Tim Cook is not the only executive who has had a successful career after first being a Chief Procurement Officer. Ardent Partners’ upcoming report, CPO Rising 2012: Keeping Score (coming out soon) highlights others who have made the jump from CPO to other executive roles’
Today, we offer a sneak preview of the report and introduce another former CPO:
Mark Roenigk has been working in the high tech industry his entire career. Said Roenigk, “I have an affinity for high growth companies and they offer an environment where experienced procurement and supply chain pros can add a ton of value as the companies grow in scale.” An engineer by trade, Mark grew up in mechanical design and development and became involved early on as a procurement engineer at Compaq. “This was before you could call 1(800) CHINA to get everything you needed. In effect, the procurement engineers operated as General Managers for their commodities or components. It was an invaluable experience and a great introduction to general management.” Over the next two decades, Mark quickly advanced from both a job responsibility and title perspective as he moved from working on hardware at Compaq to working with software (and sometimes hardware) at Microsoft where he held broad operational duties in the launch of new products and services over a ten-year career. Mark later moved to Intuit where he ran Supply Chain Operations and then XM Satellite Radio where he ran all of Operations before landing at eBay as the Chief Procurement Officer and VP of Operational Excellence. Next up for Mark was a return home to Texas when he was appointed as the Chief Operating Officer of Rackspace a fast growing, cloud-computing company that could leverage his procurement and operational excellence background and his experience with high-growth, hyper-scale tech companies.
“I always tried to take an approach to procurement, supply chain and operations that was inclusive and transparent. I like to include our supply chain partners in our planning and strategy meetings. At Rackspace, I manage with a great deal of transparency too. It’s all about getting better every day and reaching our full potential as an Open Cloud company.”
On how his background in procurement helped him succeed in other roles, Roenigk said, “I chose to be more of a utility player and an expert problem solver over the course of my career rather than focusing on being an expert in any function, using every opportunity possible to learn more about the business and taking on a variety of challenging roles that enabled me to add value to any business situation. Broad experience managing categories and different businesses within the high-tech vertical has really served me well over the course of my career.”
