
      Xerox
  

About us

  Fuji Xerox, with Xerox Corporation, represent the world's largest document management technology and services group, developing and marketing innovative technologies, products and solutions that organisations can depend upon to improve business results.

Fuji Xerox


      Alight Solutions
  


      Sutherland
  

About us

  In 1939, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, college friends turned business partners, started the original Silicon Valley startup in the space of a rented Palo Alto garage. Starting with audio oscillators, the friends built the foundation for a company that would grow to become a global leader in enterprise technology.
 
More than 75 years later, our success is exemplified through our employees’ drive to advance ideas that bring meaningful innovations to life for our customers and partners around the globe. We are guided by our mission to help customers use technology to turn ideas into value, and empower them to transform industries, markets and lives. We simplify Hybrid IT, power the Intelligent Edge and provide the expertise to make it all happen.


      Hewlett-Packard (EDS)
  

About us

  Avaya is a global provider of business collaboration and communications solutions, providing unified communications, contact centers and related services to companies of all sizes around the world. For more information please visit www.avaya.com.


      Avaya GlobalConnect
  

About us

  Nortel was a recognized leader in delivering communications capabilities that make the promise of Business Made Simple a reality.  Nortel developed next-generation technologies, for both service provider and enterprise networks, to support multimedia and business-critical applications. Nortel's technologies were designed to help eliminate today's barriers to efficiency, speed and performance by simplifying networks and connecting people to the information they need, when they need it.  At its peak, Nortel did business in more than 150 countries around the world.


      Nortel
  


      Lenovo India Pvt Ltd
  

DHL is present in over 220 countries and territories across the globe, making it the most international company in the world. With a workforce exceeding 285,000 employees, we provide solutions for an almost infinite number of logistics needs.

DHL is part of the world's leading postal and logistics Group, Deutsche Post DHL and encompasses three divisions: DHL Express, DHL Global Forwarding, Freight and DHL Supply Chain.


      DHL Danzas
  

Seal is a privately owned SAP consulting company.


Various IT and operational roles of increasing responsibility from 1987 to 2001.


For more than 250 years, Columbia has been a leader in higher education in the nation and around the world. At the core of our wide range of academic inquiry is the commitment to attract and engage the best minds in pursuit of greater human understanding, pioneering new discoveries and service to society.

Columbia University in the City of New York

Long Island University

The University of Utah, located in Salt Lake City in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains, is the flagship institution of higher learning in Utah. Founded in 1850, it serves over 31,000 students from across the U.S. and the world. With over 72 major subjects at the undergraduate level and more than 90 major fields of study at the graduate level, including law and medicine, the university prepares students to live and compete in the global workplace. Known for its proximity to seven world-class ski resorts within 40 minutes of campus, the U encourages an active, holistic lifestyle, innovation and collaborative thinking to engage students, faculty and business leaders.

The University of Utah became a member of the PAC-12 conference in July 2011.

Technology and Commercialization
The University of Utah is tops in the country for creating start-up companies from university research, according to a ranking by the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM). See http://unews.utah.edu/news_releases/u-of-utah-no-1-for-startups for more information.

Forbes magazine’s recent ranking of the “Best States for Business” pointed to “an educated labor force” as a big reason Utah came in at number one. The U supplies many of the employees for companies that keep expanding their operations in Utah, such as Goldman Sachs, Adobe, Omniture, Oracle, Ebay and many others. http://pac12info.utah.edu/commercialization-of-innovation/

Healthcare
University of Utah Health Care recently ranked first in the nation in a prestigious national study. The University Health System Consortium’s 2010 Quality and Accountability Study compared 98 of the nation’s top academic medical centers and ranked them based on core quality measures, patient safety indicators, mortality rates, re-admission rates, and patient satisfaction scores. See more about University of Utah Health Care at http://healthcare.utah.edu/index.php

University of Utah

Real world. Real learning. Real impact.

Founded in 1941, the UConn School of Business has evolved into one of the most comprehensive business schools in the nation, offering academic programs at the bachelors, masters, doctorate and advanced certificate levels, in several Connecticut locations – Storrs, Hartford, Stamford, and Waterbury. The School of Business has established a strong reputation for high quality research and academic programs, spanning a wide array of functional disciplines – Accounting, Finance, Management, Marketing, and Operations and Information Management.

