Many Paths Traveled

Hunkered down in a bunker outside a U.S. Army data center near Saigon night after night in 1969, Peter Burrows got a sense of what mission-critical is all about. A private with a data processing management degree who was called to serve in the largest draft of the Vietnam War, Burrows spent 14- to 16-hour days as a grunt programmer traveling around base camps with a Univac 1005. In one of the earliest uses of mobile distributed computing, he used a minicomputer to order food, ammo and other supplies – and manage payroll – by taking requests from the local commanders and transmitting them to a logistics command center.

“It was like getting two to three years’ experience in a single year,” he says. But nights were another reality. The blinking lights of the Univac gave way to the light show of rockets headed for the data center. The logistics of gathering data gave way to the logistics of making it through to another dawn.

“Every day was the contrast of enjoyment and terror, of learning and trying to stay alive,” says Burrows, now chief technology officer at Reebok International Ltd. in Stoughton, Mass. “I developed an incredible sense of what it takes to get something done in the worst possible situation. You ended up developing an incredible sense of mission and your role in it, a sense of ‘I will get this done no matter what happens.’ No excuses.”

The tenacity and sense of mission that Burrows acquired then are qualities shared by many other information technology leaders.

The variety of their routes to the top proves that there’s no one path to IT success. Burrows worked in two rather unglamorous environments before ending up at one of the most recognized brand names in the world of consumer products. Some IT leaders have job-hopped, some have industry-hopped, some have stayed in the same companies their entire careers. What they share is a combination of chutzpah, doggedness, strategic vision, devotion to learning and an eagerness to solve problems.

Problem Solvers

Enthusiasm for tackling problems and putting the processes in place to solve them drew Scott Heintzeman into IT from day-to-day hotel operations at Carlson Hospitality Worldwide in Minneapolis.

Heintzeman, vice president of knowledge technologies, started his career at the company at 17, riding his bicycle around town to deliver laundered sheets and towels to the Radisson South. He worked his way into hotel management and spent 10 years opening new Radisson properties, establishing procedures and policies, training staff and moving on to the next new hotel.

In his first management gig, Heintzeman reached a turning point. It was a seemingly ordinary problem: a foul-up on a hotel VIP’s reservation and check-in that the desk staff wasn’t trained to handle. But it underscored a lack of sufficient processes – processes for which he was responsible.

The snafu itself “was not a life-changing event, but it created embarrassment for the hotel’s general manager, and he was furious,” Heintzeman recalls. “I knew I either had to pack up or rally my organization and solve the problems. I decided I was absolutely not going to fail under any circumstances. Failure wasn’t an option. That was a big learning point for me, and that philosophy and commitment have been what makes me me.”

The experience served Heintzeman well when he was put in charge of an ambitious project to automate Carlson’s reservation and check-in system. His team created a great system from scratch but found that “the hardware available to us was woefully inadequate to support it,” he recalls. Again, failure wasn’t an option, so he rallied his team. “It took a year to get the right horsepower under the software to make it perform correctly, and that was an entire year of tremendous pain and organizational discomfort,” Heintzeman says. “But we all bonded together and stuck to the project until we could see our way to stabilizing the system and making it what it has become today.”

Heintzeman made the full leap into IT in 1993 because he enjoys “organizing people and issues and solving problems through better processes,” he explains. “And today IT is at the center of those opportunities.”

Business Visionaries

Like that of Heintzeman, Peter Solvik’s career has focused on the intersection of business and IT. The CIO at Cisco Systems Inc. in San Jose determined as an undergraduate in the late 1970s that while he loved technology, it had to serve a greater purpose. He took his then-uncommon idea to the dean of the business school at the University of Illinois and proposed a hybrid business/IT degree. In 1980, he graduated with the university’s first dual bachelor’s degree in business and computer science. It gave him his pick of jobs, and he joined Texas Instruments Inc. as a liaison between IT and end users.

This was just at the point when businesses were trying to increase usage of IT – and Solvik’s move demonstrated his knack for being in the right place at the right time. From TI, he moved to Apple Computer Inc., just as the PC revolution was taking off. At Apple, he ran the AppleLink group, which grew out of the Eworld project, an early attempt at an online community for Apple customers. From there, he joined Cisco just as the Internet revolution was beginning.

Solvik says he was fortunate to “land at companies that were important and dominant in the industry,” which gave him a chance to “make an impact and continue learning.”

Constant Learners

Christopher Smith takes at least a few minutes of each day to surf the Web researching a chosen topic. “I think of it as playing,” he says. “If you don’t do a little every day, you’ll end up behind.”

Keeping up with what’s new is imperative: The CIO at HomeLife Furniture Corp. in Hoffman Estates, Ill., which spun off from Sears, Roebuck and Co. in February 1999, Smith has built his career tackling new projects that his employers had never attempted before. He’s reached his personal apex in his current job, where he’s building HomeLife’s entire IT infrastructure from scratch.

Smith has spent nearly 20 years trying the untried, most recently as supply-chain systems director at Sears, a position in which he re-engineered the software and business processes supporting the retailer’s huge supply chain.

His first job after college, at a small start-up run by a former Michigan state police officer, was to develop a system for tracking missing children and identifying similarities and patterns among different cases. It was 1982 – before such systems were widespread.

“There were no models; anything I did, I had to invent for myself,” Smith says. “And that attribute has carried me through every job I’ve ever had – there have been no instructions.”

His willingness to learn and to constantly reinvent himself was what sustained him through a tumultuous year at Kmart Corp., as he made the transition from lead systems analyst into management. The challenge was to shift from being a hands-on technologist – interested in the most elegant technical solution – to being a full-fledged project manager.

“For a while, I was failing miserably,” he says. “But I had a manager who was willing to ask me the tough questions like, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ And in a year, I went from being one of the worst project managers to probably one of the best. If I hadn’t had that experience, I wouldn’t have learned the skills necessary for my job today.”

Smith says of the three subjects he studied in college – business, computer science and philosophy – philosophy has been the most advantageous to his career: “It’s helped with getting to the root of what I’m really trying to say, getting to the root of solving problems and organizing arguments.”

Embracers of Challenge

Another Sears veteran, Joseph Smialowski, concurs that the study of philosophy provides a strong foundation for an IT career. “In philosophy you deal with a system of the world – how did it start, how do things relate to each other?” says Smialowski, now vice chairman at Fleet Boston Financial Corp. in Boston. “And that big-picture aspect has helped me, as has the logical aspect that you go through in philosophy.” Smialowski has specialized in turnarounds, starting with himself. In college he’d planned to become a philosophy professor, but after graduating, he realized that “in 1971, there wasn’t a large demand for folks in philosophy programs.”

So Smialowski enrolled in an eight-month technology training program, “one of those schools you find on the back of a matchbook cover.” He got his first programming job at Hartford Insurance Co., parlayed that into a job at Xerox Corp. and earned a techno-MBA from Rochester Institute of Technology.

The would-be philosopher next joined the Price Waterhouse consultancy, where “we were constantly called into situations where the business was in trouble and the common theme was they had lost sight of who their customer was or how important the people in their organization were,” Smialowski says.

He embarked on a series of challenges to get clients back on track, and when one customer – Saks Fifth Avenue’s Arthur Martinez – took the helm at Sears, he brought Smialowski onboard. The retailer’s turnaround is by now legendary.

“I’ve never refused a challenging assignment, and my willingness to take on challenges has led me to where I am today,” Smialowski says. “No matter how difficult or ugly they might look, in those situations lies opportunity.”

Goff is a Computerworld contributing writer in New York.