Andy Jassy is trying to reset Amazon’s culture by getting rid of excess layers of middle management.
The Amazon CEO stated on Tuesday at the company’s annual conference for third-party sellers that he wanted to eliminate bureaucracy to help Amazon grow and innovate more quickly. Bureaucracy is not compatible with “startups” and “entrepreneurial organizations,” but it is “really easy to accumulate,” according to Jassy.
“I would say bureaucracy is really anathema to startups and to entrepreneurial organizations,” Jassy said at the event. “As you get larger, it’s really easy to accumulate bureaucracy, a lot of bureaucracy that you may not see.”
Related: Amazon Tells Thousands of Employees to Relocate or Resign
Jassy wrote in his latest annual shareholder letter in April that Amazon must “strive to operate like the world’s largest startup” by solving real customer problems, working quickly, reducing bureaucracy and being willing to take risks.
Jassy’s latest remarks on Tuesday follow Amazon’s attempts across the past year to flatten its organization and eliminate excess layers.
In September 2024, Jassy asked each team within the company to reduce the number of managers by at least 15%. A leaked guidelines document in January showed that Amazon accomplished this without layoffs by asking managers to increase their number of direct reports, pause hiring new managers, and demote some employees down a level to non-managerial positions.
Managers are now required to have at least eight team members as direct reports, an increase from the six that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos mandated in 2017, according to the document.
Jassy also introduced a “Bureaucracy Mailbox” last year to allow employees to email him examples of unwanted processes or rules that could be changed to help the company run more efficiently. Within a year, the mailbox received 1,500 emails, resulting in changes to 455 processes, Jassy said at Tuesday’s event.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on July 8, 2025. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
At a November all-hands meeting, Jassy reiterated that he wanted to make changes to middle management to keep the company competitive.
“The reality is that the [senior leadership team] and I hate bureaucracy,” Jassy said at the meeting. “One of the reasons I’m still at this company is because it’s not a political or bureaucratic place.”
Jassy took over as Amazon CEO in 2021, following Bezos. Under his leadership, Amazon laid off 27,000 corporate employees and mandated that employees return to the office five days a week.
Despite complaints from employees and an initial shortage of desks, the return-to-office mandate took effect on Jan. 2.
Amazon states on its sustainability page that it employs 1.5 million people worldwide at the time of writing, making it the second-largest employer in the world.
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Sherin Shibu