Learn Today! Online Class - Leading Digital Transformation

Charlie Feld

Founder and CEO of The Feld Group Institute

During his extraordinary 50-year career, Charlie has been committed to helping organizations and executives achieve IT-driven transformation. He’s frequently been featured in the media and has received numerous awards in recognition of his profound influence in the IT industry.

Before founding The Feld Group Institute in 2009, Charlie served as the SVP of EDS from 2004 and 2008. During his time at EDS, Charlie focused his efforts internally on positioning the global outsourcer to better serve its clients by helping modernize legacy systems and move to flexible architectures designed and built for business agility. Prior to EDS, Charlie founded The Feld Group in 1992. This firm provided outsourced leadership to help companies achieve large-scale transformation. The two-year turnaround model drove dramatic results for several Fortune 500 clients and, over time, evolved into its strategic Transformation Framework, highlighted in Charlie’s 2009 book The Blind Spot: A Leader’s Guide to IT-Enabled Business Transformation.

While directing The Feld Group, Charlie served in numerous IT leadership and senior advisory roles, including as Interim CIO at Delta Air Lines, Sante Fe Burlington Northern Railroad and First Data Resources, as an adviser to the EDS CEO and board of directors, and as a mentor to the CIOs of WellPoint and FedEx.

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“Charlie Feld – Making an Impact On People and Teams”

Charlie’s perspectives on IT, leadership, transformation and enterprise excellence were strongly impacted by formative career experiences at two world-class organizations – PepsiCo and IBM. At PepsiCo, he served from 1981 – 1992 as Frito-Lay Co.’s VP & Chief Information Officer, and he was Director of Management Services from 1981 – 1983. Prior to this, Charlie held a number of Systems Engineering and Account Management roles at IBM from 1966 – 1981. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the City University of New York, Hunter College.

Charlie has received several prestigious industry awards, including the Smithsonian Award for Technology Excellence and the Carnegie Mellon Award for Innovative Technology. He has also been featured in InformationWeek and CIO magazines, which placed him among its “5 Top CIOs” in 2001. In 1997, Charlie was named “One of the 12 Most Influential IT Executives of the Past Decade” by CIO magazine and Computerworld named him as one of “25 IT People to Watch in 1998.” He was the recipient of the CIO Dallas Leadership award in 2017.

Charlie’s articles on IT leadership topics have appeared regularly in Computerworld Executive Suite, Harvard Business Review, and CIO magazine. In addition, The Feld Group’s work has been the subject of multiple case studies appearing in the Harvard Business School, MIT and McKinsey Quarterly. Charlie has authored two books on leadership – Blind Spot: A Leader’s Guide to IT-Enabled Business Transformation and The Calloway Way-Results & Integrity.

Blind Spot

A LEADER’S GUIDE TO IT-ENABLED BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION

Charlie Feld’s first book describes a framework developed and enriched over several decades in a variety of organizations, including Frito-Lay, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, Delta Air Lines, Home Depot, and Southwest Airlines.

Charlie’s approach demystifies technology and illustrates a common language for dialogue among business and IT leaders. IT and business change can be complex. However, the best leaders can articulate and collaborate based on these kinds of simple words:

  • WHY (do anything?)
  • WHAT (will we do?)
  • HOW (will we do it?)
  • WHO (will lead the change?)

The framework and principles in the book have proven to be durable through the eras. If there’s a time that you cannot afford to fall behind in modernizing your business, it’s right now. If you embrace this framework, you will dramatically improve your business agility, reduce risk, and increase your probability of success.

“In “Blind Spot”, Charlie Feld provides a clear and simple framework for managing major IT-enabled business transformations. I developed and then taught the Frito-Lay case study at Harvard Business School for many years. The reason it has been so popular with senior executives is it is more about a business transformation that was enabled by IT than about technology.”

Lynda Applegate, Harvard Business School

The Calloway Way

RESULTS & INTEGRITY

For almost a quarter of a century, Wayne Calloway led Frito-Lay and PepsiCo to double in revenue and profitability every five years, an astonishing story of success that has never been fully told. However, this book is more about the systematic leadership approach to achieving results than it is about the numbers.

The Calloway Way is focused on achieving aggressive results with extremely high personal integrity. Calloway believed that without growth, you can’t sustain energy and enthusiasm. Without energy and enthusiasm, you can’t attract the best talent, and without the best talent, you can’t sustain growth.

Charlie’s second book has a dual purpose. First, to tell an important, untold success story. The second, to inspire a needed leadership renaissance for competitiveness in the 21st century. A key takeaway from The Calloway Way is that leadership and people matter, even in this digital age.

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Russell Villemez

Affiliate, The Feld Group Institute

Head of Technology Strategy, Dialexa – a Feld Group Institute partner

Highly regarded CTO and change agent with IT strategy and enterprise architecture expertise.

Russell Villemez is an Affiliate with the Feld Group Institute and the head of Technology Strategy at Dialexa, a Technology Research, Design and Creation firm that works with organizations on initiatives such as Operational Transformation, Business Growth, and New Venture Creation.

During 17 years in operational roles and 15 years in consulting roles, Russell has worked across a variety of industries in both executive leadership positions and as a subject matter expert. Russell thrives on the scale and complexity of leading major change agendas in large corporate environments.

Recent consulting clients include AmerisourceBergen, the American Automobile Association, Brinker International, Cubic, Equifax, and Cox Automotive. A common thread is the client’s need for strong leadership during a period of change—whether motivated by acquisitions, spin-offs, competitive pressures, or other factors. Clients also benefit from Russell’s expertise in enterprise architecture, agile development, application portfolio rationalization, technology and architecture strategy, as well as business strategy and commercial software product development.

Recognized as a versatile IT executive, adept at solving complex problems with innovative solutions, Russell’s capabilities and achievements span a continuum from business-strategy formation to hands-on IT solution development. His extensive career achievements include pioneering the first use of relational databases in high-volume transaction systems in the ‘80s, applying voice recognition DSPs in public intelligent network services for consumer markets in the ‘90s, and leading large-scale adoptions of open systems, object technology, and middleware frameworks in complex business environments, often in advance of commercially available software products.

Prior to joining Dialexa, Russell served at HP as Enterprise Services Chief Technology Officer for the Americas, leading a global capability for embedded Account CTOs in large enterprises. Russell began his career at Accenture, where he first crafted his consultative problem-solving approach, later honed at A.T. Kearny and the Feld Group. Russell’s deep telecom experience is built upon numerous director and enterprise architect positions at AT&T, Bell Atlantic, Telstra, US West, Pacific Bell, and Sprint, and as V.P. and CIO for WebLink Wireless.

Russell has a BS in Business Administration from Louisiana State University and an MBA from Vanderbilt University. In his spare time, Russell participates in amateur auto racing, and is a driving instructor with the Porsche Club of America.