Management Amazon case study ITM assignment 代写

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  • Management Amazon case study ITM assignment 代写
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    Introduction to Management: Assignment 1 Case Study – Marking Rubric  Criteria
    Fail Pass Credit Distinction
    High Distinction
    1. Case Analysis: Analyses
    the case identifying the
    key issues and/or
    problems. Identifies
    problems using evidence
    from the case plus
    theories and concepts
    Too brief; inability to
    identify issues raised by
    the question; may show
    superficial treatment;
    insufficient knowledge or
    understanding of the
    topic; much irrelevant
    material
    Borderline and limited
    understanding of key
    issues and problems in the
    case study; some gaps in
    addressing key issues and
    problems; largely
    descriptive and lacks
    analysis. Limited use of
    theories and concepts.
    Sufficient understanding
    of the case; some
    evidence of analysis of
    issues and problems in the
    case. Competent use of
    theories and concepts to
    support the analysis.
    Very good understanding
    of the case; analysis and
    some linking of issues and
    problems. Very good use
    of theories and concepts
    to support the analysis.
    Comprehensive and
    critical understanding of
    key issues; high level of
    critical analysis of the
    problems /issues in the
    case. Excellent use of
    theories and concepts to
    support the analysis.
    2. Linking theory and
    practice to the solution:
     Develops a solution to
    the issues or problems.
    Justifies the solution with
    evidence, management
    theory, approaches,
    concepts and/or models.
    Unclear solution and does
    not link to the issues and
    problems that were
    identified; structure is
    disjointed, lacks logical
    flow and cohesion; mostly
    description or listing of
    facts from the case study
    Some lack of clarity in
    solutions and does not link
    to the issues and problems
    that were identified,
    structure lacks logical
    flow, and is disjointed in
    places; reliant on restating
    major themes from the
    case. Some attempt at
    justifying the proposed
    solution.
    Clearly developed
    solution/s that are well
    linked; some drift from
    logical flow; utilises a
    variety of credible sources
    to justify the proposed
    solution drawing on some
    scholarly sources.
    Well-developed solution/s
    that are well linked;
    logically constructed;
    generally coherent and
    cohesive justification of
    the proposed solution,
    drawing on a range of
    evidence and scholarly
    sources
    Well organised, logically
    formulated solution/s that
    are well linked; sustained
    coherence and cohesion in
    the justification of the
    proposed solution drawing
    on a range of evidence
    and scholarly sources.
    3. Recommends specific
    strategies to accomplish
    the proposed solution
    Actions to achieve the
    proposed solution do not
    relate to the priority issue;
    Does not discuss expected
    outcomes.
    Actions to achieve the
    proposed solution
    somewhat relate to the
    priority issue. Some
    discussion of expected
    outcomes.
    Actions to achieve the
    proposed solution relate
    to the priority issue. Good
    discussion of expected
    outcomes.
    Actions to achieve the
    proposed solution strongly
    relate to the priority issue.
    Very good discussion of
    expected outcomes.
    Actions to achieve the
    proposed solution strongly
    relate to the priority issue;
    Excellent discussion of
    expected outcomes. .
    4. Referencing
    Harvard Referencing style;
    including in-text
    referencing and an
    alphabetised reference
    list.
    Does not meet minimum
    referencing guidelines;
    absence of, or extremely
    poor and inconsistent use
    of required referencing in-
    text and in reference list
    Appropriate, though
    perhaps inconsistent,
    application of referencing
    guidelines both in-text and
    in reference list
    Appropriate and
    consistent use of
    referencing guidelines;
    some errors in-text or in
    reference list
    Appropriate and
    consistent use of
    referencing guidelines;
    minor errors only
    High level of consistency
    and appropriate use of all
    referencing guidelines
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    5. Professional level of
    presentation, case study
    structure with
    subheadings; appropriate
    academic level of writing
    Poorly presented; does
    not follow case study
    structure; many errors in
    spelling, grammar and
    vocabulary; unclear
    expression; many overly
    short paragraphs, bullet
    points and lists. You are
    encouraged to use the
    university services to
    improve your academic
    writing and referencing
    skills.
    Presentation requires
    some improvements,
    mostly follows case study
    structure, some errors in
    spelling, grammar and
    vocabulary; some errors in
    expression; some overly
    short paragraphs and/or
    bullet points and lists.
    Presentation of an
    adequate academic
    standard with minor
    errors only; follows case
    study structure; generally
    clearly expressed logically
    constructed paragraphs
    with some evidence of
    critical analysis.
    Presentation is of good
    academic standard;
    follows case study
    structure; clear and fluent
    academic writing skills;
    logical flow of sentences
    and paragraphs with
    critical analysis evident.
