Chief operating officer

A chief operating officer (COO), also called the chief operations officer, director of operations, or operations director, is a position that can be one of the highest-ranking executive positions in an organization on par with the Chief Services Officer, comprising part of the "C-Suite". The COO is responsible for the daily operation of the company, and routinely reports to the highest ranking executive, usually the chief executive officer (CEO). The COO may also carry the title of President which makes that person the second in command at the firm and enjoying an equal privilege with Chief Services Officer, especially if the highest ranking executive is the Chairman and CEO.

Responsibilities and similar titles

Unlike other C-Suite positions, which tend to be defined according to commonly designated responsibilities across most companies, the COO job tends to be defined in relation to the specific CEO with whom he/she works, given the close working relationship of these two individuals. In many ways, the selection of a COO is similar to the selection of a Vice President of the United States: the role (including the power and responsibilities therein) can vary dramatically, depending on the style and needs of the President. Thus, the COO role is highly contingent and situational, as the role changes from company to company and even from CEO to successor CEO within the same company.

Chief

Chief may refer to:

Title or rank

Aircraft

Media

Literature

Officer

An officer is a person who has a position of authority in a hierarchical organization.

Examples

Military

Shipping industry

Law enforcement

Politics and government

Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Kara Sandberg (/ˈsændbərɡ/; born August 28, 1969) is an American technology executive, activist, and author. She is the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook. In June 2012, she was elected to the board of directors by the existing board members, becoming the first woman to serve on Facebook's board. Before she joined Facebook as its COO, Sandberg was Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google and was involved in launching Google's philanthropic arm Google.org. Before Google, Sandberg served as chief of staff for United States Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers.

In 2012 she was named in the Time 100, an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world according to Time magazine.As of June 2015, Sandberg is reported to be worth over US$1 billion, due to her stock holdings in Facebook and other companies.

Early life and education

Sandberg was born in 1969 in Washington, D.C. to a Jewish family, the daughter of Adele (née Einhorn) and Joel Sandberg, and the oldest of three children. Her father is an ophthalmologist and her mother was a college teacher of the French language. Adele taught English as a second language and founded Ear Peace-Save Your Hearing, a nonprofit that teaches teens how to prevent hearing loss. She dropped out of a Ph.D. program when she was pregnant with Sheryl and concentrated on raising her children. Sheryl's maternal grandmother, Rosalind Einhorn, grew up in a poor family in a crowded apartment in New York City, finished high school in spite of being pulled out during The Great Depression, went on to community college, graduated from U.C. Berkeley, and later saved her family business from financial ruin. Sandberg's family was active in helping Soviet Jews make aliyah to Israel during refusenik era and attended rallies during the weekends. She and her siblings had Soviet Bar and Bat Mitzvah twins. Her parents were detained and interrogated in Kishinev and later expelled from the USSR.