My CIO Career: Mike Giresi, Chief Digital Officer at Molex, on Building Consensus for Digital Transformations

Mike Giresi, the first-ever chief digital officer (CDO) at Molex LLC, has led the effort to support the transition of an 86-year-old electrical products manufacturer into a digital business.

It was the challenge of embarking on a transformation of the company, a subsidiary of Koch Industries, and a global electronics industry leader which enticed Giresi to accept the position in 2019.

“The role really intrigued me,” he says. “I thought it would be a great challenge to work in a company that did not yet have a digitally native way of working and to help transform it. The goal was to take it from what it was, which was heavy in transaction and processing, to a company that truly embraces the concept of customer experience in the digital age.”

He adds: “It was an opportunity for me, as a digital officer, to help lead that transformation from a technology and, more importantly, a business operating model perspective.”

Although the CDO role was new to Molex, it was not novel for Giresi.

Before joining Molex, a subsidiary of Koch Industries, in 2019, Giresi had worked as chief digital and technology officer for Aramark, the food service and facilities services provider. His tenure as CIO includes serving as IT leader for several well-known brands: Royal Caribbean Cruises, Tory Burch, Direct Brands and Godiva Chocolate. Giresi’s nearly 40-year IT career includes numerous other positions, including IT director at Campbell Soup Co.

Among the most telling lessons Giresi says he has learned in his career: his preference for big challenges.

In a May 2024 interview for the My CIO Career series, he talked about his professional motivations, his desire for driving transformation and the importance of being uncomfortable.

Mary K. Pratt: You called out the challenges of your current role as a selling point. Why?

Mike Giresi: I love really complex, challenging situations; I am not a run-and-maintain person. I really enjoy driving change. I get personal satisfaction from helping people go from being able to do something at some degree of capability to a place where they are adding way more value, where they feel more self-actualized because they can focus on the things that really matter to them.

Creating such a mutually beneficial environment and building a team that helps create that environment gets me super motivated.

And I find it very fulfilling when the customer says, “I really enjoy working with your company. You have been so thoughtful about how I engage with you. You are adding value to our relationship in ways that I did not think was even possible.”

Can you tell me about the top challenge you faced when you started as CDO?

There was not a lot of clarity on what the objective was. When I first interviewed for the role, there were 16 different projects that leadership wanted to execute. The projects were all centered around technology. There was recognition of what we needed to improve, but there was not an integrated vision of what was to be achieved to ensure success.

How did you overcome that challenge?

We had to ask: Why would the customer care if we did all this? How do we prioritize all this work? And what is the logical order of driving this change across the operating model? Answering these questions is how we got the vision for One Molex.

Tell me more about One Molex.

Molex had grown up as many smaller entities and operates in four different verticals. Before our transformation, a customer could be working with multiple divisions of Molex and the experiences were very different in each.

But One Molex establishes a digital operating model that enables us to scale our capabilities in product development, manufacturing and operations, global supply chain and customer experience. We are creating platforms of capabilities that our businesses can consume into their marketplaces, so that we show up in a manner that is relevant to the business problems that each customer is trying to solve. We do so without creating lots of complexity from an operating perspective.

This enables us to be more competitive by focusing first on the things that matter to the customer.

How did One Molex come together, and how as CDO did you move it forward?

Koch Industries, being the company that it is, has an internal organization that is all about business transformation. So I reached out to them and said, “I think we have an opportunity to really establish a good vision for transformation at Molex.”

We worked with peers from that team, collaborating through a design-thinking process via Teams during Covid to rethink our operating model.

Once we came up with the One Molex vision and had CEO buy-in, it got tremendous traction. We marketed the vision, using it to educate employees throughout Molex on what transformation really means.

We used all the normal mechanisms to show today versus tomorrow, but ultimately getting support from people at all levels within the company came down to consistent repetition of what we are trying to do and why we are doing it.

We stressed that it was not a technology program, that it was a people and change program. We stressed that it was really about culture and thinking about how our business could be different, how it could be reimagined.

Do you think the CDO role will replace or co-exist with the CIO position in the future?

I am not sure that the CDO role has to exist long term, but I also believe that the CIO role has to evolve to where most CIOs act like today’s CDOs.

CIOs are really great at managing IT operations, and some become very comfortable with doing only that. Businesses created the digital officer role as a result, because they needed digitally conversant people who understand how to use IT to drive value and to understand their customers at a persona level through multiple variations and variables. Businesses need IT leaders who can work with marketing, sales and other teams to create digital experiences.

CIOs still need to make sure the systems stay up. But to stay relevant and not be replaced by a role like a CDO, they also must be digital enablement leaders, using technology to drive greater value and utilizing data in a way that constantly lets the company evolve intelligently.

How did you ensure that you evolved as the CIO role changed?

I love to learn and learn through the experience of others.

I also learned to look at companies that are really good at something and ask: How did they get good at it? What are they doing differently? Then, working with my team, we sought out the answers.

And I surround myself with people who are doing things differently than I am. They may have worked for those companies that were better than whatever company I am working for, and I work to understand from them what they do differently to help me learn and to help our company grow and change to meet changing customer and employee requirements.

Furthermore, I am comfortable being uncomfortable. There is a certain level of comfort with routine that many people default to because it provides a sense of security. But if you are not comfortable being uncomfortable, you are not going to evolve.

Can you give me an example of how you help others be comfortable with change?

We are deploying AI at Molex now. We are trying to be really surgical in terms of using AI where we create value by doing something different, and that usually requires a tremendous amount of change.

When you are changing how someone does something, that is very uncomfortable – particularly for people who are afraid that the technology could displace them at some point. To be comfortable, they have to believe in what we are trying to achieve.

So we let them know that they are the ones who are pulling through the value versus the digital team saying, “You should do it this way.” We know what the technology is capable of, but we help  them see that they are the ones who know how it could be applied to make a difference.

What changes do you see for yourself moving forward?

I love what I do. I want to keep doing it. I am not ready to stop working. My wife also works professionally; she is a chief marketing and digital officer at a company in Chicago. Work is so core to who we both are that quite frankly I cannot imagine not working. I am sure some day someone will tell me I cannot work anymore, but I would like to keep working for as long as I can.

But I would love to someday apply what I have learned to the social, rather than the business, side, to further focus on opportunities to change people’s lives.

How do you spend your time outside of the office?

My wife and I have a big family, we have five kids and a couple of dogs, so that keeps us active. We love to travel. We have been fortunate enough to dabble in rental property, and that has been super interesting. And we love to hike. It is so peaceful; it is almost medicinal. We are going to Idaho in a few weeks to go hiking, and we are hoping to hike Kilimanjaro someday. It will be a mountain to climb – but personal or professional – that is what I love.

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