When Alicia Boler Davis, a former senior leader at Amazon, left the retail giant last summer, she made an unexpected move.
After departing her post as senior vice president of global customer fulfillment, a job she held through the rush of pandemic demand, she took over as CEO of Alto, a prescription delivery startup. The more obvious path for Boler Davis—who also spent nearly 25 years at GM, where she became the head of global manufacturing and labor relations—would have put her in the corner office at a Fortune 500 company. But she sought a different kind of challenge. “I wanted to do something more impactful and transformational,” she told Fortune.
Still, Boler Davis wields power at one of the world’s most influential companies: JPMorgan Chase, where she became an independent director last month. She spoke to Fortune about leading through the uncertainties of today’s global business environment and takeaways from Silicon Valley Bank's failure.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Fortune: Why were you drawn to the JPMorgan board?
Davis: JPMorgan provides diverse financial services that impact many communities, businesses, and individuals. It believes in leveraging technology to improve services for customers, and it's an innovative company. That aligned with me. The overall values of the company also aligned with my personal values. So I hope to bring my diverse background—and 30 years of experience in complex, regulated environments—to help JPMorgan as it moves forward.
What’s on your mind as you join the board?
Understanding what the risks are in the company and the macroeconomic risks. That's where I'm spending time. How might some geopolitical risks impact the company? What are some of the worst-case scenarios? Do we have plans around that?
You were a director at General Mills for three years before this. Does your board experience affect how you lead at Alto?
It does. Once you have board experience, you think about what you should be doing from a governance perspective or risk perspective, and you understand audit. At General Mills, I was the chair of the corporate responsibility committee, so I think about that as well.
What are your key challenges at Alto Pharmacy?
At Alto, the key for me is making sure we're clear on our strategy, where we're going to focus, and then being agile enough to make adjustments as needed. It's also important that we communicate to our employees where we are, what's going well, where we need to make changes, and that we see around corners. Employees are focused on their day-to-day. As leaders, we are responsible for discussing how we’re considering the risks that we see and those we don't see.
I’m using that word 'risk' a lot because I think that's a big part of your job as a CEO, to understand and mitigate the macro and internal risks.
How do you prepare for risks that you don’t see?
SVB was our bank. So far, we have not had any significant impact and we don't anticipate having any, but it was very, very scary for a while. Once you see an event like SVB’s failure, that should inform your risk framework. It's just like the pandemic: I don’t think anyone saw it coming, but you learn from that. You see other risks that you hadn’t captured before.
First, you have to have a framework to start with because if you're not aware of and managing through the risks you know, it's going to be so much harder when unexpected things happen.
Lila MacLellan
lila.maclellan@fortune.com
@lilamaclellan
