Jeff Wilke, CEO of Amazon's worldwide consumer company, will retire early next year, Amazon stated Friday.
Dave Clark, senior vice president of retail operations, will triumph Wilke later he retires, Amazon stated.
In a memo to workers, titled"Hanging up the flannel," CEO Bezos called Wilke"an unbelievable instructor to all people" and stated Clark is well-suited to presume Wilke's role.
Since Jeff joined the company, I have been lucky enough to have him as my mentor," Bezos said. He's simply one of these people without whom Amazon would be totally unrecognizable."
Wilke, 53, has been with Amazon for over two years, joining the company in 1999 to lead international operations. Since then, he has risen through the ranks and now manages the company's heart e-commerce and physical retail business. Wilke is one of the closest executives to report to Bezos and was widely considered to be a possible successor for Bezos if he step down. In 2013, Clark was tapped to become Amazon's global logistics leader, overseeing the corporation's growing network of warehouses, together with last-mile delivery operations crossing trucks, vans and airplanes. Clark's focus on detail and demanding management style has made him the nickname"The Sniper," because of his tendency to spot and fire workers slacking at work in the name of ensuring rapid delivery.
Wilke will leave his high-profile post at Amazon following among its hardest periods. Amazon, like many retailers, found itself grappling with a logistical nightmare at the height of this coronavirus pandemic, as its warehouses became quickly overwhelmed with online orders at higher levels than it typically sees through the holiday shopping rush. Clark assisted Amazon navigate through the dual crises of shipping delays and rising tensions with warehouse workers who called for increased safety protections.
The two Wilke and Clark are members of Bezos' S-Team, a tight-knight group of over a dozen senior executives in virtually all areas of Amazon's business, such as retail, cloud computing, operations and advertising. The S-team seldom sees its members leave and if they do, their functions aren't always replaced. This past year, another member of this S-Team, Jeff Blackburn, Amazon's SVP of business and corporate development, declared he was taking a yearlong sabbatical starting in 2020.
Boler Davis is the first Black woman to serve on Bezos' S-team. Bezos has gradually diversified his circle of leading executives, including two girls to the S-team last year, such as Colleen Aubrey, vice president of performance advertisements and Christine Beauchamp, vice president of Amazon fashion. Before that, Beth Galetti, vice president of human resources, was the only woman who held a position on Bezos' senior leadership team.
Amazon declined to comment further on Wilke's strategy to retire.
Read Bezos' complete letter to Amazon employees below:
Topic: RE: Hanging up the flannel
Date: August 21, 2020
After over two years, Jeff Wilke is likely to retire in Amazon first next year. I've attached beneath the heartfelt note he simply sent to his organization sharing that information.
Since Jeff joined the business, I have been fortunate enough to own him as my tutor. I have learned a lot from him, and I am not the only one. He's been an incredible teacher to all of us. That form of direction is indeed leveraged. When you see people taking care of consumers, you can thank Jeff for it. And there is this important point: in tough moments and excellent ones, he has been just plain fun to use. Never underestimate the significance of that. It makes a difference.
Jeff's legacy and impact will live on long after he departs. He is simply one of those people with whom Amazon will be completely unrecognizable. Thank you, Jeff, for your gifts and your friendship.
Jeff has also set up us to triumph in his absence. I can not consider someone more suited to measure into Jeff's role than Dave Clark. People who've worked with Dave understand his unbelievable passion for serving customers and encouraging our employees -- I am excited for him to direct our teams and continue innovating for customers.
I would also like to congratulate our new S-team members Alicia Boler Davis, John Felton, and Dave Treadwell. I look forward to inventing .
Jeff
Here is the memo Wilke delivered to workers:
To: Worldwide Consumer Employees
Topic: Hanging up the flannel
Date: August 21, 2020
Heading into my 22nd vacation season at Amazon, I'm once more looking at the flannel shirts that fill my closet rack. This vacation with Amazon is going to be different in a variety of ways. And it's going to be my last.
In December 1999I left work most evenings -- along with most of my colleagues from the half of a floor of Key Tower that housed the whole corporate operations group -- to visit the Seattle Distribution Center to package boxes and gift wrap presents. I packed flannel tops for these trips to colder regions of the nation. Our main purpose was to ensure we sent all client orders in time for your holiday. However we benefitted in different ways from these visits. We got to see how the physical operations connected to our electronic store, and I got to inspect our safety culture. We made new friends (and a few of these friendships led to unions ). And, perhaps above all, we gained tremendous respect for the dedication and client attention of our fellow employees who exercised from headquarters.
