Career Pathways to Executive Management (the full video)

[Music] you all are in an absolutely wonderful place in your career i know it's hard work and you struggle to get in here and there's probably times you wonder whether this whole experience was was worth it cost you time and money to come here but i think when you look back on this experience at stanford the connections that you made the classmates that you met and the things that you learned while you were here i think you will absolutely find that this was well worth the sacrifice to come here and complete the program having said that it also puts you in a very unique place and it's why i i choose to take the tack i do with these remarks because contrary to most other times in your career you are at an ideal point if if you choose to do it to kind of hit the reset button on your career which you know an mba or a mid-career master's any other graduate degree that has a break from your work and has you come out different than when you went in gives you this opportunity to hit the reset button and do something different now there are some limitations on how far a field from where you've been that you can easily go you can do you can go a little more a field with more and more and more difficulty nothing is impossible especially for stanford graduates as we all we all know but one of the things i want to try to touch on here today a little bit is what's easy and what's hard and then you can choose you know where in that spectrum of things that that you want to position yourself and maybe we'll have some tips in terms of how to do it and in the q a uh fire away i always get some interesting questions i'll do the best i can to be to be dead honest with you because the last thing you need from anybody like me is some platitudes about how easy something is going to be when it's hard or how something that you think you want to do isn't going to work and or probably won't work and if that's the case i'm just going to tell you that and you know you can value the advice of what it costs you to get us started i thought i would go through about a dozen slides this will be real quick but there's some things in here that i hope get you thinking a little bit and maybe uh cause a question or two that we can deal with later because i really want the bulk of the time here to be devoted to your questions and my experience has been your questions generate other questions and the audience starts to play off each other and we have a little fun but let me run through this fairly quickly if you have a question about the slides feel free interrupt me on this is really informal i don't we don't have to hold everything until the end but i i'd like to try to set the stage a little bit with just some initial thoughts that i call launching or relaunching an executive career and there we go so here's a here's a pretty obvious statement and we'll start with an easy when companies are formed and built and grown on three legs of a three-legged stool ideas money and talent those are the three things that's all there is so what about these three things ideas ideas are never in short supply as i said here there's almost an infinite number of ideas for product service and technology in the world and every time somebody makes a stupid statement that everything important in this field is invented virtually the next day somebody comes up and proves them wrong with a new idea and has everybody saying yeah i never thought of that wish i had money money you need money to build businesses but money's normally in in pretty adequate supply in every business cycle good ideas get funded and then some of them as we've seen over and over again lousy ideas get funded but good ideas can always find funding somewhere so what's the shortage the shortage is you the shortage is talent it's in limited supply it's finite at the leadership level it's not only finite it's declining as baby boomers who have been the the leadership core of the world for the last 20 years my generation are getting out of these jobs and doing things like this talking to people like you who are taking over for for my generation and you can't make more there's only that many people of that age and that talent and so what that says is this leadership shortage which is going to be forever is really good news for you if you have a compelling story and if you tell your story the right way to the right people it doesn't matter how good your story is if you don't tell it to anybody that can help you and if you have a lousy story and you tell it to the wrong people that's not going to get you anywhere anyway so what about resumes i'm asked a lot of times about resumes and i probably pay less attention to resumes than than most people do you got to have one um maybe i mean frankly today your linkedin profile may be good enough for most of the things that that you've got to do if you don't have a linkedin pro profile you've got to get one and do that do that quick make sure it's always current and make sure it's always accurate beyond a resume this is a document that helps you tell your story and it'll help you if you have a good story to tell and if you tell it right so what makes a good story well in my opinion good choices because you're going to have to be explaining them with logical explanations because in your career you're going to be faced with a number of times where you're going to be sitting down across the table from somebody that you want to convince they ought to do something positive for you and they're probably going to look at your background and look at your resume and start asking you questions like well why did you do that why did you make that choice why did you go here instead of there why didn't you stay and get promoted in this job if in fact you were doing as good as you tell me you you were companying people over product and compensation i generally advise people to go work for the best people they can work for and for the best companies they can work for if the product's not right and it's a good company and you're working for great people that'll get fixed over time if the if it's the greatest product in the world and you're working for lousy people they'll find a way to mess it up and you'll be on the outs venture capitalists understand this all too well i mean one of the oldest sayings in the venture capital world is a an a management team with a b product will find a way to make their investors money and a b management team with an a product will find a way to mess it up i mean and that's how they invest you look at their record and you'll see it it's people measurable accomplishments and promotions if if you can focus on anything when you're putting your story together focus on what you have accomplished that you can legitimately take credit for or at least partial credit for and be clear which is which when you're explaining it that's measurable with facts and figures and things that people will recognize and ideally which got you promoted credible transitions and moves as i said you're going to be explaining your moves uh over time to people who are not going to take or fluffy answers and pay much attention to them so think about that before you make a transition or a move and certainly as you're making it how you're going to be explaining it 10 15 20 years down the road recognized mentors and references as as you're building a career you're going to work for people and whether you like it or not the reputation of those people rubs off on you if it's good it helps you if it's bad it hurts you and there's not a whole lot that you can do about that other than to be smart in your choices and if you find that you're working for somebody whose reputation is likely to hurt you because their reputation is bad get out get away or get out and do it as fast as you can and finally what makes a good story when you're telling it to somebody is at the end of the day at the end of the conversation you've got to be able to convince them that you can be successful doing something that in fact they want done because if you can convince them that you can do it but it isn't anything that they need to have done then you don't go anywhere or if they have something that they need to have done and you can't convince them that you can do it it doesn't go on anywhere it's only when you put those two things together that telling your story to somebody that matters and can do something positive with it will get you a good outcome how to tell it well we've touched on some of this clear clarity of goals and accomplishments i'm basically an advocate of a simple chronological resume that says what you did when you did it who you did it for what the results were and and what happened to you as a result i mean if you think about those things that's that's what i'm always looking for i don't like a lot of fluffy explanations uh of of things that don't matter facts are good if they're true promotions are better accurate facts and dates easy to pick out successes keep in mind that you