That spring, with Amazon sprinting toward its profitability goal, Wilke shut down McDonough and fired four hundred and fifty full-time employees. Closing the facility wouldn’t solve Amazon’s problems; in fact, the reduction in capacity put even more pressure on Amazon’s other fulfillment centers. The company was already running at capacity over the holidays and sales were growing at more than 20 percent a year. Now Amazon had no choice but to master the complexity of its own systems and get more out of the investments it had already made. Wilke had
what if each team had independant resources and had to answer for their own product P&L?
