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

PREFACE

Welcome to Confessions of a Successful CIO. Early warning: This isn't your normal book on IT leadership.

Most books in this category focus on a theory—very smart people espousing their ideas about the CIO role, how it will change, what current and aspiring IT leaders must do to succeed. Those books are valuable, and they provide an inordinate amount of useful, actionable ideas for today's IT leaders.

We might have our own ideas about those things, but we thought it best to leave the theory to smarter folks. We came up with a different approach: Find the best CIOs in the United States—arguably, in the world—and tell their stories.

What do we mean by “stories?” It's relatively simple: We asked these respected, acclaimed IT leaders to walk us through the toughest business challenge they've ever faced, how they tackled it, and what they learned from it. The stories we heard—and that you're about to read—are, simply put, awe-inspiring. We've been working with or writing about IT leadership for more than 35 years combined, but the stories in this book were beyond what we expected—and will continue to amaze for a very long time.

All that said, the hardest task was selecting those CIOs. We may have years of experience interfacing with them, but we knew we couldn't take on such a task alone. There's another piece of magic in this book: To pick these CIOs, we called on some of the most prominent thought leaders in the CIO universe to help us pick our nine.

Meet our expert panel: ...