2 Black executives leave Amazon amid changes in leadership

Two of Amazon’s most senior Black executives are departing the company, according to four people familiar with the change, leaving Amazon without any Black leaders on its senior leadership team, which includes more than two dozen executives responsible for running the company.

Amazon confirmed the departures Tuesday shortly after the company announced a new head of its retail and operations business.

Alicia Boler Davis, the senior vice president who oversees Amazon’s fulfillment operations, and David Bozeman, the vice president overseeing its trucking operations, are both leaving, the people said. Neither immediately responded to requests for comment. Amazon had no further comment.

On Tuesday, Andy Jassy, who became CEO of Amazon almost a year ago, named Doug Herrington, a 17-year veteran of the company, as the new CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores. He is filling a role similar to one held since early last year by Dave Clark, who was the architect of the company’s warehouse operations. Clark is leaving Amazon at the end of the month — after 23 years at the company — to become the CEO of Flexport, a logistics startup.

In an email to employees announcing the change, Jassy said Herrington was “a builder of great teams and brings substantial retail, grocery, demand generation, product development and Amazon experience to bear.”

The company’s vast operations, including warehouses, trucks and delivery networks that fulfill and ship customer orders, will be managed by John Felton, another longtime veteran who had most recently run the company’s logistics and delivery operations.

Boler Davis joined Amazon in 2019 from General Motors, where she was once seen as a potential successor to the auto company’s CEO, Mary Barra. In 2020, she joined Amazon’s “S-team” of senior leaders, which at the time had no Black members. Employees had voiced concern about the lack of diversity in that elite group. She was promoted to senior vice president at Amazon last year.

Bozeman joined Amazon in 2017 from Caterpillar and ran operations that hauled cargo among buildings in its growing warehouse infrastructure.

Amazon said it doubled the number of Black employees in the United States at the director and vice president levels in 2020, and by almost 70% more in 2021. About 70% of Amazon’s U.S. workforce, largely its hourly workers that power its operations, are not white.

Felton wrote in an email to staff that Boler Davis and Bozeman had “decided to explore new opportunities outside Amazon,” and he thanked them for “their remarkable contributions to the company and our employees.”

Jassy’s note also said that in addition to Felton, Herrington would have eight other direct reports, including leaders responsible for the international retail business, health care ventures and a new program to let merchants offer Amazon’s Prime shipping benefits to customers on their own websites. Eight men and one woman will report to Herrington, according to the memo.