The Hindu Business Line : 3 tips to advance one’s career

The foremost quality you need for career advancement is to be demanding, says Dina Dublon. She serves on the boards of companies such as Microsoft, Accenture and PepsiCo.

“Dublon, born in Brazil, holds a Bachelors degree in economics and mathematics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a Masters degree from the Business School at Carnegie Mellon University,” informs a page in www.microsoft.com, about the former Chief Financial Officer, JPMorgan Chase.

What does it mean to be demanding? “Be demanding of yourself, of your boss, and of the company you work for,” instructs Dublon in an essay titled ‘Three essential attributes for career advancement,’ included in Managing Your Career ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com).

“Being demanding of myself has meant focusing on the quality, on the speed, on the clarity of whatever I was tasked to do. However, what became very clear early on is that I needed to be equally demanding of my boss and of the company,” explains Dublon.

If you don’t ask, you don’t get, she reasons. “You need to be prepared not to get whatever it is when you ask for it, but unless you ask, there is much less chance of the person knowing what is important to you.” Therefore, according to Dublon, it is a good discipline to discuss your expectations and aspirations with the person you work for.

The second attribute is resilience and perseverance, a combination of the two. “I have had many examples throughout my career of feeling put down, whether it’s in a meeting where I had been told by a manager that my opinion didn’t matter, or whether it is being called into somebody’s office to be told that I had raised issues in a meeting that questioned the way he was pursuing the business.”

How true, you’d agree! But what can be done in such upsetting situations, you may fret. Go back home and cry? Okay, that’s understandable; “but get up the next morning and realise that there is a shining sun,” urges Dublon. It is resilience and perseverance that will give you the ability to go back and go for what is important to get achieved.

The third point she mentions in her essay is confidence and a can-do attitude.

“This is more than just confidence; it’s about making sure that you appear confident, even in those situations where there is a level of anxiety associated with taking on a new role.”

Having this attitude of ‘things can get accomplished’ is not about not understanding what the obstacles are, the author clarifies. “It’s about realising there are obstacles to getting things accomplished in a large organisation but figuring out how to overcome them as opposed to saying, ‘Oh, here is a wall I cannot climb over.’”

Ready wisdom.

Two revolutionary developments

While it is well known that the US won the A-bomb race owing to the contributions of Albert Einstein and other refugee physicists, “less well known is the similar role that immigrant scientists played in America’s stunning triumph in the information technology race,” writes Amy Chua in Day of Empire ( www.landmarkonthenet.com).

She argues that the boom enjoyed by the US during the 1980s and 1990s was directly fuelled by two revolutionary developments, one technological and the other, financial: “the discovery of the microchip and the creation of venture capitalism. The former gave birth to the computer age, and the latter to Silicon Valley.”

The author narrates the story of two immigrants, Eugene Kleiner and Andrew Grove.

Kleiner who, at the age of 18, fled Vienna in 1941, worked under William Shockley, the inventor of transistor at Bell Labs. (Shockley won the 1956 Nobel Prize for his role in discovering the transistor.)

Shockley had left Bell Labs to start his own company with the idea of developing a multiple-transistor semiconductor, using germanium as the semi-conducting material.

Kleiner and seven others on the team, who believed silicon would be superior, broke away, “scraping together $3,500 of their own money to pursue their silicon-based research,” in the 1950s. With additional funding support, Fairchild Semiconductor was soon born. (Grove would work in the company, during the 1960s, before leaving to start Intel.)

Chua contrasts how, even as Shockley Semiconductor was a commercial failure, the breakaway group was successful, with “the world’s first commercially practical IC (integrated circuit) — out of silicon.

Within a short time, Fairchild Semiconductor grew from 12 employees to 12,000, with revenues of $130 million a year.”

She traces how the wealthy Kleiner focussed on making life easier for breakthrough scientific innovators by creating an investment fund.

“Although venture capital is a familiar concept today, it was not in the early 1970s. Virtually unique in its time, the investment firm that Kleiner co-founded — which eventually became the now legendary Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers — adopted the strategy of aggressively searching out and betting big on untried technology while allowing (indeed encouraging) the inventors to retain a large ownership stake in the new companies.”

The formula succeeded, recounts Chua. “The companies that Kleiner, Perkins helped launch include AOL, Genentech, Compaq, Lotus Development, Netscape, Quantum, Sun Microsystems, Amazon.com, and Google.”

Venture capitalism, she says, was nothing less than a late-twentieth century incarnation of strategic tolerance; cutting-edge talents and intellectual capital could similarly enter long earlier into Rome or the Great Mongol Empire.

The model was straightforward: offer “enormous inducements to young scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs of all backgrounds, rich or poor, white or minority, native or immigrant, to pursue their ideas.”

Of the thousands of engineering and technology companies started in Silicon Valley between 1995 and 2005, an amazing 52.4 per cent had at least one key founder who was an immigrant, informs statistic in the book.

Examples include Vinod Khosla (Sun), Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail), Tim Berners-Lee (WWW), and Sergey Brin (Google). “Of the 400 richest Americans in 2000, an extraordinary two-thirds had built their fortunes from nothing.”

Engaging account.

Four paths of innovation

Nokia’s innovation needs no introduction. You see it all around you. Do you know how the company has stayed innovative?

“Processes are its key,” says John W. Mullins in The New Business Road Test, second edition ( www.crosswordbookstores.com).

“Some of Nokia’s key processes are those in the Nokia Ventures Organisation (NVO), the company’s formal approach to fostering, encouraging and nourishing innovation.”

NVO, with its brief to develop new business opportunities that fall outside the current focus of the company’s core businesses, works on projects, both internally generated ones and external.

“Once ideas were developed, either they were moved into one of Nokia’s business units or they were sold.”

Mullins describes ‘four specific initiatives’ that NVO adopts for driving innovation:

The insight and foresight group identifies disruptive technologies and develops new business models.

The new growth businesses group takes business ideas and makes them a reality, transforming them into sustainable businesses.

Innovent, a US-based team, collaborates with ‘external entrepreneurs to offer expertise and resources’ that help clarify their visions and accelerates ‘the process between concept development and commercialisation in emerging areas of interest to Nokia’.

NVP (Nokia Venture Partners) raises capital from Nokia and outsiders ‘to invest in mobile telecommunications and related start-ups’.

With NVO, Nokia is able to nurture innovation as efficiently as a smaller company, says the author.

“Will Nokia’s superior performance continue in the topsy-turvy world that is telecom today?” he asks rhetorically.

And, hastens to add: “Time will tell, but 135 years of continuing adaptation suggests that Nokia has long been a very good bet.”

Tailpiece

“Whenever we kick people upstairs, we give them…”

“A grander title?”

“Plus a longer e-mail ID!”