Attending Duke was a transformative experience. When I was invited to deliver a keynote address at the Cybersecurity at Duke conference “In the Age of AI,” I was eager to share the experiences that led me to become the first Chief Information Officer for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Below is an excerpt of my interview with Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering.

Please tell us a bit about your early beginnings. Who inspired you during your childhood and undergraduate studies? Why did you come to Duke?

I grew up in a small town in Bavaria, Germany, and thinking back, my grandparents were incredible role models. They were the epitome of being “arbeitssam,” as we say in German, meaning “work embracing.” They never stood still and loved to work – I think this rubbed off on me.

Let me tell you something that may come as a big surprise: I do not have an undergraduate degree! When I was in my teens, I was this dreamy kid in small-town Bavaria, realizing that I was gay and I was lost. I did not fit in, could not focus in school, and would instead read Shakespeare after class rather than work on my math assignments.

Fortunately, my career progressed well in spite of not having a degree. After my entry-level IT job, I landed a position at Compaq Computers in Munich, Germany, and transferred with them to Houston, Texas. Compaq later merged with HP, and over 20 years, I progressed through the IT ranks of Compaq and HP.

I visited several universities as part of my evaluation of where to do the MBA. Within an hour of stepping on campus and talking to people, I knew that my heart was with Duke.

Of course, the issue of not having an undergraduate degree came up. I will forever be thankful to Duke for accepting me based on my professional achievements. At that time, I was Vice President of IT at Sierra Wireless, a global wireless technology pioneer headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. My admittance to Duke required taking math, statistics, and calculus classes, which I completed in the year before starting the MBA. This time, I had much more fun with math than during high school!

Perhaps it was the fact that I went through much of my professional life without a college degree that created an intense hunger for academics. I soaked in the MBA program to the maximum and was proud to get into the top 10% of the class as a “Fuqua Scholar.” Then, I decided to continue academically by getting a second master’s degree in business and management research and a Doctorate in Business from Henley Business School at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.

What was the journey from being a Duke MBA student to becoming NATO’s first CIO? How is this role aligned with the career dreams that you had while you were a student? 

I graduated with a Global Executive MBA from Fuqua School of Business in 2014, so there was quite some time on this journey. I was already in my mid-forties when I started the MBA, but career dreams can be formed at any age!

My path to get into IT was purely accidental. I was 18 and started in the company’s IT department, where I had just completed an apprenticeship. The IT director there offered me a job, and I took it because I really liked the people in that department. I quickly realized that my interests were more on the people side than the pure technology part of IT. I would typically ask questions like “How will this system affect people?” or push for solid change management practices when rolling out new functionality. This taught me early on that being different is a competitive advantage and something to be treasured. Fortunately, my supervisors over the years thought the same.

A couple of years before starting the MBA, I had an accident that resulted in me being flat on my back in a hospital bed for a week. I had all this thinking time while staring at the ceiling and decided then that it was time to “go in big.” This meant a graduate education and forming the goal of becoming the CIO of a large company.

How did your experiences at Duke and the work at Compaq, HP, and Sierra Wireless prepare you for what you do today? 

The Duke MBA changed me to the core. I mentioned earlier that I made it through decades of work without an undergraduate degree. The Master of Business Administration from Duke, a first-class and highly prestigious university, carried tremendous weight for me. First, it gave me a lot of confidence: Gone are the days when I encountered the field “university degree” in a form and had to put down a dash. Then, while one rarely knows what weight a hiring manager or hiring panel attributes to a specific university, I cannot help but think that “Duke” put a spotlight on my resume.

Above all, what I learned in the Duke MBA program made me a different person: how I look at research, read a newspaper article, conduct data analysis, negotiate, evaluate a balance sheet, etc., is very different from how I did these things before.

Workwise, Compaq, HP, and Sierra Wireless played important roles in my professional development. Everything that we do – all the time – prepares us for what we do next. At HP, I had an incredible boss for several years. She challenged and stretched me to the maximum – mentally but also in terms of stamina and the capacity to work for hours with unrelenting concentration. At Sierra Wireless, I had a boss for many years whom I admired very much. He taught me never to back down if I feel strongly about something. He is a master of negotiation and showed me that one could love it like a sport!

This shows us the importance of mentors. They are all around us. If you live life constantly observing people, a lot of the preparation and learning happens by itself. It is a matter of trying things out and internalizing what one has observed.

I invite you to read the full interview, where I share my passion for cybersecurity, the challenges facing NATO, and more.