In 2014, Stephenie Landry was finishing up her one-year stint as Technical Advisor to Jeff Wilke, who oversees Amazon’s worldwide consumer business, which is a mentor program that allows high potential executives to shadow a senior leader and learn first-hand. Her next assignment would define her career. At most companies, an up-and-comer like Stephenie might be given a division to ...

The three game changers guiding Amazon’s long strategy will forever alter the way we think about customer experience. Jeff Bezos’ vision for the future of Amazon goes well beyond the short term speculation about the pending Whole Foods acquisition. The din around Amazon’s $13.7 Billion acquisition of Whole Foods has been deafening. Most of it has focused on the expansion ...

With Amazon edging towards becoming the world’s first trillion-dollar company, fresh attention is being paid to the factors that could derail its growth. The company slowed a bit this quarter, sending the stock down eleven percent. Nevertheless, this downtick should not distract from the reality that Amazon has emerged as the new model of innovation effectiveness. They are something new in ...

This one concept captures beautifully all of the trials, tribulations, and magic of the entrepreneurial spirit. Every so often you come across a concept so elegant in its simplicity that you can’t help but be drawn to it because of how easily it reduces even the most complex set of ideas into something short and memorable. For example, Malcolm Gladwell’s ...

Give an honest answer to one question and even the most complex and intractable decisions become a piece of cake. In the end, it’s not the knowledge you accumulated that you’ll think about but rather the decisions you made. I’ve taught graduate school for two decades. I’m always amazed at how one of the hardest things to teach is decision ...

It is clear that the internet has transformed how we shop.  More people are buying more products and services on-line than ever before.  High-street retailers and big brands are suffering at the hands of on-line merchants large and small.  There is one often overlooked innovation which has enabled this trend.  It is buyer/seller feedback. A key component of any business ...

The Healthcare Innovation Amazon and Apple Should Focus On It is no secret that Amazon has a secret artificial intelligence healthcare project called 1492. Amazon is making several strategic moves into the healthcare vertical, including hiring machine learning experts, investing in healthcare startups, and sponsoring hackathon-type innovation challenges with six-digit prizes for killer apps that can leverage Alexa, Amazon’s voice-recognition ...

Probably the hardest thing in business is to innovate consistently, year after year and decade after decade. Take a look at any industry at any point in time and you’ll find one company that seems to have hit on a secret formula only to find that ten years later that things have gone awry. Consider the technology industry. If you looked ...

It has been just over 100 days since I began my new role at Amazon Web Services (AWS). I have received hundreds of LinkedIn questions, Facebook comments, and even DMs on Twitter asking what it is really like on the “inside” of one of the world’s most innovative companies. Here are 7 of the most valuable lessons I have learned ...

Author’s Note: The opinions expressed in this article represent my views and my views alone. I do not work for or represent Amazon.com in any way. In 2005, I joined the ranks of a company called Amazon.com – a company that was, at that time, a retail underdog. Their stock price was laughable at $25/share (vs. nearly $1,000/share today), and ....