Amazon announced today that CEO Jeff Bezos will transition to Executive Chair in Q3 2021. Andy Jassy will become CEO at that time.
Jassy is currently Chief Executive Officer of Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is the most broadly adopted cloud platform. Jassy joined Amazon in 1997 and has led the AWS division since it inception. He has held various leadership roles across the country prior to founding the AWS team.
His baby, AWS, is the fifth largest Enterprise IT company by revenue in the world.
COVID-19 is pushing companies toward the cloud. Many enterprises have gone from just talk to having a plan. The pandemic accelerated cloud adoption by several years.
Andy Jassy Believes You “Don’t Wait Too Long To Reinvent”
Jassy presided over the first virtual AWS re:Invent in December 2020. His keynote focused on re-invention.
“Don’t wait too long to reinvent” The desperate kind of reinvention- near bankruptcy- is a crap shoot. “You want to be reinventing when you’re healthy. You want to be reinventing all the time”
His keys to creating a reinvention culture provides a roadmap of how he’ll lead Amazon.
8 Keys To Create a Reinvention Culture
The leadership to invent and reinvent – If you’re going to be a leader who will reinvent, you’ve got to be maniacal relentless and tenacious to getting to the truth. What competitors are doing in your space. What’s working and not working. You’ll have people obfuscate that data internally for various reasons.
Acknowledge that you can’t fight gravity – See what Reed Hastings did at Netflix a few years ago cannibalizing their DVD business in favor of streaming. Jaffy says they did it at Amazon creating the Marketplace. They now sell half of retail products from Marketplace sellers.
Talent that’s hungry to invent – It’s hard to ask employees to reinvent what they’ve built. Often new employees are leading the reinvention.
Solving real customer problems with builders – What we build is based on what matters to customers. Not just technology we think is cool.
Speed – Speed disproportionally matters at every stage of your business at every size of company. Speed is a choice, it’s not pre-ordained. You need to set-up a culture with a sense of urgency.
Don’t “complexify” – For Companies making big transitions and shifts, it is much easier to be successful picking one partner. Learn how to do it, get momentum, results. Then later on bring on other partners and complexity.
Use the platform with broadest and deepest set of tools – It makes it easier to migrate existing applications and enable builders to create anything they can imagine.
Pull everything together with aggressive top-down goals – Leadership team must build top down aggressive goals. This forces the organization to move faster than it organically otherwise would.
These keys are not technical. They’re really about leadership.
