When Brazilian superstar Pele and a host of other world class footballers were lured to the United States in the 1970s to promote the country's burgeoning soccer scene, the influx also opened a door for a kid from Mexico with pretty average skills on the pitch.

Toby Redshaw had moved to the US to study and, coming from a footballing nation, was instantly made both captain and coach of his university team."I was an OK soccer player in Mexico but I was a rock star in the States," he says. "It was like being Pele."

Redshaw led the University of Memphis team to the State championships, and says the experience remains one of the most formative lessons he's carried over into his business career, during which he has spent more than two decades in leadership roles at some of the world's biggest corporations.

"If you lined up my university team against all the other teams, man for man, the opposing teams had better players in every position. But we played a disciplined team game and we'd win. So for me the difference between superstars and team playing came through at an early age. I've always believed business is a team sport."

Down Mexico way

Now global CIO at Aviva, the world's fifth largest insurance company, Redshaw's career path nearly took a very different direction. He graduated with double honours in Philosophy and Economics at the age of just 19, but his first choice had initially been to study theatre.

He found it difficult getting a job in the US after graduating and in 1982 hit the road back to Mexico in a '76 Chrysler Cordoba packed with everything he owned, $80 in his pocket and a newly grown beard to make himself look older and more creative.

The ploy obviously worked - Redshaw landed a job as media manager at Noble y Asociados, at that time the biggest advertising agency in Latin America. He might have stayed in advertising had a career-defining opportunity not come knocking in 1983.

Redshaw joined the FedEx international customer service team, where he was given responsibility for automated call distribution (ACD) equipment and managing the scheduling at a giant call centre at FedEx headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee.

That was followed by a move onto call centre systems for the "international" side of the business (which at the time consisted mainly of three cities in Canada).

"In 15 years, we took that to 211 countries and compound annual revenue growth of 65%, so it was like constantly being at a start-up. It was very profit-and-loss focused with a consistent "do-more-with-less" mindset. It was fantastic. I did all sorts of work, from managing M&As to building call centres."

Setting the bar high

Among the key experiences and skills Redshaw absorbed during his 17 years at FedEx was to set the benchmark high: "Set really amazing, aggressive goals and challenge teams to get there. Teams will surprise you if they think part of their job is to innovate and figure out how to get this done in a faster and cheaper way. If the goal is 1,000 and you come in at 900 then it's so much better than setting the goal at 500 and coming in at 505."

And, as with many cutting-edge, entrepreneurial companies, the FedEx culture was not shy of embracing failure as a way of learning and improving. "Failure won't kill you," says Redshaw. "I was once sent to Australia to see if we wanted to buy a certain company. I was only 23, so my reaction was, 'Gee, I'm the call centre guy - why are you sending me?'"

Redshaw was told that FedEx managers with the relevant skills profile were already overstretched: "They said, 'You understand service well, so go and see if the target company could be turned into a true service organisation. When you get there, just hire some KPMG people to help you with the other end of things.'"

He adds, "It was a terrifying experience but it worked out fine; we bought the company and it was very successful." That episode established his reputation for troubleshooting.

In 1991, Redshaw was part of a FedEx leadership team sent to Hong Kong on a project to turn around the Asia-Pacific business. After that, there was a similar job in the Latin American region, where Redshaw was also handed the role of CIO of that business unit.

After years of global experience gathering, Redshaw returned to FedEx HQ to take on a varied portfolio that included responsibility for global supply chain integration and automation, the leadership of the company's Y2K remediation project across more than 200 countries and the vital role of working with all the relevant airport authorities and government transportation bodies.

Hard bargaining

Redshaw's approach to negotiating has been shaped by his hard-driving years at FedEx, and he dismisses any notion of cosy "win-win" deals - except in relationships with the most strategic of partners.

"I don't care if you're bleeding out of both ears financially," he says. "I'm going to do an 'I win and you make it up off your other customers' deal. I don't go out of my way to make suppliers lose but if you're providing a commodity product or you're in a market where the cost of change is not huge for me, I want to out-negotiate you."

