Today’s CIOs are at the epicenter of organizational change. In an era of disruption, transformation, and persistent uncertainty, they face rising demands: managing legacy infrastructure, enabling innovation, safeguarding cybersecurity, and preparing for AI, all while achieving operational excellence.
These challenges require more than technical expertise; they demand a new kind of leadership.
IT organizations have been directly impacted. Once tasked with managing infrastructure and systems to stay operational, CIOs are asked to prepare their organization and the business for the future. What separates those who rise to this challenge is that they guide and enable their entire organization, not merely enabling the strategy or systems. They are seen as architects of the future version of the business. They bring leadership superpowers to lead boldly, communicate clearly, and align across and with functions.
These superpowers aren’t magical.
They represent hard-earned capabilities that illustrate a leader’s ability to navigate the paradoxes they and the organization face. Many CIOs already exhibit these superpowers, often without realizing it, as they guide their teams and organizations forward.
Leadership Superpowers: Blending and Balancing Tensions
In my experience speaking with C-Suite leaders across industries, key tensions consistently emerged, tensions that all senior leaders, especially CIOs, must navigate.
- Present vs. Future
- Preparedness vs. Risk Taking
- Experience vs. Learning
- Strategy vs. Execution
- Accountability vs. Collaboration
In each case, defaulting to one side leads to missed opportunities or diminished value. For example, focusing solely on the present puts the company’s future at risk, while concentrating only on the future at the expense of the present could lead to near-term failure.
Future-ready leaders don’t settle for binary choices; they embrace these tensions and utilize both-and-thinking to discover a more powerful, value-creating third path.
Instead of Present vs. Future, they are Present Futurists or Strategic Executors rather than Strategy vs. Execution, transforming these tensions and choices into superpowers. These superpowers are at the core of high-performing CIOs effectively leading in a persistently turbulent and uncertain world. Importantly, they are not merely concepts; they represent enduring disciplines to be applied continuously.
Let’s explore each.
Present Futurists
CIOs who lead with foresight while remaining grounded in present-day realities are Present Futurists. They prepare for tomorrow, today.
This requires managing legacy systems, fostering innovation, and guiding transformation while delivering value today. Present Futurists monitor trends and signals, anticipate emerging shifts, and work backward from a clearly defined future vision.
The present informs the path forward but does not limit or constrain it.
Prepared Risk Takers
Smart, calculated risk-taking is an integral part of business. Innovation and growth require it. At the same time, robust risk awareness and management, along with a prudent posture of preparedness (resilience), are essential during turbulent and uncertain times.
CIOs who demonstrate both are Prepared Risk Takers.
These CIOs embrace intelligent, strategic risks while fostering the resilience to withstand challenges and shocks from new initiatives, competitive threats, shifting market dynamics, or internal missteps. Prepared Risk Takers blend courage and discipline, positioning the organization to act decisively, capitalize on opportunities, and swiftly recover from disruptions.
Experienced Learners
Transformation is continuous, as learning must be. We’ve observed high-performing leaders leverage their experience and expertise while humbly acknowledging their limits, embodying continuous learning and fostering it within their organizations.
CIOs and other leaders who practice this are Experienced Learners.
They draw from their expertise without being constrained by it. They cultivate curiosity and adaptability. In the face of changing market dynamics, new technologies, and evolving customer needs, Experienced Learners unlearn outdated practices, build new capabilities, and embrace new models.
Strategic Executors
A brilliant strategy means little if it cannot be executed.
Successful leaders recognize that in a turbulent and uncertain environment, both disciplined execution and adaptability are necessary to achieve the desired strategic outcomes. Leaders who operate this way are Strategic Executors.
These CIOs manage the present while building for tomorrow.
They align their operations and delivery with the business’s vision, prioritize dynamically, and lead teams capable of executing reliably under changing conditions. Strategic Executors convert aspirations into action and transform action into outcomes without sacrificing agility, particularly when navigating complex, cross-functional initiatives.
Accountable Collaborators
No CIO operates in isolation. Technology influences and enables every function, partner, and stakeholder. Highly effective CIOs foster strong, trust-based relationships to address complex challenges and deliver desired outcomes.
They do this across organizational boundaries with C-Suite peers, internal business leaders, external vendors, and ecosystem partners.
CIOs who do this are Accountable Collaborators.