you want somebody who's looking at your resume or looking at your linkedin profile to look at something on there and say aha i can use that that that fits here that's interesting logical transitions no misrepresentations or vague claims and a clear incredible path to what you seek we'll come back to that because that last point's important and i and we're going to cover that in the q a because it doesn't matter how good your background is in a conversation that you're having with somebody about the potential of working for them unless you can convince them that that excellent background fits something that they need to have done otherwise it's a nice conversation they probably like you and say you've got a great background doesn't fit here but you know why are you telling me your story you should be telling it to somebody who can do something about it we talk a lot about networks most people don't have any idea how big their networks in fact really are your networks are enormous i mean you start with the people in the room you start with everybody they know you start with people that they know you you look at graduates of stanford you know people that they know the places that they've worked before you know it you can define your network literally as being hundreds of thousands of people because any any anybody who can make a connection to somebody that might be willing to help you is in fact part of your network and you may not even know who they are but they're part of your network and you can make that work for you if you want to meet somebody somebody usually somebody in the stanford business school alumni community will make that introduction for you if you can figure out the right way to get to them and the right way to ask that question gsb alums will usually help i'll make this point because i i always make it and that is almost anybody is going to be willing to help you i'd be willing to help you your classmates will be willing to help you your professors and alumni will be willing to help you but very few of them are going to be willing to do your homework for you and so an example if you call me and say tom i want to get into you know i don't know venture capital would you introduce me to some venture capitalists what that's a lazy question okay but if you said i've got two years in the venture capital industry and i worked on a project that you know you know josh green at more david dao is a board member of i know you know josh because i know you work with him on a board would you be willing to introduce me to josh uh josh green so that i could have a conversation about this project that i know he's interested in okay that now the night and day those two questions the first one general requires work on my part and i'm not gonna go do a lot of work to try to figure out what you could have figured out and didn't but the second one if if i believe that that's a very credible question it takes me about 30 seconds to pop off an email to josh and say look this is somebody i think i think you ought to meet and they've they've specifically picked you out of the hundreds or thousands of venture capital people because of your experience in this company and they're interested in that and they think they have something to add would you meet with them for you know 15 20 minutes specific on the one hand general on the other hand said pick specific targets make specific requests and then if somebody does you a favor particularly somebody who didn't have any reason to do it other than they were just trying to help you after the thing is done you met with josh order go back send them an email and tell him what happened hey i met with josh thanks for setting that up i'm not sure what's going to come out of it but i really appreciate it we're going to stay in touch thank you believe me that will pay dividends later first of all it's just good common courtesy if somebody did something for you that they didn't have to do to call them up and thank them and tell them what happened because they're probably curious it also leaves that door open to go back to them again in the future because they've got a good good feeling about you this is somebody that handled that right and they'd be willing to go do another favor for you down the road whereas you know i've got a lot of people i i won't name them maybe i will later if you but who seems like every couple of years would call me up and say tom it's been so long since we've talked i would really want i really wanted to get back to you and see how you were doing well i'm doing fine how are you doing well you know i didn't work out i was looking for a job but what happened with the last thing that you called me about two years ago that you never came back and told me what happened about that and you know maybe i'll be polite to them maybe i won't more likely they don't somehow i'm out of town or something when that call comes in and and my ea just handles it and it never sees the light of day stay connected to the people who have helped you now my career was in the executive search business i started uh very early uh i was i think i was like 32 i spent 30 years with heidrick and struggles we were the largest search firm in the world for a long time i think pretty much the most respected senior executive search firm in the world then and now i did a lot of things with the firm including uh spending the last five years before i retired from that as as chairman and ceo we were a public company by then with 70 offices in 40 countries and 500 and some partners spread out all over the place and it's amazing to me that so many people who interact with executive search firms don't have hardly any clue about how the profession works and what it does and what it doesn't do and how it can how it can work for you let me give you an example there's thousands of of search firm partners and you know my firm had about 500 they were spread out all over the world but for any one particular thing particularly at the very senior level where recruiters in every firm begin to specialize on industry and function for somebody in this audience there might have been in my firm three four maybe five of the 500 recruiters that it would be useful to build a relationship with and 495 who might like you might be friends might be a neighbor might help you a different way i'll come back to that but would never be in a position to have an assignment where you could be a candidate because maybe you're a chief consumer products chief marketing officer and your next-door neighbor is a partner at one of the big five executive recruiting firms and does chief information officer searches for industrial companies pretty much only and dominates that space there is zero chance that that that person will ever have a direct assignment that you can be a candidate for but that person knows those five people who are the five people in that firm that you ought to get to know and the way to use them if you can get a relationship with them is tell them exactly either what kind of person or if you can do your research it's usually not very hard what specific person in their firm you'd like to get introduced to and they'll probably do that for you because it's it's it's the stock and trade recruiters work work for clients we work exclusively for clients but we have this kind of odd three-party symbiotic relationship it's completely unique in professional service representation where we get paid by one side of a transaction but have to be perceived as fair balanced and delivering value to both sides lawyers don't get that i mean you got you got two companies fighting with each other company a's got a lawyer company b's got a lawyer the lawyers fight with each other but they know who they're they know who they're representing they're not trying to be fair they're advocates they're advocates for their side you know marketing people pr people you know accountants they're working for their clients and every client has one of those but the search the search profession is is pretty odd so the people that do would have to tread this line between loyalty to a client and respect and loyalty among the candidates because unless they can put a transaction together with two willing parties who are both smart and ideally not going to do something that's not in the both of their best interests no transaction happens no search gets completed and nothing gets done and that person doesn't stay in the business very long so you can make that work for you as long as you understand that it's not the recruiter's job to find you your next position it's a recruiter's job to solve the problem that their client has and if you can be the solution to that problem then they're going to be real happy to bring you forward and have you be a candidate for that project if you're not the solution to that problem two things can happen if you recognize it early on and raise your hand and say this isn't right for me what i'm really interested in is x uh let me try to help you with a suggestion of somebody