From CIO to Boardroom: Ron Blahnik on Building Future-Ready Tech Leaders | Top Innovator Series

Thank you so much for having me.

Well, making choices, remaining focused and remembering that it's a journey, not just a destination. And so, you'll make many, many choices throughout your career that you may begin to question, but they all lead someplace. And one thing that it leads to is wisdom and experience. All those things are applicable no matter what role you take, no matter what organization you work in. The idea of learning, curiosity, those are the things that lead to success long term.

Well, I'll take you back. It's 47 plus years. I'm a young high school kid trying to decide what he wants to do. You can't see me on camera in terms of my height, but I'm 6'8" and I was that. So I thought I was going to go to the NBA and then I played a basketball game against Lansing Everett when I lived in Michigan and their starting center happened to be Irving "Magic" Johnson and what he managed to do to us on the court in terms of humiliation. He scored 99 points in their 136 to 46 victory in 48 minutes. Clearly it was a decision point, right? Am I really going to go to the NBA or have I just witnessed someone who's going to be in the NBA? And I certainly recognized the greatness that he represented. So it meant shifting courses, right? I'm going to have to buckle down and study. Not that I wasn't studying, I was a good student, but recognizing that wasn't going to be a fallback for me. It was going to be my primary. The second thing was how was I going to get there? I was one of nine children, we didn't have the financial position to allow all of us to be going to college and there would have been five of us in college at the same time. So I went to the army to get my education in data processing and programming and analysis and that kind of thing. That was a key decision point and that was made by the time I was 18. And the third decision I made was what was going to be my career destination. After research I decided I wanted to be a sitting CIO at some point in my career. Recognizing that's a ways off but you got to have a long-term goal in mind. I started setting my short-term strategies around achieving the long-term goal. So, making choices, staying clear to those choices. I resolved at 17 I was going to be a sitting CIO. It took me many, many years to get there, but I never lost sight of the goal.

Well, I would add one more decision to that, and that is picking a life partner. So even Warren Buffett says, your biggest decision in your life will be your life partner. Mine happens to be one that was hugely supportive of myself, my career, my destination. Without her, I would certainly not be sitting where I am today. So having a life partner that knows how to put up with what it takes in terms of commitment. A lot of times leadership is not a 40-hour a week job. You got to deal with folks during the day and you still have other things you must accomplish and so those can stretch into nights and weekends and that's all a part of the journey for me at least.

Yeah, at 22.

Absolutely. Absolutely a good summation of it. When I talked to college students, and I did a lot of recruiting in my career, they often didn't know what they wanted to go to college for, and there's in their freshman, sophomore, and junior years even. I said, once you lock in on something that you want to do because you're going to be doing it for the next 40 years, your waking hours for the next 40 years are going to be spent on a career journey. Pick something that you absolutely have some passion around, that you really like to do. Don't make it about the money, make it about the work, the money will follow. I was fortunate to be able to make those choices very young. I coach folks that have struggled with that choice.

Well, the idea of my career is my hobby. So I dabble a lot. Not everybody wants to, but what I suggest to folks is do your best to learn from everybody around you. So no matter what role you take on, walk into it like it's your first day and your last. The idea is you're working your way out of a job. How do you do that? You grow people around you and you learn from who you receive information from and who you send information to. Don't just be the pastor, understand the context because what you're doing now is you're expanding your base of knowledge which means you could shift left or right because of something you learned by working with someone in another field or another department or another discipline. The other thing is to rotate them. The idea is they don't always know what they're best at and sometimes you have to create opportunities for them to learn what they might be more passionate towards. That's giving them opportunity.

It has to be their decision. You can't make it for them. That's always the challenge when, you know, my dad told me I was going to do this. Great. But what do you want? What do you want to do? The value in them making that choice is then they become embroiled in that choice. It becomes their choice, their passion and not trying to fulfill the expectations of a leader or a parent or guardian or someone in their life.

Well, some of it is also recognizing it's not a job, it's a career. The difference, show them the explanation in Webster's. There's a difference between having a job and having a career. A career is something you have to nurture. A job you go and execute. I never thought of the work I did as a job. I wasn't going to the job. I wasn't getting up in the morning and going to the job. I was getting up every morning and going to further expand my career opportunities and those around me.

