Steve Frazier: I worked really hard on the student newspaper in college, to a point where I almost wasn’t a student. I built my clip book and had great summer internships. I was hired by The Wall Street Journal straight away, starting in the Dallas bureau in 1979. 

At that time the Journal did not have bureaus in Latin America, so Dallas covered Mexico and Central America. I was assigned to cover the housing industry and then Central America. That turned out to be pretty consuming; the war in El Salvador was just starting, and US policy was getting a lot of attention during the transition from the Carter Administration to Reagan. 

QH: So, a little housing, a little war?

SF: It was an unusual way to split my time. My first trip to El Salvador was December of 1980, as the war was heating up. Three of my sources for my first story were assassinated while having dinner at the local Sheraton Hotel a few weeks after I met them. And I worked with four foreign journalists who were killed by landmines, in firefights, or trouble just over the border in Honduras. It’s a lot to contend with in your early twenties. 

That’s on top of everything I was trying to figure out as a reporter. Like, “What’s going on in this society, and why did it reach the point where they’re killing each other?” I’d travel out to the countryside, talk to farmers, and look at the social injustices everywhere. You absorb a lot when you try to understand the causes of violence that are everywhere in the country. You see so much suffering, and hear so many stories of what families have endured. And then, every morning, I’d have breakfast with the photographers who’d already been out to the dumps where the death squads left bodies.

After a few weeks there,  I’d go back to Dallas, write up my stories from Central America, and then spend a few weeks covering things in the US. Then back to Central America.  

After that, I was in LA for two years, covering the Las Vegas gaming industry and oil companies. Then I moved to Mexico City in 1983, reported from all over the country,  and covered the devastating earthquake in 1985. I  moved to Houston in early 1986, and it was there I decided to get my MBA.

QH: That sounds like a lot of energizing, if freaky, work. Why walk away?

SF: I’m not sure looking back that I had ever had a grand plan for my reporting career. I’d figured at the start that I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. By the time I got to my late 20s,  I’d done that, plus lots more. I didn’t think I could keep doing that until I was 70, and I didn’t want to be an editor. Grad school seemed interesting, partly because I worked so hard on the college paper as an undergrad that I thought that I’d go to grad school and just focus on learning again. 

I still liked journalism, though. I figured I could get an MBA and  move over to the  business side of some big media company.

Also I was really struck by my reporting on the Houston oil bust in the late 1980s. The local economy was collapsing and lots of people lost jobs. Home foreclosures skyrocketed. I’ll always remember one career expert who told me “People think they have to be ready to have several jobs during their career, but you really have to be prepared to have several careers during your life.”  That got to me – I didn’t think I was ready to have several careers, and I thought getting an MBA would help.

QH: Did the choice of schools matter?

SF: I was filling gaps in my skills. So I chose to go to the Kellogg School at Northwestern University because they promoted the group learning process: Lots of classes are based on groups, and students do projects and papers together.  It’s a lot of work, and then the group gets a collective grade. That was attractive because I was worried I wasn’t  good at that. And I thought it was a skill I’d need for any business. 

It turned out to be incredibly helpful. Working as a reporter is individualistic. You have a manager and colleagues, but fundamentally you’re writing stories and managing your time on your own. In a general business job, even if you are an individual contributor when you start, you are always part of a team with goals to produce something. Then when you become a manager,  your ability to  build teams and work across  a large network of teams is even more important.  

QH: Say more about that.

SF: In big organizations, over the long term, success in teams is the ultimate path to success. Can I think about starting a new business, then hire the right people to  build the team to do that? If I can manage a single team, will I be trusted to build multiple teams? Ultimately, you want to be known as a manager other people want to work with because you’ve shown you can build teams that do well. And you hope to build a record as someone who develops talent, and whose team members go on to do bigger things. 

One of the worst things is to be a manager known for being selfish with your people, trying to  protect them from leaving to go to another department. You’ll have no alumni network, no way to attract new talent. So you  build teams, and then celebrate when someone whom you rely on gets recruited for a bigger job somewhere else in the company. If you can show that record, you are able to attract more talent. . 

QH: So what happened to your plan to get the MBA and go back to the media industry?

SF: Early in my first year in business school, I wrote to all the big media companies to find a summer internship. There was zero interest in me, my journalism background,  or my MBA.  I got the most astounding set of rejection letters of my life. The best one was from The New York Times, which said “We’re sorry, but our summer copy boy jobs are reserved for the relatives of Times employees.” 

Meanwhile, investment banks and consulting firms were inviting me for interviews. As a former reporter, I caught their attention because they figured from my resume that I could write, and communication is a very important part of their business. In their interviews, I just needed to check their other boxes and show that I had decent grades in quantitative things like accounting and finance. I thought if I did consulting for two or three years after the MBA I’d finally have enough credibility to get media companies to take me seriously.

I got that summer internship with McKinsey, then went there after graduation and stayed for five years. I learned a lot more about teams and management; they were good at training. I ended up in their retail practice, which I really liked. It reminded me of my favorite reporting, where you were trying to understand issues at a high level but you could also walk the floor of businesses and watch customers interact with the business. When I covered casinos I’d meet the CEO or other execs, but then I’d walk the gambling floor, the hotel lobby, the buffets, and try to understand what they were trying to accomplish. I liked connecting the dots between their corporate strategy and the actual customer experience. Retail is similar – you’ve got investment and lots of analytics as a foundation, but the magic only happens on the retail floor when customers respond to the actual shopping experience.

