Women Of The Year Lifetime Achievement Award Honoree Joyce Mullen Admired As Authentic, Driven, Energetic

‘No one cares about your growth as much as you do,’ says Joyce Mullen, Insight president and CEO. ‘Treat your development like a job. The more you grow, the more choices you create. Get clear on your values and purpose. Be proud of your work. Be generous with your time and talents. Have the courage to use your voice. Mentor at least one woman in tech and help her reach a board. Your perspective matters. The industry needs you.’

It’s a story Joyce Mullen shares so often that Brenda Hudson recalls it vividly.

Years ago, early on in Mullen’s career, she was in Indiana to represent Cummins Engine Company at a technology forum. She walked into a conference room for a meeting at the forum, but before she could take her seat was stopped by a male executive. He gestured to his empty cup and asked Mullen to get him a coffee, detailing how he takes it.

Mullen didn’t flinch. Didn’t correct him. Didn’t raise an eyebrow. “All right,” she said lightly, and headed for the coffee urn.

She returned a moment later, placed the cup of hot coffee in front of the man with quiet precision and then took her seat at the conference table, sliding into her spot as one of the forum’s key participants.

“Ok are we ready to start the meeting?” she then said, as she watched the man sink smaller and smaller into his chair.

“He looked over and suddenly realized she was a formidable participant, not the server he assumed she was,” said Hudson, senior vice president of commercial sales, sales enablement and learning and development at Insight Enterprises. “He wanted to disappear from embarrassment.”

And Mullen? She carried on, unfazed. No call-out, no performative lesson, no need to reclaim dignity.

“That’s just Joyce,” said Hudson, who also worked alongside Mullen at Dell. “Confident, poised, unbothered, articulate. Magical, really. She didn’t have to do anything. She just sat at the table. And the meaning behind that is so large, it speaks volumes.”

That graceful confidence is just one aspect of the trailblazing leader whose impact spanned both industry-defining transformation and deeply human leadership. Mullen reshaped Dell’s global channel and OEM ecosystem into a $100-billion-plus innovation engine, and as Insight president and CEO led the Chandler, Ariz.-based solutions provider’s reinvention into an AI-first solutions integrator.

Yet it’s her people-first ethos that sets her apart, those close to her echo. She exudes authenticity that made teams fiercely loyal, the humility that allowed her to learn from anyone, and the conviction that empowered countless women and rising leaders to believe in themselves. Mullen doesn’t just deliver results, she elevates people, redefines what’s possible and leaves every organization stronger than she found it, earning her the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award at CRN’s Women of the Year Awards.

Mullen received the honor at CRN’s black-tie gala at Gotham Hall in New York City on Dec. 9, just six weeks after announcing her retirement as president and CEO during Insight’s third-quarter earnings call in October.

She Fell In Love With Technology, But It’s ‘The People Part Of The Business’ Where She Thrived The Most

Growing up, Mullen never imagined a career in technology, she was interested in international business. When she shared her career aspirations with a guidance counselor, the counselor suggested she be a flight attendant.

“My grandmother was outraged. ‘Are you kidding me? You should do whatever you want to do,’” Mullen recalled. Her grandmother, she said, became her earliest mentor.

“Two lessons stuck with me forever: Don’t let anyone else define your limits, and be the voice of encouragement for others that my grandmother was for me,” she told CRN in an email.

After graduating from Brown University with a degree in international relations, she got a chance to work at a startup building systems to predict military and political conflict using public data sources. She and a friend drove cross-country, in Mullen’s professor’s car, to take the job.

“I ended up running the office and hiring 45 people to do the coding work, despite being the only non-academic on the leadership team,” she said. “That’s where I discovered what I really loved: the people part of business, figuring out what motivates different teammates and aligning their personal goals with business goals.”

She left after three years to earn an MBA in business administration and management from Harvard University, then joined Cummins Engine Company, a 100-plus-year-old manufacturing firm, as an international business development manager. By the end of her nine-year tenure, she was leading international customer-support strategy for a $2.5 billion business and saving $5 million annually by consolidating global distributors onto a single IT system.

