Since the gradual exit of Jeff Bezos from the picture, the American company "Amazon" (Amazon) is experiencing a clear management crisis that some fear will affect its future.
Dozens of executives decided to resign from their positions within a short period of time and for similar reasons, which some described as "the big abandonment of Bezos."
Will these changes affect the future of the online shopping giant?
Bezos builds Amazon from scratch
To understand what is going on in the management changes, it is necessary to go back to the beginnings;
Amazon was created on July 5, 1994 by Jeff Bezos as a bookstore, and its name at the time was Cadabra, before it was renamed Amazon later in the year 1995.
At the beginning of the third millennium, the Amazon website developed greatly, providing a service to register members on the site, giving them many features such as free shipping, broadcasting, shopping, and reading.
In the year 2007, the company launched the “Kindle” electronic store specialized in browsing, reading and purchasing books, magazines and newspapers, and around the same period, Amazon launched a comprehensive cloud computing platform for customers to access their resources and services faster, and provided many tools for their management and ease of control. The first offer was launched in 2006 and it was a special offer for websites and applications by the client, and it began to spread and flourish.
Since the creation of Amazon to this day, the parent company has created a lot of its subsidiaries that provide diverse and unique services.
Jeffrey (Jeff) Preston Bezos created Amazon in 1994 and started a bookstore called "Cadabra" (Reuters)
Bezos leads Amazon with "S Team"
Jeff Bezos founded the so-called "S-Team", a team of senior executives who make the company's decisions and hold regular meetings with each other.
The S Team consists of:
Jeff Bezos - Former Amazon CEO:
He is the founder of Amazon, and has led and directed the company since 1994.
Andy Gacy - Current CEO of Amazon:
He has been the CEO of the company since 2021, and he was previously the CEO of Amazon Web Services, known as the AWS subsidiary.
Dave Limp - Senior Executive Vice President, Digital Management:
responsible for digital management and development of Amazon devices, businesses, and applications, including the Kindle project, Alexa, and the startup bot app Astro.
- Beth Galletti - Senior Vice President, Human Resources:
Responsible for hiring, payroll, and bonuses for Amazon employees.
- Neil Lindsey - Deputy Director of Marketing and Marketing Plans Around the World:
Responsible for advertising, sales management, promotion, working in the money market and measuring the returns on the company's marketing investments around the world, and he is the CEO of the subsidiary "Amazon Prime".
- Brian Olsavsky - Senior Vice President, Financial Relations and Economics:
Amazon's chief financial officer responsible for concluding the company's financial deals.
David Zapolsky - Senior Vice President and General Counsel:
He has been the general counsel at Amazon since 2002, responsible for the company's regulatory issues.
Jay Carney - Senior Executive Vice President:
He is the company's public relations officer, responsible for corporate affairs and public relations, and is the newest member of the team, having joined the company in 2015.
In 2007 Amazon launched the Kindle online store that specializes in browsing, reading and purchasing books, magazines and newspapers (European News Agency)
Top managers quit Amazon
Since the beginning of 2021, more than 90 CEOs and Vice Presidents have left Amazon at different times of the year, the last of them were Greg Zahr and Tom Taylor, where Zahr announced to employees that he would retire on October 11, 2022, and on the same day Taylor announced his retirement .
Many of those managers who retired went to look for other job opportunities in start-up companies or competing companies, and some of them started their own business, and some actually retired.
It is strange for a huge company like Amazon to lose such a huge number of senior employees in just two years, especially since it is known for keeping its senior employees and managers for decades.
These senior employees have been leaving the company since Amazon announced the appointment of Andy Gacy as CEO, replacing Jeff Bezos.
And the departure of Zahr and Taylor has been confirmed by Amazon, which will leave a big gap in the leadership of large businesses and projects, because they are among the oldest veteran employees in the company, and also Zahr is the inventor of the Kindle store and tool, and Taylor is the main supervisor of Alexa tools, but the company confirmed that it was blocked The vacuum and the appointment of new managers from within the company, and that the Alexa and Kindle projects continue with the same strength and momentum.
Is Amazon affected by the resignations?
Following a series of major resignations, Amazon is going through a large set of confusions in the global financial market, as it announced its loss and the decline in sales in the financial market for the second time in a row;
In the second quarter of 2021, losses amounted to $2 billion, and in the previous quarter, the loss amounted to $3.8 billion, and the company's online store business recorded a decline of 4%, which is huge losses.
The losses announced by Amazon coincided with the beginning of a series of directors’ resignations at the beginning of the year 2021, and the company is currently suffering from slowing consumer demand from the company’s stores and rising costs for goods at the same time, but the company’s CEO Andy Gacy expressed his optimism about the company’s future, as he stated that he should Although pressures in fuel, energy and transportation costs continue to swell, the company is making progress on manageable costs such as those for electronic goods.
He also indicated that the Amazon share price improved by more than 10%, which is higher than expected after the senior managers left the company, and the percentage of sales increased by 7%, reaching 121 billion dollars, compared to 113.1 billion dollars in the second quarter of 2021.