When my hippie husband decided to leave me and our 18-month-old son in a rundown trailer park with no money, I had no job and no plan for how to survive. With only a high school education, I was only qualified for certain jobs like bank teller, office worker, and manufacturing operator, and even those were hard to get because in the 1970s no one wanted to hire a single mother who might have to take time off when her child was sick. I quickly realized how desperate my situation was and how quickly I needed to adapt and find a way forward.
I knew I needed more education to get a job, but I was on welfare, and few people considered welfare a path to college. But I was a born salesman, and I was able to convince my caseworker to use a portion of my monthly paycheck to go to a local community college. I decided to take a course to become a better teacher for women, but in my second year I started dating a radio station engineer and decided to take the first semester of an electrical engineering technology curriculum to make myself a more attractive “prey.”
Difficult career paths for women
I ended up fitting right in with engineering, and that rash decision led me to work in the semiconductor industry, one of the most male-dominated fields in the world. The career path I chose was not easy, even today, for women. I experienced several heartbreaking setbacks, including when I started a multi-billion dollar business as a manager only to have it handed over to someone from the “old boys club” who knew next to nothing about the business. In fact, encountering and overcoming adversity helped me find the grit and determination to pursue some of the biggest opportunities of my career, including becoming the first female CEO of a semiconductor company (AMI Semiconductor, later acquired by ON Semiconductor for approximately $1 billion) and serving on several other CEO and board of directorships.
Achieving success wasn't easy, but a few guidelines helped me to forge ahead no matter what obstacles I encountered.
First, I learned to seek out and pursue “white space” opportunities that no one else was looking at. I learned this early on, while still in college. The year was 1975, when microprocessors were available for $25 and, for the first time, poor college students had access to them. I wanted to graduate quickly, so I convinced my school and professors to let me build a computer from scratch for extra college credit. This required a lot of hardware design work, and since there was no commercially available software yet, I had to write it myself (I later learned from Steve Wozniak that he was doing the same thing at the time).
Seeking out the white space in microprocessors and gaining in-depth knowledge of new technologies gave me an edge over others, even at a technological powerhouse like IBM. I was quickly recognized as an expert on new technologies, which gave me great visibility and opportunities. Today, I can do the same by exploring and exploiting the white space in AI.
Second, I learned the value of aligning myself with the interests of the customer, who is the primary stakeholder in most organizations. Throughout my career, many managers and colleagues were skeptical of my abilities. I didn't graduate from an Ivy League university, I didn't have any substantial connections, and I was a woman. I didn't overcome these “debts” by playing politics, but by focusing my energy and efforts on the customer and their needs.
Advance your career with the power of your customers
For example, one of the white space opportunities I pitched was to sell custom semiconductors manufactured by IBM to customers like Apple, HP, Cisco, and Qualcomm. Because no one else wanted to pursue that new path, I was freed from executive oversight and constraints to develop and sell the products these customers wanted most. Customers generally don't care what college degree you have. All they want is for me to deliver a great product with great support. Once the revenue started coming in from these great customers who were happy with my work, nothing else mattered. “Customer power” is a superpower for those who know how to understand and leverage it. If you can be their advocate and provide great customer service, whether it's internal or external customers, your career will accelerate.
And finally, a willingness to adapt is essential to career success. When I built my first billion-dollar business by combining a strong team, great technology, close customer relationships, and great service, I wasn't an executive. I just did it. I saw an opportunity and went after it. When senior management took that business away from me in favor of their trusted male leader, I learned to “if you can't make it, go around it.” I realized that if I couldn't succeed in building a large, valuable company within that organization, I would never be successful in it. So I pivoted to a new organization within IBM and suggested to the head of sales that he allow me to create a new field engineering group, but only if I made him an executive in that role. He accepted my proposal, and I became an executive in an entirely new field, built another billion-dollar-plus business, and kept moving forward.
Conventional wisdom says success is only available to those with the resources and connections to rise a few steps from the beginning. Conventional wisdom says that single mothers with no education are destined for a life of mediocrity. In my experience, success in business (or life) isn't determined by demographics or the types of challenges you face in life. The seeds of success are within you. You too can defy convention by looking for white space, knowing that the power lies with the customer, and being willing to pivot and adapt.
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