Microsoft has announced a new addition to its senior leadership team this week. In a post on its official blog, CEO Satya Nadella revealed that the company has hired Carolina Dybeck Happe as its latest executive vice president and Chief Operations Officer.
Nadella stated that the Chief Operations Officer role has been newly created and that Happe will report directly to him as part of its Senior Leadership Team. Nappe previously worked as the Chief Financial Officer of GE for four years. During her time there, the company split itself off into three publicly traded companies.
In his blog post, Nadella said he was an admirer of Happe"s and named her "a global business leader." He added:
She is recognized for her ability to drive transformational change at scale while delivering improved customer experiences and faster time to value. Carolina will partner with the SLT to help us drive continuous business process improvement across all our organizations and accelerate our company-wide AI transformation, increasing value to customers and partners.
Nadella added that several Microsoft divisions, including the "Commerce + Ecosystems organization in Cloud + AI, the Microsoft Digital organization in Experiences + Devices, and the Microsoft Business Operations organization in Finance," will report directly to Heppe.
Microsoft has not had a person with the title of Chief Operations Officer for a number of years. The last person who held that title was Kevin Turner, who worked in that role at the company from 2005 to 2016. Before his departure, Turner was reportedly a major possibility to be Microsoft"s CEO after Steve Balmer departed Microsoft, but in the end, Nadella was picked to lead the company.
It will be interesting to see what Heppe, an outsider who was brought into the company, will do at Microsoft under this new role.