Andy Jassy Early Struggles Reinforce the Power of Vision for a CEO Successor

Geekwire and CNBC have recent reports about both the layoffs at Amazon, as well as the struggles that Andy Jassy has following Jeff Bezos.

Let’s think about some recent corporate transitions:

Microsoft: Bill Gates to Steve Ballmer, and then Steve Ballmer to Satya Nadella.

Apple: Steve Jobs to Tim Cook

Amazon: Jeff Bezos to Andy Jassy

UPS: David Abney to Carol Tome'

This transition doesn’t feel like any of these significant transitions - so far -- it feels like something new. By all reports, Andy Jassy was the most like Jeff Bezos of all the remaining executives, and he had built AWS into a juggernaut which is no small feat.

Let’s look at what Andy is up against right now:

• Expense challenges (can't grow into new network fast enough)

• Layoffs (related but sounding like other self-inflicted issues too)

• Pending and current government investigations/lawsuits

So it looks like the walls are closing in on Amazon. What’s needed now? Well, right now Amazon is in the FedEx trap that investors are cheering them for cost reductions only, and not innovation.

This isn’t going to get Amazon out of this mess. Instead, Amazon needs to grow its way out of its problems. There are two ways to do that.

One is the Carol Tome’ of UPS approach. She outlined a way for a better not bigger UPS to focus on profitable growth segments on the road to building a slightly smaller but higher-quality business. Obvious declining Amazon volume trends shaped this narrative.

The second is the Satya Nadella of Microsoft approach. Within a few months of joining Microsoft, he was preaching about a new Microsoft vision of mobile, cloud, and AI. The company needed a good kick in the pants.

The big worry is what is who now holds the vision of Amazon? What does Andy Jassy believe about the future of Amazon other than he will try to keep improving what’s already there?

My real worry is if he hasn’t articulated a new vision, maybe there isn’t one.

I have strong feelings that not all of Amazon's revenue is truly good revenue. Quality of listings, Quality of search results, quality of sellers, quality of products, and transactional trust are all huge opportunities for Amazon to reinforce and defend its still dominant US eCommerce position before it erodes too quickly.

We are very comfortable saying in a marketplace business that more SKUs and more sellers lead to growth, but popular wisdom is less quick to point out that quality of experience also leads to growth. And more sustainably.

(Did I mention that Amazon is still wasting money on drones (not gonna matter), Zoox (I can't believe this is still a thing -- outsource it to Elon), Alexa (GPT anyone?) and Kuiper (same, thank you Elon)?). Don't even get me started on Amazon Video.

In short, it looks more like the UPS approach than the typical Amazon "grow grow" approach.