Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is standing on business when it comes to “eliminating bureaucracy” by cutting out middle managers as a follow-up to mass layoffs that occurred in early 2025, Inc. reports.
Jassy reiterated his plans to reduce managerial ranks in his annual letter to company shareholders. The objective is to make the online retail giant “operate like the world’s largest startup” to move faster, create a better customer experience, and improve the shopping experience. He is moving past Amazon’s past ways of relying on “owners.”
He defines “owners as “really smart, motivated, inventive, ambitious people” who want to achieve goals by asking the question, “What would I do if I started this company and I was the majority owner?”
“Owners feel accountable,” Jassy said.
“They care deeply about the quality and effectiveness of what they own, and view the company’s mission as their mission… That’s part of what our effort to increase the ratio of individual contributors versus managers is about.”
But what does that mean for some of Amazon’s lower-level or white-collar employees?
By diminishing the number of managers, those in such positions will no longer need clearance before launching into action. Jassy feels it will remove “unneeded processes that get layered on that add little value.”
“Builders hate bureaucracy. It slows them down, frustrates them, and keeps them from doing what they came here to do,” he explained. “As leaders, we don’t always see the red tape buried deep in our organizations, but we can sure as heck eliminate it when we do.”
The new moves shouldn’t surprise stakeholders and employees. According to Fortune, in September 2024, the CEO announced he wanted to “increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025.” Amazon isn’t the only major corporation to initiate such moves.
META CEO Mark Zuckerberg labeled “flattening” as a key part of a business’s restructuring in 2023. He claimed that asking middle managers to become individual contributors would assist in making the company’s information flow more efficient. And data shows this is what the incoming working generation — Gen Z – wants. A 2025 survey from recruitment company Robert Walters found close to 52% of Gen Z workers admitted that they would rather skip over being middle managers.
Seventy-two percent said they would much rather take an “individual route to progression” over supervising, as they see how the concept results in intense burnout, as demonstrated by their bosses.
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