By 2019, a decade had passed since Amazon purchased Zappos, and its executives had been patient. As Jeff Bezos had promised, the company had largely left Zappos, and its then CEO, Tony Hsieh, alone, a rare move that signaled his approval of Tony. Amazon had, in fact, learned from Zappos and its management experiments. At one point, Amazon executives had had preliminary discussions about integrating parts of holacracy into some of their other divisions. They seemed, on the whole, supportive.
Still, Tony worried about what he and other Zappos executives referred to as “Amazon creep,” the tech behemoth increasingly getting involved in Zappos’ business. Tony wanted to protect his employees from Amazon’s famously aggressive work culture and its layers of bureaucracy. Tony and his team were careful to call Amazon only if they really needed something. Sometimes even a simple question…
