What's Bezosism? Is it the Future of Management?

• Author: Gilmore, Trevor
• Position: TechTalk

Christopher Mims, a technology columnist for The Wall Street journal, recently coined the term Bezosism. What is Bezosism? It may become the standard of workplace efficiency soon--including at your firm.

CPA firms tend to manage their overall productivity by utilization rates. What do your local Amazon warehouse, let's call it SFO1, and your own CPA firm have in common? Both SFO 1 and your firm use people and technology to fulfill a customer's order. There are five key criteria to fill that order: workflow, roles, collaboration, technology and continuous improvement.

It's often said that the value of your firm are the people sitting at your desks producing something valuable every day. That value is quantified in your revenues, your EBITDA, your utilization rates, and your client and employee retention rates. It's a bit more complex the higher up the knowledge ladder you go, but at the end of the day, if your people are not efficient compared to your industry, you will fall behind.

Bezosism Benevolence?

OK, now back to Bezosism. Jeff Bezos, of course, is the oft-quoted and studied billionaire who built Amazon--and now wants to win the private citizen space race--on worker efficiency. The pandemic only grew his wealth and expanded the Amazon empire.

How did that package of floss arrive so quickly in a box so comically large? Bezosism. Its journey started in an Amazon warehouse, and the order was fulfilled by an assembly line of workers and processes in an Amazon fulfillment center. Austin Morreale, who took a job at an Amazon fulfillment center as a stower to supplement his own income, said most people he trained with quit within their first two weeks. They couldn't make "rate," which is the Bezosism term for keeping up with the pace of work.

Bezosism does not involve managers walking the warehouse floors, hovering down from above and shouting expletives as workers frantically run around filling boxes. Rather, warehouse managers hold standup meetings twice a day, where they report on making rate--the metric for evaluating worker efficiency and performance.

Amazon has fitted their warehouses with sensors that track employees moves, and those moves are then analyzed in software, real-time and reported back to the warehouse employees regularly throughout the day. The rate is the output of this complex algorithm.

Per Mims, "It's a mix of surveillance, measurement, psychological tricks, targets, incentives sloganeering, Jeff Bezos' trademark...