A couple of years later -- with the help of an operational excellence focus built on Lean, statistical process control, a very clear comprehension of our own bottlenecks, and purpose-built applications -- we didn't have to send out corporate employees to satisfaction centers (FCs) to include much-needed bandwidth encouraging our partners. Everyone cheered our improving operational capacity, but I discovered something was missing. Holiday conversations within our frugal, however comfy, Seattle offices increasingly turned into holiday celebrations and eggnog, and away from the stories of FC heroics. I didn't hear exactly the same sharing of respect for the job being done in our FCs, and I had been dedicated to reconnecting corporate employees to surgeries.
We created Customer Connections to ensure each new worker spent time in an FC or Client Service. I doubled down representing our Operations staff in the corporate environment, such as beginning every assembly with a security tip. And I started to wear my flannel shirts every day of Q4. The flannel gave me a opportunity to talk about our surgeries and remind everybody of how committed and customer-focused our colleagues in the area were, too.
COVID-19 has pulled me back to my roots in surgeries like I work with the teams building antigen testing capacity, which we will deploy to our front-line employees. I am so pleased with the dedication our folks have shown since they pick, pack, ship, and send to hundreds of millions of customers around the globe who depend on us. These employees deserve every ounce of our focus to make sure their security, which explains precisely why we've spent so much time and cash to keep them healthy and safe. This testing work is quite much in the soul of flannel, and is the latest example of our dedication to the people in our fulfillment centers.
I am planning to retire in Q1 of next year. I treasure the deep relationships we forged as we climbed this provider. From Jeff Bezos and my S-team colleagues into the countless hundreds of leaders all over Amazon who employ our Leadership Principles every single day. We worked hard. It is just time. Time for Dave Clark to step in and lead the organization as CEO Worldwide Consumer. Time for Russ Grandinetti and Doug Herrington to expand their already appreciable influence on the company's culture and performance.
As part of the transition, We're also adding John Felton, Alicia Boler Davis, and Dave Treadwell into S-team. This caps years of effort to build up incredibly capable leaders throughout our Consumer enterprise.
John started as a senior financial analyst at Retail. He rose through the finance ranks to ultimately serve as the head of fund for Dave Clark's WW Operations team. In 2018, Dave asked John to leap from Finance into Operations. He did so enthusiastically, first leading international Client Fulfillment, and now Global Delivery solutions, which comprises our enormously successful AMZL expansion.
While she had been at General Motors, Alicia and I was introduced by a mutual friend and consented to have lunch. We hit it off right away. I was so impressed with her leadership expertise, technical acumen, and especially her devotion to the employees on the shop floor. She wasn't wearing flannel, but I was convinced we shared the very same instincts. She is off to a great start running Global Client Fulfillment.
I met with Dave Treadwell during our freshman year of school. He was already way better in writing code than that had been. After spending almost 30 years climbing through the senior ranks at Microsoft, I asked him if he might consider joining Amazon. He was intrigued, and I jumped at the chance to employ him. "Tread" has led our eCommerce Foundation tech groups because he combined Amazon, driving enormous architectural change through Rolling Stone and our transition into native AWS, together with a substantial advancement in our infrastructure expenses. Dave has an odd mixture of deep technical acumen and empathetic direction, and he will be a great add to the S-team.
I didn't employ Dave Clark. Our MBA recruitment team brought him months before I joined. But soon after my arrival at Amazon, I knew that he was special. He possessed a exceptional mixture of raw wisdom, systems thinking, sharp wit, and tons of leadership courage. I"asked" him to go to Tokyo to start up our first Japanese FC (which he did after obtaining his first passport). I"asked" him to visit Campbellsville, KY, to take a Senior Manager function. I hoped that one day Dave might function as the successor leading Operations, but I knew he would need substantial plant leadership experience to finish his mental models. After helping to dramatically improve the operations in Campbellsville, I asked him to choose the General Manager function at our Delaware FC. The surgeries there were relatively simple, so the leadership challenge was more about leading people than maximizing process. From that point, Dave returned to Seattle to remain, assuming a variety of roles in Operations that included designing our second generation FCs. Seven years back, he took over direction of WW Operations and joined the S-team. Dave believes and contributes . In the last two decades, we moved Prime, Marketing, and also the Stores organizations to Dave, giving him a chance to broaden his leadership beyond surgeries. Dave is now prepared to direct WW Consumer, and I'll be proud to turn it over to him early next year.
We have a significant holiday season ahead as customers will be depending on us more than ever. We've got so much to do in the coming months, so I am not leaving yet. After this holiday season, we will have time for Chime high fives and socially distant thank-yous and goodbyes, and I will cherish each of them.
Thank you for caring about our customers and about every other. Amazon is a very special company, and it is my honor and privilege to help lead it for just a little while longer.