    Presentation is of a high
    academic and professional
    standard; follows case
    study structure; clear,
    fluent writing skills; as a
    whole, carefully crafted,
    cohesive, convincing and
    critical analysis of the
    case.
     
    Page 1 of 4
    ADAPTED FROM BUSINESS DAY, NEW YORK TIMES
    By JODI KANTOR and DAVID STREITFELD, AUG. 15, 2015
    USE OF THIS CASE STUDY IS LIMITED TO RMIT UNIVERSITY INTRODUCTION TO
    MANAGEMENT STUDENTS ONLY.
    Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace
    The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push
    white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions.
    At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings,
    toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why
    they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are
    “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to
    send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used
    to sabotage others.
    The company’s top performers dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-
    billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Non-performing staff
    leave or are fired in annual retrenchment of the staff. Some workers who suffered
    from serious health issues including cancer and other personal crises said they had
    been evaluated unfairly or edged out rather than given time to recover.
    The company, founded and still run by Jeff Bezos, rejects many of the popular
    management approaches that other corporations at least pay lip service to and has
    instead designed what many workers call an intricate machine propelling them to
    achieve Mr. Bezos’ ever-expanding ambitions. “This is a company that strives to do
    really big, innovative, ground-breaking things, and those things aren’t easy,” said
    Amazon’s top recruiter. “When you’re shooting for the moon, the nature of the work
    is really challenging. For some people it doesn’t work.”
    A staff member in a book marketing role lasted less than two years and later said
    that his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other
    workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a
    grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry
    at their desk.”
    Thanks in part to its ability to extract the most from employees, Amazon is stronger
    than ever. Last month, it eclipsed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the USA,
    with a market valuation of $250 billion, and Forbes deemed Mr. Bezos the fifth-
    wealthiest person on earth. Tens of millions of Americans know Amazon as
    customers, but life inside its corporate offices is largely a mystery. Secrecy is
    required; even low-level employees sign a lengthy confidentiality agreement.
    More than 100 current and former Amazonians described how they tried to reconcile
    the sometimes-punishing aspects of their workplace with what many called its
    thrilling power to create. Some employees said they thrived at Amazon precisely
    because it pushed them past what they thought were their limits. Many employees
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    are motivated by “thinking big”. They later realized they had become addicted to
    Amazon’s way of working.
    Amazon has just been quicker in responding to changes that the rest of the work
    world is now experiencing: data that allows individual performance to be measured
    continuously, come-and-go relationships between employers and employees, and
    global competition in which empires rise and fall overnight. Amazon is in the
    vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and
    more productive, but harsher and less forgiving.
    One of Amazon’s new hire explained how he left his old company for a faster, grittier
    one. “Conflict brings about innovation,” he said.
    A Philosophy of Work
    Jeff Bezos turned to data-driven management very early. He created a technological
    and retail giant by relying on his eagerness to tell others how to behave; an instinct
    for bluntness bordering on confrontation; and an overarching confidence in the
    power of metrics to get the most out of workers.
    According to early executives and employees, Mr. Bezos was determined almost
    from the moment he founded Amazon in 1994 to resist the forces he thought sapped
    businesses over time — bureaucracy, profligate spending, lack of rigor. As the
    company grew, he wanted to codify his ideas about the workplace, some of them
    proudly counterintuitive, into instructions simple enough for a new worker to
    understand, general enough to apply to the nearly limitless number of businesses he
    wanted to enter and stringent enough to stave off the mediocrity he feared. The
    result was the leadership principles, which describe the way Amazonians should act.
    Amazon has rules that are part of its daily language and rituals, used in hiring, cited
    at meetings and quoted in food-truck lines at lunchtime.
    The guidelines conjure an empire of elite workers who hold one another to towering
    expectations and are liberated from the forces — red tape, office politics — that keep
    them from delivering their utmost. Employees are to exhibit “ownership”, or mastery
    of every element of their businesses, and “dive deep,” or find the underlying ideas
    that can fix problems or identify new services before shoppers even ask for them.
    The workplace should be infused with transparency and precision about who is really
    achieving and who is not. Within Amazon, ideal employees are often described as
    “athletes” with endurance, speed, performance that can be measured and an ability
    to defy limits. Mr. Bezos stated that when he interviewed potential hires, he warned
    them, “It’s not easy to work here.”
    While the Amazon campus appears similar to those of some tech giants, with its
    dog-friendly offices, on-site farmers’ market and upbeat posters, it offers no pretence
    that catering to employees is a priority. Workers are expected to embrace “frugality”,
    from the bare-bones desks to the cell-phones and travel expenses that they often
    pay themselves. The focus is on relentless striving to please customers, or
    “customer obsession”.