Then a friend at Dell convinced her to interview for an open role.

“That’s when I fell in love with technology,” she said. “Michael Dell [Dell chairman, founder and CEO] is a legend, and the technology itself is endlessly fascinating. We use it to solve some of the world’s most complex problems.”

Mullen spent more than 21 years at Dell, rising through a series of increasingly senior roles to lead major global businesses and transformative initiatives. She guided multibillion-dollar divisions including global channels, OEM, IoT and software and peripherals, delivering industry-leading growth, expanding global partner ecosystems and strengthening Dell’s solutions strategy. She built and scaled global partner programs, re-engineered sales operations and led complex integrations and alliances that improved profitability and customer experience. Across every post, from supply chain operations to executive leadership, she consistently delivered growth, operational excellence and innovation at global scale.

“What I’m most proud of is how we transformed what it meant to be a channel partner,” she said. “They weren’t just resellers. They became innovation drivers helping customers tackle complex transformations.”

In 2020 she joined Insight as president and added CEO to her title the following year, leading a sweeping transformation that repositioned the company as an AI-first solutions integrator.

“This wasn’t intuitive. Combining business models is complex.” she said. “But watching our team define what this looks like, and identifying the right metrics—customer satisfaction, recurring revenue, wallet-share expansion and client-engagement depth—has been incredibly rewarding.”

Insight’s decision to embed AI directly into clients’ existing architectures and not treat it as a bolt-on helped establish a new category. The hardest part, Mullen said, was building a new model while sustaining the old one, which meant developing new capabilities, hiring new talent and shifting from transactional measures to long-term client value. Ultimately, the organization had to prove the model worked before the industry would recognize it.

That meant hiring new, diversified skill sets and shifting metrics away from transactions toward long-term client value. Today, women represent 43 percent of Insight’s executive team and 39 percent of directors and above.

“We got there by actively seeking diverse perspectives,” she said. “It’s smart business.”

Leading Innovation And Collaboration With Heart

Mullen’s approach to innovation has always been grounded in collaboration and clarity, former colleagues say.

“She was out there making it real for people, explaining the solutions, the customer outcomes, the opportunity,” said Erica Lambert, senior vice president of global customer success and education services at Dell. “Way before it was cool, Joyce was pushing IoT. I remember thinking, ‘What even is the Internet of Things?’”

Lambert recalled a leadership meeting held in Belgium where the demeanor in the room quickly went sour.

“Then Joyce walked in. She didn’t lecture, she just shifted the dynamic,” she said. “Suddenly people were contributing and leaning in. She pulled out everyone’s strengths and got us back on track.

“Everything she touched got better,” Lambert added. “The channel succeeds when we come together for something bigger than ourselves, and I can’t think of anyone who embodies that more than Joyce.”

Shawn Trotter, vice president of sales at GTS Technology Solutions and a 23-year Dell veteran, said Mullen pushed teams to look at everything through the lens of partner success, driving the collaboration needed to make it happen.

“We surveyed partners every year, down to the last comment, and she took it seriously,” Trotter said. “We fixed what we could fix, and she was brutally honest about what we couldn’t. She never fed partners a bunch of unicorns and rainbows. And because she was real with them, they trusted her.”

And Mullen’s innovation push reshaped Insight’s internal capabilities.

“She made sure all 14,000 of us had access to AI tools: Microsoft Co-pilot, Google Gemini, ChatGPT, everything,” Jen Vasin, Insight’s chief human resources officer, told CRN. “Her philosophy was simple: If we aren’t using this internally, how can we help clients?

“From the moment she arrived, she was unstoppable,” she added. “Her energy is unbelievable, she’ll travel country to country, even for a day, because being with the team matters to her. She once said, ‘I’m going to stop at the Sydney office on my way to Hawaii.’ And she did.”

But Mullen wasn’t defined by speed alone, she was decisive. Vasin recalled reviewing parental leave for the company. The industry average was eight weeks with a high of 12 weeks. Insight was at four.

