Bezos requires some of his S-team members to mentor him.
A number of S-team executives, at some point in their careers, became Bezos’s technical advisors, more informally known as “shadows.
Early in Amazon’s history, Bezos would mentor a few select executives, but the effort wasn’t paying off as much as he hoped. So he selected Andy Jassy, a Harvard MBA with no technical background, as his first full-time shadow. Jassy eventually helped build and now runs AWS, the largest cloud service business in the world—an amazing accomplishment for someone with a non-tech background.
From that point on, the technical advisor program became an integral part of Amazon’s culture, and over the years, Bezos has put a string of successful executives through the program.
