Over the weekend I was sifting through a survey from Navex Global about compliance training programs, and came across what chief compliance officers consider the biggest obstacles to effective training programs: employee cynicism about corporate culture, and fear of speaking up.
Then I turned to the New York Times and read its brutal, brilliant, portrait of corporate culture at Amazon.com—a company that somehow took simple, noble principles of good corporate organization and perverted them into something awful, into a business that looks like a miserable place to work. A rank-and-yank system of performance reviews that pits one employee against another. An employee feedback system that generates anonymous personnel tension far more than it roots out legitimate misconduct. A culture so obsessed with data that executives turn a blind eye to context, which breeds ever more fear of failure into an overworked and exhausted workforce.
