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Note: The CIO's road through Wal-Mart, Dell, and HP was marked by very different cultures and expectations.
Randy Mott doesn't think small. As CIO of four of the largest U.S. companies during his career of more than 30 years, he has tended to go "all in" on IT measures, whether they're data center consolidations or workforce overhauls.
But three of those market-leading companies--Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, and now General Motors--couldn't be more different. At least Mott caught them at very different stages in their evolution.
Mott's 22 years at Wal-Mart, where he was CIO from 1994 to 2000, were marked by tremendous growth, as it shot past $100 billion in revenue to become one of the largest corporations on the planet. During those years, as it emerged from the larger-than-life shadow of founder Sam Walton, Wal-Mart was a pioneer in analyzing big data (before the term existed) to optimize its global supply chain and ultimately deliver all manner of products to customers at "everyday low prices."
They were Wal-Mart's glory years, before the lawyers and interest groups and politicians started sinking their teeth into the country's largest employer, and before Target, Costco, Amazon, and other rivals cut in...