better than me for this project and would you remember me for something or introduce me to one of your colleagues who's working on what i want to do that's a good interaction that will serve you well what won't serve you well is either trying to convince a recruiter any recruiter really at any level that you're something that you're not because they'll figure it out eventually or that you are interested in something that in the end you're really not interested in because you're wasting the recruiters time which is the only asset they have to make a living with and they don't appreciate it when their time is wasted uh they know every every uh set of interactions is not going to lead to a successful outcome and you may go all the way to the end and you may decide or the client may decide this isn't right it didn't happen but as long as that was done with good faith nobody has any hard feelings but if it was done with bad faith and bad faith can be on the client side too i've experienced this as well in which case i apologize to the cli to the to the candidates and try to make it right if i can but nobody worries about that as long as everybody is proceeding along the path with good faith be specific be special try to be very clear when you're dealing with recruiters of any kind what it is that you want what you're willing to do what you're not willing to do and you know be asked ask the kind of questions to try to decide if this opportunity that they've put in front of you or called you about is is the right potential one for you if it is say so don't be cute don't play hard to get be honest and it would be plenty of time for negotiation at the end if it isn't pull out fast and uh and don't waste your time don't lie or embellish your resume my colleagues and i spent years honing skills to smell coming a mile away i mean a good recruiter will not let you get away with claiming something that isn't true that's fluffy credit for something that really maybe you had a small part of and you're trying to take too much credit for you don't need to do that you've got good records just be honest and and try to position yourself someplace where your skill set and your interests fit what the clients need needs we've covered some of this other stuff the second one though i want to come back to because as you think about what it is that you want to do there is a role there for executive recruiters to play over a long period in your career and the key i think for all of you is to figure out literally that handful and it's probably no more than that in any particular geography if you go more broadly global it could be a little more it's still not a big number and i doubt i doubt for most of you the critical mass of recruiters among the major search firms who would be in a position to be really good career long allies and sources for you i would be very surprised if that was more than 10 or 12 people in total that's a number of people that you can over time get to know it's not hundreds that's hard but you know 10 6 8 10 12 you can do that particularly if you identify who they are and have a strategy to get to know them in a positive way through introductions of people other search people others who will help you but get to know them in a positive way stay connected don't be a pain in the neck but stay connected and and build a very long-term relationship with them particularly the ones that are working in your chosen field a level or two above where you are now because over time they'll move up too and as you move up you'll be heading into there into their space from from below as as it will and those are the people you want to be dealing with not the ones that are working at or below your level now which by the time you get your next promotion you've outgrown them and they can't help you anymore so you want to be aiming high so what is what do companies want when they when they when they're hiring people companies in every cycle are hiring people they're trying to hire good people well a they want to they want to understand what your career is and how it fits with them they're looking for skills and experience that closely match their needs as as they see them and probably you can't do a whole lot to convince them to see it some other way this third one's really important because anybody even the ceo hiring somebody has got an answer to his his or her board and everybody else has a boss maybe more than one boss and if they're going to hire you they got to go explain to somebody else probably somebody you never met maybe you met him but maybe you didn't why they want to hire you as opposed to somebody else and it's your job if you want that job to make it easy for them to explain to whoever they have to explain to why it is that they want to hire you as opposed to anybody else that they might hire so if you put yourself in that mindset and say you gotta you gotta tell a story not only will they believe but that they can retell because they're gonna have to they're gonna have to justify this decision to somebody and so the easier you can make that for them the more likely they are to hire you which says personality and style that fits their culture every company has has a culture some cultures are more comfortable for some people than others some companies are more female friendly than others some are more ethnically open than others some are more open to different nationalities than others you can fight that we can all deplore that and say that's horrible but you're looking for a job and uh i mean if you if you go back to uh one of the things that i've always loved that uh that my good friend jim collins jim probably speaks around here once in a while it's fond of saying is it says look for the open door he said so many people go through their lives spending an awful lot of energy trying to pound their way through doors that are closed and locked it's possible but it's hard down the hall three doors down maybe there's an open door with somebody there that would say come on in you know once in a while you may want to think about maybe i'll go down there and go through that open door as opposed to trying to pound my way through this one that's locked or locked to me now it may be locked to me for reasons that i find reprehensible yeah you can decide if you want to try to change that good luck to you or you can say you know i'll do that in my spare time but i need a job so i want to go someplace where somebody wants me for what i am for who i am and they like what i am as opposed to me trying to convince them they should like what i am when they don't um simple as that no side issues or hassles the more the easier you make it to recruit you the more likely it is that somebody is going to do that because this gets back again to they got to go explain this to somebody else if they want somebody to start you know the first of next month and you don't want to start for three months that's a problem for them particularly if they've got another candidate might not be as good as you that's willing to start when they want if you need a lot more compensation than they're prepared to pay or you have a whole lot of other complicated things that they have to deal with that's hard so the point there is think about what it is somebody said the difference between what you'd like to have and what you need to have focus on that make it easy to hire you compensation demands they can meet yeah you know sometimes you can push the boundaries we've got another little uh presentation i do on negotiating compensation i don't think we're gonna have time to do that tonight but we could if anybody has any questions about that we'll handle it in the q a and once somebody hires you they want you to go they want you on board you should want that too but they want you on board starting and engaged so we're in silicon valley and many of you either have uh working startups in fact how many of you have worked in startups uh not too many uh usually it's more okay how many of you are thinking about working in startups okay let me i don't know if i got the match right how many of you who have worked in startups before are thinking about going back into startups again one two three okay good so you didn't get you didn't get turned off it by the first time some somebody asked uh i i'm not sure who it was it might have been john doerr kleiner perkins said if one time he said if you're trying to figure out if you're an entrepreneur you're not which i always thought was kind of interesting if you need structure there's nothing wrong with that big companies need a lot of people they're good places to work and if if that's you that's fine go big lots of big companies recruiting here lots of big companies are great places to to work for entire careers if you decide to go to a startup i would i would pose not not for everybody but for the people in this room because you're special you're a special group of people i would say if it's a startup you want to be focused on a couple of things and i say will you be at