    “I work hard at helping to maintain the culture,” Mr. Bezos said last year.
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    Of all of his management notions, perhaps the most distinctive is Mr. Bezos belief
    that harmony is often overvalued in the workplace — that it can stifle honest critique
    and encourage polite praise for flawed ideas. Instead, Amazonians are instructed to
    “disagree and commit”, to rip into colleagues’ ideas, with feedback that can be blunt
    to the point of painful, before lining up behind a decision.
    Motivating the ‘Amabots’
    In Amazon warehouses, employees are monitored by sophisticated electronic
    systems to ensure they are packing enough boxes every hour. (Amazon came under
    fire in 2011 when workers in an eastern Pennsylvania warehouse toiled in more than
    100-degree heat with ambulances waiting outside, taking away labourers as they fell.
    After an investigation by the local newspaper, the company installed air-
    conditioning.)
    But in its offices, Amazon uses a self-reinforcing set of management, data and
    psychological tools to spur its tens of thousands of white-collar employees to do
    more and more. “The company is running a continual performance improvement
    algorithm on its staff,” said a former Kindle marketer. Every aspect of the Amazon
    system amplifies the others to motivate and discipline the company’s marketers,
    engineers and finance specialists: the leadership principles; rigorous, continuing
    feedback on performance; and the competition among peers who fear missing a
    potential problem or improvement and race to answer an email before anyone else.
    Many other staff said the culture stoked their willingness to erode work-life
    boundaries, castigate themselves for shortcomings (being “vocally self-critical” is
    included in the description of the leadership principles) and try to impress a company
    that can often feel like an insatiable taskmaster. For example, making staff take
    marathon conference calls on public holidays, criticism from bosses for not
    accessing the Internet whilst on vacation, and hours spent working at home most
    nights or weekends.
    To prod employees, Amazon has a perpetual flow of real-time, ultra-detailed metrics
    that allows the company to measure nearly everything its customers and staff does.
    Amazon employees are held accountable for a staggering array of metrics, a
    process that unfolds in what can be anxiety-provoking sessions called business
    reviews, held weekly or monthly among various teams. A day or two before the
    meetings, employees receive printouts, sometimes up to 50 or 60 pages long,
    several workers said. At the reviews, employees are cold-called and pop-quizzed on
    any one of those thousands of numbers. Explanations like “we’re not totally sure” or
    “I’ll get back to you” are not acceptable, many employees said. Some managers
    sometimes dismissed such responses as “stupid” or told workers to “just stop it.”
    Employees talk of feeling how their work is never done or good enough.
    A Running Competition
    Many staff described feeling sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified
    colleagues with whom they could not argue. In some cases, the criticism was copied
    directly into their performance reviews. Employees say that the Bezos ideal, a
    meritocracy in which people and ideas compete and the best win, where co-workers
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    challenge one another “even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,” as the
    leadership principles note, has turned into a world of frequent combat.
    A senior developer said he admired the customer focus but could not tolerate the
    hostile language used in many meetings, a comment echoed by many others. Each
    year, the internal competition culminates at an extended semi-open tournament
    called an Organization Level Review, where managers debate subordinates’
    rankings, assigning and reassigning names to boxes in a matrix projected on the
    wall. The practice — often called stack ranking, or “rank and yank” can force
    managers to get rid of valuable and talented staff just to meet quotas.
    The review meeting starts with a discussion of the lower-level employees, whose
    performance is debated in front of higher-level managers. As the hours pass,
    successive rounds of managers leave the room, knowing that those who remain will
    determine their fates.
    Many women at Amazon attribute its gender gap (it does not currently have a single
    woman on its top leadership team) to its competition-and-elimination system. Several
    former high-level female executives said they believed that some of the leadership
    principles worked to their disadvantage. They said they could lose out in promotions
    because of intangible criteria like “earn trust” or the emphasis on disagreeing with
    colleagues. Being too forceful, they said, can be particularly hazardous for women in
    the workplace.
    When ‘All’ Isn’t Good Enough
    “When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a
    major weakness,” one former employee said. Other workers who had suffered health
    crises also felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to
    recover.
    For all of the employees who are edged out, many others flee, exhausted or
    unwilling to further endure the hardships for Amazon. Amazon, however, retains new
    workers in part by requiring them to repay a part of their signing bonus if they leave
    within a year, and a portion of their hefty relocation fees if they leave within two
    years. Several fathers said they left or were considering quitting because of pressure
    from bosses or peers to spend less time with their families.
    New workers will strive to make Amazon the first trillion-dollar retailer, in the hope
    that just about everyone will be buying Amazon products.
    Management Amazon case study ITM assignment 代写