Delivering The Goods with Graham Allison

Outline

In this episode we take a dive into the life of an executive who navigated a successful tenure with the Royal Navy to ship goods and onboard new talent for one of the World's largest and most successful corporations.

Graham Allison is a down to earth, straight talking Glaswegian who, following a tour of duty within various Amazon fulfilment centres, saw him take charge of one of Europe's largest. The Dunfermline site's 3,000 staff handle the task of managing pretty much all product returns for the UK and its fair share of order fulfillments from a facility that can probably be seen from one of Mr Bezo's rockets as it orbits the earth.

We explore the lessons that can be learnt in the commercial world from forces training and the increasing customer and employee demands faced by this phenomenon of 20th century retailing.

Graham certainly delivered plenty for us to unpack in this neatly wrapped episode. You could say its a "Prime" podcast in this series or perhaps its best just to say put it in your pod basket and check it out.

Bio – Graham Allison

Regional Director UK Operations, Director level leader of large-scale operations, Amazon

Graham heads up one of Amazon’s largest fulfilment centres in Europe which understandably presents a ready supply of interesting challenges. It’s just as well he enjoys tackling big problems and working at the intersection of people and technology. The Amazon Fulfilment Centre in Dunfermline has thousands of employees and unsurprisingly a high level of complexity requiring high performing teams who enjoy growth at scale.

Prior to joining Amazon, Graham served for five years with the Royal Navy managing multiple active operational deployments and winning an award for his performance as a Warfare Officer. He has a BA Hons in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science and an MBA from Edinburgh University, He also graduated from Amazon’s 3-year executive fast-track scheme in just 14 months. Now leading a team of more than 2000, fulfilling millions of orders a week, Graham has developed a reputation for nailing big projects and also managing to have some fun in the process.

Website: Amazon Dunfermline