the table at the table means are you going to be in the group the small group of people that makes the key decisions that are in a closed room with the door closed when something big is coming down and bet the company or really important decisions have to be made if you're at that table it doesn't matter a whole lot what your job title is what your compensation is really or anything else because it'll all be taken care of if you're not at the table and you're outside looking through the keyhole trying to figure out what's going on in that room when the key decisions are being made i would say to you if it's a startup most of the time the risk-reward ratio for you is not right you know that that puts you in in in the world of four box matrixes in the high risk low reward box and i don't think that's a box that you ought to be intentionally aiming yourself to that if the company is wildly successful you make a little bit of money and you weren't really part of the the team that drove it on the other hand if you're in the high risk high reward box yeah that could be great can you handle the risk what will you do if it fails some cultures some geographies failure's really hard it's really hard to explain or somebody said once are you going to go home and tell your mother that your company failed if you grew up around silicon valley it was like okay big deal what are you going to do next but there's some places in the country and in the world where you know that that's going to be really hard for you and if it if it is and you don't feel like you're up for it maybe that's not where you ought to go are the leaders of the startup professionals or are they friends i i put up a big red flag every time i see a startup that's three college roommates that get together because they want to start a company and i'll be the ceo and so you be the marketing vp and what do you want to be okay uh engineering yeah well we gotta have one okay well you're really not very good that's a bad way to get a company started and if you get into a company where where the officers are friends and they wouldn't be picked for their talent in a fair fight against other people this has a very high probability of coming out with the worst possible outcome you could imagine which is you lose the company you lose the job and you probably lose your friends uh in in in the process so i just say massive caveats on going in any startup where a bunch of your friends get together and choose upsides is the financing solid for at least a year um because you don't want to be coming into something unless there's at least a year of runway there before the company needs to raise money because maybe it won't and that's and that's tough as i said if it's a tough choice say no i think we had like two slides left and we're going to q a i knew you had lee did you have a question you wanted to ask before you left you'll catch me contrary to somebody who i recruited ceos mostly for a living and there's a popular wisdom that you really want to go out when you're looking for a ceo and find somebody that's done this successfully two or three times and that's that's the spiel we gave to our clients it was a big part of our sale they bought it most of the time it wasn't true uh the fact of the matter is most successful ceos that you could think about and that you could identify did the job they succeeded the first time they tried it most of them never did it again um a few did generally with less success than they did the first time but a few is very few successful successive entrepreneurs of ceos of multiple things i said experience counts but the best succeed the first time here's where i say and this is contrarian thinking and it's contrary into the experience most of you will have where you'll have a lot of jobs you'll work for a number of companies and your 10 years you know maybe fairly short and they're getting shorter in in this day and age but i urge you each time that you think about taking a job whether it's the one you get out of here when you reach hit that reset button or each subsequent time i urge you to at least put some of your effort into the thought process that this is the last change i'm ever going to make and i'm going to work for this company for the rest of my working career i'm going to run it one day and then i'm going to retire from it having spent my whole career here chances are pretty good it won't happen but that mindset will serve you well no matter what it happened to me wasn't my first time was my second time i found something that i really liked i stayed with the company for 30 years i ran it i retired from it so i i admit my bias is characterized by my personal experience which i freely admit but don't go work for a company that you don't respect that you can't go home to your family and tell them what they do and have them feel good about that it's not on the slide but don't go work for a company if you won't relocate to where the corporate headquarters is i can't tell you how many times and i've got this story and it is so obvious that i have to tell it i was interviewing a guy some years ago who was a extremely successful regional manager for medtronic great company wonderful company he was in washington dc running the eastern eastern region and they wanted him to move to minneapolis which is where the company was headquartered and he didn't want to do that because he wanted to stay in washington and i asked him i said you know how is this not predictable i mean the only way that eventually you're not going to get asked to go to the corporate headquarters is if a the company's fails or gets sold or b you're not very good and if you're not willing to go where the seat of power is why in the world did you spend the last 10 years working your ass off to get to generate this opportunity which now you're going to turn down explain to me how that makes any sense so think about that run something hard my my bias is if you've got an opportunity to take a line job over a staff job do it get p l responsibility get higher and fire responsibility get something where you've got budgets to run people to hire things to manage that can be measurable if you're successful and do the best to avoid things that where you your contribution isn't measurable even if the company is successful because you'll have you'll get some spin-off from being associated with a successful company but it won't be as good as if you can demonstrate that something good happened because you let it or you did it the people part sometimes people tend to think i don't think anybody here would think that but sometimes people tend to think that they don't want to hire really really good people because it'll make them look bad or they might overshadow them or they might be risky to them and i'll tell you that's a prescription i think for failure because two things you're not going to get promoted and this is if you're in a corporate job in a big company but pretty much anywhere you're not going to get promoted to the next big job unless whoever is going to promote you thinks there's somebody in your organization that can take over for you and if you haven't got anybody well you'll either sit in that job until you do or you'll get passed over because you aren't perceived as having good people working for you so you work for great people they're going to get promoted they're going to pull you up behind them you work for you hire really good people they'll push you up because they'll be ready for new challenges you'll give them to them that reflects well on you plus it makes you feel good and the last thing is there's nothing that i looked for and when i scanned resumes and i talked to people about their background the first thing and the last thing and almost everything in between that i looked at was where and when did this person get promoted because you get promoted when the people or the company that you work for thought you did a good enough job and what the job they gave you to give you a bigger one and you know it's amazing when i looked at careers would see backgrounds of somebody that starts out probably not a stanford mba but they start out as a you know district sales manager of company a and then a a regional sales leader of company b and then a sales and marketing director of company c and a vp of sales and marketing company e and the chief operating officer of company f looks like a great progression of titles they never got promoted never once so it makes you wonder were they just getting out of town just before the axe fell on them and getting lucky to use their background to get promoted to another company that would buy by their story and give them a bigger job and you look around you'll see people like this all the time and they're not the people you want to go work for for one thing they're going to be splitting they're not going to take care of you because they're only concerned about themselves and you don't want to be one of those people so think about if if you're close if you've got an opportunity