My father worked at IBM for 35 years. He told me about the days, decades ago, when he first ran into a new breed of executive and thought, “What the heck is a CIO?” These information-focused leaders emerged as the world changed and the capabilities that companies needed shifted over time. And as an HBS white paper points out, even some of today’s most mainstream executives — from the CTO to even the CFO — were once just new positions created to deal with “significant opportunities and risks emerging from technological or social disruptions.”