Not a direct rebuttal.. but there are several things that need to come together for this to work.
1. The leadership team should trust each other's data. Over a period of time, that has not been true.
2. The group reviewing the data depends on everyone being there long enough to understand and get the feel. That is also hard to achieve and imho, is no longer true.
3. The metrics tend to ignore the cost to the workers. After all, everything looks like numbers and charts.
For me, WBR is a mechanism, but Amazon's focus on just the metrics has hurt its workers, employees, sellers and partners a lot.
Yes.. I mean at Amazon. The WBR (when I was there) was held on Monday at the director level, Tuesday at the VP and Wednesday at the S-team.
The following is purely my opinion:
The constant churn of employees and directors at the lower levels meant the data is mostly massaged or explained away.
The really good old-timers would focus on exceptions and single anomalies - much to the frustration of poor engineers and managers. But they intuitively knew that those small issues can snowball and catching them early helped mitigating the issue. But as the systems grew more complex and the number of teams expanded massively, the feel for the pulse became more mechanical and remote. New managers, directors and VPs did not come from a similar culture and the constant politics sidelined the more experienced employees who quit. Once that knowledge is lost, it takes multiple years to get it back and I do not think Amazon got that mojo anymore.
It felt more mechanical and ritualistic, rather than genuinely trying to uncover issues (which is when I quit). It is Goodhart's law at the next level.
1. The leadership team should trust each other's data. Over a period of time, that has not been true. 2. The group reviewing the data depends on everyone being there long enough to understand and get the feel. That is also hard to achieve and imho, is no longer true. 3. The metrics tend to ignore the cost to the workers. After all, everything looks like numbers and charts.
For me, WBR is a mechanism, but Amazon's focus on just the metrics has hurt its workers, employees, sellers and partners a lot.