Andi Karaboutis is Executive Vice President, Technology and Business Solutions, at Biogen. Previously, she served as Vice President and Global Chief Information Officer at Dell. Prior to joining Dell, Karaboutis spent over 20 years at General Motors Corporation and Ford Motor Company in various global IT and business operations leadership positions. "Don’t define yourself primarily as a female executive. Have I sometimes felt as if I were treated differently because I’m a woman? Absolutely, but I don’t go in to situations with that at the top of my mind." (Source: Straight Talk)
Author of the best-selling book Dare: Straight Talk on Confidence, Courage, and Career for Women in Charge, Becky Blalock is a sought-after speaker and the Managing Partner at Advisory Capital, a strategic consulting firm. Previously, she was Senior Vice President and CIO at Southern Company, the fourth-largest utility in the U.S. "Women feel that they don’t have the same safety nets that men do. If they fail, it’s going to be final. But we overestimate the consequences of failure. If you want to be all that you can be, you must try new things. Those failures are not failures; they’re feedback on what doesn’t work. They help us to be successful on the next try." (Source: Straight Talk)
Annabelle Bexiga is Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for Asset Management at TIAA-CREF, a Fortune 100 financial services company. Previously, as TIAA-CREF's CIO, she has led TIAA-CREF in a multi-year, multimillion-dollar IT transformation. “A focus of our culture change initiative has been inculcating the mind-set that innovation isn’t just the purview of the leadership team. It is everyone’s job.” (Source: Straight Talk)
Pam Parisian is CIO at AT&T Services, responsible for technology development for the business-supporting systems that enable ordering, care, rating, and billing for AT&T’s strategic Mobility, Business, and Home Solutions businesses. Previously, she held a number of senior IT positions with AT&T. "Bring a positive attitude to work every day. I’m proof that a career in IT can be exciting and rewarding. There is plenty of room to grow. But you not only need to be willing to get your hands dirty – you have to love doing it. I think that one of the reasons I love what I do is that I have an ownership attitude. I own whatever I’m asked to do, all the way back to that messy microfiche room." (Source: Straight Talk)
LeAnn Ridgeway is Vice President and General Manager, Simulation and Training Solutions, at Rockwell Collins, providing innovative solutions for aerospace and defense. Previous positions with Rockwell Colins include Vice President and Managing Director, Americas, and Senior Director, Engineering Services, leading a global network of 400 field service engineers. "I’ve never been much of a video game player, and the whole motion thing disturbs my inner ear, yet here I am leading simulation and training! Naturally, the first thing proud employees want to do when they have something new is to throw me in the simulator to check it out. I’ve gotten better over the past three years." (Source: Straight Talk)
Gerri Martin-Flickinger is Senior Vice President and CIO at Adobe. Previously, she served as CIO at VeriSign, Network Associates, and McAfee. "One thing that is very different about modern IT is that so much of what a good IT professional has to do is be able to integrate. Integrate people, systems, data, and it’s almost the concept of the old broker consultant role. A really successful IT professional today isn’t about a specific piece of technology they know very well, it’s how they can bring things together... Collaboration, integration, working in a more collaborative style is critical, so we have a different kind of leader in IT today than we would have had 15 years ago." (Source: Forbes.com)
Angela Yochem is the Global CIO at logistics provider BDP International. Previously, Yochem was CTO at AstraZeneca and Divisional CIO at Dell. "[Observers now warn that] Silicon Valley's insularity may lead to a significant drop in collective tech creativity and the eventual demise of the U.S. tech industry... The lines between technology and business are blurred--and have been for over a decade now, due largely to the disruptive business models promoted by tech companies from the Valley itself… So yes, the tech industry can't be contained in the Valley. But as long as we can find teams of highly diverse and accomplished superstars to build great technology, wherever they are, I’m not going to lose any sleep." (Source: Yochem's LinkedIn post)
Padmasree Warrior is Chief Technology & Strategy Officer at Cisco. Previously, she was CTO and also co-led Cisco's worldwide engineering organization. As Senior Vice President, Engineering, she was responsible for core switching, collaboration, cloud computing and data. Before that, Warrior was CTO at Motorola. "The scale of change, even in the next five years, will be dramatic. And I think everyone has to get ready for it, and I think we as users have to get ready for it. I’m a technologist, and I have to get ready for it because a lot of things will happen that we don’t even anticipate today." (Source: McKinsey.com)
Sophie Vandebroek is Corporate Vice President, CTO, and President, Xerox Innovation Group at Xerox. Previously, she served as Xerox’s chief engineer, vice president of the Xerox Engineering Center, technical advisor to Xerox's chief operating officer and director of the Xerox Research Centre of Canada. "The more senior jobs you get, the easier it is. You get less control over how busy you are, but you get more over decisions about when you're busy and how you're going to do things... What's important is you deliver results. If you're requesting flexibility and you're not performing to the level your manager expects, you're in big trouble—you can't do that." (Source: Fast Company)
