Remains of the Day. When I started my first job at Amazon. I inherited the work of producing the Analytics Package. I capitalize the term because it was both a serious tool for making our business legible, and because the job of its production each month ruled my life for over a year. Back in 1. 99. 7, analytics wasnt even a real word. I know because I tried to look up the term, hoping to clarify just I was meant to be doing, and I couldnt find it, not in the dictionary, not on the internet. You can age yourself by the volume of search results the average search engine returned when you first began using the internet in force. I remember when pockets of wisdom were hidden in eclectic newsgroups, when Yahoo organized a directory of the web by hand, and later when many Google searches returned very little, if not nothing. Back then, if Russians wanted to hack an election, they might have planted some stories somewhere in rec. Though I couldnt find a definition of the word, it wasnt difficult to guess what it was. Some noun form of analysis. More than that, the Analytics Package itself was self describing. Literally. It came with a single page cover letter, always with a short preamble describing its purpose, and then jumped into a textual summary of the information within, almost like a research paper abstract, or a Letter to Shareholders. I like to think Jeff Bezos famous company policy, instituted many years later, banning Powerpoint in favor of written essays, had some origins in the Analytics Package cover letter way back when. The animating idea was the same if you cant explain something in writing to another human, do you really understand it yourself My interview loop at Amazon ended with an hour with the head of recruiting at the time, Ryan Sawyer. After having gone through a gauntlet of interviews that included almost all the senior executives, and including people like Jeff Bezos and Joy Covey, some of the most brilliant people Ive ever met in my life, I thought perhaps the requisite HR interview would be a letup. But then Ryan asked me to explain the most complex thing I understood in a way hed understand. It would be good preparation for my job. What was within the Analytics Package, that required a written explanation Graphs. Page after page of graphs, on every aspect of Amazons business. Revenue. Editorial. Marketing. Operations. Customer Service. Headcount. G A. I am in the process of fixing my HTML in my eBay listings and want to shorten it. I figured creating a tabbed table with clickable headers would. Thats it. The rest of the book is just one beautiful elaboration after another of those first principles. The world in one page. Of all the graphs, the line graph is. G. E. General Electric Radio T 1000 PRINT AD Collectibles, Advertising, Communication Utilities eBay Welcome the best and the biggest collection of website templates online. TemplateMonster offers web templates designed and developed by field experts. Customer sentiment. Market penetration. Lifetime value of a customer. Inventory turns. Usually four graphs to a page, laid out landscape. The word Package might seem redundant if Analytics is itself a noun. Patch Ivt Bluesoleil 8 there. But if you saw one of these, you knew why it was called a Package. When I started at Amazon in 1. Details about LADE 13 14 Timbales Drum Set Premium Steel Cowbell and Cowbell Holder US. Simple Shading Art Lesson lt Outdoor Storage Sheds 10 X 10 Wooden Storage Shed Bound Brook Nj Amish Storage Sheds Martinsburg Wv. Ebay Auction Template For Fine Art' title='Ebay Auction Template For Fine Art' />Analytics Package was maybe thirty to forty pages of graphs. When I moved over to product management, over a year later, it was pushing a hundred pages, and I was working on a supplemental report on customer order trends in addition. Analytics might refer to a deliverable or the practice of analysis, but the Analytics Package was like the phone book, or the Restoration Hardware catalog, in its heft. This was back in the days before entire companies focused on building internal dashboards and analytical tools, so the Analytics Package was done with what we might today consider as comparable to twigs and dirt in sophistication. I entered the data by hand into Excel tables, generated and laid out the charts in Excel, and printed the paper copies. One of the worst parts of the whole endeavor was getting the page numbers in the entire package correct. Behind the Analytics Package was a whole folder of linked spreadsheets. Since different charts came from different workbooks, I had to print out an entire Analytics Package, get the ordering correct, then insert page numbers by hand in some obscure print settings menu. Needless to say, ensuring page breaks landed where you wanted them was like defusing a bomb. Nowadays, companies hang flat screen TVs hanging on the walls, all them running 2. Most everyone ignores them. The spirit is right, to be transparent all the time, but the understanding of human nature is not. We ignore things that are shown to us all the time. However, if once a month, a huge packet of charts dropped on your desk, with a cover letter summarizing the results, and if the CEO and your peers received the same package the same day, and that piece of work included charts on how your part of the business was running, you damn well paid attention, like any person turning to the index of a book on their company to see if they were mentioned. Ritual matters. The package went to senior managers around the company. At first that was defined by your official level in the hierarchy, though, as most such things go, it became a source of monthly contention as to who to add to the distribution. One might suspect this went to my head, owning the distribution list, but in fact I only cared because I had to print and collate the physical copies every month. I rarely use copy machines these days, but that year of my life I used them more than I will all the days that came before and all the days still to come, and so I can say with some confidence that they are among the least reliable machines ever made by mankind. It was a game, one whose only goal was to minimize pain. A hundred copies of a hundred page document. The machine will break down at some point. A sheet will jam somewhere. The ink cartridge will go dry. How many collated copies do you risk printing at once Too few and you have to go through the setup process again. Too many and you risk a mid job error, which then might cascade into a series of ever more complex tasks, like trying to collate just the pages still remaining and then merging them with the pages that were already completed. If you wondered why I had to insert page numbers by hand, it wasnt just for ease of referencing particular graphs in discussion it was also so I could figure out which pages were missing from which copies when the copy machine crapped out. You could try just resuming the task after clearing the paper jam, but in practice it never really worked. I learned that copy machine jams on jobs of this magnitude were, for all practical purposes, failures from which the machine could not recover. I became a shaman to all the copy machines in our headquarters at the Columbia building. I knew which ones were capable of this heavy duty task, how reliable each one was. Each machines reliability fluctuated through some elusive alchemy of time and usage and date of the last service visit. Since I generally worked late into every night, Id save the mass copy tasks for the end of my day, when I had the run of all the buildings copy machines. Sometimes I could sense a paper jam coming just by the sound of machines internal rollers and gears. An unhealthy machine would wheeze, like a smoker, and sometimes Id put my hands on a machine as it performed its service for me, like a healer laying hands on a sick patient. I would call myself a copy machine whisperer, but when I addressed them it was always a slew of expletives, never whispered. Late in my tenure as analyst, I got budget to hire a temp to help with the actual printing of the monthly Analytics Package, and we keep in touch to this date, bonded by having endured that Sisyphean labor. My other source of grief was another tool of deep fragility linked spreadsheets in Excel 9.