Over a 35-year career at IBM, Jon Iwata held multiple leadership roles, including Senior Vice President, Chief Brand Officer, and leader of the company's global marketing, communications and corporate citizenship organization. He reported to three IBM CEOs during two decades of significant transformation. He was chairman of IBM’s corporate strategy committee. According to Interbrand, IBM became the second most valuable brand in the world during Jon’s tenure as Chief Marketing Officer.
Today, at the Yale School of Management he is an Executive Fellow at the Yale Center for Customer Insights, a Lecturer in the Practice of Management, and the Practice Leader of the Program on Stakeholder Innovation and Management.
Jon is Executive Chairman of the Data & Trust Alliance, a not-for-profit organization formed in 2020 by CEOs of leading corporations to develop and adopt responsible data and AI practices. He is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and a director of the Ladies Professional Golf Association. He was appointed a Tech Ethics and Policy Mentor at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University in 2023.
Jon is an inductee of the B2B Hall of Fame and the Marketing Hall of Fame. He was named a Brand Genius by AdWeek. In 2023 he was awarded the Harold Burson Award, the Larry Foster Award for Integrity in Public Communications by the Page Center at Penn State University, and was named to the 2023 NACD Directorship 100 – the annual list of the most influential people in the boardroom and on corporate governance. He holds a B.A. from the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at San Jose State University.
Jon is co-inventor of a U.S. patent for a nanotechnology and process for atomic-scale semiconductors.
Education
BA, San Jose State University
