The man who built Amazon’s delivery machine

As of August, according to Morgan Stanley research, Amazon was delivering 46% of US packages bought on its platform and is now shipping 2.5 billion packages a year, compared with 3 billion for FedEx and 4.7 billion for UPS. Some analysts believe the delivery machine Clark has built could one day become an entirely new business and eventually end UPS’s and FedEx’s primacy. — Reuters

Shortly after being named Amazon.com Inc’s global logistics chief in 2013, Dave Clark held a conference call with his new reports. During the meet-and-greet, according to a person on the call, Clark described his early-career habit of lurking in the shadows of Amazon warehouses and scoping out slackers he could fire, which earned him the nickname The Sniper.

Clark speaks in a monotone and is hard to read, but the message was clear enough: The new boss wanted his underlings to know that he will let little stand in the way of ensuring that customers get their orders on time.