October 19, 2009 By Tod Newcombe, Editor
Photo: Steve Emanuel, CIO, Montgomery County, Md. Photo by Cade Martin
When it comes to leadership, there's nothing like a humble beginning. Take the example of Teri Takai, California's CIO and one of the country's leading IT executives in government. Just about everybody agrees that Takai has burnished the CIO's role as a leader in the public sector. Yet at the start of her career, she was a duck out of water when it came to leadership.
"I was awful," she said, recalling her start as an IT manager at the age of 28. "I had no background or experience in managing people." Worse, Takai began as a manager in a foreign country where the cultural chasm was deep. "I was a short Japanese-American telling them how to do IT. How was that going to work?"
Photo: Teri Takai, California CIO. Photo by Gerry McIntyre
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