Microsoft named General Electric’s former chief financial officer, Carolina Dybeck Happe, as its new executive vice president and chief operations officer.
Dybeck Happe will join the company’s senior leadership team, reporting to Satya Nadella, according to a memo from the Microsoft CEO to employees Thursday morning. The move comes as Microsoft continues to reposition itself both internally and externally to capitalize on the rise of artificial intelligence.
“I’ve come to admire Carolina through her work as a global business leader, including most recently her role in leading GE’s historic turnaround,” Nadella wrote in the memo. “She is recognized for her ability to drive transformational change at scale while delivering improved customer experiences and faster time to value.”
The turnaround of GE included a lean manufacturing overhaul and strategic asset sales, shifting the company from a conglomerate at risk of bankruptcy into three independent, publicly traded entities.
In the new role at Microsoft, Nadella wrote, Dybeck Happe “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.”
Microsoft hasn’t had an executive with the COO title since the departure of Kevin Turner in 2016. Nadella called Dybeck Happe’s position a newly created role, and his description of the position differs sharply from Turner’s focus on sales and Microsoft’s competitive positioning under then-CEO Steve Ballmer.
Dybeck Happe announced her plan to leave GE last year and purchased a home in the Seattle region in June, according to a report at the time by the Puget Sound Business Journal. She worked previously in financial leadership roles at companies including A.P. Moller – Maersk and ASSA ABLOY Group in Sweden and Denmark.
As part the new role, Nadella said these groups will now report to Dybeck Happe: the Commerce + Ecosystems organization in Cloud + AI, the Microsoft Digital organization in Experiences + Devices, and the Microsoft Business Operations organization in the company’s finance division.
