Joy Covey was flying to an early morning analyst meeting for Amazon.com when it dawned on her something was missing. She had left her dress shoes on the plane. She needed a solution – and fast. She quickly scanned well-dressed women in the baggage claim area of the airport. Then she saw an acceptable pair worn by a woman who appeared to share her shoe size, or close enough. Covey offered the woman $120 in cash for the shoes on her feet. The woman refused, but was willing to sell her another pair from her suitcase. Problem solved.
That’s the kind of quick adaptation to circumstances and problem solving that defined an extremely successful career for Covey as CFO for the still-young and unproven Amazon. Covey took Amazon public and increased it value exponentially. She then went on to serve as chief strategy officer for the internet company.
Raised in San Mateo, California, Covey didn’t follow a conventional path. She dropped out of high school at 16, though she later received an equivalency diploma. At nineteen, she graduated from Fresno State University with the second-highest score in the nation on the accounting exam. She went on to earn joint degrees in business and law from Harvard.
When she joined Amazon in 1996, it had a scant 150 employees and $16 Million in sales. Five months after her arrival, they raised company revenue to $55 Million and her personal value skyrocketed.
Covey looked at problems in a new ways. The company routinely faced situations it had never seen because of its blazingly innovative business model. “Rather than asking ourselves, “How has this been done in the past? What’s the answer to this question?’ we said, “Where do we want to go and what are our goals?” Her team spent a lot of time thinking through problems in ways that were non-traditional, but base on its core corporate principles.
Under her leadership, Amazon sacrificed short-term profits in favour of stable, long-term value. She and her team were committed to building a sustainable company. “So we asked ourselves,” she recalls, “how do we structure our conversations with Wall Street from the very beginning, before we even go public?”
After all, innovation isn’t worth much if the solutions it creates aren’t enduring.
Covey had a successful career in Amazon. Unfortunately on September, 2013 she was killed in a fatal accident, leaving her 8-year-old son, Tyler.