Inside the Giant Machine: An Amazon.com Story, Second Edition
I do hope that this short book will motivate executives to reconsider managing employees by making them feel adequate. In fact, Silicon Valley has several successful companies that achieved success by taking care of their workers.
San Francisco, California (PRWEB) January 25, 2014
Two years ago, former Amazon.com manager Kalpanik S. demonstrated his courage to speak up by sharing shocking details of Amazon.com inner culture in his brazen Amazon.com memoir "Inside the Giant Machine: An Amazon.com Story, second edition". This short book captures the emotional and physical toll of working at Amazon where employees' emotional and physical well being is often sacrificed to achieve productivity improvements. The book describes Amazon's obsession with “metrics” which not only includes numeric targets for things like packing and shipping boxes by warehouse workers or call handled by customer support, but also quotas on number of employees supposed to fired by each supervisor every year.
This easy to read eBook which is equivalent to about 180 print pages was an instant hit in its category with readers downloading more than 20,000 copies on eBook platforms such as Kindle™ and Nook™.
The publisher Center of Artificial Imagination is now celebrating the books’ second anniversary by offering it for only $0.99 for a week.
George A., a reader from San Francisco Bay Area describes how each of the hundreds of times he purchased something at Amazon.com, he wondered at how smart the people who got it working must have been. He found the book to give him a peak behind the curtain, calling the company “long on brain and short on soul” comparing the company to a chess-playing computer that beats a grand-master, “you acknowledge the machine’s superiority but don't admire it.” He also describes author's style to be engaging and candid.
“The book evolved from a series of blog articles that were authored in 'real time' before, during and after my stint at Amazon.com. At the time of writing, I did not know how the rest of the story will turn out, so the only agenda I had while writing was sharing my journey with my friends,” says Kalpanik S. “I do hope that this short book will motivate executives to reconsider managing employees by making them feel inadequate. Silicon Valley has several leading companies that achieved success by taking care of their workers and making them feel valued.”
"Inside The Giant Machine: An Amazon. Com Story, Second Edition" can be purchased for the discounted price of $0.99 at Amazon's Kindle store in US till January 31st. In addition the Kindle store in US, the eBook edition is also available at Amazon's websites for United Kingdom and Germany.
In addition, the printed edition of the book can be purchased online at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and other online and brick-and-mortar book retailers.
About Kalpanik S.
Kalpanik S. was born in India, where he studied computer science at a prominent engineering college. He came to the USA in the late 1980s on a fellowship from the University of California to do graduate level research in computer science. After completing his studies, Kalpanik worked at both large technology companies and small start-ups in Silicon Valley and in Seattle. During that time, he kept a journal about his journey though the United States, and he finally decided to get it published. In addition to "Inside the Giant Machine: An Amazon.com Story", the author has authored several other books including Artificial Imagination, Welcome to the USA and more.
Kalpanik (pronounced as KAAL-pah-nik) means “imaginary” in Hindi. The author uses a pen name to allow him to separate his literary identity from his professional identity.
Notes:
1. Kindle is a registered trademark of Amazon Technologies, Inc
2. Even though the Kindle edition of the book is published on Amazon’s Kindle platform and print edition is published and distributed by CreateSpace, an Amazon.com company, the opinions expressed in the book are author’s own, and not Amazon’s. Amazon.com does not endorse nor oppose any products and services offered by the Center of Artificial Imagination, Inc.
