The Most Influential IT Thought-Leaders

by Peter High, series on Forbes.com

I would like to introduce a new series, which I refer to as “IT Influencers.” The field of Information Technology is home to many innovators and thought-leaders. These individuals, all from vastly differing walks of life, share a commonality: Their expertise and unique insights have made them some of the most influential members in their professions and in IT. This is a diverse lot, including individuals like:

• Walt Mossberg, Journalist/Columnist
• David Pogue, Yahoo! Technology Columnist & CBS News Correspondent
• Salman Khan, Executive Director and Founder of Khan Academy
• Sir James Dyson, Inventor, Industrial Designer & Founder of Dyson Company
• Dr. James Goodnight, CEO of SAS Institute
• Sebastian Thrun, CEO and Co-Founder of Udacity
• Rich Karlgaard, Publisher of Forbes
• Yves Béhar, Founder and Principal Designer of Fuseproject
• Vicente Fox, Former President of Mexico
• Emerson Spartz, CEO of Spartz Media
• Dion Weisler, Executive Vice President of HP’s Printing and Personal Systems Organization
• Peretz Lavie, President of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
• Marc Lore, CEO and Founder of Jet
• Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett Packard
• Ron Ross, Fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology
• Scott McNealy, Co-Founder and former CEO of Sun Microsystems
• Steve Case, Co-Founder of AOL
• John Hagel, Chairman of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge
• Mike Schroepfer, CTO of Facebook
• Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist
• Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack
• Peter Diamandis, Co-Founder of XPRIZE and Singularity University
• Jay Rogers, CEO of Local Motors
• Andrew Ng, Co-Founder of Coursera
• Cathy Bessant, Chief Operations & Technology Officer of Bank of America
• Dave Evans & Bill Burnett, Co-Authors of “How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life”
• Stanley McChrystal, Partner at McChrystal Group
• Ken Xie, CEO of Fortinet
• Alan Trefler, Founder & CEO of Pegasystems
• Roger Martin, Institute Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute
• Andrew Moore, Dean of The School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
• Vint Cerf, ‘Father of the Internet’ and Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist
• Toomas Hendrik Ilves, former President of Estonia
• Mike Volpi, General Partner at Index Ventures
• Kai-Fu Lee, Founder of Sinovation Ventures
• John Chambers, Former CEO of Cisco Systems
• Matt Harris, Managing Director at Bain Capital Ventures
• Max Tegmark, MIT Professor and Author of Life 3.0
• Reid Hoffman, Greylock Partner and Co-founder of LinkedIn
• Michael Lewis, New York Times Best-Selling Author
• Chris Young, CEO of McAfee
• Laszlo Bock, CEO of Humu
• Sarah Guo, General Partner at Greylock Partners
• Rick Smith, CEO of Axon
• Tom Siebel, CEO of C3.ai
• Andrés Gluski, President & CEO of AES
• Steven Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone
• Simon Sinek, Author of The Infinite Game

In the kick-off article to the series, I highlight some common denominators among these trailblazers:

1. All of them have thought about business value first, and technology second
2. Most have worked in other business disciplines prior to ascending to the CIO role
3. Many work within organizations that promote from within
4. A majority have an MBA or advanced degree in a business discipline
5. Many also have spent time as consultants