Salute, This Memorial Day!

Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.

 

Now, Amazon is taking on people, as well as technology.  The company began with a simple idea from Jeff Bezos; the rest is history.  First, they captured the goods to people fulfillment notion that used up all the industry capacity for automatic movement (and the technology behind it).  Then came the drone revolution, with increasing capacities and accuracy.

Next, the Big Warehouse In The Sky, and the stockroom in The Cloud - the virtual always-on fulfillment blimp.  The hits just keep on coming . . .

This Spring, not content with merely hiring veterans, Amazon has created a fast-track leadership program, propelling entrants on a par with graduates from top business schools.  Candidates arrive with significant experience, coolness under stress, and a host of built-in leadership traits.  They know how - and why - to "git 'er done".

In the Pathways Military Leaders program, Amazon, seeks the best and the brightest - and is finding them.  Their bias for action and proven abilities parallel their continual striving for disruptive change and technology that makes a difference in their competitive universes.

Test cases, toes in the water, wait and see approaches simply won't work.  One is either all in or all out.  

Those who wait are likely to still be waiting a few years from now, while the giant wins at a game that is already over.

Go ahead, President Trump, downsize the troop deployment again - and outsource what's left to Amazon.  Only this time stay away from the IEDs, and concentrate on the supply chain logistics of moving stuff, and moving it well.

Technology and people in the hands of authentic leaders are too powerful to fight off.