or you're thinking about leaving and you're close to finishing a project you can take credit for and getting a promotion i would urge you think long and hard before you leave anywhere just short of a promotion because somebody like me is going to ask you why did you leave just short of when you should have probably gotten promoted were you going to get promoted why were you why didn't you get promoted who got the job in that company that you would have wanted were they better than you so maybe i should be talking to them so a few final thoughts then we'll go to q a the world is big your world is bigger than most people's worlds because you have opportunities that most people don't have you've earned them by being here by having the capabilities to get here by making the sacrifice to come here and so your opportunity set is large your networks we talked on this your networks are much bigger than your biggest imagination of how big they can be they're bigger if you think expansively people like to help as i said before make it easy for people to help you don't make it hard make it easy they'll do it they'll do it over and over again and be nice to them now somebody said be nice to the people you pass on your way up the corporate ladder you may you may pass them again on your way down but uh i hope not but you'll see them again success is measured in a lot of ways we can talk about being ceo of a fortune 1000 company and maybe a couple of you in here will do that but most of you won't and that doesn't mean you're less successful what matters is your success according to you not according to me or your classmates or the school or surveys it what matters is your success according to you you measure it your way and don't let anybody convince you that you should measure your success in life any more than your happiness in life by somebody else's standards they they've got their own issues they've got their own goals you should have yours and you should have every reason to expect that you can achieve them last comment is you know don't hit the panic button too soon life is long enjoy the journey you've got a lot of great experiences along the way there's a lot of people that will help you and appreciate what you do and i i i can't i wish i was out there and there's an irish comedian that used to say gee i wish i was out there in the audience listening to this but uh you know in some ways i wish i was out there with the opportunities that you all have because i they're they're really almost limitless and all i can say is i wish you uh good luck with them and we'll be we'll be tracking your progress [Applause] hopefully there's hopefully there's something there that gets some questions going yeah i'm going to talk a little bit about the process of getting ramped up into a job search with the recruiter starting with how you identify those four or five out of the 500 that are relevant okay um yeah the question the question is how do you how do you identify the recruiters who are right for you to begin making a relationship with over time um there's two or three ways and i would i would try them all um it it starts by figuring out what it is that you want to do and and being as clear and specific about that as you can and then you get to people in the recruiting firms and there's five large ones large global ones mine was one and then there's you know a dozen or so mid-tier ones and then lots of small ones many of whom are uh founded in the staff by alums of the big ones so they're just the quality is just as good they may be they may be small you start asking people around who does this kind of work and you ask enough questions the same names will come up second way to do it is reverse engineer searches it got done uh if if there's a job out there that you would like to have had or would like to have the next time and it just got filled you saw the announcement in the paper chances are there was a recruiter that did that search call up the company call up the individual in the job and say look i see you got this promotion or sent them an email you can reach them on linkedin by the way we'll come back to that and say i'm curious as to was there a recruiter that handled this search and if so who was it and did were they good because if they were good for them they'll be good for you the one thing about the recruiting profession is once you start building a reputation for doing certain kinds of searches the industry knows and they'll come back to the same people time and time again for those projects that's why they that's how they build specializations and the same thing happens within the search firms i got a lot of calls because i was high profile from companies wanting searches done almost never would i do them so the question would be who would we recommend that they talk to and it's going to be the person in our firm that has the best track record doing those kinds of searches and everybody knows who they are and so at that point your goal is to figure out who those people are and try to get an opportunity to have them know who you are and if they're willing just spend a little bit of time not a lot of time but you know 15-20 minutes meeting you and uh and just saying yeah maybe maybe i'm not a candidate for anything right now but i'm a candidate for what you do as a recruiter and one of these days you're going to have an assignment that i'm going to be qualified for and interested in i wanted you to know who i was and that are that that line of discussion works if you're right if your facts are right and you've done your homework it's a waste of time if it's if it's a random blast at the recruiting world and just as it's pretty much a waste of time to send resumes to recruiting firms don't bother it's not worth the paper you're printing your resumes on they get tens of thousands most of them unfortunately go in the go in the scrap heap including some of the very same people who come into them through their sourcing exercises uh later on a search that they pay a lot of attention to they wouldn't have paid any attention to the resume coming in because they're not geared to do the scan and match by the way linkedin is an excellent way i mean linkedin didn't exist for most of the years my years in the recruiting business the search firms are using linkedin now massively and so you know you need to make sure that your linkedin profile is current and is as as good as it can be and if you want to get to somebody a recruiter or somebody that you don't know and you don't know what their email address is if they have a linkedin account you can send them a linkedin mail on the linkedin account and they'll get it it's it's the best way to reach somebody that you don't know how to reach and so just sort of tuck that away you can you can do that i think on the basic free linkedin uh subscription so many a month some people here probably know better than i but for a little bit of money you can move up to the to the um higher levels for even if it's just for a short period of time while you're doing a job search and you get a lot more access that way so anyway that's what i would do yeah um my question is uh especially especially in the valley there's a bit of a blurred line uh between what is a startup and what is established company we've got companies growing to hundreds of millions of dollars in like a year or two right and so if i said well there's a company it's raised series b financing it's uh it looks very solid would you say that so they say like north of 20 million dollars or 50 million dollars would you still say that you need to have a seat at the table there well that's a mature startup that's that's not a pure startup from zero uh if if they've done a series b and they've got financing for a year or more and they're and they're growing rapidly then you might want to you might relax that because they're going to be hiring a lot of people and they're not all going to have a a seat at the um at the key table then the the question though to ask is will i have a seat at some interesting table um and does the person that i'm gonna be working for maybe have a seat at the big table um i mean if if if you're working for somebody and you won't have a seat at an interesting table and you're working for somebody that doesn't have a seat at the big table and and but but maybe has heard about who the people are who do i'm not sure that's what you want to do but you know if there's a path the company looks good you know that that you're right it's in the fuzzy area between a small and a big company i was more talking about a pure you know seed round or or a round uh startup which i think is much more risky than what you just described yeah either one we'll get the other one after about the pizza for international people that we may have some additional things like we don't know the culture that much or we don't know the networks of the industry that much uh we have maybe to figure out some things related with visas what things can we highlight to stand up with maybe