The Real CIO - by Mark Schwartz (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The noise around being a CIO is deafening--forty years of recycled advice ends here.

The leadership shelf is full. Frameworks, playbooks, and listicles promising to transform how you align IT with the business, manage up, and finally earn your place in the C-suite. Most of it recycles the same conventional wisdom that has failed to resolve the CIO's core problem for forty years: The role was promised as a high priest of technology transformation but set up to be a bureaucratic troll. Mark Schwartz, author of A Seat at the Table and The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy, has spent decades watching organizations resist exactly the change they claim to want. He knows the advice. He knows why it doesn't work.

The Real CIO is something different. Drawing on character and effectiveness rather than productivity hacks, Schwartz introduces the impeccable CIO: a technology executive guided by integrity, courage, clarity, humility, and practical wisdom--not as ideals, but as the only reliable foundation for navigating contradictory expectations, closing the credibility gap, leading the enterprise into the world of AI, and building organizational influence without direct authority.

With expertise from AWS's pioneering AI work, Schwartz shows how it changes the CIO's responsibilities and powers. Based on his work advising leaders at some of the world's largest enterprises, Schwartz offers a rigorous, philosophically grounded framework for responsible AI leadership, for stopping IT from being seen only as a cost center, and for leading digital transformation that actually sticks.

The CIO paradox is real. Every technology leader who has felt it knows that more advice--more alignment workshops, more stakeholder mapping, more agility frameworks--is not the answer. The Real CIO is the first book that doesn't pretend otherwise. It is also, finally, the one worth reading.

About the Author

Mark Schwartz is an iconoclastic CIO and a playful crafter of ideas, an inveterate purveyor of lucubratory prose. He has been an IT leader in organizations small and large, public, private, and nonprofit. As an Enterprise Strategist for Amazon Web Services, he uses his CIO experience to bring strategies to enterprises or enterprises to strategies, and bring both to the cloud. As the CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, he provoked the federal government into adopting Agile and DevOps practices. He is pretty sure that when he was the CIO of Intrax Cultural Exchange he was the first person ever to use business intelligence and supply chain analytics to place au pairs with the right host families. Mark speaks frequently on innovation, bureaucratic implications of DevOps, and using Agile processes in low-trust environments. With a BS in computer science from Yale, a master's in philosophy from Yale, and an MBA from Wharton, Mark is either an expert on the business value of IT or else he just thinks about it a lot.