Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Confessions of a Successful CIO: How the Best CIOs Tackle Their Toughest Business Challenges
    Confessions of a Successful CIO: How the Best CIOs Tackle Their Toughest Business Challenges
    Confessions of a Successful CIO: How the Best CIOs Tackle Their Toughest Business Challenges
    Ebook234 pages4 hours

    Confessions of a Successful CIO: How the Best CIOs Tackle Their Toughest Business Challenges

    By Dan Roberts, Brian Watson and Susan Cramm

    3/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Be the most effective CIO you can be—by learning from the best in the business

    Today's Chief Information Officers must be an entirely new breed of technology leader. With ever-changing demands from the business, and in an increasingly technology-centric business environment, CIOs must find game-changing innovations and process improvements that make a real impact on the bottom line. Business executives need their CIOs to be real partners—speaking the language of the business and donning their strategist caps—not just commodity managers. Those IT leaders who fail to break out of the order-taker, utility manager mold will, simply put, be looking for a new job.

    In Confessions of a Successful CIO: How the Best CIOs Tackle Their Toughest Business Challenges, current and future CIOs will gain invaluable perspectives from the stories of today's best IT leaders. These acclaimed leaders—each profiled in their own chapter—explain the toughest business decision they had to make, and how the outcome influenced and impacted their leadership style. These in-depth anecdotes take the reader inside some of the most challenging business climates imaginable and chronicle how these elite CIOs made the decisions that mattered.

    • Read detailed case studies of how some of the best CIOs have handled their most challenging business problems
    • Learn how the best CIOs anticipate changes to their business and respond—before the business comes knocking
    • Explore how these top-flight CIOs make critical decisions around strategy and IT to not only benefit their companies, but in some cases, to save them from becoming obsolete.
    • Analyze their perspectives on managing people, crises and balancing the risks and rewards of their "bet the farm" strategies

    Confessions of a Successful CIO is the new playbook for learning how to take risks, respond to crises, and create more value from IT. Each chapter presents a different challenge, giving present-day and future IT leaders the chance to examine, analyze and learn so that they can be just as successful as the CIOs they're reading about.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWiley
    Release dateMar 19, 2014
    ISBN9781118849286

    Read more from Dan Roberts

    Related to Confessions of a Successful CIO

    Titles in the series (19)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Business For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Lessons From A First-time CEO

      Jul 21, 2021

      Lessons From A First-time CEO
      5 min read

    • Article

      So, You Want To Be A CEO?

      Sep 1, 2018

      So, You Want To Be A CEO?
      10 min read

    • Article

      Leadership Forum: Making Digital Transformation A Reality

      Jan 1, 2018

      Glenda Crisp Senior Vice President and Chief Data Officer, TD Bank Group + Connie Bonello Associate Partner, Financial Services, IBM Canada IN MOST OF TODAY’S ORGANIZATIONS, data underpins every transaction, operation and interaction. And yet, the ab

      8 min read

    • Article

      Making The Most Of The Cloud

      Jul 8, 2021

      Making The Most Of The Cloud
      6 min read

    • Article

      Managing the Risks of Digital Lending

      Feb 18, 2022

      TECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN the crux of the Indian banking system and the advent of Covid-19 has fuelled the shift of business models from ‘physical’ to ‘digital’. The journey of innovation, which started with internet banking and digital means of payments,

      6 min read

    • Article

      Cloudy With No Chance Of Erp

      Nov 11, 2019

      ERP (enterprise resource planning) was born around the time the first ‘[Something] for Dummies’ book was published*. It’s typically inflexible, uncompromising software designed for large businesses, like banks, large corporations, manufacturing and s

      2 min read

    • Article

      Leading With Empathy

      Sep 1, 2020

      When some people hear the word empathy being used in a business context, they think ‘What does that have to do with business?’ How do you respond to that mindset? I would argue that empathy has everything to do with business. If you accept that innov

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Million Dollar Question

      May 22, 2018

      More than a decade ago, the metaphor “data is the new oil” shook the world and left organisations scrambling for ways on how they could translate it into tangible value for their business. While others already reaped and are reaping the benefits emer

      2 min read

    • Article

      Big-Picture Thinking

      Jan 1, 2024

      Big-Picture Thinking
      2 min read

    • Article

      WE ARE LIVING IN AN extraordinary time

      Oct 3, 2019

      “We are at the dawn of a deep transformation with historical dimensions creating the emergence of shifts in societal cognition. This imminent change will literally turn things on its head as we know it.” (Quote from the article: Beyond Collaborative

      2 min read

    • Article

      Creating And Leading A Future Ready Enterprise

      Apr 3, 2019

      As we head deeper into the year ahead, we strive to highlight the essential strategies and latest research studies that will enlighten and equip companies and their leaders to keep abreast with the advancements and stay ahead of the curve amongst dis

      2 min read

    • Article

      WHERE CAN YOUR Sense of Wonder Lead You?