more simple local candidates well sure uh yeah i think that almost everybody has some kind of skills and attributes that other people don't have and you're better off if you can package those and show them to somebody who has an appreciation for him so i mean if you're if you're not a us national and you have extensive international experience either in your home country or in some third international country that that's an asset that companies are looking for particularly companies who are going to be expanding international i can help you go to latin america i can help you go to europe or asia or india and so the entry there may well be through somebody in international uh one of the things a lot of people find is an entry to the bigger companies is through one of their countrymen who's a prior graduate from here who you know would help them i mean if you're if you're chilean uh you know you want to be making sure that you're connected you know with the chilean mba graduate community and the chilean community of senior executives here in silicon valley because my experience is in is they look out for their countrymen and they'll try to find a way to help you and then that translates over to introductions to other countries and you move to latin america i'm just using chilean latin america as an example applies to almost any anybody anywhere okay lucky guess great country by the way so you know i think i think that's the case don't again back to the open door and the closed door try to find some open door where somebody wants to help you for who you are not wants to slam a door in your face for who you're not uh and so i can't emphasize that that's strong enough find people that are willing to help you and let them get you through an open door and then work you around in the back as opposed to trying to bang your way in through the front where maybe they're not not so open yeah you we missed you it's your turn valley can abuse failure it's not really that big a deal it's accepted if you fail as an entrepreneur i just want to try and build on that sentiment because many of us here come from not an entrepreneurial background and have come from corporates um who and have had reasonably successful careers but are contemplating as part of a career change here the stint in entrepreneurship there is the risk that it could fail and and so i just wanted to get a sense from yourself is to in that point when you're trying to think through okay go back into a corporate career and continue the momentum or take an extent in the entrepreneurship world and take the potential risk for the potential reward not just compensation but also a role the seat at the table that you mentioned i'm trying to think how is really in your opinion failure perceived because well it depends on yeah it it depends it's perceived differently depending on who's perceiving it um as i said you you graduate from here you've got the opportunity to hit this reset this career reset button once but you don't get an unlimited number of opportunities to hit that reset button uh you might you might get a second pop at it in a couple years if something didn't work out but then probably not the the other comment i would make is career transitions that i've watched are historically quite easy from large companies to small ones and quite hard from small ones to large ones and so if you are going to go from a big company background into the entrepreneurial world think long and hard about that because it won't be that easy to go back where you came from i mean maybe if it's a year or two and you duck back quick or you go back to the company you work for you might be able to do it but then i would almost say you weren't really all that committed to going into the startup world in the first place if you were looking for an opportunity to go back like i said if it scares you go big um the the the failures particularly in the entrepreneurial community here are are really almost no big deal um but they tend to be perceived as a much bigger deal by the bigger companies the bigger more mature companies and it's just a fact of life i think you probably many of you have probably experienced that so i think the likelihood is if you are committing to an entrepreneurial career path that's a commitment you need to make and you need to probably believe that it's a career-long commitment that that's where you're going to spend the rest of your career god forbid it didn't go well to an executive search firm who's trying to fight you the next job well well a they're not going to be trying to find you the next job they're they may be talking to you about a position with one of their clients in which case they're already interested in you so you don't have to you don't you you they found you somehow otherwise you didn't get in the door and you weren't sitting in front of them so that's a positive interview if you got it and then all you have to do i mean if it's if it's a startup that failed yeah it's a startup that failed this is this is what i thought was going to happen the questions that i would ask would be around the choices and the explanation for the choice you made to go there not so much the outcome because you can't control that what you can control is the choice that you made to go there and so i i really want to know well why did you choose to go there what did you think the likely outcome was going to be why did you believe the company was going to be successful turned out it wasn't but but those questions can have very good incredible answers to them and that's what you should think about because as i said that's part of telling your story and an answer like they told me it was going to be great and i didn't really check it or one of my friends went there and he said it was cool or uh they had they had a cafeteria where you could get food like all the time i mean those are not very good i'm just i'm kidding you a little bit but those are not very good answers to to questions but an honest assessment that look i looked at it i thought the technology was solid they had financing in place for a year the executive team was a was an a quality team in in my estimation and you know it just it didn't work out that answer's fine at that point that's all i want to know and then i'm on to thinking about well do you fit you know my next uh my next deal here and chances are you probably learned something from that experience which is also an important thing to to get into the into the discussion uh who is next i think maybe you were um yeah my question is can you speak to the different hiring practices by uh geography and by industry so for example the bay area seems to be a search firm averse you know you hire through your network whereas you know maybe other industries are more blue chip but more senior levels are much more friendly sure um well the first thing i think if you if you're trying to if you're focused on particular company or particular set of companies um figuring out what their hiring process is and who who or what institutions they use to help them in it is a good first step and it that's basic homework and it shouldn't be very hard you know a few questions you can call the hr department and talk to somebody in their recruiting department they'll they'll tell you the answers to those questions do you use recruiters yes or no if you if you do use recruiters who do you use what do you use them for what level uh i think you're you're correct there's a huge infrastructure of talent moving around in silicon valley it's almost unique in the world and it's um it's not that they don't use recruiters they use everything and they use everything in volume uh i mean the recruiting business here is very strong but so is direct recruiting i mean most of the major companies have created big in-house recruiting staffs most of those staffs uh worked at one point or other in their in the big search firms i mean the top recruiters at apple pretty much all work for me uh over the years and the in other places though where the local talent pool is maybe not quite so vibrant companies will either tend to rely on recruiters more and that tends to be the case as you go up more and more senior levels at the at the officer level we i just did chief chief cxo searches and ceo searches for medium to big companies for the most part pretty much all those searches still use recruiters executive recruiters but levels below that it's a complete mixed bag and a lot of it's networking and so here's where your networks really matter a lot is to to tap on both for contacts and to tap them for information in terms of how this particular company hires and if you want to get in the hiring process and cycle for this company or this set of companies how do you do that and people will people will tell you and this is where uh graduates of this program two three years out working in these companies who who sat in these chairs two years ago and are out doing those jobs now are the the people that i'd be talking to not me i'm too far removed from