From CIO to board service with Graphic Packaging’s Vish Narendra

At Graphic Packaging International (GPI), CIO Vish Narendra has spent years embedding technology teams within operations to solve business problems, rather than simply implement solutions. This approach has driven measurable impact while positioning him for board service. Through a deliberate five-year board campaign focused on cross-functional credibility and strategic networking, Narendra has shown that business leadership prepares technology executives for governance roles.

You’re on the board of a large private company. How did you get there?

Everything I’ve done from the beginning of my career has led me to a board role. I was very intentional about pursuing it. Around five years ago, I started thinking about my glide path beyond being an operator. A few things came to mind including consulting and advisory roles, as well as board work. Doing nothing was not an option.

With boards discussing cybersecurity and transformation, they clearly needed the CIO voice to complement the traditional CEO and CFO board membership. Seeing that opportunity, I started a board campaign.

First, I got advice from people I really trusted, and they helped me think about my positioning and build my bio. They told me an operator is very different from a board member, especially the technology and cybersecurity jargon that board members wouldn’t get. Another piece of advice was to emphasize the broader experience I had in sales, sourcing, and quality roles, and the fact I currently run global business services at GPI, which includes payables, receivables, payroll, and travel expense processing.

This underscores a broader point that everyone on the board brings a particular expertise: talent development, go-to-market strategy, customer service, and operations. The advice was that while technology is your ticket to the dance, it’s about much more, and you must contribute in other areas.

What was the broader positioning, and how did you start your board campaign?

I reflected on my career in manufacturing and supply chain, software development, and P&L leadership, and knew that companies in need of digital and supply chain optimization would be in my wheelhouse. My positioning was as a go-to-market and transformational leader in these spaces.

Before I started the campaign, I got CEO approval and made my CFO and CHRO aware, and then I started to network. I knew that 70% of board seats are filled through the board’s own referral network, so I listed everyone I knew who were on boards or advisors to boards, including the big four accounting firms and compensation consultants.

I reached out to four or five of them a quarter, and included my areas of focus and bio. I also told them I was interested in both public and private board opportunities.

Now that you’re on this private board, what’s your contribution?

I’m on the audit committee, and the nomination and governance committees, and that involves tapping my networks for new board members. This company is a distribution business, where inventory turns are critical. I’ve spent time enabling e-commerce to increase revenue in B2B settings, which is experience I also bring to this company.

But more than that, what I contribute to the board is a blend of technology expertise and business leadership. As CIO at GPI, I’m a business leader. I start with the company’s vision and operating plan, and direct our resources toward business impact. For example, when we centralized technology procurement out of individual plants, we leveraged our buying power and drove down operating costs. Now we’re using agentic AI to achieve higher velocity and more cost savings. This is not technology implementation, it’s business leadership.

What are you doing at GPI to embed business leadership in the culture?

Growing a technology-enabled industrial business doesn’t come from hiring top coders. It comes from technology teams that visit the shop floor and sit next to customer service to understand their experience. Just as journalists get embedded with troops for the best view of the action, I embed my teams within operations, to make sure they’re solving real problems. My direct staff knows to skip my meeting for a stakeholder meeting.

My senior leaders need depth in technology, but along the way, they also develop business domain knowledge. Our SAP team leader leverages his deep knowledge of our manufacturing processes much more than his technical depth in SAP. He knows every asset on the shop floor and how those assets make product, which he can mirror in the system. His first thought is how to produce a folding carton, not how to implement SAP.

A technical leader on my team with strong people management skills and a high say/do ratio wanted to grow, but because leadership at GPI requires business knowledge, the technical track would be limiting. We moved her to applications, which was a calculated bet to develop her transformation skills, and building business leadership in IT means pulling people out of their comfort zones and into where they better learn how the business works.

When my team mentions the business, I always replace that with finance, operations, or sales. We need labels to communicate, but we can’t separate IT from the business. We’re unique functions all working together.

When I took on shared services at GPI, my new teams didn’t understand why they were working for the CIO. I had to prove I could speak their language, and wasn’t just some techie who sits in a cave coding away who suddenly showed up as their boss. We changed our team name from information technology to transformation and technology.

You’re retiring at the end of the year and devoting more time to board service, but what are your thoughts on the universal push into AI?

There’s been discussion in boardrooms about bringing in an AI leader who reports to the CEO. But the CIO should be the transformational leader for the company. The CIO and technology team run the plumbing of the organization, so they have visibility across everything. If the CIO is driving transformation, AI should be another tool in the toolkit. Yes, this tool is disruptive, but the CIO should lead that disruption. If they don’t, the CIO gets subsumed under an AI leader, or you get organ rejection because the AI leader lacks the relationships and business context to be effective. In an R&D lab, a separate AI leader might make sense, but for enterprise AI, that leader is the CIO.