Michael Arena

Vice President Talent and Development Amazon Web Services

Michael Arena is the Vice President of Talent & Development at Amazon Web Service. He also serves as a faculty member in Penn’s Masters in Organizational Dynamics program and acts as a design thinking coach within the Stanford School. He was recently nominated to the Thinkers50 Radar class of 2020 for his work on network roles in creating adaptive organizations and his research on networks won the 2017 Walker Prize from People + Strategy. Prior to joining Amazon, Arena was the Chief Talent Officer for General Motors Corporation where he launched GM2020, a grass roots initiative designed to enable employees to positively disrupt the way they work, which was highlighted in Fast Company and Fortune Magazine. This initiative and others are highlighted in his book, Adaptive Space: How GM and Other Companies are Positively Disrupting Themselves and Transforming into Agile Organizations. Arena also spent two years as a visiting scientist with MIT’s Media Lab researching human networks and served as SVP of Leadership Development at Bank of America.