that but i i i know there are a lot of people out there who are willing to help you and they're pretty easily identified virginia can tell you who they all are she knows them all and mike they know them all uh i think you were next okay question is about sourcing um recruiters when they do searches use a variety of techniques one they all have databases of candidates that they that they maintain not not so much from resumes sent to them but by profiles they've created over the years candidates they've interviewed may be presented and want to do present again because that's they've got qualified people so they look at that that's all categorized they they look at their own prior search work that's similar where do we do a search like this the last time and who were the candidates who came in second third fourth on on that search that maybe would be a good fit for this they do industry sourcing which is what you talked about where they call around typically at a level or two above what they're what they're trying to find if if i'm doing a search for a marketing you know vp uh i'm calling ceos and saying you know who who are the best marketing people you know and your competitors you know maybe not one of your people sometimes they'll even suggest one of their people that is is blocked you know surprisingly it happens um who who's worked for you over the years that you think is really good and here this is where if you've worked for really strong mentors and strong performers they know about you and if you stay in touch with them as even if they've moved on from where you are they'll think about you they'll recommend you because they're the people with the reputations who are going to get the calls the weak ones don't get those calls the strong ones get those calls and are in a position to help influence the hiring of people that either they know about or more likely have worked for them or for their on their teams over the years and really good executives i find tend to take very good care of people who perform for them over the years i mean they'll recommend them for for jobs they'll proactively recommend them for jobs and in fact if you've got a good relationship with them you can go ask them to do that go to somebody who was a boss of yours in another company if that was a good relationship he or she has a good feeling for you call them and say look you know i'm ready to make a move who should i be talking to who in the search firm world do you know that you'd be willing to introduce me to and if somebody reaches out to you you know keep me in line so well two things one if they're if they're international firms that have offices in the uk and you have good relationships with the recruiters in the uk ask them if they'd be willing to introduce you to their counterparts here in silicon valley in their firms most of them will be willing to do that um if the firms are large and and have offices in in both places if uh if if not then the other the other source is it could be the uk uh expat community here you know people people who are who are who are brits who are working in silicon valley and there's lots of them and you know my experience has been as i as i said before they're they're willing to help their countrymen because they know you're in a strange strange land here and you need a little help so those two those would probably be my my two first places uh that i would go beyond just the normal networking that i talked about before uh i think you and then you yeah i'm a little bit personal to ask a question after your answer with widows i'm afraid that you can read minds sometimes so on the topic of magical powers if you could look into the future say 20 or 30 years ahead hypothetically a lot of ceos previously came from operations and then sales and then the finance strategy will there be a change in the origin of where ceos come from particularly if they've got a technology background you know are technologists ever going to be never going to have the keys to the executive washroom well some some do and some have i think technologists are going to continue to run technology companies and if you if you look at even the near term future most of the important companies are going to be technology companies or are going to be trying to claim to the world that they're technology companies even if they're really not if you saw the cover article in fortune this week had a picture of bob iger of disney on the cover talking about disney as a technology company and his uh his efforts to to remake disney as a as a technology company so bob had no technology in his background and he's now a technical guru i still think as i as i mentioned before that the people that are going to move up are the ones that have taken responsibilities for pieces of business and have run them successfully and you can get a business unit in a larger company or even a smaller company to run if you set out to do that pretty early in your career it might not be a massive one but you know if you take a small one and turn it into a medium sized one that's gonna be that's a pretty good record then the next time around they give you a medium-sized one you turn it into a big one you're successful at that you can do anything and so um i i i actually think the question i'd almost come back at that question and and reverse it and it's it's not so much what companies are going to be what what functional or areas they're going to be looking to for their next leaders they're going to look they're going to look for leaders and they're going to take them from wherever they can find them whatever they've been doing if they think they have the leadership capabilities to run their company or if we think they have the leadership capabilities to run another company but you got to be in a position to have shown your leadership capabilities before somebody can look at you and say this is a leader who we can give a bigger job to and if it's been all staffed that's really hard some combination of line and staff if you've got credible line experience and some great executives have gone back and forth between line and staff and there's a few that have gotten to the top of big companies all staff through consulting or staff jobs typically more finance than than say the softer ones like planning or hr or pr but you know i i still think that setting out to build a record of having been successful running something where that success can be measured and people recognize it is the best path that i can find to uh to to leadership there there's a question i wasn't asked yet at least today but i'm gonna i'm gonna ask it and then answer it because it gets back to setting the reset button in your career and some of you here may want to go and make a radical shift uh i don't know i don't know that to be true but there's always some and if you've been doing um you know consumer products and you want to you want to go to tech or even all big company and you want to go to startup and people ask me about how that kind of a desire uh matches up with executive recruiters and the answer is it doesn't uh hardly at all and so and you will you will frustrate yourself a lot if in fact you're trying to make that work because 99 times out of 100 it isn't going to work what the what recruiters want they want an easy path to to a solution of a client problem and they've got a defined spec and let's call it a you know a marketing director position for uh pc apps business okay well who are they going to present as candidates on that search they're going to present probably three candidates after after a work they want to present that the top individual in that job for their client company's biggest competitor or the number two person in a company a lot bigger um or somebody two levels up in a in a smaller company in the same space or a closely related space so basically somebody that's done this job before and can come in here and do this job for my client fast they're not going to present somebody who was a finance manager in a consumer project products company that got his mba and now wants to be a marketing manager in tech it's not going to happen that that job can happen but not down that channel it'll it if if you want to make a jump shift like this is what we call a jump shift change of change of function and change of industry you're likely not going to get much help from the executive recruiting profession to do that and that's just a fact and i'm just i just want to tell you that clear because don't waste your time trying to convince them to do that because they're not you got to go find that another way and the way you find it is typically by somebody who knows you that's seen you work somewhere else before and is in a position to say yeah i know you've never done that before but i know you can do it because i've seen what you can do that's not how that get that doesn't get done through a third party recruiter but it gets done every day through your personal networks and your personal contacts so if that's what you want