Last month, Amazon fired 100 people working in the Kindle division, and a couple of days ago, it fired over 100 more. This includes people from the Goodreads social book discovery website. CEO Andy Jassy is undertaking an initiative to reduce what he has described as an excess of bureaucracy at the company, including by reducing the number of managers.
“As part of our ongoing work to make our teams and programs operate more efficiently, and to better align with our business roadmap, we’ve made the difficult decision to eliminate a small number of roles within the Books organization,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy reminded staff that developing enormous teams and personal fiefdoms is not the way to success at the company, emphasizing that the online retail giant rewards those who accomplish more with fewer resources. Rather than mass layoffs, Amazon accomplished this goal by consolidating teams and reassigning some supervisors to individual contributor positions.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.