The CIO Paradox: Battling the Contradictions of IT Leadership

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The Corporate Board Paradox

I probably get more calls and e-mail from CIOs interested in sitting on corporate boards than I do on any other single topic. Despite evidence to the contrary, I am actually a nice person, and I like to be encouraging and give good news. But the fact is, very few corporate boards appoint CIOs. In fact, I was recently talking to an executive recruiter friend of mine (we recruiters do have friends, you know) who runs a practice focused exclusively on board placements. He told me that in his more than thirty years of recruiting board members, never once has he been asked to recruit a CIO.

This is a real paradox. We all know stories where a data security breach has wrought havoc on a company. We’ve seen as many situations ...