Enterprise data, turned into decisions that hold up in the boardroom.

I am the VP and Global Head of Data, Analytics, and Mattel's Global Capability Center. My teams govern the data behind some of the world's most recognizable brands, running an enterprise platform on Google Cloud whose data products power self-service analytics for hundreds of business analysts every day. The capability center in India is a particular point of pride: it began as my proposal to the CTO and CFO, and I now lead its build-out toward a six-hundred-person technology organization.

Before Mattel I spent fourteen years at Verizon, finishing as Director of Data Science for the Business Analytics Center of Excellence, a COE whose creation traced directly back to the FP&A transformation I had led as its global process owner for systems and data. Earlier chapters covered supply chain analytics, IT audit, and the consulting years at KPMG, where I learned the craft of asking hard questions politely.

My conviction is that analytics succeeds as an operating discipline, not a science fair. The interesting work is rarely the model; it is the governance, the data quality, the operating rhythm, and the patience to make a metric mean the same thing in every meeting. I am genuinely enthusiastic about AI, and equally enthusiastic about knowing where it does not belong. For a few years I also taught executive masterclasses in data and AI at Caltech, which remains the most efficient known method of discovering what one does not actually understand.

Away from the dashboards I am a committed spectator: of Carnatic music in Chennai's December season, of sport in most of its forms, and of the occasional perfectly engineered couplet by Ogden Nash.