Dive Brief:

• Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos Monday released an open letter, addressed to Amazon employees, defending against a scathing news story in the New York Times detailing an awful corporate culture at the company, mostly for its white collar workers.

• In it, Bezos said the Amazon depicted in the newspaper’s account “doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day.”

• But he also encouraged employees to read the piece and to get in touch with the company, including him directly, with any issues that would bolster the article’s claims.

Dive Insight:

Amazon has made bank on a corporate culture on near-constant innovation and achievement of vaulted goals. Indeed — in a real way “failure” is baked into its approach to success. There’s little fear of failure because “failure” comes with the territory.

“What really matters is, companies that don’t continue to experiment, companies that don’t embrace failure, they eventually get in a desperate position where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary bet at the very end of their corporate existence,” founder-CEO Bezos told Business Insider late last year.

“Whereas companies that are making bets all along, even big bets, but not bet-the-company bets, prevail," he says. "I don’t believe in bet-the-company bets. That’s when you’re desperate. That’s the last thing you can do.”

Still, Monday Bezos seemed taken aback by the description of Amazon as a heartless place to work, especially for employees suffering health issues. He deplored the New York Times portrait of the company as “shockingly callous management practices” that he said wouldn't help a business thrive or even survive.

“I don’t recognize this Amazon and I very much hope you don’t, either,” he wrote in his email to employees.

The troubling details in the New York Times aren’t unrecognizable, though. Brad Stone, author of the 2013 book "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon," (which famously earned a one-star review on Amazon itself from Bezos' wife), found many of the same issues.

And warehouse workers have written high-profile depictions of pretty harsh conditions among blue-collar jobs there as well.