University of Connecticut School of Business

A Premier Academic Institution started in 1882 from Lahore, reestablished in Chandigarh after Independence is now forth oldest University in India having International name and fame. Panjab University is situated mainly in Sector 14 and Sector 25 of the City beautiful, Chandigarh but it has three regional centres in Hoshiyarpur, Ludhiana and Muktsar in Punjab for Oriental Studies and Law courses and research.
The University Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University Business School, Bio Sciences, humanities,  Dental College, Arts Faculty, Languages, Pure and applied science are par-excellence and have fame over the Globe.

Panjab University

Mentor Students connect students with a hiring manager in a conference call, and helps students with their job/internship search. 

Students:
1)      build professional network while at school, i.e. consider it as a prequel to Linkedin;
2)      learn how various career paths fit with their interests and skills;
3)      get guidance on how to groom themselves for their chosen career path;
4)    increase their job prospects. Students understand job expectations, deliverables, skills needed, and work culture from a hiring manager. With this understanding, students can better outline job-relevant projects and courses in a cover letter.


Hiring managers:
1)    promote job/internship opportunities across multiple universities at the same time without leaving office;
2)    save time in shortlisting, since students are rank-ordered based on cover letters and profiles;
3)    get the gratification of mentoring students and making an impact on their career;
4) can increase the application pool by engaging promising students through the system.


      MentorStudents.org
        
  

Coworker titles & Effective work strategies

President and Chief Operations Officer, Xerox

Program's best parts & Career preparation

Master's degree, Masters of Science, Columbia University in the City of New York

Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science, Long Island University

 I was never afraid to make a significant shift that makes a significant change and I've always chosen the hardest path for a variety of different reasons

I've got a very blessed history, and it's an interesting story, so let me just go back a little bit. When I was literally a junior in high school, my mom, dad, and I lived in the New York area. My dad was getting transferred to the West Coast and he said to the family that we're all moving to the West Coast. I decided that obviously as a young man that was playing sports I decided I was not going to go and at the time my family said, if you stay behind you are on your own. At the time, it was a very difficult start when you really think about it to be on your own at the age of 16 still junior in high school, but it shaped a lot of my character going forward from a variety of different perspectives. Number one was learning how to survive and I mean literally surviving with having to go in and do 80 hour work week while still going to school while still doing all the other things. Every credit I got both finishing high school as well as I went to from data systems into for vocational studies in computer science for specific operations. Ultimately went for a two-year degree, four-year degree every single credit at night all working full time. So you learn an awful lot about how hard you work to get to just getting into and getting your career started. During that period of time, I was working all different types of jobs, most notably heavy construction, where you work in the winters and it gets pretty darn cold and you learn an awful lot about the appreciation of being inside and working inside an office. So that shapes my career, that starts my career and I think it gives me the foundation of understanding and always being not afraid of regardless of where I start or goes where I am, I can always be better and I can always get to a point of success. So when you literally start from where I started, I graduated from a very difficult neighborhood in Long Island and it wasn't exactly the CEO capital world because you know Jamaican New York is a very tough neighborhood in the New York area. If you graduate, you get out of that high school and get out of that environment, you're not slated to get to the sea level, so somehow I made it here. So that shapes the beginning of my journey to where I am today. But I also had a variety of good mentors, mentors in the sense of both good and bad. You learn very early in your career what you don't like from management styles from people who are in authority and you take that and you say I'm just never going to go do that. As well as you learn from those individuals that are good. Then the other thing I had always done is I had always taken the hardest path to do something. I was never afraid to make a significant shift that makes a significant change and I've always chosen the hardest path for a variety of different reasons, so that's kind of what shaped me to where I am today.

we're constantly working on driving the business, driving the performance of the business, making sure that we continue to bring value to our shareholders

