The Run

Jeff Bezos said at a conference that if you ran Amazon the way New York City runs its school system, packages would take six weeks to arrive, the delivery fee would be a hundred dollars, and when the package finally came, it would be wrong.

He said this to an audience of people who run organizations. They were there to learn about running organizations. Jeff Bezos was the speaker. He has experience with this.

Jeff Bezos ran Amazon for twenty-seven years. He founded it in a garage in Bellevue, Washington, in 1994. He ran it until July 5, 2021, at which point he handed it to Andy Jassy and left to focus on Blue Origin, which is a company that launches rockets. (The rockets go to space, briefly, and then come back. They do not deliver packages. The packages stay on Earth. This is by design.)

Andy Jassy has been running Amazon since July 5, 2021. He is still running it. During the four years he has been running it, Amazon has delivered an estimated several billion packages. A substantial portion of these packages arrived in two days. A smaller portion arrived on the wrong day. A smaller portion still arrived wrong. Amazon does not publish the figure for the wrong ones, but it is a large number in absolute terms, though small as a percentage, though the percentage is also large when applied to several billion. (I am not criticizing the delivery accuracy. I am contextualizing it. These are different activities.)

The New York City school system serves approximately 900,000 students. It has a budget of around $37 billion per year. It does not deliver packages. It has not been asked to. Jeff Bezos has not been asked to run it. He has been given no authority over it, no operational responsibility for its outcomes, and no access to its teacher-performance data. He compared it to Amazon at a conference. This is allowed.

Jeff Bezos now gives speeches about organizational efficiency. He gives these speeches to people who run organizations. He explains what it takes to run things well. He ran Amazon, which is a thing that was run well, and the evidence for this is that Amazon is still running. This is the argument he makes. This is a reasonable argument. It is also the argument a surgeon would make after the patient continued living without them.

Amazon runs two-day delivery on most eligible items. It runs same-day delivery in some metropolitan areas. It runs next-day in most of the continental United States. It runs all of this without Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos runs speeches. The speeches explain running.

He stopped running Amazon in 2021. Amazon has not stopped.

He has noted this in several speeches. He considers it the point.