This is not a democracy

Photo by Ahmad Al-Shabory.

Jeff Bezos is not stupid.

He may be a lot of things, but dumb isn't one of them. So what the shit is going on?

If you need to get caught up, let's do the very quick version...

Ok, you're a big ol' billionaire with an unusually large yacht and several companies. You also happen to own a newspaper. It's the narrow run-up to a close election in the country where many of your businesses and employees are based. The results of said election will have ramifications across your companies. Several of them count the US gov as a customer. And nearly all of them are super susceptible to fluctuations in or new regulations on global trade. We're with you so far. Not entirely relatable as a protagonist but we're following along.

And at the very last moment, you tell writers. At The Washington Post. Not Washington, the state. But Washington, the District of Columbia. The political epicenter of the United States. That they can't publish a presidential endorsement this year. And while it would have been better if someone told them that before they wrote one and were set to publish it, it's passive-voice unfortunate that they are finding this out now. And also no, it's absolutely not up for discussion or debate. And yes that's final.

The story you tell yourself in that moment is that you're making a tough call. And that you get paid the unwholesomely big bucks to do so. Besides, The Post is more of an altruistic-y project, not even like a real business. Nobody gets rich off of media. Print media? C'mon. That's laughable. And anyway, this isn't a democracy. No business is.

Amazon basics

There was a hard call to be made. And Jeff made it. That's not abnormal. Jeff makes a lot of hard calls. There have been stacks of business books written on his approach to hard calls. His approach to breakfast on the days he needs to make hard calls. His belief system around pizzas in relation to decision-making. His love of structured memos as a tool for, you guessed it, making hard calls. The man is a hard-call-making machine. He has trained his whole life for just this moment.

And this one just went very badly. A Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer quit the editorial board, badly. Lost a quarter million subscribers in a weekend, badly. A bobble that is front-page news not only at The Post but also everywhere else, badly.

Front-page bobble and unforced errors aren't really Bezos's vibe.

So we come back to the statement we made at the top. Jeff isn't a stupid guy. He's preternaturally good at analyzing complex situations to find an edge. And nearly his entire work history is full of unpopular but necessary calls where people catch up to his genius later.

But this one was different. And we have a strong hunch as to why...

This is sort of a democracy

Putting Jeffrey aside for a minute, we see this pattern a lot, though it's usually from a very different kind of boss.

It starts from this lovely, self-effacing place. A leader, often new in their role or new to the org, will sit down with their team and say,

"Look. I'm not someone who's going to just boss you around and tell you what to do. I want us to discuss that together. I'm not the smartest person in the room and I don't have all the good ideas. I want you all to bring your whole selves to work, to disagree with me, to push back. We're going to get to better decisions together."

Isn't that just so, like, righteous? Even with all the voices in business shouting that consensus is a bad word, and that decision-by-committee is an insult, somehow this framing feels really good to a lot of leaders, and to their teams. It feels respectful, and democratic, but more than that it feels...cool? Like, this is what a modern, equitable, ego-light cool boss should sound like, right? If you've ever given a speech like this to your team, you know that it's generally received very well.

Until it isn't.

Because a manager is not a team mascot. Your job definitely includes cheering for the team, making sure other parts of the org see their work, and cultivating the safety within the team for them to voice concerns and bring up new ideas. For sure. But you are also accountable to the org as a whole for the work your team does, and the decisions your team makes. You specifically will often have to commit your team to work, to shift your team's focus, to prioritize and make trade-offs. And sometimes those will be unpopular.

When that happens, a lot of our modern, empathetic leaders get stuck. If you're one of them, you know the feeling. You've set up an expectation within the team of consensus — or at least consent — on decision-making, and the rewards of that have been high-esteem, good morale, risk-taking and growth. Truly baller eNPS scores. But you've got no groundwork for overrides, for the buck-stopping-ness of your own role. And so it feels really stressful — honestly it just feels shitty — to be in a 1:1 with your own boss talking about a decision that you need to be make. Just playing it out in your head over and over again, how badly it's going to go when you bring it to the team.

And so you gird yourself. You channel whatever your image of a clear and direct leader is, and you deliver the news of your decision to the team. In a tone that sounds utterly unlike what they're used to from you. For them it's a Jekyll & Hyde moment. Where did the cool and consultative boss go? What the fuck happened to us having integrity and autonomy in our work? Who is this person tearing down all the expectations that have been set, and why are they saying, in a slightly-too-sharp voice, that "This is not a democracy"?

Back to Bezos

It still doesn't make sense, though, because that is not at all who Jeff is. Hard-call-making machine, remember? Amazon's culture is legendary for many things and none of them are empathetic consensus. Are you serious? One of their core leadership principles is "Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit." And lest you think he'd forgotten it over the years it's also, verbatim, one of the core values at his new rocketship company.

But The Washington Post isn't Amazon, and it isn't Blue Origin. It isn't even Basecamp, where Jeff holds a significant stake and so had a front-row seat for how this was going to go when they tried to burn their own house down. The Post is its own organization with its own history. And while Jeff could have brought Amazon's values poster in on day 1, he didn't. For this company in particular, he did the cool boss thing. When he bought The Post in 2013, he said, "the key thing I hope people will take away from this is that the values of The Post do not need changing."

Eugene Meyer, who was the Post's publisher in the 30s and 40s wrote those values. They're engraved in brass when you enter the newsroom, and they read, in part,

"The newspaper’s duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of its owners."

That's what's going on. The core of the issue is that he created a situation where the team had one set of expectations about how decisions get made, and he had another. When it felt good for him to talk about independence and hands-off ownership of a bulwark of democracy, that wasn't a problem.

Until it was.

To understand the fallout, it sort of doesn't matter why he made the decision, and his piece isn't actually very well-argued anyhow. If not doing endorsements is a principled stance, where has it been for the last 11 years? And why now? In service of some dated, view from nowhere concept of journalism? From the outset this decision has smelled a lot like craven self-interest and anticipatory obedience, and this reasoning doesn't really make it seem less...weasel-y.

Either way, Pulitzer Prize winners are resigning from the editorial board, and hundreds of thousands of people have unsubscribed. Not because they didn't know, two weeks ago, that Bezos owned the paper. Not because they didn't know that an owner can spike stories, or that some papers don't do endorsements.

As a leader, you can change the rules. You can do so unilaterally. It is so often your job to make the hard calls. No one writing this newsletter would tell you otherwise. What we can tell you, though, is that when you change the rules your people will notice. And at that moment, they will have some hard calls of their own to consider.

— Melissa & Johnathan

[In the email version of this newsletter, we referred to David Hoffman, the Pulitzer-Prize winning writer who resigned from the editorial board, as a “reporter”. Editorial writers and reporters are different gigs and we have fixed that in this version, after one of our readers wrote to let us know. Thanks for that. And if you’re curious, here’s a good explainer that person shared as well!]