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Know Thyself: Launch a Business Doing What You Love
June 18, 2010
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“Julie and Julia” and your career -Part One
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Know Thyself: and Then Forget What You Know
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Know Thyself: Feeling Gracious? Or is It Something Else?
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Know Thyself: Emotional Intelligence and Your Viability as a Job Candidate.
June 8, 2010
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Know Thyself: Put Your Best You Forward.
June 4, 2010
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What You Can Learn From a CFO
December 8, 2008 | Author: Promise Phelon | Filed under: The Networking Habit
Here at UpMo, our mission is to help you get behind the wheel of your career. And we know it’s much easier if you’re not alone.
That’s why we’ve got a team of UpModels on board to help you figure out the way. These are professionals who have had long, varied and challenging careers in business, academic and non-profit arenas. They’ve shared their stories with us, and we’ve used a patented system to break down and map their paths to success.
Our hope is that you choose an UpModel whose career path, personality and habits inspire you. You may be surprised to find out that among these success stories are people who have rebounded from job losses, made career decisions they later regretted, or zig-zagged between different industries.
We will share snippets of our lengthy interviews with UpModels every Monday, giving a taste of the UpModel experience. This series of Q&As provides an intriguing and inspiring glimpse into the habits of highly successful people. They also provide a platform for discussion: feel free to jump in with your opinions and questions.
Today, we look into the mind of a CFO.
In his 35-year career as a full-time corporate financial professional, UpModel John Hagedorn moved from electronics to transportation to semiconductors to communications.
- John progressed from his first assignment, after receiving his MBA, as a financial analyst at a Ford subsidiary, to manager of cost accounting, to director of financial planning and analysis, to director of operational planning, to operations controller, to VP of Finance, to CFO.
- After serving as a CFO for 20 years, John retired in 2000 to become a consultant to young technology companies, helping them analyze markets, develop financial plans, raise funds, reduce cash consumption, manage exits and establish management processes critical to success.
Here, he shares his thoughts on:
Changing industries: How do you go from trucking to semiconductors?
Picking the right employer: Don’t be the big fish in a small pond.
Networking: He’s still exchanging Christmas cards with contacts from the 1960s, and confesses to being old-fashioned when it comes to social networking.
UpMo: Was it difficult to change industries?
John Hagedorn: The change from transportation to semiconductors was the most difficult. When I was interviewing at Intel, I was asked, “How can a trucker understand semiconductors?” and there was no broad smile from the interviewer following the question.
It helped that I had a strong engineering background as an undergrad. But the most constructive approach if you are seeking to change, or have succeeded in changing, industries is to read voraciously about the new business, its markets, its technology, it competitors, its financial metrics.
- Read the reports by security analysts on the target or employer companies and their competitors.
- Read books written about the industry, especially those that describe how the leading companies have succeeded.
- Once you are inside a company in a new domain, develop relationships with your peers, mentors and bosses so you can gain the benefits of their experience in performing specific assignments and also informally over lunch and in social activities.
During my first three months at Intel, I spent every evening reading about Intel and the semiconductor industry — often staying up till midnight to learn about the technology, the management processes and the markets that were unique to semiconductors. By reading and assiduously picking the brains of my colleagues, bosses and mentors, I quickly transformed from being perceived as a neophyte in the industry to being accepted as broadly knowledgeable.
In my third year at Intel, I was made director of production planning, an assignment that required an understanding of the manufacturing processes.
Bottom line: You can bridge radical domain changes if you are willing to invest enough interest and energy in learning about the new industry. Don’t assume you can just learn by osmosis over time. Purposively and intensively ramp up your knowledge of the new industry. That would be in the top 10 things I would advise somebody trying to keep on their career path.
John Hagedorn: I was very fortunate that two of my first three employers, Ford and Intel, were well-respected companies at the time. I did not choose my employers as well, thereafter, but starting with companies that are respected in your profession opens a lot of doors, in part because it is assumed you learned management processes at those companies that have universal applicability.
Picking the right employers is more important to your mobility early in your career, but perhaps more important to your financial security later in your career.
There were really four credentials that facilitated my obtaining new positions in new companies: Being a Yale graduate, having a Harvard MBA, starting my career at Ford and progressing rapidly at Intel.
