The advice was almost offensively practical. Joyce Mullen had become a plant manager at Cummins, with little manufacturing experience, and went looking for guidance from people who had been doing the job for years. One of them offered a prescription that could fit on a hardware-store receipt: “Just paint the bathrooms.”
Mullen did not immediately understand. She had complained about deliveries from the plant while running a distribution business; the response had been to put her in charge of it. Now someone was recommending decorating. It was a small assignment for a large responsibility, which was precisely why it stayed with her.
A neglected bathroom tells workers something about their place in a company. Fixing it tells them something else. The advice gave Mullen a way to make concern visible, in a room employees actually used. A speech could wait. The mirrors and paint could not.
That factory-floor lesson is a useful way into her career. She eventually ran a public technology company whose work included cloud platforms, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence. Yet when she talks about leading people through change, she keeps returning to the ordinary conditions under which they work. The bathroom is a fairly unforgiving performance review of management.
“Just paint the bathrooms.”
The advice Mullen carried out of manufacturing
An international-relations degree meets a balance sheet
Her route into business began at Brown University, where she studied international relations. Several relatives, including her grandparents, had attended Brown. After graduating, she crossed the country with a friend in a professor’s car to join a startup in Monterey, California. Its researchers were exploring whether public information could help anticipate political and military conflict.
Mullen found herself hiring and organizing the people who would do the coding. The attraction was assembling a team and understanding what made its members want to do good work. She was learning management by being responsible for other people before she had much formal preparation for it.
The experience also exposed a gap. She could manage staff, but lacked financial fundamentals, including how to read a balance sheet. An MBA at Harvard Business School followed. There is something appealingly unceremonious about that sequence: encounter a problem, discover what you do not know, go and learn it.
Her first job after business school came through a campus interview with Cummins. She stayed for more than nine years, moving through several leadership roles. Her network grew through everyday activities, volunteering, conversations, and people who suggested possibilities she had not considered herself. A connection could become an introduction; an introduction could turn into a new assignment.
Twenty-one years, then a deliberate exit
A friend and former colleague encouraged her to investigate Dell. She liked the people and culture, accepted an offer, and moved her family to Austin. Over 21 years, she worked across services, sales, operations, logistics, and strategy. By November 2017, she was leading its global channel, OEM, and IoT business.
The breadth matters. Selling technology through partners requires attention to companies that have their own customers, incentives, and difficulties. It also puts a leader some distance from the comforting fiction that a good product can distribute and explain itself. Relationships have to work in both directions.
By 2020, Mullen was ready to leave. She described wanting another opportunity on a senior leadership team at a smaller company. She had discussed the move with her husband and children; she was willing to take time to find the next job. Long tenure had made Dell familiar, and she wanted another challenge.
Her departure interview was affectionate about the company and its partners. She credited Michael Dell and other executives with teaching her, and expected to remain in touch. Leaving a place after two decades can invite a theatrical rupture. Mullen’s version involved gratitude, practical transition arrangements, and an appetite to try her accumulated skills somewhere else.
Taking the job with more to learn
She joined Insight as president of North America in October 2020. The relationship already existed: Dell and Insight were partners, and she knew Insight’s then-CEO, Ken Lamneck. She arrived with experience of the business from the other side of the table.
When she was chosen to succeed Lamneck, effective January 1, 2022, she became Insight’s first woman CEO. Asked about that milestone, she pointed to other women in technology and to the women already holding senior jobs inside Insight. She treated the appointment as a privilege with colleagues attached.
Her response to the new responsibility included a revealing line: “I’ve got so much to learn, so it’s great.” The last three words do a surprising amount of work. A gap in knowledge, for her, could be a reason to take the job.
She could draw on more than a dozen roles at Dell, but did not present experience as immunity from questions. That is a useful distinction for anyone promoted into unfamiliar territory. A larger office may change who brings you the information. It cannot guarantee that you have understood it.
