The Running

Jeff Bezos recently told a conference that if they ran Amazon like New York City schools, packages would take six weeks to arrive, cost one hundred dollars, and arrive wrong. He said this as a comparison. The comparison was meant to illustrate something about organizational efficiency.

Jeff Bezos ran Amazon from 1994 to 2021. In those 27 years, Amazon became the largest online retailer in the world, expanded into cloud computing, logistics, film production, grocery stores, and healthcare, and reached a market capitalization of approximately 1.7 trillion dollars. He ran all of this. In July 2021, he stopped.

Amazon continued to run.

The current CEO is Andy Jassy, who took over in July 2021. Under his leadership, Amazon has continued to deliver packages. The packages generally arrive in two days. They generally cost less than one hundred dollars to deliver. They generally arrive correct. (There are exceptions. The exceptions have reviews.)

Bezos is now executive chairman. He attends board meetings and appears at conferences, where he explains how organizations should run. The organizations that might benefit from this include New York City schools, which serve approximately 1.1 million students across 1,800 buildings and have an annual budget of roughly 38 billion dollars. The schools are currently run by someone who was not at the conference.

He left the building in 2021. The building kept running.

He has been available since then.