Redshaw argues sourcing is about "choreography" rather than negotiation and key to this is hiring procurement and negotiating experts. "You have to do that dance and you have to hire experts. You put an IT director and an applications development director in a room with an Oracle sales pro; the Oracle sales pro wins every time - it's what he does for a living. The applications development guy is a techie.

"So we hired a very small team and if you examined them genetically you'd find they are half pitbull, half piranha. They may not be people you want to invite to dinner or play golf with but they are the people you want doing your deals for you."

He should know: for a while, Redshaw was on the other side of the table. At the height of the dot-com boom in 2000 he moved from FedEx to a tech start-up, becoming general manager for global operations and supply chain at Zoho, a B2B hub for hotel supplies. He invested his own money in the company and brought in other investors.

Highs and lows

In frenetic start-up mode, he spent most of his time travelling, keeping clothes in a London hotel, an apartment in Ohio, an apartment in Silicon Valley and his house in Tennessee, where his wife still worked for FedEx. "It was a fantastically intensive year. Once a month there could be an event that would kill or make the company. People in most industries have no idea what real make-or-break stress feels like. And I got to run a business, so I carried a sales bag."

The biggest high was beating SAP to the largest account in the UK; the low point came a year later, when the dot-com bubble burst and the company went bust, taking a lot of Redshaw's money with it.

But he stayed with the high-tech industry, joining mobile phone and chip company Motorola with the singular title corporate vice president, I.D.E.AS. (innovation, data, enabling platforms and architecture services). That put him in charge of a global sourcing budget of $6 billion, with responsibility to improve IT value for the business dramatically by cutting the annual run rate from $1.4 billion to $920 million.

Redshaw was at Motorola when it hired new CEO Ed Zander from technology giant Sun Microsystems. He knew the industry inside out and was well connected with key IT players in the marketplace.

"You want a context-rich conversation around IT with a CEO? There was lots of technology that Zander knew more about than me or the people on my team. Instead of me saying, 'Let me tell you what SOA is and why web services are going to be very important,' he'd say, 'Who are you looking at in the marketplace?' It was a fantastic accelerator. You want your CEO either to be like that, or like my current chief [Aviva's Andrew Moss]. He isn't a deep tech guy, but is very clear on the value of IT and why it matters."

Starting from scratch

The leap from fast-moving, high-tech Motorola to insurance - not an industry with the strongest reputation for investing heavily in technology - isn't an obvious one, and Redshaw admits he initially rebuffed Aviva's approach.

He was eventually lured by the challenge of the company's ambitious "One Aviva, Twice the Value" global transformation programme. The challenge was made even more appealing by the blank canvas - on arriving, he found Aviva had no real global IT strategy in place.

But this is not about imposing global IT on the business. "You have to spend time building trust with the business, with peers and with the regional CIOs," he says. "You earn that through delivery. But once you get the team shaped into the right form with the right vision, it's just a fantastic ride."

Already Redshaw has grafted on some cutting-edge atmosphere. Aviva now has a Web 2.0 platform catering for 44,000 employees, helping them collaborate, share information and innovate.

One reason why he can push a radical agenda, he says, is the crisis in the financial services industry. "When people feel the belt needs tightening, they're more open to suggestions of how to do things faster, better and cheaper. That really sells in these times."

Toby Redshaw: The resume

1982-1983: Noble y Asociados, Mexico City - Advertising agency media manager
1983-1984: Federal Express, Memphis, Tennessee - International Customer Service, Master Control
1984-1988: Federal Express, Memphis - International Customer Service Systems
1988-1991: Federal Express, Memphis - Manager, Corporate Analysis and Process Control
1991-1996: Federal Express Hong Kong - Managing director, Customer Automation
1996-1999: Federal Express, Miami, Florida - CIO Latin America, Caribbean Business Unit  
1999-2000: Federal Express, Memphis - Vice president, Global Supply Chain Integration
2000-2001: Zoho Inc, Europe, UK, Asia, USA - General manager, Global Operations and Supply Chain Solutions
2001-2007: Motorola, Chicago, Illinois - Corporate vice president, I.D.E.AS.
2008-present: Aviva, London, UK - Global CIO

Illustration: Masao Yamazaki