Senior Vice President of Amazon to speak about leadership

Jeff WilkeOn April 18, Jeff Wilke, a senior vice president with Amazon, will give the final address in this academic year's "Leadership in a Technological World" lecture series at Princeton University.

The title of the talk is "Tough Choices: Leadership Is All About the Long Run." It will begin at 4:30 p.m. in the Friend Center Convocation Room; a reception will follow. The event is free and open to the public.

Wilke joined Amazon in 1999 as vice president and general manager of operations. Previously he was with AlliedSignal (now Honeywell), where he was vice-president and general manager of Pharmaceutical Fine Chemicals, a $200 million global business. An in-depth profile of Wilke appears in a 2002 book on leadership by Warren G. Bennis and Robert J. Thomas titled Geeks & Geezers: How Era, Values, and Defining Moments Shape Leaders.

Wilke has served as Amazon's senior vice president, North American Retail, since January 2007. From January 2002 until December 2006, he was senior vice president, Worldwide Operations. After graduating from Princeton with a degree in chemical engineering in 1989, Wilke received his MBA and master's in chemical engineering from MIT's Leaders For Manufacturing program.

The lecture series is sponsored by Princeton's Center for Innovation in Engineering Education and underwritten by the William Pierson Field Lectureship fund. Other speakers in this year's series were Norman Augustine (see story), the former chairman and chief executive officer of Lockheed Martin Corp.; David Crane (see story), the chief executive officer and president of NRG Energy; and Anne Mulcahy, chief executive officer and chairman of Xerox Corp.