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Amazon organizational structure
Jeff bezos leadership
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Amazon’s Leadership
A usual work day at Amazon is busy with non-stop problem-solving and process improvement. The pace is quick and the work challenging. Organizational discipline, time-management skills and the ability to dive into something without a clear solution, in order to determine the best way forward are necessary qualities for a successful employee. Bezos has often been criticized for his unusual leadership style but more often praised on his ingenuity in the growth of Amazon. His leadership style is said to be unconventional, and sometimes ruthless. With a clear focus on where he is going, he micromanages his team. He has a history of managing his team in an autocratic manner within a closed systems approach. Open systems theory
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Transactional leaders, focus on the proper exchange of resources. The transactional leader gives followers something they want in exchange for something the leader wants. Transactional leadership is considered more commonplace than is transformational leadership (Judge & Piccollo, 2007). A transactional leader is one with difficult standards or benchmarks who is often uninterested in other people’s opinions. It is an effective style to achieve operational goals and outcomes. Quite beneficial for creating business opportunities that thrives in an era of global competition (Stone, 2013). Bezos is task oriented, he micromanages his staff and is not often interested in others opinions; his leadership style incorporates many traits of a transactional …show more content…
Douglas Mcmillon has been in the news lately for poor customer service under what seems like a lack of leadership style. Walmart has failed to keep up with changes in the retail environment. Once an ever anticipating, low cost retailer of consumer needs type business to a now slow reaction to change retailer. Buyers’ behavior has changed and so has the business landscape. Leadership must be able to realign strategy to suit consumer need. What works this year may not work next year. Consumers now have zero tolerance for inconvenience of any sort (Mourdoukoutas,
History”, n.d.). But the unbelievable pace at which Amazon added new products and new customers proved to be a formidable barrier for any competitors. Within the first 10 years Amazon accomplished an unbelievable feat; it had 49 million customers and 6.9 billion dollars in revenue, and it had done so by selling some products at a loss to build market share (Rivlin, 2005). At times it was difficult leveraging so much capital to grow market share, but Jeff Bezos’ focus on the customer and long term growth of the company proved to be the real reason Amazon didn’t fall prey to the .com bust like so many other internet
The major categories or modes of shipment for Amazon.com in the U.S. are drop-ship, split, partnered, and postal-injection.
Growth is core to Amazon.com's business strategy, and that has had a significant impact on the way they use technology: growth through more categories, a larger selection, more services, more buying customers, more sellers, more merchants, and more developers, increasing the different access methods, and expanding delivery mechanisms. The impact has been on many areas: larger data sets, faster update rates, more requests, more services, tighter SLAs (service-level agreements), more failures, more latency challenges, more service interdependencies, more developers, more documentation, more programs, more servers, more networks, more data centers. A large part of Amazon.com's technology evolution has been driven to enable this continuing growth, to be ultra-scalable while maintaining availability and performance.
Amazon is best known for their kindle, fast shipping, and selling various products (Smith). With Amazon being such a large corporation, professionalism, academics, character, and engagement are crucial parts of the success of the company. Professionalism: Amazon has grown to become the largest internet-based retailer in the world by total sales. It began as primarily an online bookstore and soon began to sell more and more electronics and then over time began to sell pretty much anything. In 1998, Amazon earned about $0.6 billion, which held steady growth from 1998-2006 (“Amazon.com”).
Amazon.com operates in the Online Retail Industry. The sector is one of the fastest growing globally and is outperforming the ordinary retail marketplace. It was created after 1995 and it was only the Internet that made it possible for such an industry not only to be established but to become one of the most flourishing sectors in the business environment. What is interesting is that Amazon.com, together with eBay is the pioneer in the field. Both companies were launched in 1995 and are still extremely successful. The creation of e-mail in 1996 had a huge impact on the development of online retail by introducing a fast and easy way to communicate with customers. For this two-year period Internet usage doubled annually, thus, allowing for the expansion of the industry. Google is launched a year later, in 1998, only to become the most used search engine in the world and an essential partner for the online retailers by helping them tailor their websites to customer’s personal preferences and by advertising. After that, more and more people see the opportunity in the growing industry and enter it. By 2001 there are more than 513 million Internet users globally, which calls for action in terms of creating regulations and laws to protect the users and personal property. In 2003, Apple launches iTunes, and provides a platform for low-cost digital downloads. Another major change is the appearance of social media from 2004, which is one of the biggest influencer on the state of the industry. With the launch of iPhone in 2007, this trend strengthens as people get to enjoy the Internet anywhere they want to. From then on, technological advancements have made it extremely easy and fun to shop online, making it ...
Jeff Bezo’s began Amazon in his garage in July 1995 with three Sun workstations setting on wooden doors for tables and extension cords running from everywhere (Academy of Achievement, 2010). Right from the beginning he was a visionary leaving his well paying job as a senior vice president with D. E. Shaw to begin Amazon.com (Academy of Achievement, 2010). Being the visionary that he is he saw an opportunity prompted by the huge growth rate of internet use in a single year and ran with it never looking back. Jeff realized that the internet had “no real commerce to speak of” so he began researching possible businesses (Academy of Achievement, 2010). “After reviewing 20 mail order businesses and deciding which could be conducted more efficiently over the internet than by traditional means he decided on books” (Academy of Achievement, 2010). He thought books were perfect because attempting to send huge catalogs for all the available books would be expensive and cumbersome, but an online resource database that was easy to navigate would provide customers with easy access and a single point from which to shop. “In 30 days, with no press, Amazon had sold books in all 50 states and 45 foreign countries, obviously by the success of Amazon he was right (Academy of Achievement, 2010). In a case study written by Javad Kargar called “Amazon.com in 2003” he stated that “Amazon's online store was a big hit, with about $5 million in the first year of operations” (2004). This huge success so quickly would have confirmed for Jeff that his idea was viable and drove him to continue to strive for more. Jeff Bezo’s charismatic-visionary leadership is the key to his and Amazon’s success.
