- Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is now more fully involved in the daily operations of the company, after having spent the past few years almost exclusively focused on long-term projects.
- Bezos has said he prefers working 2 to 3 years into the future, and he rarely gets pulled into the daily oversight of the company — unless something goes wrong.
- The plethora of disruptions caused by COVID-19, including supply chain lockdowns and shipment delays, pushed Bezos to become more involved in the here-and-now issues facing the company.
- While most of the issues are COVID-related, Bezos has spent his time addressing other challenges as well, including counterfeits, workplace diversity, and emerging competitive threats, like Shopify.
- More recently, Bezos has slowly started to spend more time on his personal projects, after Amazon made hundreds of safety improvements and logistics updates to improve its supply chain and overall logistics network.
When Amazon’s finance team held its quarterly meeting with CEO Jeff Bezos this past April, they anticipated their boss would zero in on the estimated $4 billion in COVID-related costs.
That figure, which included costs for new safety measures and productivity losses, represented a huge undertaking that would wipe out the entire profit Amazon had expected to make in the second quarter. Given Wall Street’s growing focus on Amazon’s profitability at the time, the team had prepared for a long list of potential questions.
But Bezos didn’t dwell on the $4 billion. Instead, he spent most of the time drilling into other key parts of the business, like the sales growth and cost structure of individual segments, according to people familiar with the matter. In daily follow-up emails, Bezos asked deep questions about the roughly 45 revenue-generating units he closely follows at Amazon, and issues around the supply chain and customer satisfaction ratings.