Stephen Gillett first became a chief information officer in his early 30s. He rose to become a CIO-plus at Starbucks, holding the CIO role in addition to being the executive vice president of Digital Ventures. After a brief stint as president of Digital, Global Marketing & Strategy at Best Buy, he took on his current role as chief operating officer of Symantec. Still in his mid-30s, Gillett embodies the characteristics of that rare but growing number of executives who have risen beyond CIO. Not so typical to the group, however, he was an offensive guard on the University of Oregon football team. During his time as an undergrad, he started a business that provided technology support and consulting. The ambition and drive that were apparent during his time as an undergraduate have served him well, and provided some insight into the meteoric rise through the corporate world that would follow.
Peter High: Stephen, you are an example of two trends I have been covering of late. You were a CIO-plus at Starbucks, and your positions at Best Buy and now at Symantec are beyond the CIO role. I want to go back to the earlier part of your career. At what point in your career did you decide you wanted to be a CIO, and why?
Stephen Gillett: My first job in IT was the equivalent of the Geek Squad at Best Buy in the 1990s. From there, I had a range of IT positions from working in the help desk to network operator to applications development to engineering to Director of Information Technology. This experience was key for me because I got to know most of the traditional functions of an IT operation. I exposed myself to these diverse areas out of technical curiosity and progressed naturally to the CIO role.
PH: You also went back to get an MBA, as many people profiled in the Beyond CIO series have. Why did you elect to do so?
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SG: I was the VP of IT at CNET at the time, and the CIO involved me in a lot of non-traditional assignments. I spearheaded organizational design initiatives. I worked on a variety of HR issues and opportunities. I did not have a formal skillset in these areas. As they say, the more I learned, the more I realized I needed to learn.
I wanted to be able to speak with the CFO, and I realized I did not have a foundation in business language. I needed to understand cash flows. I learned early on that you don’t go to speak with the CFO using technical jargon; you use terms he or she understands best, and those are financial terms. I decided to go to school as close by as possible, at San Francisco State, and got my MBA at night. It was a lot of work going to school while working, but it provided me an invaluable toolset to leverage.
PH: When you joined Starbucks, the role technology played was very different from what it would play when you left. How did this evolution toward developing a digital business model occur?
SG: I joined soon after Howard Schultz made his return to the CEO role at Starbucks, and I was part of the new management team that he installed. It was an exciting time in that Howard gave us a lot of leeway to reinvent the roles we were taking on and to develop some really creative ideas. I was 31 years old at the time and reported directly to him. It was admittedly a bit intimidating. I knew nothing about retail.
The first thing I did was to go to the Starbucks near my house, and ask the general manager if I could work some shifts to get to know the business at the grass roots level. I advise that every CIO do the equivalent to this when they take on a role in a new industry especially. As I learned more about the process of making each coffee, and how customers ordered, I also looked out into the store and saw people working, having meetings, using a variety of devices. Starbucks was becoming the third gathering place besides the home and the office. Rather quickly, it occurred to me that there was a lot of untapped potential to better leverage the internet in some really creative ways. Howard offered the permission to be curious and creative, and the rest took over.
Digital Ventures was an outgrowth of that. I wanted to develop a part of our business that would be focused on new ways to creatively leverage technology, whether it was digital payments, online experience, entertainment, music, mobile. I presented this idea to the CFO. I presented the opportunity in financial terms, and the function was born.
Date: July 15, 2013