“We proposed moving to eight,” Vasin said. “And Joyce said, ‘No, we should lead. Let’s go to 12.’ Overnight. There’s no better person to make that call than someone who raised four kids while building her career.”

‘Paint The Bathrooms:’ Respect Is Leadership

The best piece of advice Mullen ever received was, “You’ve got to paint the bathrooms.”

During her time at Cummins, plant manager John Yoder gave her this advice, with a double meaning.

“I thought it was bizarre,” Mullen said. “He said, ‘Think about it. You’ll figure it out.’ When I looked, the shop floor bathrooms had broken mirrors, broken tiles, broken toilet seats. The environment screamed, ‘We don’t respect you.’ That lesson about demonstrating care for the people who do the work shaped my entire philosophy.”

The lesson wasn’t about the bathrooms. It was about what they represented: respecting people by paying attention to their everyday environment.

“Years later, I heard [behavioral scientist] Jon Levy say that in uncertain times, leaders must demonstrate three things: competence, honesty, benevolence, and benevolence matters most,” she said. “That’s what John Yoder was really teaching me. Demonstrating how much you care about your teammates is something AI can’t do (yet!). It’s the most human part of leadership and it’s what people remember long after the strategy decks are forgotten.”

Another Cummins colleague couldn’t read or write yet could diagnose a machine failure by touch, instilling in Mullen that titles and credentials say nothing about someone’s intelligence or value. “Stay humble and curious about everyone,” she said.

That perspective shaped her broader belief that generosity fuels success.

“Management gets work out the door. Leadership unlocks potential,” she said. “That’s what John was really teaching me. Demonstrating care is the most human part of leadership.”

Her passion grew deeper at Dell where she learned “to sweat the small stuff” after stumbling in her first quarterly business review. “That was the last time I came unprepared.”

Other lessons came through crisis, in particular a massive cybersecurity event involving a partner.

“We ran 43 concurrent business continuity and incident response teams simultaneously because this partner served many customers who were also our customers,” she said. “We accomplished things we never thought possible. We designed a storage environment in an hour and ordered equipment the same day. Nobody thought about their utilization or performance metrics. Everyone focused completely on the customer.

“We discovered capabilities among our team we never knew existed. Leaders emerged in real time,” she added. “It still gives me goosebumps.”

But one of the hardest moments came at Dell, when the company moved technical support to India too quickly.

“We got overconfident. We compressed what should have been a 36-month rollout into six months,” she said. “We were hiring, training, piloting and setting up administrative processes simultaneously with almost no expats, just experts flying back and forth.”

But when it came time to shut off U.S. calls, they weren’t ready.

“This was my business,” she said. “I told my boss and my boss’s boss we shouldn’t go. They were convinced we’d work it out. I made my arguments, but weakly and without conviction. We moved the calls [and] customer response was deafening. Within six months, we moved them back.

“It takes confidence, courage and conviction to stand up to the freight train,” she added. “When you know something isn’t right for customers or your people, you can’t just make the argument. You have to make it with absolute conviction, even if it means saying, ‘Over my dead body.’ I’ve used that incident as a touchstone ever since. When you’re heading down a road that’s wrong for customers or your teammates, work up the courage to make that call.”

Small Gestures, Big Impact

Mullen’s united approach is part of what has made her a steadfast champion for others.

“She puts people in the spotlight and supports from behind the scenes. I’ve seen her advocate for people who weren’t even in the room,” said Dell’s Lambert. “She’s a force you can’t miss and a master class in leadership, positive energy and drive.”

Insight’s Hudson said Mullen’s style stood out for its clarity and calm, always getting right to the heart of the issue . “ Not with sharp elbows or breaking glass, but with focus. People underestimate how rare that is,” she said.

And inside Insight, her daily habits made as strong an impression as her strategy.

“When she’s at headquarters, she’ll stop in the coffee shop every morning and buy coffee for whoever’s closest in line,” said Insight’s Vasin. “She never walks through the building without saying hello to everyone she passes.”

