Carl Turza
Former Chief Information Officer - Sigma-Aldrich
Carl has held General Management, Operational, Technological, and Financial positions over his thirty year career as VWR’s VP Global e-Business, Sigma-Aldrich’s Chief Information Officer, W.W. Grainger’s Vice President of e-Business, and as Allied-Signal’s Vice President of Information Technology. Carl led a small distributorship as Chief Operating Officer, co-founded a boutique consulting firm, and has held multiple developmental positions. With every career step, Carl’s high-performing teams and deft application of technology have driven growth in the business he’s served.
Carl began his career in 1981 at Continental Bank in Chicago. Their combined entry-level training on the Financial and IT sides of the business made an indelible impression on his approach to problem-solving and visioning. Peter Senge’s writing in 1990, and sessions from 1996-1998 at the Santa Fe Institute cemented his recognition that a multi-disciplinary approach accelerated insight, discovery, competitive advantage, and fundamental shifts in institutional thinking. “Win-Win” solutions are rarely generated by a single discipline. Multiple trusting perspectives, voiced on a specific issue, drive breakthrough thinking. Carl’s teams consistently exhibit those multi-disciplinary, self-challenging traits and generate notable results.
Carl has enjoyed seeing his vision and multi-disciplinary approach yield game-changing results. In 1989, A.C. Nielsen management demanded its Finance staff be able to quickly examine and manipulate actual, forecast, and budget information at the desktop. The first Windows application built east of the Mississippi provided the answer. In 1995, AlliedSignal Aerospace found itself unable to link sales, financial, and operational data across its eight factories. Carl’s team built one of the country’s first distributed data warehouses, allowing staff to interact with the system in layperson’s vernacular, from any place in the world, and receive accurate answers.
As Vice President of W.W. Grainger’s e-Business unit, Carl applied his A.C. Nielsen and Donnelley Marketing experience to the B2B problem presented at Grainger. Carl fused Marketing and Technical positions to create a mechanized Demand Chain, driving a $300M business to $750M in three years while cutting operational spend by two-thirds. In addition, his team coined the term “B2I”, recognizing that individuals (not businesses) demonstrate buying behaviors, and can be influenced measurably by applying Demand Chain techniques.
Carl welcomes the challenge to build high-performance, multi-disciplinary teams that drive top-line growth with trust and technology. He received his BA degree in economics in 1981, and his MBA (concentrations in finance and strategic planning) in 1989, both from the University of Illinois.
