Charlie Feld
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.
“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.
