A CEO Describes the Single Key to Success

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 17, 9:30AM EDT

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A CEO Describes the Single Key to Success — © Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images News via Getty Images

Shareholders love to dig through the letters CEOs write to shareholders once a year when they release their proxies. Among the most well-read are those by Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon. Buffett is the most successful investor in American history, and Dimon is his generation’s greatest banker. The two letters could not be more different in length. Buffett’s is a few hundred words long. Dimon covered 66 pages and 35,000 words this year.
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The new chief executive officer of the nation’s second-largest company, Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction), has just written his second shareholder letter. Many call Andy Jassy one of the worst big tech CEOs of the past several years. Amazon’s core e-commerce business is in deep trouble. Jassy overbuilt Amazon and has decided to fire thousands of workers to return to reasonable margins. (These are 17 terrible investments by Amazon.)
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Amazon’s shares have fallen 32% in the past year. The situation is bad enough that shareholders want founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos to return.

Jassy’s letter has one piece of advice that is valuable to almost every business, which he does not seem to have adopted. Near the start of his 10-page letter, he writes, “While there were an unusual number of simultaneous challenges this past year, the reality is that if you operate in large, dynamic, global market segments with many capable and well-funded competitors (the conditions in which Amazon operates all of its businesses), conditions rarely stay stagnant for long.”
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Jassy had run Amazon as if it were the same company it was in July 2021 when the COVID-19 pandemic helped Amazon encourage people to order products online due to the danger of the disease.
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Amazon will post its first-quarter results in a week. They are expected to be dismal because Amazon already has said they will be. Revenue could be as low as $121 billion, up only 4% from the same quarter the year before. Operating income could be as low as $0, compared to $3.7 billion.

In his letter, Jassy covers his entire 15-year tenure. He does not say much about the layoffs or the stock price. Perhaps they will go away because “conditions rarely stay stagnant for long.”

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.