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The Paratrooper CIO: David Lister, Reuters
The James Bond of CIOs...

By Andy McCue

Published: Tuesday 19 September 2006

Of the four different types of CIO - paratrooper, consultant, professional, executive - the paratrooper is the strong and independent outsider usually headhunted in by the top management when major change is on the agenda.

A typical paratrooper is David Lister, CIO at Reuters, who has spent his career working for major global brands across different industry sectors during periods of change, transformation and restructuring.

The main advantage the paratrooper brings is the outsider's view. They are not constrained by legacy thinking and are quickly able to assess what the real situation is and what needs to be done.

Lister says: "The advantage of coming new into an organisation is that you are not bound by conventional wisdom. Because you come with a fresh view you fairly quickly assess the problems and challenges."

Lister is an architect by training who moved into IT and worked in electronics in local government and then on to the chemicals industry. He joined Coopers and Lybrand doing management consultancy before moving on to Guinness at the time of the acquisition of Distillers, where he stayed for 10 years in five different posts.

He says: "I did all the senior IT jobs across what became Diageo."

It was then on to Glaxo Wellcome just before the SmithKline Beecham merger where the company was trying to move away from having lots of standalone businesses to an integrated unit ahead of the merger.

It was a similar story at Boots where the challenge was to integrate 14 conglomerated businesses into one single integrated company.

Now at Reuters the challenge is along the same lines. Lister says: "We need to get fit, lean and healthy and move away from being a global federated company to a global integrated one."

There's an obvious trend with this career path that is typical of the paratrooper. Steady-state is not for them and part of their task usually involves grooming a successor to run the IT operation once the change programme is complete.

Lister says: "I get bored with business-as-usual activities. When things calm down I tend to move on."

One weakness of the paratrooper can be that being an outsider and the leader of sometimes unpopular change they often have to tread on toes and make enemies but Lister says this isn't always the case or the best way to get things done: "There are some consulting skills that have to come into play around communicating and influencing and how to promote change."

Although Lister is currently fully focused on the job in hand at Reuters, the paratrooper in him will inevitably lead him onto new challenges in the future.

He says: "I spend a lot of time solving problems that are legacy to businesses. I am keen to take the skills I have and take a growth organisation. I'd like to take a business to growth and build."