As President and chief operating officer here at Xerox we're in unprecedented times with COVID right now we're in the middle of a global pandemic. We are in 60 plus countries, we have over 30,000 employees that were responsible for around the world. First and foremost it's protecting our families, protecting the communities, protecting our customers, and making sure that we can help in giving back to the communities that we serve today. Xerox has turned some of the manufacturing capabilities into creating ventilators into making hand sanitizers etcetera. So today one of my daily jobs is how do we navigate and deal with the COVID-19 pandemic grow up against the day. If you look at just my broader responsibilities, I essentially have everything in the company, supply chain, service delivery, go to market for my S and B, I have the IT organization. I'm responsible for real estate, I'm responsible for product development and product strategy. So pretty much I have a good portion of the company with the exception probably direct go to markets. We've got sales teams directing the region. I've got an incredible schedule, my daily day starts at 4:30 a.m every day. I've been doing that my whole career. I can limit myself to 4.5 to 5 hours of sleep per night. So we're constantly working on driving the business, driving the performance of the business, making sure that we continue to bring value to our shareholders both our external shareholders as well as our employees as well as our customers or our stakeholders. My day can be from running and looking at the supply chain, running and looking at IT organizations, driving revenues, spending time with customers. Every day is different and every day is dynamic.

You find out a lot about leadership when things are not going right. Anybody can lead when things were going really well, It is difficult to lead when times are difficult and when there are challenges that you have no answer for

Just take COVID, just take where we are today. If you go back in February of this year, Xerox was in the process of making an offer to acquire Hewlett Packard. Our stock price was worth $35 a share. We were in very good shape in our Q1 activities and ability to deliver the quarter and just 3-4 weeks later COVID-19 hits. We've got to pull our the offer of HP. Our stock was down to the mid 17's down to mid-teens and we've to pull guidance going forward. So it's a perfect example of how quickly, good and bad these environments change. It is all about leadership, It's all about how do you lead through the different dynamics, global dynamics and it could be economic dynamics, It could be competitive dynamics, It could be a technology dynamic. Something hit us from a security standpoint or something hit us from a competitive standpoint that we didn't know was coming. So as a leader and a leader to the company. You've got to be prepared for any and all of those things. COVID is a great example of not knowing what you don't know back in January and then being in the middle of it in the middle of March and you rely on your leadership skills. You have 30 plus 1000 employees that are looking for leadership to how do we get to the other side of this safely? How do we get the other side of this where we have a company? How do we get to the other side of this but we still have people employed? How do we make sure we don't Infect any of our employees infect any of our customers so they're looking for a steady hand. One of the things that I learned about leaders is that the bigger the storm, the more calm and more stable and the more steady hand they are. You find out a lot about leadership in the time of crisis. You find out a lot about leadership when things are not going right. Anybody can lead when things were going really well, It is difficult to lead when times are difficult and when there are challenges that you have no answer for, you have challenges that you have never been have a history and a perspective to think about. COVID-19 is one of the greatest challenges that any of us in leadership have seen.

 C level executives like to talk to each other and share best practices, share experiences and get other ideas.

And so understanding and knowing who you communicating to understanding the way in which they like to be communicated with is extremely important.

don't waste people's time, go in there with conversations and ideas that bring value in a very quick period of time. 

it's very important that you understand who you're communicating to and very important that you understand who you're communicating with.

First of all, there are four offices of the company that reports directly to me today. So we have the chief technology officer reporting to me, chief commercial officer reporting to me, chief product officer, chief delivery officer. All officers' of the company are reporting to me. I interact with each and every one of them on a daily basis. Obviously, my board, my boss, vice chairman and CEO of the company deal and interact with the board interact with shareholders, interact with other C level executives, especially now during a COVID time. But even in general, C level executives like to talk to each other and share best practices, share experiences and get other ideas. One of the things that I talk about is leadership is lonely at this level, there's nobody left to me, there's nobody writing to me. Everybody is looking for me for answers on, so it's very confident sometimes to be able to go out and have a network of people that you can talk to and be able to bounce ideas off or at least get some insight too. I think this is not just dealing with C level executives, but dealing with anybody in general understanding how people like to be communicated to understand their background. So real simple example, if you're a CFO of the company you are used to and you are focused on financials and focused on facts and focused on numbers and spreadsheets and if you go to that individual on you if give him a marketing pitch, you're going to get run out of the room. The same thing, if you go to a chief commercial officer who is a marketing individual sales individual in sales, you got 60-70% of all sales activity fails. They have to be optimistic by the very nature they've got to be very optimistic, they can't be pessimistic because they run themselves off a bridge every day. The finance team and chief financial officer doesn't have that room. The same thing with the IT community you go and talk to CIO, CIO must have and must be 99.999% uptime and accurate if it doesn't, the whole business gets taken down. And very few functions within the company have that type of service that brings us back to the business. And so understanding and knowing who you communicating to understanding the way in which they like to be communicated with is extremely important. Then I think the other thing is don't waste people's time, go in there with conversations and ideas that bring value in a very quick period of time. When I go talk to the CFO, CFO cares about revenue and cash and operating profit and earnings per share very quickly. When I sit down with the CFO, the conversation gets to how do we make their life better? How do we improve that particular area of the business? and so it's very important that you understand who you're communicating to and very important that you understand who you're communicating with.

