‘The way we were’: Amazon tries to rekindle its future by rediscovering a spark from the past
Amazon went through a one-way door against its will. Now it wants to go back. And the future of the company is at stake.
That’s one way of looking at Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s memo to employees Monday morning. The headlines were the full return-to-office and the thinning of Amazon’s management ranks. But the underlying story is a CEO not entirely happy with the state of the company, who is pointing to a better path.
Many will disagree with the direction, especially some Amazon employees who will be expected to work from the office five days a week as a general rule starting in January, up from the current three days a week.
However, the coverage of this policy and the debate over tactics obscures a pretty remarkable set of statements from Jassy about his displeasure with how certain things are going inside the company right now.
Here’s one part that stood out.
“As we have grown our teams as quickly and substantially as we have the last many years, we have understandably added a lot of managers. In that process, we have also added more layers than we had before. It’s created artifacts that we’d like to change (e.g., pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings, a longer line of managers feeling like they need to review a topic before it moves forward, owners of initiatives feeling less like they should make recommendations because the decision will be made elsewhere, etc.).”
These concerns are driving the mandate to reduce management layers. Jassy presented this in a tone of practiced positivity, saying that Amazon will “increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025.”
Jassy’s related “Bureaucracy Mailbox,” where employees will be able to directly inform the CEO about excessive process and rules, strikes me as something his predecessor Jeff Bezos would have done — disarming in its simplicity and practicality. Who can argue with a complaint box?
(By the way, Jassy’s promise about this mailbox is my new catch phrase: “I will read these emails and action them accordingly.” Somebody put that on a coffee mug.)
His explanation of the return-to-office mandate follows similar themes.
“To address the second issue of being better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business, we’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID. When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant.”
So complete is this vision of returning to the way things were that Amazon is getting rid of shared workstations, going back to assigned desks at offices including its Seattle-area and Arlington, Va., headquarters.
But there’s a much bigger issue at stake in all of this.
With its three-layer AI stack and jaw-dropping claims about its coding companion, Amazon will dispute any suggestion that it has been behind in generative artificial intelligence. However, it’s clear that the company has yet to prove itself as a singular leader in the field, as it did in e-commerce and the cloud.
Given that, it’s hard not to think of AI as the backdrop for this from Jassy.
“We want to operate like the world’s largest startup. That means having a passion for constantly inventing for customers, strong urgency (for most big opportunities, it’s a race!), high ownership, fast decision-making, scrappiness and frugality, deeply-connected collaboration (you need to be joined at the hip with your teammates when inventing and solving hard problems), and a shared commitment to each other.”
You’re in a race, people! Along those lines, notice what’s missing here?
“… I feel good about the progress we’re making together. Stores, AWS, and Advertising continue to grow on very large bases, Prime Video continues to expand, and new investment areas like GenAI, Kuiper, Healthcare, and several others are evolving nicely.”
That’s right, no mention of Alexa, the voice assistant that represents one of Amazon’s best opportunities to make its mark in this new era, by innovating in conversational AI for consumers. If there’s anywhere to apply a “Day One” mentality of fresh thinking, past be damned, this is it. (No pressure, Panos!)
Whenever someone congratulated him on a good quarter, Bezos liked to say that he thought to himself that the results were actually determined three years earlier.
That’s the best way to assess what Jassy is doing. The next few months will be extremely difficult for Amazon and its employees, trying to break back through that one-way door. We’ll all be watching closely to see how it goes. But the real outcome will be found in the state of this company three years from now, and beyond.
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