Wes Arens
- Former Amazon Executive, Digital Advisor, and Strategist
- Advises CEOs planning or facing digital disruption
- Expert in purpose-built digital business models that transform how work gets done in the 21st century
Travels From
Washington
Wes Arens Speaker Biography
Wes Arens is a trusted partner to both CEO’s and Boards when it comes to growing revenue and creating transformative digital strategies based on Amazon’s principles of leadership and customer innovation. Wes has dedicated his career to successfully guiding companies like Georgia Pacific, Iron Mountain, Boeing, Regence Blue Cross, and Microsoft. Currently, Mr. Arens is the Co-Founder of Digital Brand Insights, a performance improvement advisory service to third-party marketplace sellers and vendors on Amazon, WalMart, and Wayfair. In addition, he continues to serve as a Senior Advisor to the global performance improvement firm Alvarez & Marsal; where he led their digital strategy practice as Managing Director. He is also a Senior Advisor at Rossman Partners with his former Amazon colleague, John Rossman, the best selling author of The Amazon Way series which includes “Think Like Amazon, 50 ½ ideas to become a digital leader”.
Previously, Mr. Arens was Vice President Merchant Services and Sales at Amazon, responsible for Amazon's enterprise services business that provided Amazon’s e-commerce capabilities such as online merchandising, fulfillment, payments, and customer service as an outsourced service to other retailers. His team included enterprise direct sales, channels, alliances, and partnerships.
Prior to Amazon, Mr. Arens was an SVP at Syncra Systems, a startup acquired by Oracle focused on enabling B2B supply chain promotional collaboration between very large retailers and consumer brands using the internet.
Mr. Arens’ dynamic career started at IBM, serving in various sales management roles during IBM's historic transformation from a hardware company to a services company which included a role as IBM’s Northeast Regional Business Unit Executive. Following his success in this role, he was given responsibility for IBM’s global B2B marketplace initiatives on special assignment reporting to IBM’s CFO.
Think Like Amazon about — The Future of Your Industry
What is the future of your industry? It is a question that leaders must ask themselves often. But what are the right questions to ask, what metrics should be used, how is our industry going to be disrupted? All of these questions will be answered by former Amazon Executive Wes Arens. Wes was Vice President of Merchant Services with Amazon.com, where he oversaw the commercialization of Amazon's e-commerce platform and business process outsourcing. Working closely with leading merchants to provide e-commerce capabilities that leveraged Amazon's world-class website technologies, customer service, order fulfillment and online merchandising. Arens will propose several aspects of your industry which will likely change and leave audiences with strategies, tools, and questions to help create this future.
Rock Solid Disruptive Business Models
Today’s most successful companies and organizations have been able to either create waves of innovation or ride the waves of disruption to growth. Are there any similarities in strategy? Or lessons to be learned on how they leverage their resources? As operator and current advisor to some of today’s top brands (Amazon, Microsoft, and Boeing), Wes helps organizations create these waves by formulating their own disruptive business models. In this keynote he will help you identify what assets that can be leveraged for growth, as well as share ways to connect with your customers of tomorrow.
The Art of Failing Forward
Drawing on his over 30 years’ experience of being in the board room, and C Suite positions within some of the most iconic corporations, Wes Arens has seen both a lot of success and failure. Leaving the question, what is to be learned from not only your company’s failure, but other organizations as well. Using examples from his time at Amazon and IBM, along with direct consulting work with companies like Georgia Pacific and Microsoft, Wes pulls the curtain back in this keynote to share the lessons that can be learned from organizational failures, along with how they can be used as a catalyst for innovation.
