HHCIB 033 Data Intensity CEO Kirk Arnold

How Hard Can It Be?

My guest this week is Kirk Arnold, a veteran tech industry CEO, public board member, and lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Kirk was most recently the CEO of Data Intensity, a 650-person global managed services provider of cloud-based data, application and analytics acquired by EQT Partners in 2017. Before that she held roles as the COO of Avid, CEO and President of the then publicly traded billion-dollar service provider, Keane, Inc., and Founder and CEO of NerveWire. Kirk’s also become a kind of tech “CEO Whisperer” over the years, and serves on a range of boards from Ingersoll Rand to Cramer Marketing. She’s a huge supporter of the local innovation ecosystem here in Boston, rounding out her time at MIT with service on the Executive Committee and Board of Trustees of MassTLC, as a Board Member at The Commonwealth Institute, and on the Advisory Committee for the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative. Kirk is the embodiment of the servant leader mentality, having started (and succeeded) as the kind sales person genuinely focused on earning her customer’s respect and not just their signature. Our conversation covers that, and a remarkable confluence of philosophies on matters significant and trivial, from what makes for an effective President to why showing up on time and prepared is a habit worth establishing and maintaining throughout your career.