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CEO Andy Jassy sat on a stage in a Seattle conference center in September, looking out at an audience of thousands of sellers who’d traveled from around the world to the company’s hometown.
He used the moment to lay out a vision for how he wants Amazon to operate like the “world’s largest startup,” getting rid of bureaucracy in order to move faster and stay competitive.
“We’re working hard to try to flatten our organization and have fewer layers because in the very earliest days of Amazon, it’s been true for many years, we had very high ownership at every level of the organization, including on the frontline,” Jassy said at the event.
Jassy, who took the helm from founder Jeff Bezos in 2021, has embarked on a major overhaul of Amazon’s corporate culture in recent years, including a hard pivot back to in-office work, with Covid largely in the rearview mirror, and a push for employees to do more with less.