QH: Eventually you left to do retail directly.

SF: I went to Payless ShoeSource in 1994 for a job in merchandise planning. That took me deep into the details of retail management. Then a few years later, e-commerce was starting to become a thing. I convinced the CEO to invest just enough to set up their website, and we started selling a few shoes online. As I learned more, I realized e-commerce would be important to retail for the rest of my career.  

By this time, there was an Internet boom. Internet stocks and startups were going crazy. People like me, with a mix of retail and online experience, were getting lots of calls to jump into e-commerce full time. I wanted to give it a try, but I was also convinced that e-commerce was in a bubble, and lots of startups would collapse. When Amazon reached out to me, I spent time looking at their future, and their financials, and after some hesitation I decided Amazon could survive the bust that I was convinced would happen. I was still nervous, though.

In fact, the stock jumped to $120 from $80 a couple of months after I joined in late 1999, but then the bubble burst by early 2000. The crash kept getting worse, and by the time 9/11 happened in 2001,  Amazon stock fell to  $5.44. But it survived. On the inside, you could see the business and economics improving steadily, though it took several years for people on the outside to recognize that. I ended up staying for 20 years. About half the time I was launching and managing new businesses in the US. The other half I was working on international businesses. I lived in London and Beijing, and managed other global businesses from Seattle. 

QH: That’s a long time anywhere, let alone a high-pressure place like Amazon. Why did it work for you?

SF: As I mentioned about my time as an MBA, reporters start with communication skills. That’s helpful, since writing is important in business, particularly Amazon. It’s a very writing-based culture, where you lay out ideas in memos. PowerPoint was banned in favor of written documents, and you meet to argue over data and business plans until you decide what to do. So that writing background helped.

But I think there are two other skills that reporters can bring to a business. 

The first is that reporters are persistent in their pursuit of the truth. You’re used to being told “no” as a reporter. Or hearing something you don’t quite believe. Then you know it’s time to start  digging through lots of different kinds of data, legal records, regulatory filings, or financials that no one has thought to check. While there are lots of truth seekers in general business, there are also people who hear “no” a couple of times and back off –  “We tried, but we can’t get that information.” They don’t search every nook and cranny the way reporters do. That’s useful if you’re thinking about a business opportunity, or trying to figure out how consumers think.

The second skill is that reporters are trained to look for the way biases can shape information. Sometimes people in business get data or opinions and don’t stop to think about how that data might be shaped by the source. It’s not necessarily wrong, just has some biases influenced by the person who gave it to you. If you ask the marketing person how to fix  a business, they will say, “spend more on advertising.” If you ask the finance person, they will say, “cut costs.” Reporters are trained to think that every story has multiple sides, and most sources have a perspective on the truth that is different from others who view it differently. Reporters become aware that you have to evaluate the data or opinions you gather, and to make sure you search for all sides of a story before you make a decision.

QH: Sounds useful in the Amazon culture.

SF: They’re big on figuring out what customers want and how to build a business that delivers it in the biggest possible way. To use Amazon language, you “think big” to identify big opportunities. But then you also “dive deep” to figure out what it takes to make customers happy or remove constraints on growth. Or how to eventually make money. A background of looking for the truth helps. 

QH: Amazon has a reputation for being ruthless.

SF: Jeff Bezos believed that humans have evolved to be too agreeable, and too quick to compromise in order to reach consensus. He believes that’s because humans are inclined to protect each other and collaborate, and that can mean putting aside facts that are uncomfortable to confront. Instead of hiding tough issues, he wanted people to surface them, and put unsettled problems on the table. But then, when the disagreements have been properly and fully aired, he wants people to agree and move on. 

QH: You’re not moving me off “ruthless” here.

SF: When you go into a fast-moving, intense business of any type there will be parts of culture you may not like. The positive part of the Amazon culture was the desire to seek the truth, with a focus on clear, crisp, fact-based communication. That process can be difficult, with people digging in hard, and disagreeing with you to your face. 

I’ve been in other places, including journalism, where that isn’t true. You can have a gentle, soft meeting where everybody says a lot of nice things, then afterwards the politicking starts.  

At Amazon there’s another saying I like –  that people should “disagree and commit.” You are able  to surface disagreements openly. Then, the facts are debated, a decision is made and it’s time for everyone to commit. That doesn’t mean that you’ve solved every problem in a single meeting.  But it does mean that there isn’t much patience for lobbying and politics after a decision is reached.  Everyone had their chance to disagree, now we are committed. Let’s move on.

QH: Were the hours, the pace, the intensity hard on you?

SF:  It’s not always fun, but journalists learn on the job that things can be tough. When I’d read stories in the press about how stressful Amazon was, I always wondered what the reporters were using as a benchmark. Retailing is intense. Consulting and investment banking are famous for hard work. And then there’s reporting. If you think life at Amazon is hard, you should compare it to what journalists do. “Have you ever pulled an all-nighter rewriting a story? Ever covered a hurricane or earthquake ? Ever had friends killed covering a war?”  Office life can be stressful, but it’s just not on the same planet as some things journalists do.