 it's a gift to mentor people. It's a gift to be able to create future leaders

 there are now twenty-two plus C level executives that have worked for me that are now have reached C suite

 one thing that's constant in business is change.

There's a book called The Leadership Engine, which I think is outstanding

Leadership by its very nature is the ability to listen and change all the time. There are certain dynamics and there are certain qualities around leadership that I believe is incredibly important. Leaders create leaders, I think it's a gift to mentor people. It's a gift to be able to create future leaders and the gift is to yourself. I can't mentor, I can't teach if I don't know it and show one of the things that I have always been very proud of is there are now twenty-two plus C level executives that have worked for me that are now have reached C suite that would be directly under my leadership and I take great pride in that. I truly believe that leaders who developed leaders and grow leaders are a great attribute. Second, you have to be able to inspire people, you have to be able to create energy. Change is hard and the one thing that's constant in business is change. I think future leaders have to have the ability to be able to inspire, be able to create energy, and be able to drive change so that's the 2nd 3rd attribute that I've always had. The last one is never to stop learning. We got two years, one mouth for a reason to continue taking input, continuously taking information and adapt, learn, and continue to teach yourself something every day. One of the things that is so amazing to me is if I wanted to be a great musician or I wanted to be a great basketball player, I wanted to be a great marathoner, the way I do that is I practice every day. I practice every day, the greats and all the sports, the great musicians, every single day practice, they work at it. Yet when I asked leaders and I say, What did you do yesterday to make yourself better? No answer, What did you do last week? No answer, What did you do last month? No answer. Think about if you're running a marathon or you're playing an instrument and you took off with two years, how would you be able to play that instrument? Or how would you be able to run that marathon? it is very difficult and you get further and further away from your goal. Leadership is about working on it, leadership is about continuously improving learning yourself in terms of areas and things like these. I am a big believer in Jack Welch god rests his soul. Jack and his willingness to teach leadership his willingness to share his best practice or share his failures. There's a book called The Leadership Engine, which I think is outstanding. So I enjoy Jack's books I enjoy a lot of people that came out of Jack's programs through the years. Those principles, being bold, creating developing leaders, being the ultimate teacher, inspiring, driving vision, I think are all important attributes to leadership.

Ultimately I'm held accountable by what we commit to publicly to the street. As a public company, every single quarter you're accountability is in the front center. Did you hit your revenue targets? Did you hit your earnings per share targets? Did you hit your cash targets? Inside of the company you then look at what are the key indicators that you need to look at to make sure that you hit those publicly committed statements outside. So on the revenue side, we look at things like funnel and funnel demand meaning how many opportunities do we have to sell something and where are they in the life cycle. We look at operating profit, we take a look at our costs. Mostly, since we're service business, a lot of its around headcount around cost attributes and controls about labor costs. And so those are the types of KPIs that we look at. We look at KPIs on the IT side, system availability side, cybersecurity incidents etcetera. We look at service metrics on the service side, first call effectiveness, how we're doing on the customer side, and so forth. But it all gets down to how do we meet our publicly stated financial goals to the street and that's how we held accountable every year, every quarter.

one thing I think is important is as you build a team, you want to make sure you have a dynamic team,

I believe we're stronger when we have different, diverse opinions and we have different, diverse input to what we're doing