- Before DellCumminsDistribution and manufacturing
- 21 yearsDell TechnologiesOperations, services, and global partners
- 2020 - 2026Insight leadershipNorth America president, then CEO
- 2026 onwardAdvisory & boardsInsight, Toro, and Duke Energy
Buying the ability to finish the job
At Insight, Mullen’s task included extending a business long associated with supplying hardware and software into a broader set of services. The company used the term “Solutions Integrator.” The practical proposition was to help clients decide what to do with technology, then provide the people and capabilities to put it to work.
Two acquisitions in 2023 gave that proposition substance. In August, Insight bought Amdaris, a software-development and digital-services company based in the United Kingdom. Its capabilities included application development, support, and consulting. The deal expanded the pool of people who could build what a customer needed.
In December, the company added SADA, bringing roughly 850 professionals focused on Google Cloud. Insight already had a substantial Microsoft relationship and AWS capabilities. SADA broadened its ability to serve clients working across different cloud platforms.
The names in an acquisition announcement can blur together. Here the connection to Mullen’s earlier career is fairly clear: distribution gets a tool to the customer; implementation helps the customer accomplish something with it. Her strategy put more of those steps inside the same organization. Whether a client needed software written or a cloud environment changed, Insight wanted to have people who could stay for the difficult part.
The warehouse is allowed an opinion
AI gave that implementation argument a new test. During Mullen’s tenure, Insight built an internal generative-AI tool, InsightGPT, and used its own employees’ experience to develop practical knowledge for clients. The eight-week worldwide rollout included training and rules for handling company information.
The details were deliberately workaday. Teams tried the technology in sales, legal, marketing, and application development. Sales staff used it to categorize a large set of data; employee feedback helped refine the tool. People could judge the experiment against tasks they already knew, rather than against a demonstration designed to impress them.
At a 2023 industry conference, Mullen offered an example from a Chicago warehouse. An employee had automated manual work in SAP, reducing a monthly task from 10 hours to 45 minutes. She celebrated the worker’s initiative. Three interns, meanwhile, had built a sales aid that connected client priorities from filings and articles with Insight’s offerings.
These are unusually useful stories to hear from a CEO. The warehouse employee knows where time disappears. The interns can try an approach without having spent years learning why the old one is customary. Giving them room to experiment expands the number of people who can improve a business.
Mullen also pressed the question of return on investment: could an initial result help a customer pay for the next step? It was an operator’s question. A tool that earns its place in a workday has a more convincing advocate than a tool that merely earns applause at a conference.
A warehouse example Mullen shared in 2023. Time fell by 92.5% for this task; this is a single reported example, not a company-wide measure.
A short distance from paint to AI
By March 2026, Insight technologist Miles Ward was drawing a line between Mullen’s early factory lesson and the company’s AI work. Fixing a tedious workflow, in this interpretation, was another way to attend to employees’ daily experience. Mullen had supported early internal adoption and participated in learning the tools herself.
The continuity is worth dwelling on. Technology changes the available remedies, while managers still have to discover what is making work unnecessarily difficult. A new system can create friction as readily as remove it. Listening remains part of the installation.
In a 2025 conversation about leading through uncertainty, Mullen discussed trust in terms of competence, honesty, and benevolence. Her argument gave care an explicit place beside the ability to do the job. That combination helps explain why her technology stories so often have an employee or a client at their center.
She is interested in what people can do when a tool, a manager, or an organization stops getting in their way. It is an ambition with a useful built-in test: ask the person doing the work whether anything has improved.
The next seat at the table
Her time as Insight CEO ended on April 13, 2026, when Jack Azagury succeeded her. The handover had been prepared publicly following her retirement announcement in October 2025. She stayed with the company to advise its leadership.
By September, Duke Energy described her continuing Insight position as executive vice president of strategic development. On September 28, she joined Duke’s board, serving on its Audit Committee and Operations and Nuclear Oversight Committee. She also remained a director of The Toro Company.
The industries have changed around her: engines, computers, cloud services, and now an additional boardroom in energy. The recurring interest is how an organization gets useful work done through people. Her career offers plenty of elaborate technology with which to illustrate the point. The advice that survives most neatly still requires a brush, a budget, and enough attention to notice the room everyone else has learned to tolerate.