When the Covid pandemic upended Amazon’s operations—and the entire world in 2020—Udit Madan was tasked with a crucial side job: to figure out how to acquire hundreds of thousands of masks from overseas for Amazon warehouse workers, and help get the employee vaccine program off the ground.
At the time, Madan was a fast-rising Amazon vice president in his early 30s—likely one of the youngest out of hundreds with that same title inside the tech giant. But still he had no specific experience in what he was being tasked with, especially amid a level of chaos he had not experienced before.
