timbray / a-cloud-prfaq

A PR/FAQ document to support Amazon's decision on whether to spin out AWS as a separate company
MIT License
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Corporate Governance and leaders #11

Open DeerBear opened 4 years ago

DeerBear commented 4 years ago

A separate but very important issue is that of Corporate Governance and the leaders.

For a bit of context (for those who may not know what CG is), CG is the entire set of principles, practices, processes. etc. that define how a commercial entity behaves so that all stakeholders (including customers!) win as much as they can.

The problem here is defining priorities: who is the most important stakeholder? What processes (laid out in very general terms) will be put in place to nurture and develop fairness at all levels? What about the culture? What should the culture be like?

Amazon isn't known for its empathy at many levels, and I am being generous here, so should there be a right-out transfer of culture? This is actually a really important question about perception because in a lot of cases smaller businesses decisions are employee-driven and many may not feel comfortable in aiding and abetting the sort of behaviour that Amazon has in practice encouraged.

All of the above then trickles down to who the leaders are going to be: how much Amazon's senior management will accept to move to the new entity? I think there needs to be speculation about who are the initial leaders besides the CEO because it is they who will be tasked with enforcing the culture and lead by example.