Besides having the right personality fit with your bosses and peers and sharing attitudes and values that are supported by the company culture, there is, of course, no substitute for being willing to work hard and learn fast — from your successes, from your failures.
One of the best things about Intel’s rich culture was its encouragement of risk-taking, of making extra efforts to contribute to the company’s success. Even if doing so meant you were on the edge of your knowledge or skill and might fail. This is what was meant by Intel’s seemingly paradoxical cultural tenet: “Support Failure”
UpMo: Knowing what you know now, what are the types of networking activities you would recommend?
J.H.: The most important quality to being a good networker is not to have a huge Outlook book or to be connected to hundreds of people on LinkedIn. It is to be known as someone who is more generous in their willingness to help than needy in their desire to be helped.
When you establish a reputation for being generous with your help, you will not need to explain when you interact with those in your network that there’s as much in it for them as there is in it for you. The best networkers are people willing to go out of their way for someone they value, whose relationship they want to develop, to nourish, whose reciprocity is worth waiting for.
UpMo: Do you have any tips or tricks about how to offer help to someone?
J.H.: The first trick to being helpful to someone is to patiently listen to a full description of the problem. This is something I’ve learned later in life. Like many people who are “A” personalities and who have an image of themselves as “decisive,” particularly those with an engineering background, I had been too solutions-oriented. If you started to relate a problem to me, you might have been only halfway into describing before I quit listening and focused on a finding a solution.
The first advice is to listen thoroughly and, even when you think you understand what the person in your network needs, instead of offering solutions, ask more questions to be sure you understand their problem or need. Then make a commitment to help, and follow up on it. But in that first discussion, try hard to understand the problem and all of its ramifications, what circumstances and, or human errors might have created it and what kinds of outcomes represent a good solution for the person in your network.
If you’re not able to fulfill your commitment to help solve the problem, you should still get back to your network partner when you promised and tell them you didn’t succeed. Tell them about the efforts you made on their behalf and why they were to no avail, and that you were happy to have tried but sorry you failed. So the keys to being and being perceived as helpful are: listening, making a commitment to help, and following up in a timely manner.
UpMo: What kind of events have offered the best networking opportunities for you?
J.H.: They are meetings for which the purpose is something other than just networking, where there is a subject that is important to you other than just meeting new or old network partners. If you’re not really interested in what is happening at that meeting — even if there’s a potential to meet new people that may be useful in your network, you’re not likely to be engaging to new contacts or personally impressive to them if you are bored and just looking to swap introductions and business cards.
If someone goes to a forum for a purpose, they will be anxious to swap ideas with someone who is knowledgeable about that subject, problem, issue or opportunity. If the subject is not germane to you and you’re thinking, “There’s may be some people I’d like to get to know there,” I suggest you spend your time in an activity more likely to educate and excite you and eschew this purely networking opportunity.
You may think some meeting such as those honoring the “entrepreneur, venture investor or philanthropist of the year” gives you status to be in attendance. However, I don’t think such forums add much value in your networking.
You can’t confer status on yourself by where you show up. You have to know something and contribute something or accomplish something.
UpMo: What do you think of networking and meeting others through online communities or bulletin boards or blogs. Do you use any of those technologies?
J.H.: No. I do not trust or respect them. I am willing to be connected on LinkedIn with people I already know well, but I am old-fashioned in not being comfortable making new friends online.
By the time you are my age, if you have kept connected to the valuable people whom you have come to know through shared schools, employers, neighborhoods, children’s friends, recreation or political or charitable activities, you have a large base of kindred sprits for networking partners, and are not as receptive to getting to know strangers in cyberspace.
This does not mean that I am not enthusiastic about meeting interesting new people in face-to-face encounters.
When somebody that I don’t know, but just happened to have worked with, sees a common employer on my profile on LinkedIn, and sends me a message saying, “I’d like to be linked with you,” I usually don’t respond. Perhaps if you were talking to someone who is 25, they would have an entirely different view.
I not only don’t like the first-time meetings in cyberspace, I don’t trust or respect them to be genuine opportunities to form a helping relationship.
UpMo suggests the following resources about CFOs:
Eight Qualities of a High-Impact CFO
In the Eye of the Storm: Have CFOs Ever Mattered More … or Been Less Prepared?
An Open Letter to CEOs, CIOs, COOs and CFOs Across the Corporate World
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