Amazon’s macro-environment is made up of six external factors: political, economic, environmental, technological, social, and legal conditions. These factors are important because they shape how the company operates and you must know each piece to be able to compete within the retail and eCommerce industry. An evolving political factor are the efforts the government has made toward punishing offenders of cyber-crime. This kind of thief wasn’t walking into your store, but hacking into your computer. This type of crime wasn’t possible before the internet. The government has started to take these crimes more serious as technology evolves. Technology is a factor that Amazon.com must invest heavily in. They are reliant on having top of the line technology to survive against cyber-crime and to stay relevant in the tech world. ECommerce is everywhere now and competition is very high. This brings in legal conditions; Amazon must know what laws exist in which countries because they are a
Customer service is paramount at Amazon and Bezos consistently reminds employees that their focus needs to consider the impact and feeling of the consumer. He is known to be an outside the box thinking daring to be bold and go against the norm. Utilizing drones to reduce delivery times while minimizing costs display Bezos focus on customers and stakeholders (Amazon Prime Air, n.d.). Bezos is a task-oriented transactional leader, who Brad Stone in his book “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon”, described Bezos as a micromanager who does not value the opinion of his employees (Stone, 2013). These individuals excel in achieving goals and positive outcomes but need improvement in human relations. Bezos tends to be bold and brash and not warm and fuzzy, and empathy is a critical component to others buying into your vision (Schwartz, 2015). He often becomes frustrated at his employees and berates them publicly; an unusual approach for an individual who built an amazing company. A company built on fear and stress looks beautiful from the outside but internally could quickly collapse if Bezos does not address his communications approach. Corporate culture is vital to the long-term future of business and Bezos needs to recognize how he leads the internal customer will translate over to the external consumer. Managing through fear and
Amazon has been able to maintain sustainable competitive advantage based on three operational strategies. These are low cost-leadership, customer differentiation and focus strategies. Low cost-leadership is pursued by Amazon by differentiating itself primarily on the basis of price. By offering low prices to customers Amazon ensures its future success. Partially modifying the costs of lowering prices over time through achieving higher sales volumes, negotiating better terms with suppliers, and achieving better operating efficiencies. Amazon makes sure that it offers the same quality products as other companies at a considerably cheaper price. Another strategy that Amazon has is its fast delivery service and there are many delivery services that one can choose from. With Amazon Prime, there are certain, but many products that have free two-day shipping. Also, with Amazon Prime, there are many offers specifically for people that have Amazon Prime. For example,
Amazon has recorded a magnificent success in its business throughout the years that it has been in operation. It has attracted almost all people to use it when necessary. Amazon has built its success in business methodically and slowly. Amazon has made much success because of its ability to read market trends and diversify its operations. It started as an online book selling company. However, it changed its operations and started selling other products. Currently, many large retail shops use Amazon to host and power their websites, for instance, sears and virgin megastores. Amazon now attracts over fifty million visitors in a period of one month. Amazon has tried to make their services fit each individual user. It has based its services on the end user. It has shipping discounts, customer product reviews and a credit card with bonuses. It also has prime membership, product forums and 1-click ordering system among other services. The company has tried to make a remarkable experience for customers and visitors (Thomas, 2006).
Organizational culture is a reflective view of the inner workings of an organization. This culture reflects hierarchical arrangements as it pertains to the lines of authority, rights and obligations, duties, and communication processes. Organizational structure establishes the manner in which power and roles are coordinated and controlled amongst the varying levels of management. The structure of an organization is dependent upon their goals, objectives, and strategy. Determining organizational structure best suited for an organization is generally found within the six key elements of organizational structure and choosing those to implement those best suited for the organization. The six key elements include:
Amazon creates value for its customers by offering customer satisfactory services by managing retail operations with efficient use of technology. Operational efficiency is the strength of Amazon.com and supports the management to maintain its competitive advantage and enhance corporate performance.
Jeffrey Bezos, the founder and current CEO of Amazon.com, initially started the company as an online bookstore in 1994. Within several months, Amazon spread its operation to all 50 states and abroad. Presently, customers from over 45 countries buy at Amazon. Over a short period of time, the company expanded sales to electronics, video games, software, CDs, DVDs, MP3 downloads, food, furniture, apparel, jewelry, and toys. Today, the company even produces its own products such as the Kindle series. Also, Amazon.com is one of the major providers of cloud computing services. Currently, the company is the largest global online retailer responsible for 20% of online retail market share.
Walmart adopts both a transformational and transactional leadership. Transformational leadership can be defined as a leadership style which focuses on the theory that employees function most effective when led in a way that is beyond simple transactions (Burns, 1978). Further research also suggest that transformational leadership motivates workers to go beyond what is expected of them, while also seeking large shifts in their followers’ attitudes, values, morals, and needs (Bass, 19...
This method implies that leaders and follower have combine motives that can be beneficial to both parties. When theses task are assigned, there is a designed reward or punishment for the followers. This method of leadership can also be associated with managing in a sense. Transactional leadership in a sense is like management in that it does not look to inspire or promote change, it is in fact more about ensuring a particular process, and procedure meets the desired results.