Dave Clark, senior vice president of retail operations, will triumph Wilke later he retires, Amazon stated.
In a memo to workers, titled"Hanging up the flannel," CEO Bezos called Wilke"an unbelievable instructor to all people" and stated Clark is well-suited to presume Wilke's role.
Since Jeff joined the company, I have been lucky enough to have him as my mentor," Bezos said. He's simply one of these people without whom Amazon would be totally unrecognizable."
Wilke, 53, has been with Amazon for over two years, joining the company in 1999 to lead international operations. Since then, he has risen through the ranks and now manages the company's heart e-commerce and physical retail business. Wilke is one of the closest executives to report to Bezos and was widely considered to be a possible successor for Bezos if he step down. In 2013, Clark was tapped to become Amazon's global logistics leader, overseeing the corporation's growing network of warehouses, together with last-mile delivery operations crossing trucks, vans and airplanes. Clark's focus on detail and demanding management style has made him the nickname"The Sniper," because of his tendency to spot and fire workers slacking at work in the name of ensuring rapid delivery.
Wilke will leave his high-profile post at Amazon following among its hardest periods. Amazon, like many retailers, found itself grappling with a logistical nightmare at the height of this coronavirus pandemic, as its warehouses became quickly overwhelmed with online orders at higher levels than it typically sees through the holiday shopping rush. Clark assisted Amazon navigate through the dual crises of shipping delays and rising tensions with warehouse workers who called for increased safety protections.
The two Wilke and Clark are members of Bezos' S-Team, a tight-knight group of over a dozen senior executives in virtually all areas of Amazon's business, such as retail, cloud computing, operations and advertising. The S-team seldom sees its members leave and if they do, their functions aren't always replaced. This past year, another member of this S-Team, Jeff Blackburn, Amazon's SVP of business and corporate development, declared he was taking a yearlong sabbatical starting in 2020.
Boler Davis is the first Black woman to serve on Bezos' S-team. Bezos has gradually diversified his circle of leading executives, including two girls to the S-team last year, such as Colleen Aubrey, vice president of performance advertisements and Christine Beauchamp, vice president of Amazon fashion. Before that, Beth Galetti, vice president of human resources, was the only woman who held a position on Bezos' senior leadership team.
Amazon declined to comment further on Wilke's strategy to retire.
Read Bezos' complete letter to Amazon employees below:
Topic: RE: Hanging up the flannel
Date: August 21, 2020
After over two years, Jeff Wilke is likely to retire in Amazon first next year. I've attached beneath the heartfelt note he simply sent to his organization sharing that information.
Since Jeff joined the business, I have been fortunate enough to own him as my tutor. I have learned a lot from him, and I am not the only one. He's been an incredible teacher to all of us. That form of direction is indeed leveraged. When you see people taking care of consumers, you can thank Jeff for it. And there is this important point: in tough moments and excellent ones, he has been just plain fun to use. Never underestimate the significance of that. It makes a difference.
Jeff's legacy and impact will live on long after he departs. He is simply one of those people with whom Amazon will be completely unrecognizable. Thank you, Jeff, for your gifts and your friendship.
Jeff has also set up us to triumph in his absence. I can not consider someone more suited to measure into Jeff's role than Dave Clark. People who've worked with Dave understand his unbelievable passion for serving customers and encouraging our employees -- I am excited for him to direct our teams and continue innovating for customers.
I would also like to congratulate our new S-team members Alicia Boler Davis, John Felton, and Dave Treadwell. I look forward to inventing .
Jeff
Here is the memo Wilke delivered to workers:
To: Worldwide Consumer Employees
Topic: Hanging up the flannel
Date: August 21, 2020
Heading into my 22nd vacation season at Amazon, I'm once more looking at the flannel shirts that fill my closet rack. This vacation with Amazon is going to be different in a variety of ways. And it's going to be my last.
In December 1999I left work most evenings -- along with most of my colleagues from the half of a floor of Key Tower that housed the whole corporate operations group -- to visit the Seattle Distribution Center to package boxes and gift wrap presents. I packed flannel tops for these trips to colder regions of the nation. Our main purpose was to ensure we sent all client orders in time for your holiday. However we benefitted in different ways from these visits. We got to see how the physical operations connected to our electronic store, and I got to inspect our safety culture. We made new friends (and a few of these friendships led to unions ). And, perhaps above all, we gained tremendous respect for the dedication and client attention of our fellow employees who exercised from headquarters.