By empowering and enabling teams, improving alignment, and facilitating quicker decision-making across silos and boundaries, they create an environment where teams share ownership of and accountability for achieving desired outcomes.
We have named these behavioral patterns, each a superpower, for easy reference. High-performing CIOs take the tensions mentioned and others and apply both-and thinking to transform these tensions into superpowers.
These enhance their own as well as their organization’s competitiveness and future readiness.
Whether this is intuitive for some or learned by others does not matter; these superpowers have helped many CIOs and their organizations navigate turbulent and uncertain times and thrive.
CIO Superpowers in Practice
Vipin Gupta, former CIO of Toyota Financial Services (TFS), exemplifies how these leadership superpowers play out in real-world transformation. TFS is the largest auto finance business and a wholly owned subsidiary of Toyota Motor Corporation.
As Chief Information Officer, Vipin led the company to achieve remarkable growth in assets and operating income by launching the industry’s first multi-tenant auto finance platform designed to support a private-label captive finance business for other automakers.
His leadership story is a blueprint for future-ready CIOs to successfully lead enterprise-scale transformation by effectively navigating and turning these tensions into superpowers.
The development of the innovative approaches that led to this transformation was rooted in Vipin’s early realization that he was a rookie in the automotive industry. He immersed himself in learning about the automotive business by visiting assembly factories and studying the world-renowned Toyota Production System. The new insights he gained as a learner from this immersion, combined with his years of IT leadership experience in large financial services enterprises, resulted in the conception of a new operating model guided by “we build systems like we build cars.”
These new lean cross-functional digital engineering methods and behaviors significantly increased the speed of transformation on an enterprise scale.
An outcome of the Experienced Learner superpower, Vipin merged years of experience with a vulnerability to learn openly, leading to unexpected discoveries and inspiration from manufacturing to build a new way of digital engineering.
He also launched an ‘Academy’ from the ground up to foster a learning culture at enterprise scale, harnessing experienced leaders as teachers to multiply their mastery and lift digital proficiency across all departments of the company, not just IT.
The Prepared Risk Taker superpower was crucial as Vipin led a significant organizational change that needed to be accomplished without disrupting current business operations.
To protect the existing business and increase the likelihood of success, a completely new technology platform was built from the ground up, akin to launching an entirely new auto finance business from scratch all in the cloud, using an industry-first multi-tenant enterprise architecture with complete data separation across multiple companies.
Mazda Financial Services was launched as the first Private Label partner, later followed by gradual migration of Toyota and Lexus business from legacy systems to the new ecosystem. The project-based committees were dissolved, and new enterprise-wide Decision Action Teams were established to facilitate a simultaneous dialogue across all functions of the company, maintaining precise planning with a new mindset that the enterprise is one machine, one integrated product, not merely a collection of projects.
This simultaneous dialogue not only ensured uninterrupted customer service and robust cybersecurity protection but also provided groundbreaking speed and agility. It resulted in the launch of Mazda Financial Services in less than a year, with no disruption to the existing business.
The strategy was bold: launching the new private label business at an unprecedented speed of less than one year.
This required precise execution and rigorous software engineering coordination at an industrial scale. Vipin introduced a ‘digital factory’ based operating model, a new way of working modeled after Toyota’s lean manufacturing, enabling continuous building of a complex integrated enterprise technology ecosystem with automotive engineering-like precision.
He implemented an assembly plant-like discipline that assembled interrelated parts produced by 100+ factories every two weeks to build an entire machine towards a shared strategic design incrementally.
His Strategic Executor superpower led to defining and executing incrementally in micro-steps with persistent agility to achieve a strategic macro-outcome with speed, making transformation a continuous discipline, not a one-time event.
In today’s world, every change to any capability, process, or policy runs through IT.
The Accountable Collaborator superpower is at the core of the success of every CIO.
Most decisions in IT are cross-functional and depend on alignment and decision-making across multiple leaders. Transformative initiatives and operational excellence often suffer from poor alignment, coordination, and decision-making across functional leaders. Holding each other accountable for rowing the boat in the same direction is key to reducing waste and getting things done.
Vipin introduced a novel concept of ‘Decision Inventory’ to reduce friction and waste in decision-making across the organization. This technique was inspired by the lean manufacturing principle of ‘lowering the material inventory’ to reduce waste. The same principles, when applied to pending decisions, unlocked accountability by focusing everyone on reducing waste through minimizing decision inventory.