Here's the thing. When people see people that have grown to an aspirational role, they often think it was an easy path. And it's not always an easy path. Sometimes it's not just what you learn to do well, but what you learn not to do. I worked in a consulting organization from 1985 to 1996, so 11 years, but in that time I worked for 23 people. It was a lot of movement, a lot of projects, a lot of reform and form and reform. What I tell some folks that I've worked with is that of those 23 leaders, I would work for two of them again. I learned more about what not to do than what to do. From the two that I would work for again, I would follow them anywhere. They picked up the phone and called me today and said, 'I need some help. Would you come help me?' I would be there. Understanding that you have to work for good leaders in order to grow, but you can learn even from a bad leader of things you would not want to repeat. Ultimately if you can use some influence maybe you can help them along their journey. Some of the best advice I was given was be curious. Stay curious. Read. Be voracious in your reading. Find time, make time to read and acquire knowledge. Not just about your world, but about the worlds of the organizations you work with. At the higher level, it's understanding the business of Nike, Adidas, New Balance. Those were companies that we bought lots of product through and sold. But the idea of understanding their business helped me understand how to build and connect ecosystems of supply chains. Ultimately that drove a great deal of success for the organization and customer satisfaction. Curiosity is clear. The other one that's probably as important is consistency in leadership. Don't have to raise your voice to get results. I remember my father whose octave would always go a tone lower and softer when he was very angry because he wanted me to hear and wanted me to listen. Whether it's your father or someone in business, it's important to understand that the growth of both you and them is mutual, symbiotic. You can work for people that will give you lots of free reign to succeed and fail. Then you'll work for folks that will coach you and direct you along the way. You may feel like they're micromanaging. Don't take the extra attention you get as negative. Take it as a positive. They're showing interest. They want you to be successful. It's important for you to be successful. They don't want you to have to learn the hard way perhaps how they learned. Ultimately, as much as being a leader, you have to be a follower. In order to be a good leader, you have to be a good follower.

They often say people don't quit companies, they quit leaders. One would say how did you survive there? Why was that valuable for you to stay? It was always a balance. But because the consulting company I was working for was working on projects in banking, manufacturing, government, insurance, I was learning so much on these projects that it was worth the pain to get the knowledge to grow the base to work in different roles and responsibilities. Ultimately I probably was trained to deal with some of that. I did 20 years in the military and so I understand what working for folks that are going to be very directive in terms of the nature of their communication is. You have to be able to take that into stride. Listen for content, listen for context, and don't worry about the message so much. Everybody has trouble with communication at some level. Even Warren Buffett would say he doesn't communicate the best in all situations, but when he talks people listen. It's because of the message, they're listening for the context and the manner in which he delivers it. Even for myself, it's been a journey in terms of developing my communication style over the years. Be honest, be clear, be focused. Not personal, it's professional, it's business. Ultimately, how does it help the people grow? Because in order for an organization to grow, you have to grow people. You have to plan for the day that you're no longer going to be there. I've had to plan for that day. I've had to build succession plans. I've had to develop leaders. I've had to rotate them into roles that made them uncomfortable. I called it being comfortably uncomfortable. The idea is when you get really comfortable, you may stop learning. What creates that level of uncomfortableness is often a new challenge to face, something I have to learn. Ultimately that's part of the growth process. We go through that. That's why the teen years seem to be so difficult for kids, because they're going through exponential mental growth at that time.

Well, there's three pillars to my consulting practice. The first is board focused. So becoming an adviser and being able to communicate with board level folks, providing a perspective that brings my 40 plus years experience to value. Ultimately learning from them, because that's a two-way street. There's always something to be learned from people that have been leaders of other large companies. Second is the C-suite. That's where I spent a lot of the last eight years with people around the table, leading different disciplines: supply chain, marketing, merchandising, digital stores, HR, finance. The idea is understanding their pain points in their business and helping to enable them to get to a better result for them and their associates. I think there's a lot I can do in that space as well for other companies. And then the third is the rising stars. Every HR organization has a succession plan they've been working on with senior leadership. The problem is they may not have the ability in house to complete the development program and product that they want. Preparing for an exit of a C-suite member is a big deal. If you're in a small medium-sized company, often those people were promoted from within as the company grew. The challenge is they can't necessarily go to market and pay for someone who's had Fortune 1000 experience. So when someone leaves, they've got to have someone ready. The challenge is us as boomers. I say us, not you, of course, you're much younger, but me as a boomer, I'm one of the last of the boomers coming out, born in 59. That next generation has got to step up and step in. I'm not sure they're entirely ready, but I feel like I have something to offer in terms of helping them get there. I did that by building a broad base working in every area of IT at the lowest level, including side steps, laterals and even step downs to work different departments because I wanted a very strong base so that when I sat in the role of a CIO I was fully prepared and understood the people that were working for me and how they had to do their jobs. That's not always available to everybody today.

