Would there be a way of estimating how many people within the amazon organization are fanatical about same day delivery ratio against how many are “just working a job”? Does anyone have a guess? My guess is that an organization of that size with a lot of cash only needs about 50 true fanatics, the rest can be “mere employees”. What do yall think?
I can’t really think of any research bearing on this, and unclear how you’d measure it anyway.
One way to go might be to note that there is a wide (and weird) variance between the efficiency of companies: market pressures are slack enough that two companies doing as far as can be told the exact same thing in the same geographic markets with the same inputs might be almost 100% different (I think was the range in the example of concrete manufacturing in one paper I read); a lot of that difference appears to be explainable by the quality of the management, and you can do randomized experiments in management coaching or intensity of management and see substantial changes in the efficiency of a company (Bloom—the other one—has a bunch of studies like this). Presumably you could try to extrapolate from the effects of individuals to company-wide effects, and define the goal of the ‘fanatical’ as something like ‘maintaining top-10% industry-wide performance’: if educating the CEO is worth X percentiles and hiring a good manager is worth 0.0Y percentiles and you have such and such a number of each, then multiply out to figure out what will bump you 40 percentiles from an imagined baseline of 50% to the 90% goal.
Another argument might be a more Fermi estimate style argument from startups. A good startup CEO should be a fanatic about something, otherwise they probably aren’t going to survive the job. So we can assume one fanatic at least. People generally talk about startups beginning to lose the special startup magic of agility, focus, and fanaticism at around Dunbar’s number level of employees like 300, or even less (eg Amazon’s two-pizza rule which is I guess 6 people?). In the ‘worst’ case that the founder has hired 0 fanatics, that implies 1 fanatic can ride herd over no more than ~300 people; in the ‘best’ case that he’s hired dozens, then each fanatic can only cover for more like 2 or 3 non-fanatics. I’m not sure how we should count Amazon’s employees: do the warehouse workers, often temps, really count? They are so micro-managed and driven by the warehouse operation that they hardly seem even relevant to the question. I can’t quickly find that number, just totals, but let’s say there’s like 100,000 non-warehouse-ish employees; at a 300:1 ratio, you’d need 333, and at 3:1, 33,333. The former might be feasible, the latter not so much. (And would explain why Amazon.com seems to be a gradually degrading shopping experience—so many ads! Why are there ads getting in my way when I’m trying to give you my money already, Amazon!)
I’m not sure “fanatical” is well-defined enough to mean anything here. I doubt there are any who’d commit terrorist acts to further same-day delivery. There are probably quite a few who believe it’s important to the business, and a big benefit for many customers.
You’re absolutely right that a lot of employees and contractors can be “mere employees”, not particularly caring about long-term strategy, customer perception, or the like. That’s kind of the nature of ALL organizations and group behaviors, including corporate, government, and social groupings. There’s generally some amount of influencers/selectors/visionaries, some amount of strategists and implementers, and a large number of followers. Most organizations are multidimensional enough that the same people can play different roles on different topics as well.
I don’t think it needs any true fanatics. It just needs incentives.
This isn’t to say there won’t be fanatics anyway. There probably aren’t many things that nobody can get fanatical about. This is even more true if they’re given incentives to act fanatical about it.
I don’t think it needs any true fanatics. It just needs incentives.
Sure, but the incentive structure needs continual maintenance to keep it aligned with or pointing at the goal, which naturally leads to the questions of how many people are needed to keep the structure pointing at the goal, and what the motivation of those people will be.
Would there be a way of estimating how many people within the amazon organization are fanatical about same day delivery ratio against how many are “just working a job”? Does anyone have a guess? My guess is that an organization of that size with a lot of cash only needs about 50 true fanatics, the rest can be “mere employees”. What do yall think?
I can’t really think of any research bearing on this, and unclear how you’d measure it anyway.
One way to go might be to note that there is a wide (and weird) variance between the efficiency of companies: market pressures are slack enough that two companies doing as far as can be told the exact same thing in the same geographic markets with the same inputs might be almost 100% different (I think was the range in the example of concrete manufacturing in one paper I read); a lot of that difference appears to be explainable by the quality of the management, and you can do randomized experiments in management coaching or intensity of management and see substantial changes in the efficiency of a company (Bloom—the other one—has a bunch of studies like this). Presumably you could try to extrapolate from the effects of individuals to company-wide effects, and define the goal of the ‘fanatical’ as something like ‘maintaining top-10% industry-wide performance’: if educating the CEO is worth X percentiles and hiring a good manager is worth 0.0Y percentiles and you have such and such a number of each, then multiply out to figure out what will bump you 40 percentiles from an imagined baseline of 50% to the 90% goal.
Another argument might be a more Fermi estimate style argument from startups. A good startup CEO should be a fanatic about something, otherwise they probably aren’t going to survive the job. So we can assume one fanatic at least. People generally talk about startups beginning to lose the special startup magic of agility, focus, and fanaticism at around Dunbar’s number level of employees like 300, or even less (eg Amazon’s two-pizza rule which is I guess 6 people?). In the ‘worst’ case that the founder has hired 0 fanatics, that implies 1 fanatic can ride herd over no more than ~300 people; in the ‘best’ case that he’s hired dozens, then each fanatic can only cover for more like 2 or 3 non-fanatics. I’m not sure how we should count Amazon’s employees: do the warehouse workers, often temps, really count? They are so micro-managed and driven by the warehouse operation that they hardly seem even relevant to the question. I can’t quickly find that number, just totals, but let’s say there’s like 100,000 non-warehouse-ish employees; at a 300:1 ratio, you’d need 333, and at 3:1, 33,333. The former might be feasible, the latter not so much. (And would explain why Amazon.com seems to be a gradually degrading shopping experience—so many ads! Why are there ads getting in my way when I’m trying to give you my money already, Amazon!)
I’m not sure “fanatical” is well-defined enough to mean anything here. I doubt there are any who’d commit terrorist acts to further same-day delivery. There are probably quite a few who believe it’s important to the business, and a big benefit for many customers.
You’re absolutely right that a lot of employees and contractors can be “mere employees”, not particularly caring about long-term strategy, customer perception, or the like. That’s kind of the nature of ALL organizations and group behaviors, including corporate, government, and social groupings. There’s generally some amount of influencers/selectors/visionaries, some amount of strategists and implementers, and a large number of followers. Most organizations are multidimensional enough that the same people can play different roles on different topics as well.
I don’t think it needs any true fanatics. It just needs incentives.
This isn’t to say there won’t be fanatics anyway. There probably aren’t many things that nobody can get fanatical about. This is even more true if they’re given incentives to act fanatical about it.
Sure, but the incentive structure needs continual maintenance to keep it aligned with or pointing at the goal, which naturally leads to the questions of how many people are needed to keep the structure pointing at the goal, and what the motivation of those people will be.