Amazon's Brutal Promotion System - Business Insider

Getty Images/Scott Olson

Jeff Bezos

Getting a promotion at Amazon isn't easy, Brad Stone of Bloomberg Businessweek reports. 

Here's the way it works. 

To get ahead at Amazon, your boss has to debate why you deserve a promotion with other managers from the company. If he or she makes an effective case on your behalf, then you get the nod. If not, you wait another 12 months. 

These debates take place at two different meetings during the year. 

In the first meeting of the year, usually in February or March, according to a leaked presentation of how the system works, the senior staff talks about employees to see who's doing well, and who isn't, and who is getting a promotion.

In the second meeting, which takes place in September or October, the leaders talk some more about who's getting a promotion, and talk about who is doing well and who is doing poorly. 

Amazon's managers group employees into three tiers: The top 20%, who are groomed for promotions, the next 70% who are kept happy, and the bottom 10%, who are either let go, or told to get it together.

This system, which was created by Jeff Bezos, is supposed to cut down on politics and in-fighting. Unfortunately, Stone says it has the opposite effect.

"Ambitious employees tend to spend months having lunch and coffee with their boss’s peers to ensure a positive outcome once the topic of their proposed promotion is raised in [the meetings]," says Stone.

Stone also notes that promotions are very limited at Amazon, so if you fight for your employee to get a promotion, it means someone else's employee gets snubbed. And anyone in the room can nuke someone else's promotion.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his
personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-brutal-promotion-system-2013-10
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Ivanka Trump Shares First Photo Of Son Joseph Frederick Kushner

Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner welcomed their second child, a baby boy, on Monday.

The excited new mother shared a photo on her Tumblr page of herself looking stunning in no make-up and a hospital gown as she cradled her son.

Trump captioned the photo, “We welcome with love, Joseph Frederick Kushner”.

She explained the name choice, writing, “Please join in our joy as we welcome Joseph Frederick Kushner, named after each of our paternal grandfathers, both master builders of their generation and inspiring patriarchs of their families. Jared’s grandfather, Joseph, was a rock. His indomitable spirit, his sense of family, and his work ethic are the values we hope to hand down to our son. My grandfather, Frederick, was a builder not just of tens of thousands of homes throughout this city, but of a tight-knit family that honors to this day the traditions he established.

“Both men set the standards that have been passed down through the generations and which we hope to impart upon Joseph and Arabella. They created a legacy for our family that inspires our careers as well as our love and respect for one another. We are honored to name our son after these two distinguished men. We feel so blessed with the newest member of the family!”

Ivanka’s dad, Donald Trump, revealed the news of his grandson’s birth on Monday, taking to his Twitter page to share the happy news. The Don wrote, “My beautiful daughter Ivanka just had a healthy baby boy. Jared and Ivanka are very proud!”

Ivanka and Jared’s adorable two-year-old daughter Arabella was very excited about her new brother. She is shown in a cute Instagram photo holding her baby doll as she waited to meet her sibling.

Ivanka wrote, “Arabella is at home with her grandmother practicing her swaddle before her little brother comes home!”

Click thumbnails for larger pictures

Images: wenn.com

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/stupidcelebrities/~3/8qABQ2jKwuo/
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House Republicans Show Themselves To Be ... - Business Insider

House Republican leaders canceled plans to call a vote Tuesday evening on a Republican plan to raise the debt limit and reopen the government. They couldn't round up enough Republican votes to pass it.

The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza is stunned, for some reason.

In fact, this is the least stunning event ever. The bill would have raised the debt ceiling. It would have changed Obamacare, Republicans' white whale, in only the most trivial ways. The powerful conservative pressure group Heritage Action opposed it. Of course Speaker John Boehner couldn't get the votes.

The only stunning thing is that anyone still looks at House Republicans and says: "You know what would be great? Giving these people more power over public policy."

Roughly one-third of this caucus thinks hitting the debt ceiling and shutting down the government are great strategies to try to stop Obamacare. The other two-thirds of the party has realized all along that this strategy sucks, but they could not find any way to stop their party from implementing it — even though these "reasonable" Republicans outnumber the crazies.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) was on CNN today saying that his party's strategy for the last month has been lunacy. Well why the hell didn't he do anything to stop it? Why didn't he join with Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) and stop the shutdown in its tracks on Sept. 30? Where is his sense of responsibility?

Can you imagine the situation this country would be in if Republicans controlled both houses of Congress right now? Or if we had a President whose administration gets jerked around by Heritage Action in the same way that House Republicans do? It would be a trainwreck, and "reasonable" Republicans like Nunes would still be on television saying they understand it's a trainwreck, but by golly, operationally, they had no way to stop it.

