90 FASTCOMPANY.COM MAY 2019
Beth Galetti
(Continued from page 53)which, according to Brad Stone’s book The
Everything Store, originates from five core
values established by Bezos and formalized
in 1998: “customer obsession,” “frugality,”
“bias for action,” “ownership,” and “high bar
for talent.” A sixth, “innovation,” came later,
Stone wrote. Over the years, that list has ex-
panded. Amazon has 14 Leadership Principles
(“Leaders are right a lot”), and 10 Peculiar
Ways (“We use specificity when possible and
sensible”). Amazon’s love of describing itself
as “peculiar” even gave a name to its mascot,
Peccy, a blobby orange critter whose grin is
the arrow from the company’s logo. The HR
group has its own mission and tenets. (“We
build a workplace for Amazonians to invent
on behalf of the customer.”)
Galetti acknowledges that all this may
sound overwhelming to the uninitiated.
“Who the heck remembers 14 Leadership
Principles?” she laughs. “I have two children,
and I’m sometimes hard-pressed to get both
of their names straight.” But she has clearly
taken Amazon’s dogma to heart. As we chat,
she frequently calls my attention to a handy
laminated copy of the 14 Leadership Princi-
ples, using a finger to underline key phrases
such as “think big” and “dive deep.”
Any good HR department tries to help a
company live its values. Galetti’s background
allows her to see technology as a way to
achieve this goal at Amazonian scale. “If
we’re going to hire tens of thousands—or now
hundreds of thousands—of people a year, we
can’t afford to live by manual processes and
manual transactions,” she says.
Darcie Henry, VP of Amazon HR’s world-
wide operations, has worked in Amazon’s
HR group since 1998, when the company
had a couple thousand employees. She says
that when Galetti was given the top HR job,
in 2016, after Galetti’s boss, Tony Galbato,
retired, “it was the first time that the invest-
ment [of money and resources] completely
flipped toward ensuring that we are building
out our HR technology team.” Amazon reas-
signed the developers working on HR soft-
ware to Galetti’s group—a logical step given
her software-engineering experience—and
ramped up hiring for the team even further.
Longtime Amazon engineer Alfonso Pa-
lacios now oversees this 600-person brigade.
Galetti, he says, “is the primary reason why
I came on board. She holds her team to high
standards, as she should.” After Palacios gave
Galetti his first yearly plan for his group, sheasked for supporting documents from other
staffers—and then marked them up with 150
questions. “She wasn’t micromanaging, she
was genuinely curious,” he hastens to clarify.
One product his team built, called Con-
nections, asks every Amazon employee to
answer a workplace-related question in the
morning, giving the company an atomized
version of the feedback it otherwise might
have to wait until an annual employee sur-
vey to learn. Another, Forte, is a performance-
review system that Galetti describes as being
“built with the premise that what makes
people successful here are their strengths,
not the absence of weaknesses.” Amazon
has drawn heat in the past for performance
reviews that accentuated the negative.
These offerings aspire to the sort of
consumer-level polish that Amazon is famous
for but that is rarely associated with HR soft-
ware. “We don’t develop tools,” says Galetti
firmly. “We don’t develop systems. We de-
velop products.” Despite the fact that nobody
outside of the company will ever use these
particular products, she talks about them as if
she were responsible for a new Kindle.“WELCOME AMAZONIANS. IT’S STILL DAY ONE!
ARE YOU READY TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE?”
The greeting/exhortation, referencing Jeff
Bezos’s oft-expressed insistence that Amazon
is always on “day one” of its journey, is em-
blazoned on a small sign outside an Amazon
fulfillment center in Kent, Washington.
The 812,000-square-foot warehouse is
17 miles from the Spheres in Seattle, but in
some ways it feels like it’s in a different uni-
verse. The towering security turnstiles at the
entrance, intended to stop employees from
walking off with Amazon property, unques-
tionably mean business (warnings on the
turnstile bars read STOP and GO SLOW), and
posted instructions advise workers to leave
items such as phones, keys, coins, and chew-
ing gum in their lockers to reduce screening
time. (Amazon currently has 101 openings in
its Fulfillment Loss Prevention group, which
is responsible for discouraging pilfering by
workers.) There’s a sprawling break room but
no cafeteria; dining options include making
yourself a free peanut butter sandwich, pay-
ing for microwavables such as Dinty Moore
stew, or bringing lunch from home.
When I visit, Christmas is a week away,
and the facility is in the final stretch of its
busiest season, known to employees as
“Peak.” One young woman, dressed in a
festive shirt with a sparkly reindeer on the
front, politely answers my questions and
demos a networked game that lets her and
another worker elsewhere in the building—
depicted as racing dragons—compete tothe network’s subscription-based streaming
package. Miller says that NBC’s deal with PLL
is a multiyear agreement.
“Getting the sport in front of as many eye-
balls as possible is going to do great things for
lacrosse,” says Kylie Ohlmiller, the all-time
leading scorer in NCAA Division 1 women’s
lacrosse and now a rising star in the (unre-
lated) Women’s Professional Lacrosse League,
which has formed a strategic partnership
with the PLL. The WPLL will play at least two
of its games this season at shared venues
with the PLL, and the two leagues will col-
laborate on some of their youth-clinic work.
For the entire North American sports mar-
ket, PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that rev-
enue will exceed $80 billion in 2022, spread
fairly evenly across ticket sales, sponsorship,
merchandise, and media rights. Mike Rabil
projects that during the PLL’s first three years,
most revenue will come from ticket sales and
sponsorship, but then broadcast rights will be-
come the top driver. The timing here could fa-
vor the new league: Hungry for programming
and loaded with cash, big tech companies have
entered the bidding wars for broadcast rights.
Last year, Facebook signed an exclusive deal
with the MLB to stream 25 games, for a re-
ported $30 million to $35 million; Amazon
inked a soccer streaming-rights deal with the
English Premier League. (Those terms weren’t
disclosed, but one industry analyst estimated
the price to be in the $100 million range.)
The TV cameras will lure brand attention,
which will in turn likely improve the sport
itself. Top athletes earn most of their money
through endorsement deals. “If you knock
it out of the park while you’re on national
television,” Paul Rabil says, “brands will sign
you.” Former college All-American and MLL
All-Star Myles Jones, who twice experienced
ESPN national coverage, winning two NCAA
championships for Duke, has jumped over to
the PLL and says that “everybody wants to be
able to call their mom, dad, sister, brother,
aunt, uncle, grandma, grandpa, and say, ‘Hey,
I’m playing on TV.’ Now we have to change the
way we train and treat our bodies to put the
best product in front of the cameras.”
Jones was the marquee attraction at a
skills demonstration on the final day of Lax-
Con, and as he left one of the two fields that
had been set up in the convention center, he
was swarmed by boys and girls clamoring for
an autograph. Jones smiled as he signed their
programs and jerseys, and then he handed
his stick to one stunned little boy. “You can
keep this,” he said, hoisting his equipment
bag over his shoulder and heading across
the floor. The elated young fan sprinted back
toward his parents, clutching the prize.
[email protected]