In the past year, Amazon has slashed layers of management, increasing worker-to-manager ratios by 15 percent. CEO Andy Jassy enforced strict cost discipline, down to monitoring how employees' company-issued phone use is work-related.
Jassy also updated performance metrics and pay structures. He's sent the vast majority of corporate employees back to the office five days a week. He's created a "bureaucracy mailbox," to which employees are encouraged to flag unnecessary processes or rules that could be streamlined or eliminated; Amazon says the initiative has already led to 375 changes.
For Jassy, who took over from Jeff Bezos four years ago, the goal has been to restore the urgency and discipline that once defined Amazon's DNA and had begun to atrophy, following a period of stratospheric growth and then massive losses as the bottom fell out of the pandemic-era boom.
It's about getting Amazon back to what made it so successful in the first place.
As Jassy explained at an internal all-hands earlier this year, a record of which was obtained by Business Insider: "We want to operate the world's largest startup at our size — that has not been done before. It is hard to do, but it is doable."
By many measures, the reset is working. Amazon's stock is up more than 30 percent over the past year, outperforming the tech-heavy Nasdaq. Amazon's profit per employee rose to US$ 44,100 last year — more than five times the 2022 figure.
"During the pandemic, I think creativity suffered to some extent, and for sure the cohesive culture that was peculiar to Amazon also suffered," Babak Parviz, a former Amazon vice president who is now running his own AI healthcare startup NewDays, told Business Insider. "Andy is rightfully focusing on making sure that the Amazon culture is maintained and thriving, and it doesn't dissipate away."
And under Jassy's leadership, Amazon has been at the forefront of corporate America's cultural shift. Meta, Google, and Microsoft have all tightened their performance expectations, though their return to the office mandates are still less strict than Amazon's. Old guard companies like AT&T have similarly taken a stricter stance on office culture.
As Jassy enters his fifth year leading Amazon, his leadership has been defined less by any single product or splashy hire, but rather by his revamp of Amazon's culture as he tries to recapture Bezos' "always Day 1" mindset and position the tech giant to thrive.
A close reading of that effort — Jassy's hardline approach to employee management and of his laser focus on a more nimble, do-more-with-less culture — has created a playbook that leaders of companies large and small could study, even if not everyone would embrace his approach.
Amazon's return to a hardcore mindset was born out of a growing concern among Jassy and his top brass that the tech giant's famously scrappy, ruthlessly efficient culture had taken a hit during the company's years of explosive growth, according to people familiar with their thinking.
Layers of bureaucracy, which had settled like sediment as the company continued to grow, were slowing things down, struggling initiatives needed to be streamlined, and a flexible work-from-home policy meant that a lot of employees who'd joined during and after the pandemic had never been properly integrated into Amazon's way of doing things.
No comments:
Post a Comment