PEOPLE - How American Express Executive Katrina Lane Broke Through The CIO Ceiling

CIOs take heart: You don't have to be an experimental physicist to win a promotion from the IT department into a line management role, but it can't hurt, as the case of American Express executive Katrina Lane shows. Lane has been achieving at a high-level for a long time. She has a Ph.D. in Experimental Physics from Cornell, spent seven years as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, and took on marketing executive roles at multiple companies, ending up as the vice president of Channel Marketing at Caesars Entertainment. During her time in marketing, she collaborated with IT departments in developing data-driven marketing strategies, and implementing sophisticated customer relationship marketing (CRM) and business intelligence systems. She was so knowledgeable, in fact, that she was asked to take over IT as Caesars' senior vice president and chief technology officer, the senior-most information technology role in the company.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2013/04/01/american-express-evp-