In cases of normal business operation, normal corporate management, delegation, and accountability techniques generally work quite well. Decisions are extensively researched and weighed before being taken. Doing things right, not quickly, is the goal here.
In times of urgent emergency, normal management techniques fail because they can't respond quickly enough. Not because they're inferior, but because they weren't designed for it. Therefore you need one person making big, hard decisions in a timely manner.
There's probably nobody in the world who is better qualified to make big, hard, fast decisions for Amazon than Bezos, obviously. And considering his wealth is tied up in the company too, this is the smart, responsible choice for everyone involved.
> In cases of normal business operation, normal corporate management, delegation, and accountability techniques generally work quite well. Decisions are extensively researched and weighed before being taken. Doing things right, not quickly, is the goal here.
In Amazon’s case, the opposite is heavily encouraged. Here is one of their “leadership principles”:
> Bias for Action: Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.
Of course, there are other principles like “Dive Deep” and “Be Right A Lot” that balance this out, but Amazon is definitely tuned for speed of decision-making.
If anything, I would take the opposite side of this change as the real indicator. In normal circumstances, Amazon does what it does well enough for Jeff to deep-dive into specifically interesting projects while the S-Team (the executives reporting to Jeff) are trusted to run the company day-to-day. We are in far from normal circumstances now.
It could be a good thing for Amazon at this moment, due to the reasons you listed, or it could indicate unknown issues.
And from the descriptions of Bezos I've heard, he can be an obsessive micromanager type, flying down to make super low-level decisions for some random warehouse when he gets set off by some mistake. Having worked under a CEO like that, I can imagine Bezos suddenly steamrolling some important internal processes out of some mix of passion and narcissism, driving even more damage.
In cases of normal business operation, normal corporate management, delegation, and accountability techniques generally work quite well. Decisions are extensively researched and weighed before being taken. Doing things right, not quickly, is the goal here.
In times of urgent emergency, normal management techniques fail because they can't respond quickly enough. Not because they're inferior, but because they weren't designed for it. Therefore you need one person making big, hard decisions in a timely manner.
There's probably nobody in the world who is better qualified to make big, hard, fast decisions for Amazon than Bezos, obviously. And considering his wealth is tied up in the company too, this is the smart, responsible choice for everyone involved.