Amazon's Organizational Structure

After reading and learning about the various ways businesses can be organized and structured, I thought it would be interesting and important to understand how Amazon’s business is organized and structured.  Amazon, being the innovative force that they are, is studied and emulated for many of their business practices and I thought it would be interesting to see if the way in which they organize themselves follows a similar innovative strategy.

First, it’s important to note how Amazon organizes their company in terms of divisions.  As our textbook noted, companies can organize divisions in many different ways whether it’s according to specific brands encompassed by the overall business or some are organized divisionally by geographic areas.  In Amazon’s case, they are organized by specific brands/products owned and operated by Amazon.  The five divisions are Amazon.com, Amazon Web Services, Alexa, Whole Foods Market and Amazon Prime.  As one would expect, each of these divisions would be an incredibly successful business on its own but together they make up the most successful firm right now.

Next, I thought it would be interesting to understand how their board of directors is structured.  Currently Amazon has 17 board members with 7 of those members being Amazon officers and the remaining 10 members being external individuals from various business backgrounds.  Jeff Bezos serves at the President, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board which our textbook noted is somewhat common.  The 10 external board members are made up of individuals like the COO of Starbuck’s, the Dean & Vice Provost of the Cornell Tech program and a private investment firm manager.  The business backgrounds range from Fortune 500 powerhouses like Starbuck’s and PepsiCo to creative startup ventures.  I thought this was an interesting mixture of powerful minds and is definitely representative of the work and image Amazon portrays.

While the makeup of Amazon’s board of directors can be seen as diverse, I thought it was interesting that their overall organization and structure was not as innovative and unique as I had imagined it would be.  Similar to how board members best serve the company by holding an outside point of view, maybe Amazon sees that their organization best serves them by being more structured and traditional so it can balance out the innovation their staff and products deliver every day. 

https://ir.aboutamazon.com/board-of-directors