Vasin said transparency is another one of Mullen’s defining traits. She’s known for answering tough questions directly and for routinely sharing information others might need, guided by a personal mantra about ensuring people aren’t left in the dark. This way, teams avoid unnecessary rework and stay focused on the right priorities.

For those who worked with her, a few words come up again and again: authentic, dynamic, driven, energetic.

“She taught me not to put someone in a corner because they made a mistake,” GTS’s Trotter said. “She taught me how to empower, how to hold people accountable and how to push innovation without dictating. I run my team today exactly the way she modeled, everything through the lens of customer impact.

“When I was an inside sales rep saying I wanted to be a VP someday, Joyce never once said, ‘That’s unlikely,’” she added. “She pushed me to work harder and made me believe I was capable of more than I thought. I don’t think I would’ve accomplished what I did without her.”

Leadership That’s Turned Into Legacy

Mullen’s leadership shines in both her energy and her humanity.

“She can walk into a room of 1,000 or a room of 10, and somehow she makes you feel like you’re the only person there,” Hudson said. “She makes you feel seen and heard. It’s the most beautiful characteristic a leader can have.”

And when Mullen announced her retirement, Hudson cried.

“She makes you feel like you matter,” she said. “That’s huge, especially for younger women. She shows you don’t have to be someone you’re not. Bring your gifts, and you can be tremendously successful without losing who you are.”

At Insight, she joins any women’s group call to talk about her challenges and role models. She dissects a situation instead of coming down hard. She never said what people wanted to hear for political gain. She always did what was right for the customer, the company and the team.

“She empowered me, held me accountable and kept me on my toes. I wanted to do better because I wanted to run through fire for her,” said Trotter. “If she called me tomorrow and said, ‘I’m starting Joyce Mullen Enterprises, come work for me,’ I don’t care what the job is. I would leave tomorrow. I would absolutely follow her.”

Mullen emphasized the importance of making people feel seen and valued, saying this principle has guided every major decision she’s made.

And to the women coming up behind her, Mullen said to never let anyone define your limits. “It’s exhausting trying to be someone you’re not,” she said.

“No one cares about your growth as much as you do,” she added. “Treat your development like a job. The more you grow, the more choices you create. Get clear on your values and purpose. Be proud of your work. Be generous with your time and talents. Have the courage to use your voice. Mentor at least one woman in tech and help her reach a board. Your perspective matters. The industry needs you.”

As she looks toward retirement, she’s ready to reflect and recharge. But she’s not one to sit still for long.

“I’m passionate about mentoring the next generation of women in tech leadership, and I want more time for board work where I can help companies work through transformation,” she said.
“I’m also looking forward to more flexibility. Spending time with family, including watching my grandson Leo grow up in a world transformed by the amazing technology we’re building today. Reading all those books on my list. Lots of skiing. Maybe some travel.”

On her Lifetime Achievement Award, she said the award isn’t just about her, it’s about the journey of all the women breaking barriers in tech. “If this recognition helps even one young woman believe she belongs in leadership, then it’s worthwhile.”

She closed with a reminder for all.

“Technology is changing fast, but fundamentals haven’t,” she said. “Take care of your people, be obsessed with your customers, never stop learning and always hire people smarter than you. Follow your dreams, be kind, stand up for what you believe, and please … remember your table manners.”

During her acceptance speech at this year’s gala, she once again shared that story of being asked to get coffee at the top of the meeting.

“What I learned over so many years in this industry is that you don’t have to win every battle with words,” she told a crowd of more than 400 women. “Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is just sit down, take your seat, be so damn good at your job and deliver results they’ve never seen before that there is no conversation.”

She acknowledged that women are often underestimated at work but encouraged them to keep showing up and doing the work, trusting that their results will speak for themselves.

“The next time someone underestimates you, and they will, don't waste your energy on an argument. Make the coffee. Serve it with a smile,” she said. “Be the person who knows exactly where you belong. Thank you all so much for this incredible honor and thank you for letting me have the privilege of sitting at the table.”