Mike George

In Amazon Unbound (Brad Stone), Mike George is the Amazon executive who reorganized the Alexa effort into two-pizza teams under a “north star” document. Jeff Bezos is described as having deployed George — who had what Bezos called a “fungible” energy — “like a firefighter to douse the flames of chaos and instill order” across divisions including human resources, marketplace, payments, and later Bezos’s private philanthropy, the Day 1 Academies Fund. He led the Alexa unit until 2017, when Tom Taylor took over and set out to “find all the places that customers are suffering from our organizational structure” — a reaction to the product complexity that George’s decentralized many-team structure had produced.

Where this appears

• Amazon Unbound — the “fungible,” firefighter-style executive Bezos sent in to instill order across HR, marketplace, payments, philanthropy, and Alexa; ran Alexa via two-pizza teams until 2017.