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Mentorship: Are You Lucky Like Carol Bartz?

January 29, 2009 | Author: Promise Phelon | Filed under: Mentoring

Rarely does an article or interview stop me in my tracks.

I’ve been asked too many times lately (in the course of raising money) why I started UpMo.com. While delivering our product demo last week, I got: “Why would you leave a profitable and growing consulting practice to run a startup?”

There is the real answer and there is the real-real answer. I got really lucky early in my career. I was connected with an incredibly successful IT executive who really helped to shape me into the professional I am today. She was harsh, corrective, wise, HONEST, committed to my success and my ability to become the manager and leader I needed to be.

Did you have that early in your career?

When I meet people (younger and older), I can usually tell who has had the good fortune of meeting someone who helped them get ahead. There are too few of us out there.

Today, I was doing research for a VC meeting and I came across this Forbes article about Scott McNealy. He talks about his management tricks and how he mentored almost 100 highly successful technology professionals.

We started UpMo, because the other 5.9999 billion people in the world were not as lucky as the few who worked for or around Scott McNealy. UpMo is about figuring out the success pattern so that anyone can move forward: you, my little brother in Dallas, your wife who wants to know the path back from taking off two years with the baby, the systems engineer who wants to find out how to become a marketing executive, the investment banker who wants to parlay his skills and experience into becoming the head of a not-for-profit.

CAROL BARTZ

What really triggered this blog post was the recent appointment of Carol Bartz to run Yahoo. She’s one of McNealy’s mentees. “She’s tough, she can make a decision, she knows what she wants to get done,” McNealy says. “She’s got a big smile, a big laugh, but she can be tough, too.”

I’m so excited for Yahoo and look forward to our UpModel profile of Carol. Our mission at UpMo is to track the career paths of successful professionals in order to help others map their own career paths.

If you read the article, you’ll see that Carol is not only smart as hell, driven and determined, but she was lucky. Lucky to have someone who realized and saw her true power, and helped her channel it!

I don’t know if you’re lucky like Carol, but you shouldn’t wait. Check out UpMo right now. We’re profiling all kinds of professionals so that you can see what they’ve done. Learn from their mistakes. Emulate their great habits and start to GPS your career.

By the way, we also have a profile of Alan Butler, another mentee of Scott McNealy. Alan is probably one of the best relationship-builders I’ve ever met. He is wise about understanding and giving people what they want, while making it mutually beneficial. He’s lucky! He worked at Sun Microsystems at a time when you could sit and have a beer with McNealy.

Related Resources

When Your Network Speaks, Does Opportunity Listen?

Some Great Career Advice, Courtesy of Hollywood

Tracking the Habits of Elite Networkers

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