ADIEU EARTH!
July 5 was Jeff Bezos' last day as CEO of Amazon. In his place came Andy Jassy (53 years), in Amazon almost since its foundation.
Bezos will dedicate himself to the colonization of space. Start now. Together with his brother Mark and Wally Funk, an 82-year-old astronaut, he will be catapulted aboard the Blue Origin spacecraft, owned by him, for a few seconds beyond the Kármán line, the origin of space.
Greg Bensinger, who has covered Amazon for the NYT for over 10 years, and of whom he speaks very tersely, wrote: “As Bezos floats in the cosmos, the question we have left is to be able to bring Amazon back to earth”. A real party pooper!
A scholar and a brilliant journalist who knows the Seattle giant, Brad Stone, spoke very well about the matter of succession and what Amazon could be post-Bezos.
Brad Stone has dedicated two books to Amazon and his boss, one released in 2013 titled The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Hoepli Italian edition) and the other in May 2021 entitled Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire.
Who better than him to tell us about Amazon post-Jeff Bezos. Here is the Italian translation of his speech of the columns of New York Times.
THE LATEST INVENTION
Tech giant Amazon's latest creation occupies two floors in a central London commercial district: it's a hair salon.
Inside the 1.500-square-foot Amazon Salon, customers can view potential new hairstyles on the company's tablets, buy shampoos and conditioners not available in perfume stores, and order services such as a children's haircut ($20), a regrowth ($62) or a hot scissor haircut ($166).
When the company announced this initiative in the spring, I probably wasn't the only one who thought it might be an April Fool's joke.
Hair coloring and conditioning treatment seem particularly distant from the company's core businesses in e-commerce and cloud computing. And Jeff Bezos, the richest person in the world, hasn't had a mane to clip since the early 90s.
On closer inspection, however, the show fits, considering Amazon's vast ambitions under the leadership of Jeff Bezos, who retired as CEO on July 5, 2021 after running the company for 27 years.
He founded Amazon in July 1994 to sell books online, a goal at first sight limited and which, instead, served as the bridgehead for one of the most successful expansions in the history of the business.
Today, the company is a kind of corporate apeirogon with infinite sides, a shape that tends to systematically extend itself into new territories, terrifying potential competitors and provoking states of anxiety in the establishment and in the antitrust.
THE STORMY PEAKS OF BEZOS
Now Bezos hands over to his successor and longtime deputy, Andy Jassy, a company with the third largest market capitalization in the world. But there is an inconsistency — call it the Bezos paradox. As the fortunes of the company and its founder have soared, the public image of both has taken a major beating.
As some recent experiences demonstrate, Amazon workers are often pushed to their limits by arduous goals, arbitrarily changing rules, and “algorithmic foremen” who seem to have little understanding of human frailty.
I have written two books on the history of Amazon and have come to think that the company's endless expansion as well as the decline in its reputation are byproducts of Bezos's personality characterized by a towering intellect as well as a marked deficit in empathy and fear of stagnation.
Early on, Bezos sensed that, in an age of disruptive technological change, companies would have to experiment with new things at a breakneck pace, even at the risk of failure and embarrassment.
“Doing things at high speed, that's the best defense against the future,” he told reporter Walter Isaacson in an interview. “If you walk away from the future, the future walks away from you,” he added
THE BEZOS METHOD
Strengthened by this conviction, he asked all the company's teams to submit new projects on a regular basis. Bezos wanted these projects to take up six pages.
All internal proposals and decisions had to include not only financial results and projections, but also new product ideas and expansion plans. His collaborators continued to receive emails at all hours of the day and night urging them to come up with new projects.
This approach has produced some failures like the ill-fated Fire Phone, but also some huge successes. “We should be building a $20 device with a brain in the cloud that is completely controlled by voice,” Bezos wrote in 2010. Four years later, Alexa started chirping in customers' homes.
Some executives, in favor of Bezos, could create extravagant and ambitious initiatives, even if they were distant from Bezos' personal interests. Dave Clark, the company's supervising supply chain manager for a decade, wanted to end Amazon's reliance on UPS and FedEx, so he put together a fleet of freighters called Amazon Air.
Similarly, managers running retail outlets in Britain have proposed opening hair salons to sell professional beauty products to be displayed to customers on company tablets and other devices.
THE OBSESSION OF THE DAY 1
Among other things, Amazon, under the leadership of Bezos, has been a machine for experimenting with new businesses. A machine conceived to great effect. If the London salons initiative proves promising, Amazon will no doubt open more.
The alternative to this conduct, in Bezos' vision, is devastating: it means becoming a more conventional company, that of "Day 2".
“Day 2 is stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by frustrating and painful decline, followed by death,” Bezos wrote in his 2016 letter to shareholders. "And that's why it's always day 1 at Amazon."
There have, however, been notable drawbacks to this approach. Bezos' erratic attentions have left the company's traditional divisions — and their customers — feeling neglected. Bookselling and publishing, once areas of obsessive attention, are now fringe thoughts; Bezos' interest is really in Prime Video and Alexa.
As a result, large portions of Amazon's website today resemble an out-of-control border. In recent years, counterfeits, fake reviews, and unsafe products have been popping up all over the store.
Serious traders are feeling increasingly displaced by unscrupulous sellers with lower costs and counterfeit products.
When they try to put things right, they struggle to get Amazon staff to acknowledge the situation and fix it. Often, change comes only after the problems have become public knowledge through information.
LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF THE BEZOS STRATEGY
This situation is not the result of chance, but is produced by a precise strategy. Bezos initiated new ventures by personally committing to their success and by bringing together the best human resources.
But as these initiatives got bigger, he wanted to run them with technologies that require less attention from staff, thus lowering operating costs and improving financial results.
The strategy has worked out well for investors, who have quadrupled their investment over the past five years. It was also great for customers, who enjoyed low prices and fast delivery, until they ran into some problem, such as counterfeiting or cheating.
For many of the employees, partners, and small businesses caught up in Amazon's swirling ecosystems, that strategy hasn't been all that fulfilling.
The growing criticism of Amazon by the media has often traced the problems precisely to Jeff Bezos. Colleagues old and new point to his many talents, including an almost superhuman ability to focus on disparate issues and get to the bottom of complex problems.
But empathy is never part of this process: “If you're not good, Jeff chews you up and then spits you out,” a former manager once told me. “And if you're good, he jumps on your back and rides you until you're exhausted”.
THE ANDY JASSY CHALLENGE
The challenge for Andy Jassy, the incoming CEO, will be precisely to smooth the sharpest edges of Amazon's business tactics and build a more humble image of the company, particularly in the face of the many antitrust authorities trying to unravel the dull parts and intertwinings of the Amazon empire.
A few days ago the company took a small first step to be perceived as a better company. It has added two new values to its code of ethics: "Working to be the best employer on Earth" and "Success and scale come with great responsibility."
Two principles that add to the list of those that already guide Amazon's main decisions.
Bezos will remain as executive chairman and head of the board. But there are already some signs that his day-to-day involvement is declining.
On July 20, he will go into suborbital space on his own Blue Origin spacecraft. Then there's his magnificent sailing yacht and there are his luxury homes and philanthropic efforts, which include the $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund, dedicated to efforts to curb climate change.
It is likely that Bezos applies to his life outside Amazon the same erratic curiosity and impatience with stasis that has characterized his entire career at Amazon.
As for his colleagues, now the really hard work begins: finding the heart of Amazon.
From: Brad Stone, The Jeff Bezos Paradox, The New York Times, July 3, 2021.