      Jul 20, 2018

      In today’s business environment, what remains unchanged is that flicker of curiosity which fuels people’s imagination. And from that imagination, we see impressive results; we see leaders from bootstrapped startups to behemoth tech giants improve the

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Way of The Unicorn: From Start-Up to Scale-Up

      May 1, 2022

      THERE CAN BE NO DOUBT WE LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, ‘unicorns’ are privately held start-up companies with a value of over $1 billion. And despite the global pandemic, last year we saw more companies reach

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Confessions of a Successful CIO

    3/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Confessions of a Successful CIO - Dan Roberts

      Chapter 1

      The Anticipator: Filippo Passerini

      The weather in Athens, Greece, is pretty nice late in the year. At the very least, it’s a whole lot nicer there than in Cincinnati, Ohio.

      It was a Friday evening in September 2002. Filippo Passerini—then serving as the Athens-based vice president of marketing operations and corporate marketing team leader for Western Europe for Procter & Gamble (P&G)—got a call from corporate headquarters in Cincinnati. It was the morning, Eastern Standard Time.

      P&G’s second in command asked him about his wife and family, and how he was enjoying his assignment in Greece. Passerini thanked him and exchanged pleasantries, but after 20 minutes of idle chitchat, he knew something was up.

      What do you really want? Passerini asked the executive.

      The answer to this question was more complex. At the time, P&G was in the midst of an extremely complicated situation regarding their shared services organization. The company had decided to investigate opportunities to monetize the unit. But the deal was becoming too complex, and employees were frightened about their futures.

      Would Passerini have any problem curtailing his assignment in Greece sooner than expected to help fix the problem? How soon? Monday.

      Passerini was in a line-management role, another step in a deep rotation through P&G’s business—the kind of opportunity that, given two seconds to think about it, any aspiring C-level executive would drool over. He had a made a clear decision to see his assignment through—and to stay away from his background in IT for a few years to get a broader view of business leadership.

      The shared services project needed leadership, and Passerini knew it. He was far across the Atlantic, but word spread. Many of the 7,500 people in the organization were voicing heavyhearted concerns about their future.

      And Passerini and his family were reveling in their life in Athens. Yet there he was, on a plane back to Cincinnati that weekend, about to embark on a journey that would lead him to perhaps the most prestigious role of any information technology leader in the world.

      • • •

      Passerini, a native of Rome, Italy, began his corporate career with Procter & Gamble in November 1981. The 24-year-old systems analyst climbed the corporate ladder quickly, rising through the IT organization until being named vice president in 1997.

      He served in leadership capacities—in IT and various line-management functions—on four continents before taking the helm of P&G’s Global Business Services (GBS) division in 2003 and being appointed chief information officer the following year. Today he sits as group president, Global Business Services, and CIO of the $83 billion maker of some of the world’s most recognizable consumer brands.

      His long-term performance—particularly, his prowess for innovating and creating real business value—have garnered him more awards than he can probably count, including InformationWeek’s 2010 Chief of the Year and the inaugural Fisher-Hopper Prize for Lifetime Achievement in CIO Leadership from the University of California–Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

      But his ascendancy to that role began with that fateful phone call from Cincinnati in 2002.

      A few years earlier, Passerini was watching the IT industry turn on its head. The dot-com boom suddenly went bust. Start-ups, promising new technologies and capabilities to power the era of e-commerce, gobbled up millions upon millions in venture capital money, only to disappear seemingly a month later. Jobs disappeared just as quickly, setting the United States off toward its most turbulent economic decade in more than 50 years.

      But there was a silver lining for some: Spending on IT infrastructure and services was projected to rise at a steady clip.

      A. G. Lafley, P&G’s acclaimed two-time chairman and CEO, and Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto (and longtime adviser to Lafley), document this period succinctly in their recent book, Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works (Harvard Business Press, 2013). As those demands grew, in came a new crop of providers—both domestic and foreign—called business process outsourcers (BPOs). As the post-crash dust cleared, rapidly digitizing companies were faced with decisions on how much to use BPOs, which BPO partner to select, and how best to do so, Lafley and Martin explained. It wasn’t easy; the implications of a poor choice could be millions of dollars in extra costs and untold headaches down the line.

      In 1999, P&G created its GBS organization, essentially pulling together under one umbrella the units it thought could be outsourced. These included IT, facilities management, and employee services. Three years later, the company evaluated three options for the department’s future: keep it in-house, spin it off into a separate BPO, or outsource most of it to one of the active players in the BPO arena.

      There was no clear or easy decision. Many at P&G saw an arduous path ahead. Passerini saw an opportunity.

      • • •

      One of the most important motivators for Passerini in this project was the notion of turning a problem into an opportunity. It was something he experienced—the hard way—10 years into what is now his 31-year tenure at P&G.

      From his start in Italy, Passerini went to Turkey as a manager of management systems. He moved from there, in 1991, to the United Kingdom, where P&G had its second-largest IT operation, as well as its second-largest profit center. In the United Kingdom, Passerini had to step up what he called his broken English to the Queen’s English. At the same time, most of the team members he was overseeing there were older than he was.

      Then P&G decided it would roll out a new order-to-cash system across Europe. The system was the backbone—the veritable nerve center—of everything P&G does, from orders to pricing to payment to the biggest of all: shipping. If P&G can’t ship its products, P&G products don’t land on store shelves. If P&G products aren’t on the store shelves, P&G isn’t

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1