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Greetings! CEO letters to staff are usually written with so much bombast and blather that they say little of note. But that's not the case with one that came from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy today. Despite a sleepy headline, "Strengthening Our Culture and Teams," Jassy's letter delivers some home truths. Most notably, he made it clear that Amazon has evolved into a lumbering bureaucracy, with too many managers and some processes that don't do it much good. That includes what Jassy calls "pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings"—which in any other context would be a joke. To fight the bureaucracy, he outlined plans to shrink the number of managers that now crowd the company, helping to "remove layers and flatten organizations." He even is creating a "bureaucracy mailbox" so employees can email him about examples of "unnecessary process." Jassy also has ordered a return to five days a week in the office, a commendable move and one that—thanks to the office phobia that inhabits most news outlets nowadays—drew most of the headlines for his letter. Make no mistake, though—the real news was the broader message he was sending. This includes Jassy's view that Amazon's org structure isn't currently set up to drive as much speed as desired or to "deliver the absolute best for customers." It all sounds like an acknowledgment that Amazon is in the dreaded "Day 2" phase that founder Jeff Bezos described in 2016 as "stasis," the beginning of a company's slide, which (according to Bezos) ends in death. (Among other things, Bezos warned that "if you're not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations.") If you read Jassy's letter today closely, you get the feeling that the CEO feels Bezos' management is largely to blame for getting Amazon into this situation. He notes that "the number of people we've hired the last 6-8 years"—a period that stretches back to the 2016 date of Bezos' Day 2 analysis—would "stretch even the strongest of cultures." Bezos stepped down as CEO only three years ago. Indeed, Jassy has spent much of the past three years cutting staff, reducing costs and generally refocusing Amazon on the projects with the highest return. (He has killed off a few ventures, such as bookstores and some other bricks-and-mortar enterprises, as well as delivery robots. Bloomberg has a list of the shuttered projects.) Today's letter showed he isn't done shaking things up. Sometimes it feels like investors aren't paying attention. Shares of Apple dipped nearly 3% on Monday, apparently in response to weekend reports that pre-orders for the high-end iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max series were lower than they had been for last year's equivalents. That shouldn't have come as a surprise. After all, last Monday's iPhone unveiling made it clear that the hardware upgrades were very minor. This year's big shifts are coming from the artificial intelligence features Apple will roll out to the iPhone over the next few months. As those changes will require the 15 Pro series and newer, they should drive more upgrades—but probably over a longer period of time than is usual. But that likelihood has been evident since early June, when Apple unveiled the AI features. Between then and Friday, Apple shares appreciated 15%, so Monday's sell-off is just the beginning of a reversal in that rally. In the long run, Apple's AI features seem likely to prove popular. But investors need to be patient. - Judges hearing TikTok's appeal of the ban-or-sell law asked lots of questions of Tiktok's lawyers, focusing on national security issues rather than the First Amendment grounds that TikTok is focusing on. The judges' questions don't appear to augur well for TikTok's chances of freezing the law. See our detailed coverage here.
- Microsoft is rolling out new Copilot features in its Office 365 software in an effort to convince more businesses to spend on the $30-per-user AI software, CEO Satya Nadella said Monday.
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