Parag Pujari came into Jurgensen Companies as their CIO. Construction firm, 1,200 employees. The IT department was running flat out to keep the lights on, with no strategy and no roadmap.
The board had decided that needed to change. They brought Pujari in to lead an IT function that could grow with the business, not just support it. Four years later, the ERP is replaced, legacy systems are being decommissioned, and the department has a seat at the strategy table. Month-end close that once consumed most of a week now takes roughly a quarter of the time. The journey from there to here isn't primarily a technology story.
The First Move Is Not Technical
When Pujari steps into a new industry, his first move is the same: get out of the office. At Speedway, he went into retail stores. At Jurgensen, he went to construction sites. The goal isn't to learn technical requirements. It's to understand what a workday looks like for the people actually doing the work.
"I talk to the business leaders, understand where their mind is at, what the problems are, where the bottlenecks are. And I go talk to the field."
That approach does two things simultaneously. It surfaces the actual problems IT needs to solve. And it signals something to the organization: IT is not here to wait for tickets. It's here to understand the business. The credibility question, whether an outsider with no construction background can lead IT for a construction company, answers itself when you show up in the field asking the right questions.
Culture Fit Is a Proxy for Familiarity
When Pujari rebuilt his IT leadership team at Jurgensen, he rejected culture fit as a hiring criterion. His working definition of culture is specific: a team where people hold each other accountable. That requires different mindsets, not matching ones.
"Even my developers sometimes challenge me or question me, and that's where I find the value. If I bring people all similar to me, it would result in having a bunch of yes-men."
Culture fit, as most organizations apply it, filters for familiarity. Leaders hire people who interpret situations the same way they do and avoid the friction of genuine disagreement. The result is a team that doesn't slow down bad decisions. Pujari built toward the opposite.
The Technical Ego Problem
Change management is widely acknowledged as the piece organizations underestimate. Pujari agrees, and he has a specific name for one of its biggest failure modes.
He calls it technical ego. When an IT professional dismisses a 60-year-old project manager who struggles with an iPad, that condescension doesn't stay invisible. The people being written off notice. They resist. ERP rollouts stall. Month-end close stays painful. Modernization timelines stretch. Projects budgeted for growth get absorbed by legacy maintenance instead. And when transformation fails to deliver, business partners stop trusting IT to lead it.
"That part of it needs to go away. Thinking you are smarter than that person."
His organization has a dedicated change management lead. When rolling out something new, his team goes to the field and explains why the change is happening, connecting it to revenue, profitability, and efficiency. The explanation has to land with the person receiving it. That requires checking the technical ego at the door.
The Business Leader Gap
Looking across his peer network, Pujari sees a recurring pattern. Many IT leaders still lead as technologists rather than business leaders. In peer conversations, they speak technology while the room needs someone who can connect an accounting or HR problem to an IT solution.
He's careful not to make it a personal failing alone. Organizations that have always treated IT as a cost center tend to produce CIOs who act accordingly. The expectations set at entry shape what the role becomes. If the board expects a technologist, that's what they'll get. If they expect a business leader, the ceiling rises. Pujari negotiated that ceiling before he started, with board and leadership alignment and a clear mandate to transform.
The ceiling of IT is set on day one.
"It goes back to how important it is to set up the right expectations coming into an organization."