There is no serious argument for Republican governance right now, even if you prefer conservative policies over liberal ones. These people are just too dangerously incompetent to be trusted with power.

A party that is this bad at tactics can't be expected to be any good at policy-making.

There are a lot of state and local Republican officials I admire, with Gov. Chris Christie (N.J.) at the top of the list. Govs. Brian Sandoval (Nev.) and Susana Martinez (N.M.) are pretty good, too. I even think Gov. Jan Brewer (Ariz.) has a lot of merits, her opportunistic fights against immigrants notwithstanding.

What successful Republican governors like Christie have in common is that they have been able to resist their party's base when it demands they do massively unpopular things. Republican members of Congress have no such ability. And for that reason, they cannot be trusted with power.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/house-republicans-show-themselves-to-be-dangerously-incompetent-again-2013-10
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Suspected plotter of 1998 embassy bombings due in court in New York

Christine Cornell

Courtroom sketch of Anas al-Libi in Federal Courthouse iin New York City on October 15, 2013.

By James Novogrod, Jonathan Dienst and Erin McClam, NBC News

A suspected al Qaeda operative captured by U.S. special forces in Libya pleaded not guilty Tuesday in Manhattan federal court to charges that he helped plan the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa.

The alleged operative, Abu Anas al-Libi, 49, entered his plea via a court-appointed lawyer and then told the judge through an Arabic language translator that he cannot afford a private attorney.

Prosecutors said the case — which includes charges of conspiracy to kill Americans and conspiracy to destroy U.S. defense utilities outside the country — is not eligible for the death penalty.

During the brief hearing, al-Libi — who wore close-cropped hair, a beard, and gray sweatpants and a black shirt — was declared a flight risk and ordered held. He will be back in court again next week.

A key al-Qaeda planner indicted for bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzaniahas been brought to American soil for medical treatment, sparking outrage by some who say he should have been sent to Guantanamo Bay. NBC's Richard Engel reports.

Al-Libi was whisked off the streets of Tripoli on Oct. 5 and held aboard the USS San Antonio, where he was locked in the brig and questioned without Miranda rights, U.S. officials said.

Because of what U.S. officials have described as a serious medical condition — his family says it is severe hepatitis — he was taken within a week to New York, where he has been under indictment since 1998.

Some Republicans in Congress said that he should have been sent to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for further interrogation.

“This isn’t a question of getting a conviction,” said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. “It was a question of getting intelligence.”

He is one of 21 men indicted in the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed more than 200 people. He is among nine in custody. Eight have been killed, including Osama bin Laden; one died awaiting trial, and three are at large.

The indictment accuses al-Libi of helping plan the attacks and of conducting surveillance of the embassy and other diplomatic facilities in Nairobi, Kenya.

According to testimony at an earlier embassy bombing trial, it was al-Libi, who was in London at the time of the attacks, who first proposed the bombing of foreign embassies in 1993.

Richard Engel of NBC News contributed to this report.

Related:

Fugitive al Qaeda leader was hardly lying low in Libya, photos show

Slow-motion manhunt: U.S. relentlessly pursues '98 embassy bombing suspects

 

 

 

 

This story was originally published on Tue Oct 15, 2013 10:38 AM EDT

Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/663306/s/327c3a52/sc/20/l/0Lusnews0Bnbcnews0N0C0Inews0C20A130C10A0C150C20A9742120Esuspected0Eplotter0Eof0E19980Eembassy0Ebombings0Edue0Ein0Ecourt0Ein0Enew0Eyork0Dlite/story01.htm
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Amazon to open Tel Aviv office to support cloud services

TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Amazon.com will open an office in Tel Aviv to support its cloud computing offering called Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company's chief technology officer said on Tuesday.

The office is expected to begin operating at the start of 2014 and support companies from start-ups to large organizations as they move to cloud computing services offered by Amazon.

Companies in Israel, which has a large concentration of technology start-ups, were among the first to turn to cloud computing when AWS was established in 2006, the CTO said.

"If you start a business today you no longer buy IT (information technology). You spend your money on getting better engineers and product builders," Werner Vogels told a news conference.

AWS, which is the market leader in cloud computing, according to the latest Gartner research, rents remote computing and storage to other companies, providing over 30 different services.

Vogels said Amazon is focused on driving costs down and has lowered the price for its services 37 times since 2006.

"We've always know that this is not a winner take all market. There is room for many providers with differentiating products," he said.

(The story has been filed again to clarify that company is market leader according to research firm Gartner in paragraph five.)

