S03 E17: Alicia Davis – Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, Lear Corporation
Meet Alicia Davis
What happens when an investment banker, a corporate lawyer, and a tenured law professor all end up in the same chief strategy officer’s chair?
Alicia Davis is Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Lear Corporation, the largest U.S.-based automotive supplier and a global leader in seating and E-Systems, with $23 billion in net sales and 164,000 employees across 36 countries. Her path there was anything but linear. She grew up in small-town Florida, landed a Goldman Sachs internship after looking up investment banking in a library card catalog, and earned a JD from Yale and an MBA from Harvard. She went on to work in investment banking and corporate law before walking away from the deal world to become a tenured law professor and associate dean at the University of Michigan. In 2018, she made another unexpected pivot, joining Lear to lead investor relations—a field she had never worked in—before rising to CSO in three years.
Today, Alicia steers enterprise-wide strategy, M&A, and investments across 36 countries. In an industry navigating electrification, automation, and global supply shifts, her approach combines the rigor of valuation, legal risk, and academic problem-solving with a deeply human perspective on leadership. For Alicia, success isn’t just about managing quarterly swings or reacting to change—it’s about empowering teams to co-create the future and having the courage to “be afraid and do it anyway.”
In this episode, we cover:
The professor’s tip and library card catalog moment that changed the course of her life
How Lear fits into the automotive ecosystem, and how a CSO measures success without directly owning operations
Why choosing not to make a move is still making a move
Why curiosity is the one trait she would instill in every employee, and why she tells young professionals to “be afraid and do it anyway”
Leading without positional authority: lessons from academia on why “the sticks are small and the carrots are stale”
Viewing teams as “fully formed human beings” and creating a culture that supports lives outside the office
How the IDEA by Lear initiative is accelerating digital transformation and automation across global manufacturing
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