Jim Kavanaugh, CEO & Co-founder World Wide Technology

A Rebooter’s Journey

A professional soccer player and an Olympic soccer team member representing the U.S in the Los Angeles games in 1984, Jim revisited his career trajectory, took the leap of faith and co-founded WWT–growing it into one of the largest corporations in America. Still a private company, they have expanded into offering consulting services, cloud computing, digital transformation, security, strategy and integration services. A culture driven workplace, WWT consistently made it on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list from 2012 to 2022, and TIME named WWT among the 100 Most Influential Companies.

Rebooting the Next-Generation of Technology Solutions

It’s not every day that we see America’s heartland companies that are privately owned grow to nearly $20B in revenue. By some accounts they were on the brink many times and could have gone out of business, like many of their competitors and partners. WWT has achieved mass scale over the years working through the challenges and learning from the process and incorporating these to be smarter and successful.

“Very challenging times & very challenging situations expose the true character of people. It really stands the test of time that you will see what people are made of in real challenging times-the grit, the determination, the work ethic, and really the values that they display in those tough times; equally in really really good times, you also expose people, and sometimes even more so than in challenging times. When you have really good times, sometimes people tend to not focus on what they need to do to stay current & to continue to sharpen their skills, whether it’s in sport or it’s in business, or it’s in life. At times it goes to their head, and they start building teams around them of people that tell them what they want to hear and are stroking their ego instead of challenging them. If you think you’ve got it all figured out, that’s when you’re gonna get knocked off the hill there.”

Advanced Technology Center – Innovation Labs 

Investing in an advanced technology center was a move for WWT to push the barriers on bringing expanded value to their customer base. As systems integrator and value added reseller, Jim and his eighteen member executive team thought through the aspect of offering more value to customers, creating an innovation eco system. A few racks of networking equipment over time became over 800 million in value of products that they took into these labs to build complex architectures for global giants to test, evaluate and see the viability of business outcomes. That puts the company as a key business enabler for at least 70 of the Fortune 100 companies.

“The thesis around that was to expand our ability to help advise, consult, and speed up the decision making and the deployment of complex technologies for customers around the world, and create a software platform; On top of that, that allows our customers and partners and employees to get into our labs and sand boxes any time, any place anywhere around the world.”

For sure, Glassdoor’s most highly rated CEO during the Covid pandemic and one of the 25 best CEO’s in America in 2021 is constantly on his toes. 

“You have to be pushing yourself, never be complacent with what’s going on, and trying to the best of your ability to anticipate what’s going on in the market, and I think the best way to anticipate that is to be very inquisitive; to ask a lot of questions to make sure that you’re listening more than your talking, and you’re also pushing yourself to be the best that you can be.”

The experience in sports and the values, principles he derived from playing soccer is clearly evident in WWT’s core values of trust, passion and team player approach. “We’ve got big aspirations and we continue to push the company” is how Jim looks at the future and “what World Wide does today is significantly different than what we were doing even five years ago. We are a very different company- the value that we bring, the services that we provide, the things that we’re providing out of our advanced technology center, the scope and reach of the company globally” all point to the “desire and willingness to do whatever it takes to get the job done and whatever it takes to grind through it.”