(Reporting by Tova Cohen)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/amazon-open-tel-aviv-office-support-cloud-services-105047053--finance.html
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Twitter's IPO bound for NYSE as losses mount

NEW YORK (AP) — Twitter will be coming off its biggest quarterly loss in the past three years when the online messaging service brings its IPO to the New York Stock Exchange later this fall.

A regulatory filing Tuesday revealed that Twitter Inc. will list its shares on the NYSE instead of the traditionally tech-friendly Nasdaq Stock Exchange.

The documents also disclosed Twitter's financial results for the three months ending in September. The San Francisco company lost $65 million, tripling from the same time last year.

The setback was the worst Twitter has suffered in any quarter since 2010.

A target date or a price range for Twitter's initial public offering hasn't been set yet, although most analysts expect the process to be completed before Thanksgiving.

When trading in the shares does begin, it will be under the ticker symbol "TWTR" on the New York Stock Exchange.

The news is an upset for the Nasdaq, which has traditionally been the place for technology IPOs. The exchange was looking to redeem itself after last year's Facebook's IPO, which was marred by trading-order failures and delays. As a result, the Securities and Exchange Commission in May fined the exchange $10 million, the largest ever levied against an exchange.

Both exchanges had heavily courted Twitter.

The NYSE has wooed a growing list of companies recently, including 10 of the 20 largest technology IPOs so far this year, according to research firm Dealogic.

Winning an IPO is always a big deal for an exchange, but a high-profile name like Twitter is an especially coveted prize. As long as Twitter's IPO goes well, it should give the NYSE an edge in luring other up-and-coming companies, particularly in the fertile area of social media.

"We are grateful for Twitter's confidence in our platform and look forward to partnering with them," NYSE spokeswoman Marissa Arnold said in a statement.

A Twitter spokesman declined to comment beyond the announcement.

Twitter still hasn't posted a profit since it started as a side project within another startup more than eight years ago. The company has now lost a total of $483 million in its brief history.

Some of those losses have been by design. Twitter held off on trying to generate revenue during its early years while management focused on making the service more reliable and widening its audience.

By some measures, the strategy has proven to be successful.

In a development likely to hearten prospective investors, Twitter's revenue for the latest quarter more than doubled from last year to nearly $169 million.

Twitter ended September with 232 million active users, up from 218 million in June.

The company's user growth has been slowing though. What's more, most of the traffic is coming from outside the U.S., including many less affluent countries that aren't as attractive to advertisers.

Twitter got only 26 percent of its revenue from advertisers outside the U.S. while 77 percent of its audience came from overseas.

The losses are starting to drain Twitter's bank account, giving added incentive for the company to go public. Twitter is hoping to raise $1 billion in its IPO.

It ended September with $321 million in cash, down from $375 million in June.

The company also added another 300 employees during the latest quarter to expand its workforce to 2,300 people.

___

Liedtke reported from San Francisco.

.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/twitters-ipo-bound-nyse-losses-mount-011051491--finance.html
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Redefining Rock Bottom: Another Scary Poll For Congress

Cloudy skies shroud the Capitol on Monday. Congress is at an impasse as Democrats and Republicans remain at odds over the crises gripping the nation.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Cloudy skies shroud the Capitol on Monday. Congress is at an impasse as Democrats and Republicans remain at odds over the crises gripping the nation.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

It's one of the oldest axioms in politics: Voters always say they want to "throw the bums out," except when it comes to their own representative. That's why the re-election rate for House members is typically over 90 percent.

Heading into the 2014 midterms, that long-standing rule appears to be holding true. But against the backdrop of the federal government shutdown, a potential default and general dysfunction in Washington, there are signs it's reaching a straining point.

According to a new Pew Research poll released Tuesday, anti-incumbency sentiment among voters is a high point — and even the local congressman isn't immune to the anger. A record-low 48 percent of registered voters want their own representative to win re-election in 2014, while 38 percent said they want to see their representative in Congress defeated — the highest percentage in more than two decades.

A record-high 74 percent of registered voters said most members of Congress should not be re-elected next year; just 18 percent of registered voters said most representatives should be re-elected.

In November 2009 ­— the most comparable point during the 2010 election cycle, when 58 incumbents lost re-election — 53 percent of those Pew surveyed thought most representatives should not be re-elected, while 52 percent thought their own representative deserved another term in Congress.

Pew found that Democrats were slightly more likely to say their representative should be re-elected (54 percent) than Republicans (47 percent) and independents (43 percent).

The poll was conducted during the second week of the shutdown from Oct. 9-13.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/10/15/234882464/redefining-rock-bottom-another-scary-poll-for-congress?ft=1&f=1014
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