Enterprise Architects - Cut above the rest

Besides the interesting points in this article in CIO magazine, one thing that caught my attention was the profile of Motorola's Chief Enterprise Architect, Baldev Singh.

In 1975, Baldev Singh was at the pinnacle of his profession: rally racing. He was sponsored by Volvo and Fiat. But in the middle of his fourth East African Safari Rally—a three-day, 3,000-mile dash across Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, a race that only about 15 of the 300 or so cars that enter ever finish—his life changed.
...
Twenty-nine years later, he walked into Toby Redshaw's office, where Motorola's corporate vice president of IT strategy, architecture and e-business immediately realized that Singh was just what he was looking for in an enterprise architect.

Redshaw needed someone who had both a deep technical background and a good understanding of the business, skills that Singh, who had earned engineering and computer science degrees and an MBA since he quit racing, had in spades. But that wasn't what clinched it for Redshaw.

"An enterprise architect is going to get a lot of pushback," he says. Changing the way a company thinks about IT and the way IT thinks about the business is not easy. "You need someone," says Redshaw, "who has done something like drive across Africa at breakneck speeds. Someone with persistence. Someone tough."

Wow! Now, thats one really interesting requirement for an Enterprise Architect!