Mary Ann Yule’s first job after graduation was executive administrator for the president of a technology company. She loved it so much that she vowed to one day be in his chair.
That dream became reality in 2016, when Yule was hired as president and CEO of HP Canada — but it wasn’t an easy journey. Along the way she had to go back to school, take on a range of positions across the tech sector, and work her way up the corporate ladder while often being the only woman in the room.
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In 2010, while serving as the vice-president of marketing for Toshiba, Yule earned an executive MBA at night from a joint program between the Schulich School of Business and the Kellogg School of Management. In 2004, Yule was hired by CDW Canada to serve as director of marketing and procurement before being promoted to general manager in 2008.
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“I’ve had a really good view of manufacturer, reseller, solution provider and distribution, to have an end-to-end view of how the business truly works, and where the places to add value for all the various constituents are,” she said.
It was while serving as general manager of an HP partner company that Yule found herself having conversations with the person who would eventually hire her, about HP’s continuity plans following the then-president’s upcoming retirement.
“The big Hewlett Packard company split into two — the biggest separation in the history of business — and HP Inc. was reinventing itself,” Yule said. “They wanted to change the culture to be more agile, to improve all our systems and tools and processes, to engage differently with clients, and the guy who hired me — Christoph Schell, who was president of HP for the Americas — wanted me to bring positive disruptive change to HP Canada, and that spoke to me.”
In the time since, however, Yule says much of the disruption has been external. Not only has technology advanced rapidly since she took the top job at the office equipment behemoth, but the pandemic has completely changed how business tools are used.
The Star recently caught up with Yule at the company’s Toronto headquarters to talk about her leadership philosophy, how the pandemic upended the office equipment industry, and the future of work in the age of artificial intelligence. (I previously wrote for HP’s Garage as a freelance journalist, and my relationship with the publication ended in 2023.)
How did you get started in the tech industry?
Basically, I graduated from Ryerson and needed a job. I ended up getting a job in technology, which was exciting, but I just needed to support myself as an adult.
I started in the financial services technology sector as an executive administrator for the president, and that gave me an insight into how you run a company. I decided then that I really wanted to be the president of some firm at some point in my career, and specifically in technology.
How did you ultimately achieve that dream?
I realized I couldn’t become president as an executive administrator, so I took some extra courses at school at night and then moved into the company’s marketing organization. Then I did some work with them in New York City after they were acquired. I’ve been in tech ever since.
Prior to HP I ran a company called CDW Canada. I started as the leader for marketing and quickly my role expanded to running the show. When I was leading CDW Canada, CDW and HP were each other’s top partners, and I was having a meeting with the person who ended up hiring me about the continuity of care, because the president of HP Canada was retiring, and the conversation quickly went from the continuity of our mutual businesses to, “Hey, this might be a really good opportunity for both of us,” for me to join HP.
What have been some of the biggest changes since then?
A lot has happened in the last eight years. One of the most notable shifts was the pandemic. That required a different type of leadership than the one that came in to disrupt and change and drive the business.
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While I’ve always led with heart, the pandemic required a different cadence and a different care for employees. People want their employers to be empathetic, to see them as whole people, and the pandemic was the catalyst for that. People were at home, struggling to manage all the different responsibilities they had with all the fear and safety concerns they had at the time.
We do all-employee meetings regularly, and during one I opened up about my own vulnerability, about being home and not having people around me and always feeling on edge. I felt isolated and I won’t use the word “depressed” because I don’t know that it was clinical, but I was feeling super blue. I was also reading stuff online about how everybody’s doing all these amazing things with the extra time, like learning a new language or how to play piano. I remember sharing this with employees openly, and just saying you don’t need to do all this stuff, just surviving was enough.
How did the pandemic change the landscape for business tools?
I was on vacation the week before the pandemic started, and I was getting calls from my chief of staff saying, the CEOs of some very major Canadian companies need to talk with you. Everybody’s saying, “we’re an essential service, we need our people to do their jobs from home.”
We had tremendous demand during the pandemic — customers were buying anything they could get their hands on — and I’m proud of how well our reseller community stepped up to keep the Canadian economy running. Now we at HP think that hybrid is here to stay. In 2022 we acquired Poly, which provides the ability for people to have meeting equity regardless of where they are.
We’ve always been a leader in security, but we needed to invest a lot more, because now lots of the malware and attacks come through the devices, the endpoint, so endpoint security is now just as important as network security. We’re making sure our technology evolves to the change that’s happened in the world with remote work. On the hardware side, portability, long battery life, those are all table stakes for PCs now, but security is the biggest one.
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What role does artificial intelligence (AI) play in the workplace technology sector?
Well, you need a computer that can handle all that compute, whether it’s in the cloud or on premises. We just launched a new class of next generation AI PCs, and the HP Z AI studio, which gives you a workstation for AI development.
We’ve launched an AI master class so that our channel partners, their salespeople, their technical consultants, can learn more about AI so they’re better equipped to have stronger conversations with end customers about what AI is and what it means for them.
We also use AI to better our own environments. We’ve been using machine learning a long time, but now we’re using AI to improve tasks, tools and processes in our own house.
In 2019 you told the Star that Canada was seriously lacking when it comes to tech R&D and investment. Has the situation gotten better or worse since then?
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I think there’s an opportunity for our founders and the brainiacs that come up with brilliant technology ideas to be enabled more effectively. It’s the blood, sweat and tears of these organizations and these people that do this, and they employ many people, and they grow into big, amazing organizations. We’ve got all the right stuff here; we just need to have a little bit more policy, and money, for them to start and scale.
What do you think the workplace looks like in the short- to medium-term?
AI is going to change jobs, and we have a responsibility as employers to enable people. I find it strange that there’s still leaders saying, “I don’t know if I’m going to give AI to everybody,” because it’s like saying, “I’m only going to give electricity to some of my employees.” Most people are using it, whether you know it or not, so it behooves you as a company to enable them.
Younger employees especially already know about all the cool tech that’s out there — it’s not like when I started working, where employers gave you exciting new tech you didn’t have at home — they’ve got great stuff at home. You’ve got to make sure that their work is enabled similarly, and you need to train and upskill people around AI.
Jared Lindzon previously wrote for HP’s Garage as a freelance journalist. His relationship with the publication ended in 2023.
