Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wants his company to be the “world’s largest startup,” and he’s turning to employees to help slash the red tape that’s holding it back.
Speaking at Amazon’s conference for third-party sellers this week, Jassy noted the e-commerce giant set up a “no bureaucracy email alias” for employees to report slow processes and needless rules. In the past year, the de facto tip-line received more than 1,500 reports, Jassy said, according to remarks at Amazon’s annual conference for third-party sellers in Seattle reported by CNBC, and he said the company has changed about 455 processes thanks to the effort.
Near the end of the Jeff Bezos era, Amazon expanded its operations in increasingly varied product categories such as healthcare and physical retail, with an increasingly giant workforce, absorbing a great deal of bureaucracy along the way. But soon after Jassy took the helm, Amazon’s stock plummeted, reaching a low of about $84 per share near the end of 2022, compared to $230 per share today. After admitting the company have been prone to “overbuilding” during the pandemic, Jassy changed gears.
Since then, in part as a response to Wall Street concerns, the Amazon CEO has installed flatter leadership structures and a higher number of workers per manager. While Bezos’s later years as CEO were defined by the breadth of Amazon’s offerings, Jassy is now aligning the company with an earlier Bezos legacy, the “Day 1” mentality, which encourages customer centric thinking and bold innovation, as if each day was the first in Amazon history.
