Arizona ORBIE Leadership Award recipient: For Discount Tire CIO Gary Desai, technology leadership is business leadership
Gary Desai has watched wave after wave of technology reshape his profession. What hasn’t changed, he says, are the fundamentals of leadership: keep learning, understand the business, build great people, and earn their trust.
“Technology leadership ultimately becomes business leadership,” said Desai, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Discount Tire and recipient of the 2026 Arizona ORBIE Leadership Award. “The CIO’s greatest contribution is not implementing technology—it is helping the organization envision possibilities that previously did not exist.”
From Mumbai to the C-suite
Desai grew up in Mumbai, India, in a family where a good education was an expectation. After military prep school, he earned a mechanical engineering degree from IIT Bombay. Surrounded by highly competitive people in academics and sports, he learned a valuable lesson.
“No matter how good you are at something, there is almost always someone, somewhere, who can do it a little better,” he said. Rather than discouraging him, that realization instilled a lifelong belief in continuous improvement.
That mindset drew him to technology. He was fascinated by the speed of programming, where you could write code, run it, find what was wrong and see whether you’d improved it, sometimes within a single day. “I saw it as a field in which learning would never stop,” he said.
Desai’s career has moved through progressively larger transformations. As CIO of Allison Transmission at General Motors, he built an IT organization from scratch and implemented SAP across plants and warehouses, generating roughly $6 million in annual savings. At Honeywell, he led technology for a global consumer-products business, using shared services, analytics and digital commerce to improve supply-chain performance, margins and digital revenue. At Federal-Mogul and Icahn Automotive, he executed major SAP carve-outs and integrations.
Now at Discount Tire, he is using cloud, data, and store technologies to redesign the customer experience itself. Pit Pass, which speeds service while substantially reducing the physical store footprint, is the clearest example.
Yet Desai counts building organizations among his proudest achievements. “The recurring achievement is building organizations capable of sustaining transformation after the initial project is finished,” he said.
His leadership journey from “IT machine” to people-focused leader
When asked about his growth as a leader, Desai points to a series of situations that forced him to adapt, from intense competition growing up to arriving in America as a first-generation immigrant.
The most important lesson was that being right isn’t the same as being successful. “Organizations don’t change because the CIO has the right answer,” he said. “They change when people understand the destination, believe in it, and choose to move toward it together.”
Mentors at Discount Tire helped him evolve from what he jokingly calls an “IT machine” into a more people-focused leader. “Obstacles teach you who you need to become,” he said.
Outside of his day-to-day role, Desai holds an NACD Directorship Certification and serves on technology advisory boards for Netskope and Micro Focus/OpenText. He is also active in several peer leadership groups. “Contribute what you know, remain curious about what you don’t, and leave the next generation stronger,” he said.
Advice for the next generation
His counsel to rising technology leaders: never stop learning, because “the technology you master today will eventually become obsolete; your ability to learn will not.” Learn the business as deeply as the technology. Don’t automate the past; help invent the future. Stay humble and resilient.
“Be grateful for what you’ve accomplished, but remain curious about what could be better,” he said. “The moment you believe you have mastered technology—or leadership—is probably the moment you begin falling behind.”