Jon Iwata is Executive Fellow at Yale School of Management, an appointment he received upon his retirement from IBM in 2018, capping a 35-year career with the company. In 2020 he was also appointed inaugural Ogilvy Fellow at the Yale Center for Customer Insights; the fellowship was established to understand how business leadership is evolving in the era of stakeholder capitalism.
Jon reported to three IBM CEOs during two decades of significant transformation of the information technology industry, global business and geopolitics. As IBM Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications, Jon led the company’s global marketing, communications and corporate citizenship organization for a decade. He was chairman of IBM’s corporate strategy committee for three years.
As IBM’s marketing leader, Jon led the digital transformation of his organization. He developed strategies that substantially grew the value of the IBM brand and repositioned the company at key inflection points: e-business, when the Internet was emergent; Smarter Planet, which described how all systems — from power grids and supply chains to healthcare and cities — would be transformed by the phenomenon of data; and IBM Watson, which heralded the era of artificial intelligence.
Jon is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; a director of the Ladies Professional Golf Association and chair of its nominating committee, and a director of The Center for Global Enterprise.
He is an inductee of the B2B Hall of Fame, the Marketing Hall of Fame, the CMO Club Hall of Fame and the Page Society Hall of Fame, which honors lifetime achievement in business communications. He was named a Brand Genius by AdWeek in 2017. Jon holds a B.A. from the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at San Jose State University.
He is co-inventor of a U.S. patent for nanotechnology for semiconductor design and fabrication.
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