Lots of people have been asking how I have enjoyed my job
here so far. I haven’t talked about it
much – mostly because, like any job, its pretty boring to read about. If you’ve read the “sun” blog, you know that
I’ve been working a little later than normal lately. But the last few weeks have actually been
pretty fun.
When I was offered the job, I was told that it would give me
great visibility throughout the company.
This has definitely been true on this latest project, where I have been
building the Services presentations that will be given to the Ericsson board
(services is pretty much anything from Ericsson that does not involve telecom
equipment). I did a quick check the
other day, and the board includes the former CEO’s of Volvo and Electrolux
(same gentleman), DirectTV, British Telecom,
the founder of Vodafone, and most impressively, a member of the Advisory
Board at University of Rhode Island (rhody in da house!)
Needless to say, putting together a board presentation gave
me and my manager reason to talk to people throughout our organization. While normally I work closely with the
strategy managers in each product area, now I was part of the working meetings
with the heads of each product line. We
only have 3 of these lines in the Services business, so they are pretty busy
folks. Once we worked out all the
details with this team, we then moved on to have even smaller working meetings
with the head of our Services team.
Services generates over 40% of Ericsson revenues, so it was
even harder to get time with him. When
we did, it was my manager and I, the Services CFO, the Services head and one
other member of their team. It seemed
like a very closely knit group that was more collegial than I had expected –
they even managed to take a fun little dig at me when talking about the impact
of currency fluctuations caused by the banana republic that they do business
with (‘merica), followed by a wry smile.
We spent this meeting talking about how the presentation we had originally pulled
together matched what the head of our group wanted to present to the
board. In general we were very much in
line, but the hard part was finding the balance between granular details and
high-level strategic views.
After updating the presentation to reflect some of these
changes, Services management was walking through the presentation with the CEO
of Ericsson. I wasn’t able to be part of
that meeting, but within an hour my manager was emailed with direct comments on
our deck from the CEO. His target for
the presentation was slightly different from what the Services goal was, which
required another few nights of updating things.
Once we get to this level, pretty much any comments are not requests to
be discussed, but line items to be completed.
At the end of this batch of revisions, we heard that our presentation
was the best of the 3-4 presentations being given to the board, which pleased a
number of people, including my boss, my bosses boss, my bosses bosses boss and
the CEO. I'll take it.
Overall, being part of small meetings with so many of the
top folks in the company is interesting. Even when I am dealing with just the top management at Ericsson, it is fascinating to see how each tier has a different point of view on what is really important and needs to be stressed to the board.
Hearing how each group thinks about things, how they wants to present things, and what they feel
is relevant to the board members is something I wouldn't be able to experience at many places.
When I was in consulting, I did a lot of really interesting
projects, but mostly interacted with mid/high level managers. I figured that when I left consulting to go
to a corporate gig, I would lose that management access, but instead, even at
the earlier stages of this project, I was dealing with much more senior
executives. It really has made the last
few weeks fun, even if I have seen a few too many Swedish sunsets from my desk…
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