When you get to this level, I expect functionally you're going to know your job. So I'm looking for a chief technology officer, I'm assuming you're going to be really good at technology. You're looking for somebody to run your service delivery. They've got great experience in service delivery. Then gets down to how do they lead? Can they lead? Can they drive change? Can they pick up and be able to build and enhance the programs that were trying to run in the vision that we're trying to run? The one thing I think is important is as you build a team, you want to make sure you have a dynamic team, you take a look at my team, 8 out of 10 directs are women that report to me and all have some sort of minority status that report to me and I love the diversity of my team for a variety of reasons. One, I believe we're stronger when we have different, diverse opinions and we have different, diverse input to what we're doing and I don't mean just social diversity, gender diversity, opinion diversity in terms of how you run the company in terms of how you approach things. I always have somebody on my staff that is like nails on a blackboard. They constantly are just agitating the heck out of me and I think that's great. It gives me a different perspective in every decision and everything that we are doing. So when I'm hiring it usually is somebody that can fit into the team, somebody that has the leadership skills that I'm looking for going forward and obviously a check in the box to make sure they have the functional capabilities that we're looking for.&nbsp;

Well, I think as you look at interviewing, every single company has a certain set of strategic goals every quarter publicly a CEO goes and makes public statements about the company. The strategy, the importance to focus, annual reports give you what the company is focusing on and strategically, were they working on. 10-K filings give you an insight to what the company is looking for so when somebody comes in interviews to me, the more prepared and aligned you are, not just understanding what the company's strategy is, not just understanding what we're trying to do but do you have the skills to help us to accelerate the strategy? Do you have the skills to get us to where we need to be? And so if you take a look at a company statement in there saying that they’re trying to improve revenue by X percentage, the first thing I want to do is I want to see how my function and my job can improve revenues. If I'm going to accompany them trying to prove operating profit what, in my role, what can I do, to improve operating profit, and what have I done in my past that brings and shows and demonstrates that I can improve operating profits. So when somebody interviews with me and you really want to stand out? Know the company, know the capabilities and the skills that you have to be able to go and drive those changes and then be able to articulate during an interview process.&nbsp;&nbsp;

You learn an awful lot about driving change, you learn an awful lot about buildinga company and I didn't appreciate at the time. I appreciate it after when I left the company 

I've had a really blessed career. I was the chief information officer at Hewlett Packard. Also, was their head of outsourcing business, their BPO business about $3 billion business ran their captive internal shared services, had about 60,000 employees at HP when it was the combined company. I was the global CIO for Lenovo and the IBM PC spent out, was part of the team that built Lenovo today. Global CIO for DHL. I was the global CEO of a company called Avnet. It started, there were 300 million when I left, we were just north of 30 billion. The one time that I joined the company and fair with a company called Nortel, for anybody has been around the industry for a long time. Nortel was one of the largest total communication providers of equipment and software anywhere in the world. At one time, they had a market capital. $300 billion but went into bankruptcy and closed. I was there as part of a team the last three years to try and get that company turned around. I was able to general bending the mark several skills, one of Jack Welch disciples who went through Jack's programs and we just felt we did not get it turned around. The financial crisis hit. We had too much pension debt to pay and we went into bankruptcy and that was a failure. We should have done better. We could have been better. We made a vital mistake in not spinning out selling one of the business units really focusing on at the time, which was enterprised IP addressing and routing if you will, which would have been the answer in the pushback to Cisco before Cisco evolved to where it is today. Very proud of my career have over 55 plus mergers and acquisitions have been part of some great stories of Lenovo when we spun the IBM PC spin out, it was a $4 billion Chinese company trying to swallow $11 billion American icons and a brand that was incredible in Thinkpad and ThinkVantage and have a high probability of failure and we made it work today. That company is north of 50 plus $1,000,000,000. Very proud of that company, DHL, which most people don't know is bigger than UPS and FedEx put together. Not at the time it was a bunch of holding companies around the globe. We built it, merged it, and put it in with 30 post world net, which was the German post office time. And now that's one of the biggest, strongest companies, certainly here in Europe today. DHL well in the Asia Pacific. It's interesting I don't think you know what at the time I think you know it in looking back, I got to a CIO level very early in my career, very early in age, and I didn't appreciate it the time until I looked back. At ABNET, we started about a $300 million company, and we were doing one acquisition integration literally per quarter. So over 10 years we had done 40 integrations in acquisitions and you learn an awful lot about putting companies together. You learn an awful lot about driving change, you learn an awful lot about building a company and I didn't appreciate at the time. I appreciate it after when I left the company and I was starting to use those same skills in other areas in driving change in other areas and acquiring companies and putting them together so I don't think there was a moment. I think clearly that was the shaping and clearly what created a lot of the capabilities and essentially the leader that I am today because I had to drive through that. But I didn't appreciate it at the time and didn't realize it.&nbsp;

