WestRock CIDO Amir Kazmi on building resiliency

Amir Kazmi is a savvy business leader whose leadership playbook has been shaped by the fact that he’s spent one third of his career in P&L roles. In his current role as chief information and digital officer at WestRock, he’s responsible for developing and executing global information systems, technology, and cybersecurity strategy in addition to leading the company’s digital transformation.

On a recent episode of the Tech Whisperers podcast, Kazmi unpacked his unique leadership journey, his approach to leading digital innovation, and how he brings out the best in his team. Afterwards, we spent some time discussing how today’s digital leaders can build multidimensional resiliency to set themselves, their teams, and the business up for success. What follows is that conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Dan Roberts: You’ve been in many pressure-cooker situations over the years, and you always maintain a calm and confident demeanor. What do you do to prepare yourself to lead in these times, and what are you doing to continue to build your personal resiliency?

Amir Kazmi: For me, building personal resiliency starts with embracing a mindset where you’re constantly trying to learn as opposed to thinking you must have everything perfectly defined. I had to get comfortable with being uncomfortable sometimes — not always knowing the ‘how’ but continuing to pursue the vision.

That also means distinguishing between where you can take some risks and where the risk is going to be more limited. Then I think you can temper the level of testing, learning, and scaling and embed some of those growth mindset principles within your team.

This is especially important when you’re trying to bring new commercial products and solutions to the market — where you have to test and learn and iterate with customers. Space to take some risk and try new things has to be an expectation. You can still have a clear OKR framework with revenue expectations. But then be intentional about identifying subcategories where you have flexibility and expect learning for product/market fit.

I’ve observed that great technology leaders have some specific attributes in common. I refer to it as ‘Leading with H.E.A.R.T’: humility, empathy, adaptability, resiliency, and transparency. You also talk about the balancing act of leadership. What is the interplay of these attributes and how does it show up among resilient leaders?

I think that those attributes are very representative of a growth mindset I see in resilient leaders. It’s the ability to learn together, the ability to be empathetic, and the ability to know that we’re going to hold each other accountable. After all, when technology meets human ingenuity, the possibilities are limitless.

As leaders, we have to set a bold vision, inspire the team, and enable a collaborative and transparent culture that builds trust to achieve nonlinear results. Resilient leaders learn when to adjust and when to change course.

I find that transparent leaders end up building resiliency in their people by being an example of what that confidence and courage looks like. They’re upfront when they have a bad day, and they go back out and fight the fight again. What are some other things leaders can do to set their people up to be more resilient?

There are three leadership principles I would highlight that help build resilience in the team. First is recognizing the pace of change and responding to the impact it has on a team. It’s not getting slower; it’s getting faster. One of the behaviors that can help your team is to ‘explain the why.’ Set the context before the content behind what needs to be accomplished so we’re all on the same journey.

Second is recognizing that we have to instill a learning and growth mindset in the culture, in the leadership, and in the fabric of what we’re trying to achieve. Many businesses are shifting their business models from product to service, and as leaders, it’s important to build a level of learning in that journey for your teams. One of the leaders that I admire and have learned from is John Chambers, who has said, ‘It’s all about speed of innovation and changing the way you do business.’ If we don’t reimagine ourselves, we will get disrupted.

Third is transparency around what the key priorities are — because not everything can be a priority — and then creating flexibility around those priorities and how we get to the outcomes.

These principles allow leaders to create capacity for the team and the organization to learn as they anticipate customer needs and enable business outcomes — revenue, margin, and productivity. And it goes without saying, but those outcomes have to be around the customer and business: What are you doing to impact our workforce to be more effective, more productive, to have a better experience? How are we creating a stickier experience for the customers, where they’re seeing value?

Speaking of the business, there are many dimensions to building resiliency in our companies. How are you building resiliency as the owner of cybersecurity for WestRock and more generally in the business?

It starts with great people and great leadership. On our team, John Gift [chief information security officer], who recently accepted the CSO50 Award on behalf of WestRock, does a great job leading from a cybersecurity perspective. We had a cyber incident a couple of years ago, and to see how far the company has come in a fairly short period of time, as reflected by the award, shows both how we captured the moment and how we followed the mantra of converting a crisis into an opportunity. We energized the team and focused on, how do we learn from this? How do we strengthen our operations? While we have made meaningful progress, we recognize this is a persistent and evolving threat, so you have to stay up to speed on trends and risk management capabilities.

There are two sides of the coin to this risk, and the other side is about recovering faster and building tactical resiliency. Joseph Hinkle [vice president of technology platforms and global operations] runs global platforms, infrastructure, and the cloud. Through his leadership, we developed and executed a global cloud strategy, with most of our global computing in the cloud today, and strengthened operational recovery capability.

The partnership between those two leaders and their teams has established a solid foundation for expanding our digital solution capabilities. This foundation has allowed us to strengthen our customer experience and double our e-commerce revenue to approximately $600 million. Additionally, it enables over $300 million of packaging revenue from digital connected packaging solutions so customers can answer: Where is my product, what is the quality of my product, and how can I strengthen consumer engagement with my brand on the package?

As for resiliency at a more general level, whether it’s cyber or disaster recovery or something else, it’s the ability to recover faster to support the operations. We’re a manufacturing company, so it’s important to maintain uptime. Every hour or minute we’re down — especially across our over 300 production facilities across 30-plus countries — has real impact and consequence. It’s building a response plan and then testing. Everything is perfect until you put the plan into action and test it. So we run simulations and tests to prepare and manage our business risk.

The need to continuously learn as you’re going through it seems even more important today, and I’m not sure everyone has adopted the necessary mindset for it. I call it ‘grit it until you get it.’

Grit is an incredibly important trait, and I don’t believe a lot of things can replace hard work. For me, some of that learning happened when I was in P&L roles working with our product R&D teams and diverse end-market customers on product market fit with a focus on velocity of iterations. The importance of grit and humility was reinforced when I was starting a company, raising funding, building a team and customer pipeline. At WestRock, we are applying similar principles as we develop digital packaging solutions that combine IoT in packages with SaaS to help solve the three customer needs I mentioned earlier. We’re actively learning as we mature these digital solutions across different end markets.

To loosely quote the philosopher Seneca, ‘Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.’ I think luck is created through preparation and hard work, and also through resiliency — being willing to try and fail more than once.

And by the way, what fun would life be if we just played it safe?

For more insights from Kazmi on his approach to leading digital innovation and how he brings out the best in his team, tune in to the Tech Whisperers podcast.