Seems to have worked out.......

     The drive to cut costs also forced Bezos to eliminate any emerging layer of middle management from his company.  After the stock market crash in 2000,  Amazon went through two rounds of layoffs.  But Bezos didn't want to stop recruiting altogether;  he just wanted to be more efficient.  So he framed the kind of employees he wanted in simple terms.  All new hires had to directly improve the outcome of the company.  He wanted doers - engineers, developers, perhaps merchandise buyer, but not managers.  "We didn't want to be a monolithic army of program managers, a la Microsoft.  We wanted independent teams to be entrepreneurial," says Neil Roseman.  Or, as Roseman also put it:  "Autonomous working units are good.  Things to manage working units are bad."

-Brad Stone,  The Everything Store:  Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon