Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once had what he considered a “brilliant” idea to save the company’s early productivity. It turns out an employee had a much better one.
Speaking at the Academy of Achievement Summit in 2001, Bezos looked back at 1995, when Amazon was operating out of a 2,000-square-foot basement warehouse in Seattle.
There were 10 employees. The ceilings were low. The floor was concrete. By day, the team handled programming and customer emails. By afternoon and into the night, they packed books on their hands and knees.
When the company launched, demand overwhelmed them. “Literally in the first 30 days we had orders from all 50 states and 45 different countries and we were woefully unprepared from an operational point of view to handle that kind of volume,” Bezos said.
The orders kept coming. The team kept kneeling.
One night, exhausted, Bezos turned to the person next to him.
“I remember just to show you how stupid I can be,” he said. “My only defense is that it was late.”
He then described what he told the employee.
“This packing is killing me you know my back hurts this is killing my knees on this hard cement floor,” Bezos said.
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Then came what he called his “brilliant insight.”
“You know what we need. This is my brilliant insight,” he said. “We need knee pads.”
He was serious.
The reaction was immediate. “This person looked at me like I was the stupidest person they’d ever seen,” Bezos said.
The employee answered with a simpler idea.
“What we need is packing tables.”
Bezos said the shift was immediate. “I thought that was the smartest idea I’d ever heard,” he said. “The next day we got packing tables and I think we doubled our productivity.”
The fix was not padding the pain. It was removing the problem.
Looking back, Bezos said that chaotic early stretch shaped Amazon’s culture.
“That early stage of Amazon.com, where we were so unprepared, is probably one of the luckiest things that ever happened to us because it formed a culture of customer service in every department of the company,” he said.
He added that everyone packed orders. No one was insulated from the work.
“Every single person in the company had to work with our hands so close to the customers, making sure those orders went out. That really set up a culture that served us well. And that is our goal — to be Earth’s most customer-centric company.”
