Director, Corporate Strategy & Business Transformation

Company Description

At Western Digital, our vision is to power global innovation and push the boundaries of technology to make what you thought was once impossible, possible.

At our core, Western Digital is a company of problem solvers. People achieve extraordinary things given the right technology. For decades, we’ve been doing just that—our technology helped people put a man on the moon and capture the first-ever picture of a black hole.

We offer an expansive portfolio of technologies, HDDs, and platforms for business, creative professionals, and consumers alike under our Western Digital®, WD®, WD_BLACK™, and SanDisk® Professional brands.

We are a key partner to some of the largest and highest-growth organizations in the world. From enabling systems to make cities safer and more connected, to powering the data centers behind many of the world’s biggest companies and hyperscale cloud providers, to meeting the massive and ever-growing data storage needs of the AI era, Western Digital is fueling a brighter, smarter future.

Today’s exceptional challenges require your unique skills. Together, we can build the future of data storage.

Job Description

Job Summary:  This leader will partner with corporate, operations and product teams to play a key role in leading a broad set of transformation initiatives across the company. The primary responsibility is to support the company-wide Western Digital transformation program to accelerate innovation, drive efficiencies, modernize the way we operate, and to secure our competitive advantage. Further, the leader will have strong exposure in partnership with the Chief Strategy Officer to evaluate strategic growth alternatives, including: mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, license agreements, and strategic investments that support the company's overall business objectives.  This role will include both strategic influence and support in the areas mentioned, as well as program management of assigned transformation initiatives according to agreed upon governance processes in partnership with senior initiative leaders.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Set up transformation program office
  • Support the leader in setting up the transformation office and building a matrixed team of workstream leads across the company including an efficient governance model. Support day-to-day transformation program level decisions, track and report results, and coordinate governance process for assigned initiatives. 
• Support transformation program implementation
  • Collaborate with initiative/workstream owners and cross-functional teams to execute the company wide transformation program.
  • Ensure initiatives move into implementation and drive fast, pragmatic execution.
  • Lead the actual execution of specific initiatives in partnership with workstream owners
  • Serve as a support function to workstream owners, allowing line functions to focus on efficient implementation.
• Lead transformation program reporting
  • Track and report initiative progress to create transparency and enable better, faster decision-making and results predictability, both for initiative teams and for senior executive leadership consumption.
  • Ensure consistency between internal discussions and Board updates.

Stakeholder Engagement: Build and maintain strong relationships with key stakeholders, including the strategy and corporate development team and the initiative/workstream owners involved in the transformation program.

Qualifications

REQUIRED:

• Bachelor's degree in engineering; MBA/MS from top tier institution preferred
• Minimum of 7 years of experience with strong exposure to strategic transformation, experience in top tier management consulting/investment bank followed by technology company preferred
• Proven experience in successfully orchestrating/program-managing complex, company-wide, cross-functional transformation programs and delivering results at or beyond expectations.
• Willingness to work in a fast-paced “private equity like” environment
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and decision-making skills
• Excellent leadership and communication abilities, strong financial skills

Skills: 

• Strategic thinking and planning
• Financial modeling and analysis
• Project/program management
• Risk management
• Leadership and team development
• Effective communication and stakeholder engagement

Additional Information

Western Digital is committed to providing equal opportunities to all applicants and employees and will not discriminate against any applicant or employee based on their race, color, ancestry, religion (including religious dress and groomi