From the New York Times’ “Jeff Bezos to Step Down as Amazon C.E.O.” posted Tuesday afternoon:
Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, will hand over the reins of the e-commerce giant this summer and transition into the role of executive chairman, the company announced Tuesday.
Andy Jassy, the chief executive of Amazon’s cloud computing division, will be promoted to run all of Amazon.
Mr. Bezos had stepped back from much of the day-to-day business over several years, though the pandemic pulled him back in last spring.
My take: Jassy has big shoes to fill. Bezos will be lucky to get a successor as good as Steve Jobs’.
I think Bezos becomes more strategically important to Amazon. His interests were divided given his space projects, Washington Post and charities.
His decision is to spend more of his time on innovation, not being drug down by day-to-day operations again.
I see this more as a strategic move that frees him up to go back to innovating around Amazon platforms and not stepping back. In fact, I think he will have even more impact on Amazon going forward, not less.
Jassy is smart and an operational guy, much like Tim Cook Was. He knows Amazon the best, as well as AWS and like Cook, was the most qualified to take over.
The parallels between Jobs and Cook and Bezos and Jassy are spot on. Time will tell if he is Bezos Tim Cook, but signs point in that direction.
All three (four if you include Amazon) are now being led by operations/tech guys.
Looking back at my own firm, it’s failure can be traced back to me (a sales guy) and my “right” hand man (also a sales guy). Neither of us knew how to manage electronics/software development, but we had great ideas for new products.
Certainly both skills are -necessary for success-, as as product conception and marketing.
I’m inclined to believe that ‘operations’ is most important, a good VP of engineering -sufficiently empowered-, should be able to develop and deliver products. But of course, neither skill sets grow on trees, nor do companies have very good track record in developing them.
The other thing I observe about my company (which ultimately failed) was that the CEO, COO and VP Engineering -must understand- the business they’re in. For a period, my company was run by a guy who had no understanding of the defense business. That was catastrophic. He was hired mostly because the outside investors wanted someone with an MBA (presumably, someone who spoke their own language.) Now there have been a few companies where the CFO successfully transitioned to CEO, but overall that would NEVER be my recommendation. (And if I worked for a company where the CFO took over the whole shebang, I’d probably start looking for another job. )
There is one exception to the above that was very successful, Lee Iococca. He brought organization to a company (Chrysler) that had none, then convinced America to buy its cars. But then, maybe he was really a product guy.
Not surprising to me.