Amazon has reinvented itself again and again and thrived on organizational change. Since the company went online in 1995, the e-commerce giant has evolved under the leadership of one person\u2014Jeff Bezos. When Amazon Web Services (AWS) started out, most investors didn\u2019t take it seriously. However, 10 years later, it was the largest cloud retailer in the world. It now has more capacity than its nearest 14 competitors combined, but this shouldn\u2019t come as a surprise.<\/p>\n
When the company first launched its website, all it sold was books. Amazon was viewed as being like eBay or Craigslist\u2014a website you went to for a specific purpose. It wasn\u2019t a daily habit like using Google or Instagram. Gradually, they expanded Amazon\u2019s offerings to include CDs and DVDs. Kindle was one of Amazon\u2019s biggest innovations. This revolutionized the book publishing industry and changed how books are read, sold, and distributed. Some estimates have placed Kindle e-book revenue at over half a billion dollars per year. But Amazon never really stopped changing.<\/p>\n
The products offered on the website expanded and new products emerged, and the company now sells over 200 million products to customers all over the world. Amazon has a market valuation of more than $440 billion. It has become the second-largest employer in the United States, with more than 750,000 full-time employees, mostly in its fulfillment centers and warehouses, up from less than 34,000 at the end of 2010.<\/p>\n
Amazon drastically changed product delivery and automation in their warehouses. For instance, customers with Amazon Prime memberships can enjoy free 2-day delivery. Changes continue as Amazon explores delivering packages by drones in 30 minutes or less. Amazon\u2019s logistics and shipping operations have become almost impenetrable moats that few other companies will ever have the resources or ability to match, and the company said in April 2019 it was spending $800 million in a single quarter to offer free 1-day delivery for all Prime customers in the United States.<\/p>\n
Regarding hardware, Amazon learned from a failed phone launch (the Fire Phone) in 2014. They pivoted and released an entirely new gadget: the home assistant. Alexa was fully developed, turning Apple\u2019s Siri into a legacy technology and leaving Google\u2014the self-proclaimed artificial intelligence experts\u2014playing catch-up.<\/p>\n
Amazon now produces its own video, television series, and films, winning three Academy Awards in 2017. After acquiring Whole Foods, Amazon began making changes to the grocery store chain, including price cuts, adding Amazon products, integrating Whole Foods and Amazon Prime, and restructuring. Other programs include food delivery from Whole Foods, rewards for customers using Amazon credit cards, and discounts for Prime members. They seek to further disrupt and dominate retail grocery stores with Amazon Go, which is a physical grocery store with no checkout lines, no hassles, and high convenience.<\/p>\n
Amazon\u2019s defining trait has been its willingness to change. What started as an online bookstore has become a multi-industry giant. Amazon dominates non-innovative competitors and changed several [Page 431]industries. If there is one guiding principle at Amazon, it is that the customer is always first.<\/p>\n
CEO Bezos uses symbolic acts to reinforce customer obsession, such as the famous \u201cempty chair.\u201d Bezos leaves one seat open at a conference table to inform all attendees that they should consider that seat occupied by their customer, \u201cthe most important person in the room.\u201d Ultimately, these symbolic gestures are highly calculated and often repeated in messages created to reinforce Amazon\u2019s leadership principles.<\/p>\n
Lessons from Amazon\u2019s successful change management include the following:<\/p>\n
Discussion Questions<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Amazon has reinvented itself again and again and thrived on organizational change. Since the company went online in 1995, the e-commerce giant has evolved under the leadership of one person\u2014Jeff Bezos. When Amazon Web Services (AWS) started out, most investors didn\u2019t take it seriously. However, 10 years later, it was the largest cloud retailer in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-paper-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93601"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93602,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93601\/revisions\/93602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n