Fall 2025
Ask kids what they want to be when they grow up and they may answer something like “fireman,” “astronaut,” or “doctor.”
Has any child ever answered “strategist”?
“You’re never a kid thinking, ‘One day, I’ll shape company futures in boardrooms,’” says Neil Hoyne (BS Management ’03), during a video call from northern California. Yet, as chief strategist at Google and bestselling author of Converted, Hoyne has built a career rooted in making solid decisions, balancing tensions in leadership and holding honest relationships with personal and corporate values.
After graduating from Purdue, Hoyne earned his MBA. Facing graduation in the middle of the Great Recession, he landed a job at open-source software company SourceForge, he says, simply because it was the only one available.
“I got my job offer a day before graduation at UCLA. I went to the Career Center Director, David Cooley — he and I are still close friends to this day — and he was ecstatic for me. ‘So what's next? he asked. ‘I sent them a counteroffer.’” A Midwesterner, Cooley did a double-take and asked Hoyne why he countered. “I thought that's what you’d do. I thought it was the decorum,” Hoyne answered.
With a self-deprecating smile, Hoyne lands the takeaway: “The importance, ladies and gentlemen, is to understand the difference between systems and tactics. Do not confuse them. You need to know why not to counter if you do not have other offers.”
Hoyne’s focus — his passion — is creating value. When he decided he could do that better at Google, he applied and was rejected more than 34 times. (His wife, then working as a pediatric nurse, applied over 70 times before Google gave her a chance to explain how she could create value for them.) Just as he was on the cusp of giving up, his wife encouraged him to apply for three more jobs — "the well-known limit of the Google job shopping cart,” jests Hoyne. The next day the recruiter called, asking him which of the three positions he wanted.
“Put me wherever you think I can create the most value,” he told the recruiter. He admits his general response was because he couldn’t remember the precise titles.
In his new role, he grew fascinated by how companies made decisions — how they set priorities, allocated resources and attempted to “live out” their stated values.
You see that with more senior executives: the higher up you go in the organization, the harder it is to see the truth of what’s happening in your business and with your customers.
What hadn’t been deliberate — becoming a strategist — happened because of Hoyne’s curiosity. He wanted to learn how decisions are made.
Hoyne’s role at Google placed him in the unique position of being able to observe CMOs and CEOs in the boardroom. “I just wanted to see how they carried themselves, how they motivated their teams, how they shared ideas,” he says. He was distinctly interested in how executives facing similar challenges and data came to wildly different conclusions. Having now spent thousands of hours observing companies across every vertical in the country, he’s learned how living with commitment to values impacts outcomes.
He describes sitting silently in board meetings or C-suite strategy sessions, not to advise, but just to watch, absorb and understand. These observations revealed something critical: how vast the distance is between what executives think their strategy (and culture) is and how frontline employees, customers or vendors experience it.
He recalls a CEO who insisted that transparency was the company’s core value, while behind closed doors, staff signaled each other and hand-picked specific datasets to win a predetermined outcome. All the while, the boss congratulated himself for open dialogue. “You see that with more senior executives: the higher up you go in the organization, the harder it is to see the truth of what’s happening in your business and with your customers,” Hoyne says.
In another, he sat with about 40 marketing vendors prior to a board meeting led by a company CMO. Just before the presentation, the CMO entered and closed the door. “Here's the reason you vendors are here today to talk to the board,” he told the group. “They want transparency and honesty from all of you. I appreciate and respect that as a value of our business, but let me be very clear. You're all to go in there and agree with my plan because I control the budget.” So, while everyone was welcomed, anyone who left would have stood out should they have shirked away from his threat to withhold his budget if they were honest.
Boardroom cultures, Hoyne finds, are shaped by what leaders reward: harmony and consensus can stifle dissent, and supposed values like innovation often get lost in bureaucracy. His antidote? Leaders need to look for the “trade-offs you're giving up" when prioritizing one value over others. And leaders must be vigilant about the ways real cultures operate.
The throughline in Hoyne’s observation is how easy it is to declare values; the challenge is to live them. He recalls a senior executive proudly declaring a commitment to innovation. Hoyne asked him, “So if I give you an idea, how long will it take you to take those first steps towards it?” The CMO answered, “If we get a good idea on Wednesday, we’ll execute by Friday.” But when Hoyne quietly asked junior staff, they admitted it would take a year to launch anything new. They need to persuade multiple layers of management with their data, then it had to pass the risk tolerance of legal and the brand expectations of marketing. They admitted, “We only surface ideas we know will work.”
There’s often a disconnect between aspiration and reality, Hoyne observes. Companies may say, “We care about our customers and our people.” In his book Converted, Hoyne writes about how much time building relationships with customers takes but notes that companies often invest for short-term gains.
“That's the trade-off we all have to make. If there is sufficient data and evidence to say long-term investments are worthwhile, why aren’t we making those investments?” Hoyne says. “Through a personal lens, we see the parallels. People say spending time with family is important. I then ask them, ‘Why are you in the office on weekends?’”
It’s about the art of moderation, balancing short-term and long-term ROI, Hoyne notes. This is the nuanced work of knowing when to accelerate, when to pause, when to advocate for long-term gains and when to concede to short-term necessity — all while staying anchored in clear values.
As an example, he offers the current AI hype. A 2024 analysis showed that companies that mentioned AI in their earnings calls saw their stock growth double compared to companies that didn't. So, many started slapping AI onto products and into ads, like an automatic toothbrush claiming to be powered by AI that he saw while shopping recently. Hoyne was necessarily skeptical. The marketing claims have long-term consequences for customer trust. A marketer himself, Hoyne wants companies to ask, “Will your customers trust you? Are you delivering actual returns for them?”
Leaders need to look for the “trade-offs you're giving up” when prioritizing one value over others. And leaders must be vigilant about the ways real cultures operate.
It's also about managing persistent tension, which is the responsibility of leaders. “The leaders I love working with are ones that say, ‘Both sides are right, and I need to manage that. And both sides are going to hate me because they're going to see the trade-offs purely from their lens.’” It’s part of the strategic value he offers to global boards.
It’s tempting to think of Hoyne’s career as a series of bold leaps, but he reframes it as a lesson in persistence. When rejected repeatedly for jobs, he still applied again; when he was told to focus on his core responsibilities rather than sitting in on executive meetings, he kept going. For him, being in the room was as educational as any formal class. He credits his curiosity as a quality he learned from professors who gave him the skills to ask questions so he could navigate “landscapes of uncertainty,” like technology disruptions in business.
At first glance, Neil Hoyne’s career seems defined by bold moves — audacious job applications, pushing into new domains and challenging conventions. But boldness, by itself, isn’t the goal. His lesson for aspiring leaders: Don’t start with the flashy move. Start with honest questions and clear values. Assess the opportunity costs. He’s been turned down for projects because he stuck to his values.
“I don't want to be that person driven entirely by a short-term goal and sacrificing that long-term objective,” Hoyne says. “It’s the same for any company. If the company says their customers matter, and they're not going to spend the time properly supporting and developing those relationships, then I question whether that value is there. The hardest thing any of us must do is to challenge ourselves to say, ‘Are we being true to those values?’”
