- Amazon has added the first Black member to its prestigious S team, a group of executives advising CEO Jeff Bezos.
- Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon’s vice president for global customer prosecution, joins the S team – along with John Felton and Dave Treadwell – as consumer chief Jeff Wilke leaves the company.
- Boler Davis joined Amazon last year after serving as top lieutenant at GM.
- Visit the Business Insider website for more stories.
Amazon has added three new members to its elite “S-team”, including the first Black member to be added to the prestigious group that CEO Jeff Bezos advises.
Jeff Wilke, consumer chief and second-in-command at Amazon, announced on Friday that he plans to leave the company in the first quarter of 2021. As part of the change are John Felton, Dave Treadwell, and Alicia Boler Davis added to the S team. Felton currently leads worldwide delivery services for Amazon, while Treadwell is head of Amazon’s eCommerce Foundation.
Boler Davis is Amazon’s vice president of global customer tracking. She joined the company in 2019 after serving as head of global manufacturing at GM, where she reported directly to CEO Mary Barra. Boler Davis has overseen production at GM for three years – before that she led the company with connected cars with connected cars, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“While she was at General Motors, Alicia and I were introduced by a mutual friend and agreed to have lunch,” Wilke said Friday in an email to employees. “We beat it right away. I was so impressed with her leadership experience, technical acumen, and especially her dedication to the workers on the store floor … I was sure we shared the same instincts.”
Boler Davis is the fourth female executive to be added to the S team and the first Black member. Short for senior team, the S team consisted of 22 leaders alongside Bezos spread across various aspects of the Amazon business. With the departure of Wilke and the addition of three new members, the S team has expanded to 25 total members, including AWS boss Andy Jassy, who reports directly to Bezos, and Dave Clark, who plays the role of Wilke takes over.
According to Eugene Kim of Business Insider, the S team meets regularly to discuss big ideas at the company, but those meetings have been frequent, even daily, during the coronavirus pandemic.
The addition of Boler Davis to the team marks a major step for Amazon in terms of improving diversity. While more than a quarter of Amazon’s total workforce of 840,000 people is Black, employees told the New York Times in June that the company needs to do more to add diversity to the executive ranks and tackle racism in its follow-up centers .
Amazon publicly declared its support for the Black Lives Matter movement after protests broke out across the nation in June following the assassination of George Floyd. The public support caused a wave of racist emails sent directly to Bezos, which he posted on Instagram, describing those customers as the type he was “happy to lose.”
