Amazon Unbound

“principal engineers”: an elite squad of about a dozen technical wizards at the company who parachute into troubled projects to diagnose problems.

Jassy and his fellow managers asked searing questions of their underlings and hammered anyone without suitable answers or who didn’t embrace accountability for a problem within their purview.

“Of all the services we added, it was the database portfolio that broadened AWS’s appeal,” said Taimur Rashid, a former AWS manager.

“good intentions don’t work, but mechanisms do.”

His influence stemmed not from his 16 percent ownership stake but from twenty-five years of prophetic invention, strategic foresight, and disciplined management.

Colleagues said he exhibited almost inhuman levels of discipline, sitting in meetings for ten hours a day and digesting dense and complex documents without flagging.

was a typical Bezos move—brilliant, and rather cruel.

“Like a lot of things at Amazon, it was ready, fire, aim,”

The fifty-cent word “plenipotentiary” was used inside the team to describe what he wanted: an assistant invested with full powers to take action on behalf of users, like call for a cab or place a grocery order.