A couple of years later -- with the help of an operational excellence focus built on Lean, statistical process control, a very clear comprehension of our own bottlenecks, and purpose-built applications -- we didn't have to send out corporate employees to satisfaction centers (FCs) to include much-needed bandwidth encouraging our partners. Everyone cheered our improving operational capacity, but I discovered something was missing. Holiday conversations within our frugal, however comfy, Seattle offices increasingly turned into holiday celebrations and eggnog, and away from the stories of FC heroics. I didn't hear exactly the same sharing of respect for the job being done in our FCs, and I had been dedicated to reconnecting corporate employees to surgeries.
We created Customer Connections to ensure each new worker spent time in an FC or Client Service. I doubled down representing our Operations staff in the corporate environment, such as beginning every assembly with a security tip. And I started to wear my flannel shirts every day of Q4. The flannel gave me a opportunity to talk about our surgeries and remind everybody of how committed and customer-focused our colleagues in the area were, too.
COVID-19 has pulled me back to my roots in surgeries like I work with the teams building antigen testing capacity, which we will deploy to our front-line employees. I am so pleased with the dedication our folks have shown since they pick, pack, ship, and send to hundreds of millions of customers around the globe who depend on us. These employees deserve every ounce of our focus to make sure their security, which explains precisely why we've spent so much time and cash to keep them healthy and safe. This testing work is quite much in the soul of flannel, and is the latest example of our dedication to the people in our fulfillment centers.
I am planning to retire in Q1 of next year. I treasure the deep relationships we forged as we climbed this provider. From Jeff Bezos and my S-team colleagues into the countless hundreds of leaders all over Amazon who employ our Leadership Principles every single day. We worked hard. It is just time. Time for Dave Clark to step in and lead the organization as CEO Worldwide Consumer. Time for Russ Grandinetti and Doug Herrington to expand their already appreciable influence on the company's culture and performance.
As part of the transition, We're also adding John Felton, Alicia Boler Davis, and Dave Treadwell into S-team. This caps years of effort to build up incredibly capable leaders throughout our Consumer enterprise.
John started as a senior financial analyst at Retail. He rose through the finance ranks to ultimately serve as the head of fund for Dave Clark's WW Operations team. In 2018, Dave asked John to leap from Finance into Operations. He did so enthusiastically, first leading international Client Fulfillment, and now Global Delivery solutions, which comprises our enormously successful AMZL expansion.
While she had been at General Motors, Alicia and I was introduced by a mutual friend and consented to have lunch. We hit it off right away. I was so impressed with her leadership expertise, technical acumen, and especially her devotion to the employees on the shop floor. She wasn't wearing flannel, but I was convinced we shared the very same instincts. She is off to a great start running Global Client Fulfillment.
I met with Dave Treadwell during our freshman year of school. He was already way better in writing code than that had been. After spending almost 30 years climbing through the senior ranks at Microsoft, I asked him if he might consider joining Amazon. He was intrigued, and I jumped at the chance to employ him. "Tread" has led our eCommerce Foundation tech groups because he combined Amazon, driving enormous architectural change through Rolling Stone and our transition into native AWS, together with a substantial advancement in our infrastructure expenses. Dave has an odd mixture of deep technical acumen and empathetic direction, and he will be a great add to the S-team.
I didn't employ Dave Clark. Our MBA recruitment team brought him months before I joined. But soon after my arrival at Amazon, I knew that he was special. He possessed a exceptional mixture of raw wisdom, systems thinking, sharp wit, and tons of leadership courage. I"asked" him to go to Tokyo to start up our first Japanese FC (which he did after obtaining his first passport). I"asked" him to visit Campbellsville, KY, to take a Senior Manager function. I hoped that one day Dave might function as the successor leading Operations, but I knew he would need substantial plant leadership experience to finish his mental models. After helping to dramatically improve the operations in Campbellsville, I asked him to choose the General Manager function at our Delaware FC. The surgeries there were relatively simple, so the leadership challenge was more about leading people than maximizing process. From that point, Dave returned to Seattle to remain, assuming a variety of roles in Operations that included designing our second generation FCs. Seven years back, he took over direction of WW Operations and joined the S-team. Dave believes and contributes . In the last two decades, we moved Prime, Marketing, and also the Stores organizations to Dave, giving him a chance to broaden his leadership beyond surgeries. Dave is now prepared to direct WW Consumer, and I'll be proud to turn it over to him early next year.
We have a significant holiday season ahead as customers will be depending on us more than ever. We've got so much to do in the coming months, so I am not leaving yet. After this holiday season, we will have time for Chime high fives and socially distant thank-yous and goodbyes, and I will cherish each of them.
Thank you for caring about our customers and about every other. Amazon is a very special company, and it is my honor and privilege to help lead it for just a little while longer.