The Hard Truth About IT Leadership Nobody Posts About | Retired PPG CIO

Bob Hansen asks how Caruso reached the CIO role. Caruso says he did not initially intend to enter technology. He began at the University of Pittsburgh as a political science major with plans for law school, then changed to computer science after a month. He spent his first six or seven years as a software developer, became a team leader, and progressed through leadership roles. He spent the final 24 years of an approximately 40-year IT career at PPG, including five years as vice president of IT and CIO.

He links that trajectory to two childhood ambitions: inventing and helping people. He liked taking apart radios and components, and television portrayals of lawyers made him want to improve people’s lives. Becoming a team leader in his late twenties revealed a practical way to do that. He could influence teammates’ professional development and working lives. In his telling, the point of leadership is to lead people while managing technology—not the reverse.

Another pivotal period came when he had been in a senior role for almost a decade and recognized that the CIO above him was unlikely to leave soon. Instead of waiting for a promotion, he sought more meaningful work within his role. His work on digital tools that helped consumers select colors and buy paint online led to patents and two CIO 100 Awards, he says. The lesson is not that stalled advancement is easy, but that a role can still offer room to create, learn, and make a contribution.

Caruso then considers IT’s place in innovation. He says technology leaders can get stuck on a “technology treadmill” of upgrades and the next new thing, including AI. His alternative is for technology leaders to act as catalysts for business change, rather than wait for someone else to supply an idea. He discusses ongoing research on innovation obstacles and says that being viewed as an order-taking function is a major concern among respondents. That is his research-in-progress perspective, not a universal measure of every IT organization.

The conversation’s central argument is that a title, position, or pay increase is not a durable reason to lead. A few years after becoming CIO, Caruso says he questioned whether he had made the right choice. At a church dinner, a man from his old neighborhood told him about the lasting effect Caruso’s late father, an elementary-school teacher, had had on his life. The encounter renewed Caruso’s desire to make a similarly sustained difference. He later heard reflections on his own impact in a retirement video assembled during COVID, when an in-person send-off was not possible.

For people considering management, he is direct about the tradeoff. Leaders deliver bad news as well as good: performance feedback, cost constraints, and sometimes staffing reductions. He uses his son’s first leadership role to illustrate that conversation. He also offers three capabilities for aspiring leaders: listen to learn, which means understanding a customer’s problem rather than waiting to state an assumed answer; communicate to connect, which means explaining why work matters and linking it to a wider purpose; and the courage to do the next right thing when it is uncomfortable. He illustrates the final point with a story from his book about Dick Daniels, who personally delivered a sudden layoff message rather than put newly promoted managers in that position.

Caruso favors a career lattice over a narrow ladder. He warns against being defined only by one product or technology and recommends lateral experience across areas such as development, infrastructure, security, and business units. The goal is adaptability: becoming someone who learns quickly and can solve unfamiliar problems. He also says culture is created by supervisors across an enterprise, not simply declared by a CIO. He describes PPG’s long run on Computerworld’s Best Places to Work in IT list, mentoring around employees’ desired skills, and a more individualized approach to recognition. Recognition, he found, has no single formula; meaningful acknowledgement depends on the person and their contribution.

The closing story returns to purpose. Caruso and his wife fostered 15 newborns over 14 years. One child, later adopted and named Maddie, drew a family portrait that included her adoptive parents, birth parents, and the Carusos. He keeps it as a reminder of why sustained care for people matters. He closes by discussing The Impactful Technology Leader: Pursue Your Purpose to Innovate, Motivate, and Inspire, whose profits he says support the next generation of technology professionals and leaders.