billion, it has a total of 88,400 employees as of December, 2012. At first it started as an online bookstore, but soon it diversified

According to Kotter and Heskett, Amazon’s corporate culture can also be described as adaptive due to its need to be receptive to change. Staff and management are also encouraged to be entrepreneurial

Organizational culture has been described as shared values and beliefs that underline a company’s identity. A strong culture that encourages employees from the top to the bottom in adaptation and change can increase organizational performance by energizing and motivating employees, shape behaviors, unify personnel in the goals / objectives and align employee’s actions with the priorities of the company (Daft, R., 2013). Creating a constructive culture should be a manager’s top priority because the right culture will propel a company into a top performer in its industry.

“Organizational innovation is the successful implementation of creative ideas. Business operate in a constantly changing environment” (Williams, 2017). Recognizing and adapting to internal and external changes of the company can lead to success. Companies that do not change with time have the risk of organizational decline. “Organizational decline occurs when companies don't anticipate, recognize, neutralize, or adapt to the internal or external pressures that threaten their survival” (Williams, 2017). If a company sells the same product for years without making new changes, consumers may lose interest in the product and buy something that is more attractive and has something different. Amazon is making changes within the company to provide better and faster service to their customers.