Management Turnover as Change Agent

Thursday, July 17, 2008

CEO Watch - Hector Ruiz, AMD, Update 7

It's official and about time, AMD's CEO, Hector Ruiz, is finally out. We have been expecting this change for a long time (see earlier blogs).

AMD's Board of Directors after the company announced another disappointing quarter elected Dirk Meyer an employee of the firm since 1996 and the company's president and chief operating officer as Ruiz's replacement as CEO. Meyer was supposedly being groomed to be Ruiz's successor but the change took far too long. Ruiz will become executive chairman of AMD and executive chairman of the board. According to a story by Anton Gonsalves for Information Week,
Board member Robert Palmer said in a statement announcing the executive shuffle that Meyer's election to CEO is "the final phase of a two-year succession plan developed and implemented jointly by AMD's board of directors and executive team. "Dirk's extensive experience as a business leader and his notable engineering accomplishments before and during his 12 years at AMD make him ideally suited to build upon the foundation Hector created and lead AMD," Palmer said. Ruiz praised Meyer as a "gifted leaders who possesses the right skills and experience to continue driving AMD and the industry forward. I am placing the company in excellent hands."
Meyer has an extremely difficult job ahead of him. AMD continues to fall behind Intel and is struggling to find a strategy to turn itself around. According to the Information Week story Gonsalves writes,
AMD is in the process of trying to reshape its business and differentiate its product line by integrating the graphics technology obtained through the 2006 acquisition of ATI Technologies with AMD's general-purpose x86 microprocessors. "My immediate priority is to work with the leadership team to accelerate this transformation," Meyer said.
Keep a close eye on the firm.

For more:

No comments: