Mars - The CIO training ground

CIO50 2008: Work, rest and play for the UK's top CIOs

Published: 11 June 2008 17:40 GMT by Andy McCue

Tags: cio50

A Mars a day may help you work, rest and play - as the old ad for the chocolate bar claimed - but it also makes for a top CIO.

One of the themes to come out of the silicon.com CIO50 both this year and last year is the notable number of CIOs to have come through the legendary management training scheme at Mars during the 1980s.

It was described as the nearest thing the UK had got in the 1980s to a really tough business school and the same Mars management training has also turned out some of the UK's top business leaders today, including Justin King at Sainsbury's, Allan Leighton at Royal Mail and Richard Baker, formerly of Boots.

The Mars alumni reads like a who's who of the UK's top CIOs, with people like former Tesco CIO Colin Cobain just one of the familiar names.

The Mars name also features heavily on the CVs of many of the CIOs on this year's silicon.com CIO50 list, including winner Robin Dargue, group CIO and technology director at the Royal Mail - though he joined not as a graduate but later in his career as an IT analyst.

Dargue says: "It is a good breeding ground, a very unique company. There's quite a lot of Mars inc alumni walking around."

Jane Scott, IT director at food services group 3663 learnt her trade on the graduate management training scheme at Mars after studying Mathematics, and then moved into the fast-moving consumer goods sector with Coca-Cola, spending many years living and working internationally.

Others to pass through Mars on their way to the top of the IT tree include Wolseley group CIO Rod Angwin; Homeserve CIO Trevor Didcock, who served as head of IT at Mars Confectionary for three years; DHL Logistics CIO Nigel Underwood; and LCH.Clearnet group CIO Martin Taylor.

Taylor, a liberal arts graduate with a masters in English Literature started his IT career at British Airways before spending a decade at Mars including 18 months in the US.

He says: "I regard that as a core building block of what I did and everything I've done since then has really been building off that experience."

Taylor says Mars during the 1980s was a hotbed of talent with bright, hungry and competitive young people given a lot of responsibility and accountability.

Taylor says: "Just the banging together of a lot of very bright people really drove a huge amount of energy and success based on a quite tough but very analytical regime, so you really had to think through what you wanted to do, you had to be prepared to argue it, you had to be able to back it up with good forensic argument and intellectual thinking and it really forced you to think very, very hard."

But the CIO50 list also highlights some of the other corporate breeding grounds for today's CIO talent, including Diageo - which produced Dargue, plus Alliance & Leicester CIO Ian Buchanan and Unilever CIO Neil Cameron - and Marks & Spencer, also a former stomping ground for Cameron.