Getting fired from her CIO job nearly 20 years ago wasn’t just a career turning point for Cathy Hotka. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” says the founder of Cathy Hotka & Associates, which today runs an influential networking community of retail industry CIOs and digital leaders across the U.S., Canada, and the UK.
“Driving home that day with all my office things packed up in my car, I realized I had everything I needed to start a successful consulting firm,” says the gregarious Hotka, who had her first big client within a week of losing the top technology post at the National Retail Federation (NRF) in 2002.
