Jeff Wilke

Size bred chaos. 

The larger and more ambitious it got, the more complicated it became structurally and it was to keep everyone coordinated and moving quickly. Bezos wanted to execute several strategies simultaneously, but the company's various interdependent divisions were wasting too much time coordinating with one other. 

Amazon's internal logistics software didn't properly account for new categories, so the computers would ask workers whether a new toy entering the warehouse was a hardcover or a paperback book. 

Bezos refused to slow down on his grand vision for a store that sold everything. To quell the turmoil in the distribution centers, he started to rely on a young executive named Jeff Wilke. 

Bezos wanted to do it and Wilke knew how to do it. 

Wilke's Job was to fix the mistake of his predecessor. Jimmy Wright and his cowboy crew from Walmart had designed Amazon's nationwide logistics network in the late 90s and were the best in the world at building large-scale retail distribution. But in moving quickly to satisfy Bezos's open-ended goal to store and ship everything, they had created a system that was expensive, unreliable, and hungry for an emergency influx of employees from Seattle at the end of every year. 

"It was a mess. It was pretty much how Walmart did all their distribution centers, which was great if you had to send out five thousand rolls of toilet paper. But is was not well suited to small orders." says Bruce Jones. 

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