Zack Hicks and the job nobody asked him to do

Zack Hicks was working in Toyota’s travel department when he was asked to prepare a report on trips that broke company policy. Someone suggested removing the executives’ names. Hicks left them in. For a junior employee, this was an unusually economical way of announcing a management philosophy: the rules ought to survive contact with the people who write them.

That episode, from his early Toyota years, contains a clue to the career that followed. Hicks kept noticing work that sat awkwardly between departments, job descriptions and established habits. He would eventually become the founding president and CEO of Toyota Connected North America. The distance between those jobs was covered through a series of problems he chose to take personally.

A reservation for a different future

Before Toyota, Hicks spent ten years at United Airlines, working on retail automation and online reservation systems. The airline business gave him an introduction to technology as something people actually had to use. A reservation system has a wonderfully unforgiving audience. The passenger wants to go somewhere. The software is expected to cooperate.

Toyota became a client while he was an airline account representative. He liked the way its people consulted administrative assistants about reservation software. Their opinions counted because they would use it. It was a small encounter with a larger principle: a system’s usefulness is best judged by the person stuck operating it every day.

There was some irony in his attraction to the company. Hicks grew up around Detroit and had resolved to avoid the automotive industry. Born in Melvindale, Michigan, he had also taken an interrupted route through college before returning to finish his education. The eventual car executive had hardly been following a straight road toward the car business.

He joined Toyota in 1996. His education included a bachelor’s degree in business management from Pepperdine and an Executive MBA from UC Irvine, completed in 2003. For Hicks, moving between functions was part of the education, too. A sideways move could provide experience that a more impressive title would leave out. Travel, financial services and technology gave him different views of the same enterprise.

The customer should not have to start again

By 2012, Hicks was Toyota’s North American CIO. Asked about his proudest accomplishment, he emphasized relationships between business and IT, and a culture that celebrated innovation. He credited his predecessor and mentor, Barbara Cooper, with handing him challenges before he felt ready and supporting him while he learned. Confidence, in this account, was something another person helped make possible.

One example of that relationship between business and technology became Customer 360. Hicks described the familiar irritation behind it: a customer might talk to a dealer, contact customer service and post publicly online, yet find that each interaction began a new conversation. The company had information. The person asking for help still had to repeat the story.

A prototype at Toyota’s innovation fair combined internal information with public social interactions. Turning it into a working service required business teams to share data, management support and conversations about customer permission and privacy. Hicks treated protecting the idea from ordinary project demands as part of his job. A promising demonstration still needed someone to carry it through the organization.

The ambition was recognizably human: let the next Toyota representative pick up where the last conversation ended. It also explained why a technology leader needed relationships outside technology. The software could join records only after the departments responsible for them agreed to cooperate. The organizational problem arrived with the technical one, rather like a passenger who insists on bringing extra luggage.

A startup, one mile from the parent

Toyota announced Toyota Connected on April 4, 2016, with Hicks as CEO while he also remained Toyota Motor North America’s CIO. The new company would serve as a data science hub for global operations. Microsoft was a collaborator, and Azure supplied the cloud platform. Toyota was creating a place to turn vehicle data into services that could respond to a driver’s circumstances.

The launch described possibilities including services that learned preferences, insurance pricing informed by driving patterns, and shared information about traffic and road conditions. These were proposed uses for a new business. Hicks’s stated purpose was to make the experience easier and push the technology into the background. More computing was meant to demand less attention from the customer.

The company’s address reflected its position inside Toyota. Hicks and Steve Basra sought a workplace near the North American headquarters but with room for an identity of its own. They chose Plano’s Legacy West, about a mile down the road. Close enough to work together; far enough for a different office culture to establish itself.

The interiors mixed open collaboration spaces and large screens with wood, leather and Japanese design references. Images connected Toyota’s automotive history with digital work. The decor had a practical assignment: encourage people to meet and exchange ideas. Corporate culture is often discussed as though it floats above a building. Here, someone also had to decide where to put the kitchen.

“comfortable with being uncomfortable”Zack Hicks, on learning amid technological change · 2018

In 2018, the team numbered about 190. Hicks described employees who expected to change the world and his responsibility to create conditions in which they could try. He also acknowledged the difficulty of keeping up with technological change. Curiosity mattered, alongside a willingness to work without knowing everything. For the executive in charge, uncertainty was part of the working environment.

