Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?

by Aaron Dignan

happens. Amazon recently confounded the Securities and Exchange Commission when it refused to disclose its research and development spending in the same way other major public companies do. At present, the company discloses only “technology and content” spending of more than $20 billion. When pressed as to why it couldn’t break out R&D spend, the firm’s worldwide controller wrote, “Our business model encourages the simultaneous research, design, development, and maintenance of both new and existing products and services. For example, our teams are constantly working to build new Alexa skills and simultaneously maintain current skills, and these activities are within a continuum of those described in ASC 730–10–55–1 and 2 and are not easily distinguishable operationally.”35 The point? We do so much innovation so frequently in so many places here at Amazon that it’s not worth tracking project by project the way other companies do.