New methods and routines were established to objectively surface pending decisions from the organization’s bottom rungs and hold the organization’s top rungs accountable for making decisions in hours, not weeks. Collaborating with each other and holding each other accountable for making decisions to remove impediments was the biggest factor in the launch of Mazda Financial Services on the new Toyota Financial platform in months, not years, with unprecedented speed and quality, despite the pandemic.
The speed of cross-functional decisions at the top boosted the speed of the teams.
The impact of these superpowers was groundbreaking: a reengineered auto finance platform, new business lines, enhanced agility, and a digitally empowered workforce. These superpowers were evident in Vipin’s leadership.
He didn’t call them superpowers; he just used them instinctively.
Successful CIOs demonstrate these superpowers instinctively. They have developed an inherent ability to be ambidextrous and balance paradoxes through many years of lessons in the corporate battlefield.
Additional CIO Examples
We see these superpowers at play with other legendary CIOs, such as Cynthia Stoddard (CIO, Adobe), who led Adobe’s cloud transformation and aligned IT with go-to-market innovation. Her strength as a Strategic Executor enabled Adobe to evolve into a subscription business while supporting real-time, customer-facing operations.
Jim Swanson (EVP & CIO, Johnson & Johnson) drove supply chain digitization, linking AI and analytics to real-time global operations. His superpowers as a Present Futurist and Strategic Executor helped accelerate time-to-market and increase resilience.
Bask Iyer (CIO, VMware & Dell) repositioned IT as a business partner, scaled agile practices, and embraced cloud-native strategies. As an Experienced Learner and Prepared Risk Taker, he enabled internal innovation and led cultural transformation.
While these leaders adapted their styles to various situations, they shared these common superpowers. They developed leadership capabilities that shaped their organizations, enabling them to adapt and thrive amid change.
Superpower CIOs are Respected in the C-Suite and are in Demand for the Boards
In today’s digital, AI-driven business world, CIOs have become vital voices in boardrooms and C-suites, guiding organizations through the complexities of technology-led transformation.
Today’s CIO is a visionary leader who is no longer confined to IT operations, assisting boards and executives in navigating a turbulent and uncertain landscape characterized by AI, data, cybersecurity, and digital disruption. They are increasingly called upon to translate technological complexity into clear business strategies. More than ever, boards and executive peers rely on CIOs to shape digital strategy, build resilience, and develop and deliver innovative solutions.
These superpowers elevate CIOs from tech leaders to business leaders with technological expertise.
As Present Futurists, they reimagine what’s possible, helping leadership teams envision tomorrow’s potential and chart practical paths. As Experienced Learners, they lead with curiosity, constantly evolving their understanding of the business landscape and ensuring that their contributions extend far beyond technical expertise. When risk looms, Prepared Risk Takers step in with calm, structured approaches to managing uncertainty, transforming anxiety into confidence through sound logic and readiness. Strategic Executors anchor bold strategies in real-world execution, aligning teams and translating grand ideas into tangible outcomes. Perhaps most critically, Accountable Collaborators unite departments, ensuring digital efforts are shared, supported, and scalable across every function.
The CIO’s power at the C-Suite table or in the boardroom lies not in knowing the most technology, but in seeing the big picture, asking the right questions, and building the bridge between innovation and execution.
By combining these superpowers, CIOs become not just participants in the conversation; they shape the future of the enterprise, not just IT.
Reflections for Current and Future CIOs
As you navigate ongoing disruption and growing expectations:
- Which of these leadership superpowers do you consistently demonstrate? What impact do these have on your organization and business?
- Which leadership superpowers need development to address future challenges? How would developing these superpowers influence the business and organization?
- How are you exemplifying paradoxical leadership in practice?
- Not everyone has all these superpowers, but you can build a team that holistically operates with these superpowers. How can you build these superpowers in a team as one entity?
These superpowers aren’t a checklist; they represent a mindset and a set of capabilities. They empower CIOs to become trusted advisors, strategic enablers, and transformation leaders.
If you already are ambidextrous on multiple fronts, lead through paradoxical nuances of leadership, navigate complexity daily, balance risk and resilience, and vision and delivery, you might be more future-ready than you think.
If not, your organization could be vulnerable.
Now is the time to build the capabilities that matter most in the fast-paced role of a CIO.
