Define Your Own Role Microsoft CFO Amy Hood
Amy Hood is the executive vice president and chief financial officer at Microsoft and is responsible for leading the company’s worldwide finance organization, including business operations, acquisitions, treasury, tax planning, global real estate, accounting and reporting, internal audit and investor relations. Hood joined Microsoft in 2002, and through her tenure with the company has advanced global momentum in cloud and helped digitally transform the company. She is deeply involved in the company’s operations, as well as the strategy development and overall execution of the company’s successful acquisitions of LinkedIn, GitHub and Nuance Communications.
For the past nine years as EVP and CFO, she has been a strategic partner to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, propelling long-term financial growth, championing culture and driving corporate initiatives, including Microsoft’s climate, affordable housing and racial equity commitments, that have bolstered the company’s broader ecosystem. She has also served on the board of directors of 3M since 2017. Hood earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Duke University and a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard University.
“I define my role as making Microsoft a place our customers, partners, and employees want to pick every day,” Hood said of her focus as EVP and CFO at Microsoft. “If you do that, you also create a culture that you want.” “You can rewrite what the job is about,” Hood said, “And you can bring what you have to it and then surround yourself with really awesome people who bring things that you don’t have.”
She defines the job as “pairing aspiration with doing.” While the role is traditionally seen as metrics-driven, Hood says she doesn’t separate the numbers from the goals they’re meant to measure. “Metrics were just an expression of the change we wanted to have,” she added, from shifting company culture to launching new products.
“Everyday is a chance to deliver on those goals,” Hood said, and for her that opportunity begins on a personal level. Think about yourself first, she says, and what you can do today to create clarity, generate energy, and deliver to your team and partners. “The more you model that mindset as a leader, the more people aspire to do that too,” Hood said.
And that attitude extends to the Microsoft leadership team. Hood said she feels “very lucky” that CEO Satya Nadella and the rest of the executives work together in such a collaborative manner.
“We each work hard on what we own and feel accountable to each other for those outcomes,” she said, “and that’s powerful.”