 So when you talk about one of the things that can students do today, to make themselves rollover and accelerate where they could be. It's how do I use that experience in my consumer life. How does a relevant experience of my technologies and bring it to the company?

First of all, just take a step back. Technology is driving change at a great pace that we've never seen before in my entire history, in my entire career. The rate of change, the pace of change, the pace of acceptance of change, the innovation, and the ease of innovation to impact industries to impact What is happening is unprecedented. So today, Leaders and students need to think about what they do in their personal life and to share with you why I'm saying this. The enterprise and the consumer experience are colliding meaning these years ago I was at HP. You take a look at the banks, you take a look at the airline industry. When I was at DHL, we had all the technology we had all the capital all the innovation from technology came out of big corporations because they have the capital and the budget. Today, with cloud computing with mobile devices, crowdsourcing all the different capabilities that people have access to technology can now stitch it together and create solutions that create innovation and so innovation now comes from not the technology itself but the ability to apply technology to drive change. Uber is not a great technology company. They just took advantage of a lot of different things that were already in place. Proximity location, GSM technology everybody had a smartphone, everybody had Google maps. Everybody had the ability to be able to get text and so far, and so you create these unique value propositions and these unique, innovative experiences by the use of technology are pervasive and you can take a look at Airbnb but it's shaping a lot of things. That's the first thing, second, the Amazons, the Netflix, pick your company of choice. It is dramatically changing the technology experience, but more importantly, it's changing consumer expectations. Amazon has changed the entire expectation of consumers, how you order when you order, the ease of returns, the ease of tracking. When I was at DHL, we spent $2 billion to do track and trace for next day delivery. In other words, put in a network infrastructure that if you ship something at night, you would get it next morning10 a.m. delivery. Well, if I order something in Manhattan and I'm expecting something to come in two hours, I'm not tracking anything I really don't care, I just expected to show up. So that has changed dramatically. The expectation of the consumer, that expectation is colliding with the enterprise and so what we're now seeing is in every single industry being disrupted in the Ellen industry, you expect the have the same capabilities that if you're sitting in Starbucks, you are sitting in your home, you sit in the office, you better be connected. You better have access to all the different things that you enjoy the previous month on. If you think about the experience and the way in which you want to interact with content, take a look at Netflix. You want to be able to view watch content in the format that you wanted at the time that you wanted on the device of your choice and by the way, you want to be able to go back one frame to frame 20 frames whatever it is. That's changing the expectation of how we review content that will impact motion CBS, NBC, ABC. It will change the dynamics in that industry. So when you talk about one of the things that can students do today, to make themselves rollover and accelerate where they could be. It's how do I use that experience in my consumer life. How do I relevate the experience of my technologies and bring it to the company? I call it digital disruption. How do you help companies to disrupt processes that I believe will be the gating factor to how fast you rise in companies in the future. The one thing that is very constant is change in every single company. The one thing that is constant is technology acceleration and digital impact will continue to accelerate and so what companies are looking for are those leaders that can have division, can have the understanding of how you drive innovation inside of corporations and be bold, be very visionary in terms of what that particular innovation can do. Many companies are stuck with traditional processes, traditional systems, traditional ways of doing business and if you don't have the ability to be able to lead companies out of their own paradigm, somebody's going to disrupt them.&nbsp;

