Coca-Cola Bottling Investments Group CPO quits

Annella Heytens, who was working with Coca-Cola as the Chief People Officer of their Bottling Investments Group has stepped down from her role. After working with the company for 1.5 years, she has decided to join Amazon Web Services. She will be reporting to Ian Wilson, Vice President and Global Head of HR of Amazon Web Services.  

In her new role as the Head of HR of Amazon Web Services in Asia Pacific, Japan and China, she will be responsible for setting the people strategy for the region as well as de-risking and mitigating risks in a fast paced environment, nurture and building a strong culture and employee experience. 

Talking exclusively to People Matters about her stint with Coca-Cola and her new journey with Amazon Web Services, she said, “Coca-Cola is a fast moving consumer goods company and I had little experience in this industry when I joined.  I learned a lot about working in a B2C environment.  It works very differently than technology and services which is where I came from.” 

She added, “However, the parallels in terms of opportunity between what AWS  and Coca-Cola are similar.  AWS is trying to move enterprises into a cloud environment where majority of companies are still in on-premise environments.  Likewise, Coca-Cola is trying to expand beyond sparkling beverages to other categories like coffee, tea, juices, water, energy, dairy, istonic, etc. where market share is still very low.  So I can apply some of what I learned into my new role.”

 In her new role at Amazon Web Services, she will be focusing on five key initiatives.  

• Supporting the rapid growth and expansion of AWS in the region in terms of business and people.
• Ensure the Amazon culture and values that made Amazon one of the top companies in the world remains particularly in a fast growing environment.
• Winning the war for talent in the cloud space where there are a lot of players all vying for the same talent.
• Growing capability as an HR function to anticipate the future of AWS, not just planning for the right talent today but the right talent with the right capabilities in 3+ years. 
•  Executing our strategy and our people strategy to remain the number one player in the market.