By Laura Stevens
No matter how hard he works, Amazon.com Inc.'s chief executive
of world-wide consumer is only the second most important "Jeff" at
the company.
Still, Jeff Wilke's supervision now spans many of the
Seattle-based company's core businesses, including retail,
operations, technology and its marketplace and accompanying seller
services. Part of the 18-year Amazon veteran's role is to obsess
about the wants and needs of the retailer's customers.
Near the beginning of his career there, Mr. Wilke used his
manufacturing expertise to help create a more efficient way of
running Amazon's warehouses that made its two-day Prime shipping
service possible. Mr. Wilke, who graduated with a degree in
chemical engineering from Princeton University and an M.B.A. from
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also has molded the
leadership principles which guide employee behavior.
Now Mr. Wilke is in charge of integrating Amazon's new
subsidiary, Whole Foods Market Inc. and its roughly 87,000
employees. He also is part of the leadership team working on the
company's search for a second North American headquarters.
Wearing his traditional fourth-quarter flannel shirt, a nod to
the company's more than 250,000 warehouse workers filling holiday
orders, Mr. Wilke talked about Amazon's plans for Whole Foods, why
it is splitting its headquarters in two and what it is like to
disagree with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
Edited excerpts:
The Wall Street Journal: How do you approach major,
company-shifting decisions like acquiring Whole Foods or creating a
new headquarters?
Mr. Wilke: If the decision is reversible, we would prefer that
people take a chance. You can walk through the door. If you don't
like what you see on the other side, you just walk back through and
you're fine. If it's not reversible, we spend a lot more time
thinking about those. We will argue the merits of whatever decision
we are making.
WSJ: Amazon encourages employees to fail big. Tell us about a
big, fall-on-your-face failure.
Mr. Wilke: When we were deciding whether to do Kindle, Jeff
(Bezos) presented his idea to the board. I thought at the time,
"We're a software company that built a retail business. We don't
know anything about hardware." I'd come from companies that built
hardware, so I knew how complicated it was. I said, "I don't think
we should do this." I predicted that yields would be hard, that we
might miss our first launch date, etc. Many of the things I
predicted ultimately happened. But it didn't matter. Jeff at the
time said, "It's the right thing to do for customers." I disagreed
and committed, and I'm very glad I did.
WSJ: What did Mr. Bezos say to you after?
Mr. Wilke: Once we make a decision, we just move on. There are
too many opportunities to invent for customers to keep score. All
of us have been wrong at various times.
WSJ: Whole Foods is known for a more freewheeling, localized
culture. What will Amazon have to change to integrate its new
subsidiary?
Mr. Wilke: We've made a number of acquisitions over the years,
and we work really hard to respect the cultures that have been
successful. There are some ways that we can help a subsidiary like
Whole Foods with resources, maybe with ideas, maybe with some IT
services that we've already built. But we don't want their culture
to change.
WSJ: What Whole Foods practices could you see adopting?
Mr. Wilke: I hope we're going to learn about how physical stores
work. They know a lot about food, produce -- supply chains at a
very large national scale. We're going to learn with them how we
can efficiently -- and in a high-quality way -- deliver groceries
to our customers.
WSJ: Amazon's culture isn't for everyone. How do you suss that
out in the hiring process?
Mr. Wilke: In an interview situation, we use the leadership
principles as a guide to help us evaluate whether somebody would
fit in. There are lots of situations where you could decide to
optimize for the customer or to get ahead of the competitor. We
want to pay attention to competitors, but we obsess over customers.
If I detect that they are too focused on competitors, they probably
aren't going to be a great fit.
WSJ: Amazon is now a retailer, a cloud-services provider, a film
studio, a device company, a parcel carrier and a technology giant.
An estimated 40% of U.S. online spending goes to Amazon. What would
you say to people who say the company is too big?
Mr. Wilke: You just listed a very diverse and horizontally large
set of businesses. I think there's a big difference between
horizontal breadth and vertical depth. In every one of the
businesses that you describe, we have incredible competition. In
world-wide retail, we're less than 1%. We think our job is to keep
inventing for customers in each of these areas, and we hope that if
we continue to invent well, they'll choose us to be one of the
folks who wins. I don't think any one of these areas is a football
game where there's only one winner.
WSJ: What's the reasoning behind splitting Amazon's headquarters
in two?
Mr. Wilke: We have a lot of people in Seattle. We actually
expect to add 2 million square feet and 6,000 people in the next 12
months here. But we think it's important if we're going to continue
to grow, to make sure we have the space. And it'll diversify the
opportunity for people to choose where they would like to live.
Write to Laura Stevens at laura.stevens@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 10, 2017 05:44 ET (09:44 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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