I teach at Columbia today, the digital disruption class, and Columbia has got a unique offering where they have a mentorship program. They have a program where students go through the program, has a master's program, and you get a mentor and so I was a mentor. I was also an instructor as part of the program and then I decided to many years later, late in my career to actually go through the program myself. Not for any professional gain or professional benefit, I really wanted to go through the program for a couple of reasons. One, if you've gone through the program, you could be sensitive to students who go through it in the future. Second, there's an awful lot about learning and so what I learned from the program is a little bit different. I got a unique perspective on many different areas. You think about data privacy. You think about what students are thinking about the public companies, bribing public companies, issues around public companies, boardroom disruptions of public companies, and what I found interesting. It was the different viewpoints of people around the world and people around that class in that program that had a variety of different opinions that would dramatically different than mine at C level. But important to understand why they had those dynamics and why they had those understanding. So for me, being around the program, understanding different diversity, different students and get a different point of view on a lot of topics was very, very important for me.&nbsp;

Well, I could say before it was my two-year degree, my four-year degree. I did every single credit at night at Long Island University. I was working at the time. Sperry, which is now Unisys Burying Barrel, came together and created Unisys and that was a really important part of my development because a lot of my management capabilities, accounting were very important. Statistics were very important. There was an appreciation for technical writing, which was very important. So a lot of stuff that I got in LIU or CW post was very, very advantageous for me because I was getting skills candidly, I needed. I had already started my career and it was important that I get those skills and understand some of the business components of what I was doing. So it helped me tremendously in my management skills.&nbsp;

the first one is listening, not judging, and not coming to a conclusion without listening

I think the first one is listening, not judging, and not coming to a conclusion without listening. Very early in my career, I was made vice president of Worldwide Infrastructure, we were doing a very large program in a roll-out of SAP across Europe. I kept calling into the Munich facility on a Friday afternoon and just nobody was ever there. After three o'clock, people would just go, disappeared and I got a stereotype about the office and I got to stare at that but people are lazy. What the heck are you doing going home at three-thirty, what the heck is going on and then I went over there and I went over there for a couple of weeks stay. We're rolling out different infrastructures across Germany. I stayed in Munich office and I got to three, three-thirty, they're starting to leave the office. I remember asking somebody said, Where is everybody going and none of the stores were open on Saturday and Sunday, and if we don't get milk and some of the basics, you can't shop over the weekend and stores close by six o'clock. Then I understood it. I was given my US perspective, you want to get milk in New York City, you can get it. 7 24 365. Totally insensitive to what was happening in Munich at the time. Obviously, it's changed now, but at the time, if you didn't get what you wanted by 6 o'clock on Friday afternoon, there was no place to get fresh meat, fresh poultry, fresh root. It just didn't exist. You had the petrol station or the gas stations and then you had the little marts in those stations and that was it. So you quickly get sensitive to put yourself in people's shoes where they are. Listen and learn before you judge so I would say that's one of the big lessons that I learned. The second lesson was don't take the easy path, you don't get any growth from taking the easy path. I made very, very difficult changes in my life, living locations, etcetera all to not so much in hands to grow my professional skills on purpose, but I always thought it would give me life lessons. So real story. I was at DHL, I was the global CIO at DHL, the budget was probably about $6 billion. I had about 10,000 employees that reported into me and I was asked to go and be a part of this company called noble by a general by name of Steve Ward, who was at the time president of the IBM PC division. He was going to be the first CEO of the combined companies and he asked me to come over. I was going to go from 10,000 employees to 300 employees. I was going to go from a budget of close to five billion to a budget about 300 million much, much smaller, going from the top of the world to the job that nobody even knew about was just a little company with noble. Why did I go? It was the first company that would have been coming out of China and have a world presence and has a world operating system in the globe in the tech space, the very, very first. It also had a very high probability of value and so what I said was one I wanted to do something of this start, two I wanted to see of my leadership skills and I have done in the past can help me guide through this tremendous, tremendous integration and spin-off and it was going to be historic. It was either going to be successful and be very successful or was going to bust in, going to fail, but when I did that, I learned an awful lot. I learned an awful lot about what it means to not work in China, but work for a Chinese company and there's a huge difference between working in China and working for a Chinese headquartered company. Big, big, different, simple, simple, very simple. The first meeting that I was in Beijing, I was presenting in English and they were translating everything to Mandarin and we said that as we were rolling out systems around the world, we were going to convert, and everything was going to be English based in U. S. Dollars. Well, to the Chinese team. It's like, why isn't it in Chinese, and why are we converting to U.S. dollars. Why can't the French learn Chinese? Why can't the Spaniards learn Chinese? What is wrong? We giggle a little bit of that notion but if all you know is China and all you know is Chinese and local currency and everybody else is adopted to English and adapting to the U. S. Dollar well, why the heck can't we force Chinese and we force the Chinese currency so it took some education, obviously, to help the team that helped the company through that. But you would never get that perspective if you did not work in a Chinese company, one of the other things there was we inherited the IBM PC group. I had IBM employees were in Shenzhen. We had the noble employees in Beijing. I could not put those two groups together. They were trained differently. There were conditioned differently and putting those two together was like oil and water and it took a really long time for me to integrate those teams. All Chinese nationals but trained in a much different way, one was trained on empowerment, globalization, all the things that we think about in the global business, the other one didn't have those skills so it was dramatically different in terms of how you lead those two.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Don't take the easy path, especially when you're young, take risks. 