Well, the first and foremost is the experience I've gained. I have a perspective. Second is the learning. There are many books on leadership. Which ones do I follow? Which ones have the right tips and techniques? There are several that I focus on. The One Minute Manager is a good book. It's only about 140 pages, a quick read. Management and Balance by Mike Lario is another very good book. He leverages his military background and puts it into a set of experiences around leading people and getting to the right result. There's one called Make My Bed written by an Admiral, recently retired, a Navy SEAL. His whole thing was about the lessons he learned along the way, military lessons, but applied to the civilian workforce. That's something else I feel like I bring because I've got 20 plus of combined active and reserve duty. Some of those I brought to the workforce. I remember as a young leader being told by our HR professionals, 'You need to forget the military. You're not in the military anymore. You're in the civilian world.' Thankfully I didn't. What I did learn how to do was adjust the message to civilian terms. I used to talk a lot about an after-action review. You do something, then you review what went well, what didn't go well, what could we do better next time. That's a military best practice. I did it for decades. Now it's called 'What, So What, What's Next?' The idea is what's the problem? What have we identified? Just facts. So what, what does it mean? Who cares? Why is it important? And then what's next, which is what are you going to do about it? It's about taking action and not just saying, 'Well, that's the way it's been or that's the way we've always done it.' That was never more important than when we went through COVID. Our company doubled in size during COVID in a market and in a business that should have shriveled and most of our competitors did. We went to daily standups. We started working from home the very next day using Teams and other technologies. The senior leadership team met every day at 11:00 to make sure we had speed to decision. The idea of floating ideas, developing PowerPoints, going off and doing study analysis, that's all great, but when you're dying on the vine, that's not going to get you where you need to go. The ability to make decisions, best possible decision based on the information we had with the right people around the table. Everybody had a perspective. How would this impact your organization if we did this? We made decisions every day. By the end of May, we were up and running in all the stores and we had been back in the office in a 50-50 arrangement for weeks. That decision to go to a daily standup became part of the mantra and to this day they still do the daily standup. The C-suite members taking time out every day for 15 to 30 minutes just to make sure they're all on the same page. 'How can I help you? What do you need? Here's how you can help me. Here's what I need.' It makes you move at the speed of life. It was one of our catchphrases: speed is life. If you can't move fast, someone's going to beat you to the punch. Someone will be faster. Usain Bolt won races because he took less steps. He perfected a method by which he could extend his stride. Secretariat was the same way. Less strides, more distance.

Well, for the folks I talk to a great deal, they want to understand why is it that I don't talk tech. You've been in IT for 40 years. You don't use three-letter acronyms. Why don't you do that? I said, because I'm a business person. I run IT like a business. I have a P&L. My job is to find ways to make money for the company and save money for the company. I do that by working with my business partners, understanding their challenges and ultimately how do I help the sales organizations make more money, the supply organizations move product faster, the human organizations to take care of people better. That keeps turnover down. I do those things because that's a part of running a good company. So don't think of yourself in your silo. Think of yourself as part of everybody's silo. You'll find you can do a little bit better than perhaps others. The last thing I'll probably leave is chasing shiny pennies is a waste of time. Someone would say, 'Are you saying AI is a shiny penny?' It is if you don't apply it appropriately. When we looked at AI opportunities for our organization, we ranked them by the ones that could deliver value in some way. It's going to help us save money. It's going to help us serve customers. It's going to help us grow the business in some other way. As opposed to just doing AI for AI's sake. Find a way to drive an ROI. Be no different than if you did any other project within IT within the business. We had so much capital to spend. We always had to snap a chalk line at some point and say, 'These projects are not going to make the cut because we just don't have the funding for it.' What rose to the top? The ones that deliver the best results. You can do a lot with AI, but you have to give it some folks and treat it like it's a business product. It's an enabling technology. It's not AI for AI's sake. It's just something that makes another part of your business better.

Not technologies.

You bet. Take care now. Thank you.