That’s an interesting observation because Jeff Bezos also seemed to delegate a lot. It seemed that the S-team (Amazon’s term for their top executives) basically ran the entire company, which admittedly frees up a lot of Jeff’s time to focus on whatever seems most important to him.

I also hadn’t heard about him sending fixers in; was that an escalation to sending a question mark email or was it part of the normal process? I know you’re probably aware of this but for other people reading this discussion I feel I should elaborate: if some problem at Amazon, usually customer-facing and often a complaint from an actual customer, landed in Jeff’s inbox and caught his attention, he would forward the email to whoever was responsible for the situation, adding “?” as his sole commentary. I think he just forwarded the email to one of the S-team and it would get passed down the org chart until it reached the relevant manager but everyone in that chain would keep the issue at front of mind until it was resolved. And if you were the manager that actually owned the issue, it was now your top priority. The expectation was that not only would you address the customer’s immediate problem but that you would root-cause the problem and address it as categorically as possible.

Come to think of it, maybe this is a good example of founder mode.