The world in which we live in today is the slowest technology will ever be in your life, think about that.

I've said it throughout this conversation, continuously learn, to continuously challenge yourself. Don't take the easy path, especially when you're young, take risks. What you're going to find is leadership and growth is very lonely and if you feel lonely, that's okay, you're probably be leading. Change is hard. The world in which we live in today is the slowest technology will ever be in your life, think about that. Today is the slowest technology that will ever be in your life. Meaning this, change is going to get accelerated every day, technology changes are going to get accelerated every day and if you can help and have the skills to lead through that change whether it’s through public companies, private companies, non-profits, government, whether it's in a particular function like finance or HR or IT or supply chain, doesn't really matter if you've got that skill to be able to take technology and drive through change and drive that vision of change extremely valuable for the rest of your life. That's the one thing that I can promise you Change will never stop, technology will never stop, driving, disruption in the industry. In particular over the next 10 years, the GDP is going to grow by 10 trillion dollars, think about that and it's all driven through data, digital disruption, and companies and how to create new models and new paradigms. This is a saying that today’s data is the oil of the 1980s. It's going to drive value, and you think that again, your own personal experience and how you interface with different companies how you interface with different applications. Just think about that, think about why you have certain applications on your phone, certain applications you deal with, certain applications you delete because they bring value to you. The people that can go to companies, can go to industries, use technology to drive value and solve problems are going to be the ones that will accelerate in the future.&nbsp;&nbsp;

How did you get to where you are today? What is your story? What incidents and experiences shaped your career path?

What responsibilities and decisions does one handle in a job like yours? What are the top three priorities? What are weekly work hours like?

What responsibilities and decisions does one handle in a job like yours? Tell us about weekly work hours, including the time spent on work travel and working from home.

What are major challenges and pain points in a job like yours? What approaches are effective in overcoming them? Discussing examples will help students learn better.

What are the challenges in a job like yours? What approaches are effective in dealing with these challenges? Discussing examples will help students learn better.

What are the job titles of people who someone in your role routinely works with, within and outside of the organization? What approaches are effective in working with them? 

How would you describe your management style? How has it evolved over the years? Can you tell about experiences or books that influenced your management style?

What indicators are used to track performance in a job like yours? Think of the indicators such as key performance indicators (KPIs), objectives & key results (OKRs), or so on.

What skills and qualities do you look for while hiring? What kind of questions do you typically ask from candidates? 

What qualities do you look for while hiring? What kind of questions do you typically ask from candidates? 

What helped you to stand out in your hiring process? How should someone prepare for an interview for a job like yours?

Can you discuss career accomplishment(s) that you feel good about? Please discuss the problem context, your solution, and the impact you made.

What starting job and jobs after that can lead students to a position like yours? How many years does it typically take at each of these jobs?

What responsibilities and decisions did you handle? What were the top three priorities and pain points? What strategies were effective in dealing with challenges?

What responsibilities and decisions did you handle at work? What were the challenges? What strategies were effective in dealing with these challenges?

How did the school prepare you for your career? Think about faculty, resources, alumni, exposure & networking. What were the best parts?

What three life lessons have you learned over your career? If any, please also discuss your experiences facing adversity, or trying something unusual.

What three life lessons have you learned over your career? Please discuss the stories behind these lessons, if possible. Stories could be yours or observed.