In First Shareholder Letter, Amazon CEO Sticks With the Bezos Playbook
Introducing the new boss’s goals! Spoiler, they're the same as the old boss’s goals.
In his first letter to shareholders as Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy hits most of the same notes that Jeff Bezos did in his farewell letter last April.
Like Bezos—who stepped down to focus on his Blue Origin spaceflight company and, to a lesser extent, philanthropy—Jassy tells a metrics-based tale in the shareholder letter, noting the company’s incremental progress in such tasks as moving an item from a fulfillment center to a spot on a truck (an 18-hour process in the early 2000s, now two hours).
Jassy also takes that approach to tout Amazon’s progress toward making itself “Earth’s Best Employer,” a goal Bezos set in his final letter and Amazon codified as one of its formal “Leadership Principles,” along with a sustainability pledge, days before Jassy took over as CEO.
“In the last US public numbers, our recordable incident rates were a little higher than the average of our warehousing peers (6.4 vs. 5.5), and a little lower than the average of our courier and delivery peers (7.6 vs. 9.1),” Jassy writes.
“This makes us about average relative to peers, but we don’t seek to be average,” he says. “We want to be best in class”—which it’ll do by “learning, inventing, and iterating until we have more transformational results.”
Jassy does not, however, mention the successful vote to unionize Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, organized labor’s first such win at the company. And while the letter talks up Amazon raising its minimum hourly wage for warehouse workers to $15 and then $18, it does not cover compensation of delivery couriers working on a gig basis through the Flex program Amazon launched in 2015.
Amazon delivery does come up in
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