Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

by Kristi Coulter

Everyone around me has mastered not only how to find the cells that matter but how to talk about them in concise but fully formed paragraphs: here’s the metric, here’s why it is what it is, and here’s what we’re doing to either change or sustain it, all expressed in neutral, non-defensive language. No data point is too small or buried to be exempt from scrutiny, and even someone as high up as Chuck is expected to be able to speak personally to all of it.

“Amazon used to have a voice,” she says, showing me a well-buried internal website with a list of brand voice traits I’m sure are long forgotten. “Can you help us get it back?”

“It’s just that you’re looking for the Purple Panda. Everyone is. You want great creatives who also have MBAs and world-class quantitative skills, and you want to hire them to do mostly low-level grunt work. These people do not exist.”

“So, the thing about Amazon is that there are no wheels,” I say. “They were never there. What you’re experiencing is just how it is here. Absolute chaos.” “So how do you get anything done?”