The CFO’s impact on innovation was a strong theme at this year’s Annual Meeting on June 11 in Washington D.C. Setting the tone was the opening discussion with Sean Boyle, CFO at Amazon Web Services.
Amazon Web Services’ charter is to not only help its customers build their own innovations on its cloud platform, but to keep innovating new products and services for its customers. Prior to taking the helm as CFO in 2015, Boyle served as CFO at Apptio, and has held other finance and IT leadership positions at Amazon and Ford Motor Co.
At the event, Boyle shared his philosophy about what he calls “two-pizza teams,” the diversity of skills on his finance team, and why his goal is to be a “CFO-go,” not a “CFO-no.”Read on for five takeaways from the interview with Boyle, conducted onstage by Dow Jones & Company CFO Christina Van Tassell. When looking to innovate, Boyle recommends that organizations invest in small teams—meaning a team shouldn’t be able to consume more than two pizzas in one sitting, he said .
Through the discussion, Boyle used the word “invention” frequently—a testament to the innovative mindset he tries to promote throughout his organization. “What we’ve observed is having this rich composition of skill sets has been absolutely necessary both to support our business and to support the invention that we have to undertake to maintain our ability to scale.
The PR/FAQ serves as a “reference artifact that maintains a very high level of aspiration for what we will continue to strive for over time,” Boyle said. “That adds maturity and objectives to these investments in great ideas.”