Two jobs, two clocks

In April 2018, Toyota gave Hicks another responsibility: its newly created Digital Transformation & Mobility pillar. Information services, connected technologies and future mobility work came together under his leadership. He reported directly to North American CEO Jim Lentz and continued as Toyota Connected’s president and CEO. The structure linked established operations with the search for new services and business models.

That combination made the work more complicated than running an isolated experiment. Vehicle hardware, software, cloud services and the systems supporting the existing business had to fit together. In his 2019 conversations about the role, Hicks explained that even people joining a startup needed to understand the enterprise around them. Independence could help a team move; shared standards helped its work connect.

He was also concerned about timing. When business leaders requested a product only after they needed it, development could take another year or two. Hicks wanted technology teams to understand the business well enough to anticipate that demand. The job stretched from delivering what had been requested to recognizing what someone would soon need to request.

His account of connected driving applied a similar test. In a March 2019 podcast, he emphasized reducing friction and integrating outside services, rather than insisting Toyota own every part of the experience. He also treated fully autonomous driving as a more distant prospect. The useful question was what could improve a journey in the meantime, with the technology available to the team.

A meeting room is a peculiar kind of monument

Hicks’s Toyota chapter ended in 2022, after 26 years. Steve Basra succeeded him as Toyota Connected’s CEO. The company marked Hicks’s departure by naming a meeting room for him. Organizations have many ways to remember a leader; this one ensured that, occasionally, somebody would have to check whether Hicks was available at three.

The work was continuing beyond the departure. Toyota Connected’s 2022 review described the rollout of Toyota Audio Multimedia and Lexus Interface, with cloud computing and over-the-air updates. The company also reported that its Drivelink platform had passed three million calls that August. Those were team and company milestones, showing the operational life of the business Hicks had helped establish.

Kimberly-Clark appointed him chief digital and technology officer effective July 26, 2022. It was a newly created position on the executive leadership team. His Toyota responsibilities had included multimedia development across North America and Europe; the next assignment moved him into a different industry, where technology would support brands, commercial activity and operations on a global scale.

Applause is cheaper than a budget

By January 2025, Hicks was describing an approach that gave employees room to experiment, followed by decisions about what deserved continued support. An India hackathon had attracted 130 entries. Seven reached the final stage, and three received funding. Recognition mattered, but so did the prospect that an employee’s idea might become something colleagues could actually use.

He recalled an earlier Toyota hackathon where business leaders wanted to back all the contenders. His reply had a useful brevity: “You can vote with your budget.” It is an excellent sentence for a room full of enthusiastic executives. Admiration costs very little. Assigning money forces a more interesting conversation about which ideas matter enough to finish.

The practical work at Kimberly-Clark included developing technical capabilities and applying AI to business questions. Hicks later highlighted agentic tools, cloud data and a North American SAP migration when reflecting on his tenure. The recurring concern was getting useful work into people’s hands, with the organizational support that allows a project to survive beyond its first demonstration.

The question that follows him into the boardroom

Hicks joined Signet Jewelers’ board as an independent director in October 2018. The retailer wanted experience in digital technology and data analytics as it worked on customer experience and its shopping channels. For Hicks, the appointment offered a view into another industry and an opportunity to contribute outside the company where he had spent most of his career.

His Kimberly-Clark departure took effect on March 31, 2026. His current focus includes serving as a Signet independent director and chairing its Technology Committee. In a July 2026 essay, he turned to the difficulty of carrying AI projects beyond successful prototypes. Senior leaders, he argued, have to protect the effort as it competes with other demands for money and attention.

Away from the job descriptions, there are some pleasingly ordinary details. His first job was washing dishes in a diner. After moving to Texas, he traded surfing for bicycling. Asked who should play him in a film, he chose Leonardo DiCaprio. Asked what he would tell his younger self, he offered the more economical advice: “Relax and be yourself.”

That advice sits comfortably beside the career. Hicks has worked across airlines, cars, consumer goods and jewelry, repeatedly returning to the point where an organization’s needs outrun its existing arrangements. A customer has to repeat a conversation. A prototype needs a budget. A new service needs a home. His next move has often begun with deciding that the unattended task is his to pick up.