Bezos Back At Amazon?

After years of focusing almost entirely on long-term initiatives and shifting day-to-day operations to lower-level managers, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos reflects on the urgent problems facing Amazon in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the New York Times report.
“For now, my own time and thinking continues to be focused on Covid-19 and how Amazon can help while we’re in the middle of it,” Bezos wrote to shareholders last week.
Bezos is said to have entered regular calls to help make inventory-related decisions, coronavirus monitoring, and even how and when Amazon reacts to public feedback. Earlier this month, Bezos has paid a highly reported visit to one of the Amazon stores, a step not seen in years.
Before the pandemic, the billionaire reportedly spent much of his time away from the Amazon offices in Seattle. He traveled the globe and devoted a day a week to Blue Origin, his space exploration service. In 2018, he told Forbes that he was very rarely “pulled into the moment” by the supermarket empire.

At Amazon, Bezos allegedly gave preference to ventures that “addressed a significant danger to the company or where he felt he was ideally suited to contribute,” according to the New York Times. Outside of day-to-day problems, he was forced to concentrate on more ambitious, longer-term ventures such as Amazon Alexa and Amazon Go’s cashless shops.

Yet as coronavirus spreads throughout the world, it also spreads to more than 50 Amazon facilities. In addition to attempting to protect its workforce from catching the virus, the organization is faced with growing competition for its goods, even though its workers have stopped turning up for shifts, either because of fear of contracting the virus or because of lack of access to child care though schools shut down.

Bezos vanished in public at first. On March 4, the lavish journeys he had taken were nowhere to be found on Instagram’s CEO’s site, and staff at Amazon’s headquarters sent an email marked “Amazon Human Resources” to operate from home.

However, he quickly allegedly joined Amazon’s other executives to support efforts to “avoid receiving low-priority products in warehouses and postpone consumer shipments of other goods that Amazon found low demand” and to join in determining which features to withdraw from Amazon’s website to minimize market demand, such as “burying up its famous page offering regular sales.”
But Amazon employees and even some politicians have gradually called for more health measures from the organization as more personnel have tested positive for the virus. On March 21, Bezos briefly confronted his staff specifically in a blog post, saying that the company had purchased millions of face masks for workers to use while they were employed, but that “only few of those orders have been completed.”

The decision to wait to address his employees was blasted by former Medtronic executive Bill George.

“You need to be out there early, every day, and talking to your people,” he told the Times. “If the people are risking themselves, you need to be there with them.”

Since then, Bezos stepped up his efforts to ensure his employees’ safety.

The organization also announced on April 9 that it would build up the Coronavirus check capability for staff and others, and said a week later that it would recruit an extra 75,000 workers to satisfy customer demand.

Meeting notes from Bezos’ April 1 call to executives, published by The New York Times, revealed that Amazon had discussed partnering with professional associations to concentrate on increasing the research ability of its staff and others to “help immunize against accusations that we are greedy in the use of employee assessments.” According to the Times, Bezos joined the frequent calls of the existing research department.

The coronavirus wasn’t just bad for the Amazon. Thanks to the market for the virus, the company’s stock has hit unprecedented highs, and Bezos, the richest man in the world, has apparently been $25 billion wealthier since March as a result of the pandemic, according to the New York Times.