Guillermo Garcia Builds IT for What’s Next at TMEIC

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Guillermo “Bill” Garcia has spent twenty-five years saying yes to opportunity, and the trail it left spans two continents and a dozen cities. Colombia, Argentina, El Paso, Troy (Michigan), Georgia, Washington DC, New York City, New Jersey, Detroit, Ohio, Racine (Wisconsin), and, in 2024, Houston.

“You always get to meet new people, but you keep your old friends,” Garcia says. “Reinventing yourself becomes second nature. So, when people ask me about reinventing IT or navigating AI, I already know the territory; I’ve been doing it my whole life.”

Today, Garcia serves as the VP of IT at TMEIC Corporation Americas, a technology-driven industrial company that brought significant manufacturing back to the U.S. years before reshoring became a national talking point.

“This is a company that is reinventing across the board, including IT,” Garcia says. “IT is rapidly becoming the organization of the future that can support a company that doubled in revenue and will do the same again in the next few years.”

One structural advantage of TMEIC, Garcia explains, is that its IT leader reports directly to the CEO, a clear signal that the organization views technology as much more than a support function. Garcia lauds the leadership team for their collaborative, forward-looking approach, which has helped accelerate the pace of transformation.

And it is something to behold.

Within two years, Garcia and his team transformed a long established IT function into a modern organization capable of supporting aggressive growth without blowing up its foundations. The same core team, many of whom have long tenures at TMEIC, went through a reorganization and realignment, with intense upskilling and reskilling layered on top. In partnership with an external team, the team has built an AI practice from scratch, launched successful pilots, and begun delivering AI enabled solutions for internal stakeholders and customers alike.

“We were able to accomplish this without changing the base structure of this organization,” Garcia says. “I don’t think that is all that common.”

Change is never easy, but Garcia says the minds at TMEIC have made the process as fluid as possible. The VP says a majority of TMEIC’s employees are both curious and eager to experiment with emerging tools. That kind of culture makes Garcia’s job possible and also makes them conscious that they need to always be pushing the limits of what is possible. Culture demands it.

“AI has moved past the hype cycle and into the foundation,” Garcia says. TMEIC’s IT organization has built AI platforms and the guardrails to move fast, and has helped prepare people, early adopters and skeptics alike, for a different way of working.

What Garcia seems to love about his job is being an orchestra conductor. Rather than being a strict IT technologist, the VP’s role is more about being the person who understands how all the pieces fit together into a whole. He conducts those different instruments, helping them sing together.

“You need to be a good director, and for that, you need flexibility,” Garcia says. “You need the willingness to learn new things and the discipline to not get caught up in just one area. You must pay attention to every instrument in the orchestra.”

Garcia’s approach to leadership is deceptively simple. His success is a consequence of his team’s. He sees himself as an employee of his own organization, whose primary roles are to set the vision, lay the path, clear roadblocks, and create conditions that help people do their best work.

It turns out that a career spent adapting to new cities, new cultures, and new organizations is excellent preparation for leading transformation. Garcia and his family sacrificed a more traditional approach to putting down roots for opportunity, evolution, and a different pace of life. He says he would be a fundamentally different person if he hadn’t chosen to go where the work was and open his job hunts to virtually anywhere.

Garcia says he’s learned how to make being a transplant a superpower, of sorts.

“You come with a disadvantage when you are coming from the outside,” he says. “So, you must be willing to go the extra mile. That might mean longer hours, steeper learning curves. But it helps build credibility and trust across the organization.”

Today, the VP says he’s incredibly proud of his children, who are now building their own versions of success. And he’s grateful to the woman who said yes to more of those moves than anyone should, gave him his greatest source of pride along the way, and helped make a life out of all that motion.

“If you spend twenty-five years in one place, that becomes your single story,” Garcia says. “We’ve seen so much and lived it all together.”

Garcia recently launched a Substack called The AI Signal, where he explores what the AI era means for careers, organizations, and the people navigating both.

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