Meet Microsoft’s New COO, Former GE Star CFO

Hello. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said he is raising the bar for operational excellence at the company. So the tech giant created a new chief operating officer position and hired a Fortune 500 CFO to fill the role.

Carolina Dybeck Happe is joining Microsoft as executive vice president and chief operating officer. She will become a member of the senior leadership team reporting to Nadella. Dybeck Happe was most recently at GE as senior vice president and chief financial officer from 2020 to September 2023. She remained senior vice president at GE for a period of time to facilitate the transition.

“I have come to admire Carolina through her work as a global business leader, including most recently her role in leading GE’s historic turnaround,” Nadella said in a blog post published Sept. 12.

During his tenure at GE, Dybeck Happe worked with GE CEO Larry Culp to break up the conglomerate and breathe new life into it. They successfully created three independent, premier companies: GE HealthCare, GE Vernova (home to the energy portfolio), and GE Aerospace. “Under Larry’s leadership, we worked to transform one of the most iconic companies in the world,” Dybeck Happe said last year.

“Today, she brings her ‘lifelong passion for technology’ and global experience to Microsoft to drive transformation at scale,” Dybeck Happe said in a LinkedIn post last week. “When I first spoke with Satya Nadella about Microsoft’s AI transformation, I immediately saw the incredible opportunity for AI to benefit every aspect of its business as a catalyst for innovation, growth, and value creation.”

The Commerce and Ecosystems organizations, Microsoft’s digital IT team, and the Microsoft Business Operations organization in Finance will all now report to Dybeck Happe. As COO, she will most likely collaborate frequently with Amy Hood, Microsoft’s longtime CFO.

Over the past decade, about 35% of large companies have employed a COO role, according to executive search firm Crist Kolder Associates’ midyear volatility report. But by 2022, that number has jumped to 39.6%. And by the first half of 2024, about 35.9% of companies have a COO. The findings are based on data from 671 Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies. The COO role appears to be making a comeback.

Some CFOs have added the COO role to their roles, including Block CFO Amrita Ahuja and Macy’s CFO Adrian Mitchell. And Target CFO Michael Fiddelke will take on the COO role in full once the company selects a new CFO. So why are companies turning to CFOs to fill COO roles?

The primary role of an operations manager is to ensure “that trains are running efficiently, and one of the most reliable measures of efficiency is financial health,” Scott W. Simmons, co-managing partner at Crist Kolder, told me. Operational efficiency and financial health go hand in hand, he said.

At Microsoft, Dybeck Happe will need to draw on her extensive experience to drive continuous improvement of operational processes and accelerate AI transformation across the company. And all signs point to her being ready.

Sheryl Estrada
[email protected]

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com