to do then that's what you got to work if you know what you want to do and you've done it and you've got demonstrable record of doing it then there are recruiters out there that are going to jump all over you and try to get you your next job in that in that field either either a jump or a shift same by a jump higher level job doing the same thing up from director to vp same industry same function shift same function different industry director of marketing from consumer products to tech yeah probably if there's some credible way you can do it so i'd call that a jump or a shift but if you try to do what in basketball or something they call the jump shift which is change of level and change of industry and function change of function the change of industry very very hard and you gotta you gotta go work that on your own um yes thank you thank you very much that was my question but i have um another okay how do you um also to recruiters and to future employees promote um the year that you took here because i've got mixed feedback and then we're like why you already had a great career why would you break that and go and take an example like a one-year program at stanford what is like your best answer to that apart from obviously the personal reason okay what's your best answer to that question that i i wanted to um i had the headquarters story i didn't want to stay with my headquarter so i needed i wanted to have a career break i wanted to switch not not my my function but unfortunately my company because i didn't want to be where the headquarters okay and i wanted to use that time to really get some educational aspects and a new perspective okay i'd say that story is fair um i think you can improve that and i i think you would improve it by being more positive about the opportunity that you want to go to and less negative about the one that you were leaving because nobody really wants to hear that you know that i mean for example you had learned all that you could learn you knew you were missing some skills to move up to the next critical level in management and you thought this was the most time efficient way that you could add those skills and at the same time enhance your career and move move to a bigger job in a different company because you didn't see that opportunity where you were to me that's a much more positive story uh some version of that uh again i i think um nobody's gonna believe the story that you tell them unless you believe it so first off you have to believe it and you have to be convincing and telling it but to the extent that it's uh can be much more positive and and less negative this is your elevator pitch and you know sort of like what you tell somebody if they say you know you know you got two minutes tell me why i should give you another 10 minutes uh you want to have a really good story that you you can tell when you do that and and i would just say don't be defensive no reason to there's not there's not a reason in the world for any of you to be defensive coming here you've made a big investment of your life and your time to improve your skills dramatically i believe and i think most people uh would assume that there are some nba haters in the world some of them are vocal some of them are active in the venture capital community some of them have gone out of their way to say that an mba is a complete waste of time and money in fact that a college education is a complete waste of time and money you should just go code well easy for them to say because they're billionaires but you know you probably are not going to get very far convincing one of those people that your time here was well spent so i go back to the jim collins analogy of the open door forget about those people and go spend your time with people who appreciate what you did here and there's lots of them and you don't even have to take an editorial position about who's right and who's wrong but i can tell you clearly one of them is a much more likely opportunity set for you than the other one without whether you agree with their permits or not if they think this is a waste of time they're not going to help you go somewhere else yeah okay um i'm curious about what we would like to say about compensation so i've had some words about compensation yeah let me see if i can if i can boil it down into a couple of couple of key points one is ask a lot of questions because the more information you have the more the more power that that you will have um compensation has a lot more elements to it typically than most people identify at senior levels a compensation package is going to have maybe as many as eight or ten major components we tend to think about base salary cash incentive bonus and equity grants kind of the the big three but there's relocation uh you know allowances home buying programs you know pension gross ups signing bonuses uh uh a special project based uh in incentive options and as many things as people can can can dream up so the first thing you wanna you wanna do when you're in a compensation discussion with anybody is find out how many of those elements might possibly come into play you know do you have project-based bonuses do you you know do you use signing bonuses you know you know how do you award you know option option grants if i'm relocating how do you deal with relocation is a home buyout part of that blah blah blah and so now you've got a framework of of what's possible and there might be something on that list that could be really really valuable to you if you go to work for stanford your kids get to get to go to stanford i mean if you've got college-age kids i mean i know people who have stayed here because of that that's huge you know and so find out what the list is and then the other the other thing i i tell people um a compensation discussion is a little bit like working at a mixing board in a sound studio you ever see these things they got all these they're trying to manage the sound probably there's a guy back there behind the wall doing that right now and you got about 10 levers that that you know various levels of the sound you can't push them all to maximum because you just get garbage it's the same thing in a compensation discussion you can't push everything to maximum but you can probably push something and one of the things that is i tell people try to find the soft money if there is any i mean maybe the individual you're talking to has a severe salary cap and they just can't go any higher but they've got a lot of discretion on a signing bonus well money's money okay so you don't get and so maybe you don't get that extra 25 or 50 000 in salary but you pick up a hundred thousand dollar signing bonus well that's pretty good because you can have a salary negotiation again in a year but maybe you can negotiate it to six months and and get a review in six months again what's the review cycle that's one of the items on the list people don't tend to think about so you know recognize at the end of the day that if you push too many of the levers you you could blow the deal but you can push some and people expect you to push somebody they they're i think particularly impressed if you do it intelligently particularly if you push something that's not one of the one of the top three and if you've done your homework first off i mean at a minimum if you're replacing somebody you should be able to get everything that that individual got because that's already been approved in the system so that's a starting point and and usually if you ask you can find out what that is if you know what industry counterparts that their competitors get for the same job that's useful information and so again do your homework figure out what the elements are push the the the one that in in particular is worth more to you to get than it is to them to give it to you and that's where you can really uh if you push on something where they're resisting that's going to be hard so go find go find somewhere else to so it's another version of an open door but it's go go find something that's easy as opposed to fighting over something that's hard and i mean at the end of the day i always try to encourage people in that negotiation to try to get the company to accept that you want to bet on your own performance so go for bigger upside on bonuses shorter reviews project bonuses okay i'll go in at this level it's a little less than than what i want in terms of salary but given that is it possible that i i can have a review of six months and if the performance warrants i get that adjustment that's pretty soft they're not giving much they're not giving away any money they may well they may well agree to that and if and if you perform then you get it in six months if you don't perform you're working to get it anyway [Music]

Channel: Stanford Graduate School of Business

Views: 7,089

Rating: 4.9512196 out of 5

Keywords: stanford, stanford gsb, stanford graduate school of business, mba

Id: etnIIZRgI4g

Length: 80min 28sec (4828 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021