Sue Siegel: Attitude and Approach to Innovation

The other question I suspect you ask is how do you actually affect change in whatever environment that you're in? So knowing that, let's go through that a little bit. And what you can't see right now is regardless of what size company, you still have to do the same sort of elements, build teams, work within teams. If you're leading, you need to hire. You also need to fire a lot of people. Forget that portion of it. And I tell you, some of the best decisions that some of the best leaders have made have been to fire people. Because you have to set the expectation with regards to what you want in terms of quality and what you expect in terms of delivery. The other element of it is attitude. And I know this is going to sound like, well, my mama taught me that. But I have to tell you, a lot of times the soft skills I was talking about, no matter if you're in a small company or in a big company, the decisions don't get made by like big huge committees. In terms of you, typically the decision gets made by your next manager or by your manager's manager. With the manager depends on size of company. But it tells you a lot about your attitude, your willingness to actually participate in things, your willingness to actually be part of the solution versus just the problem. And that is something that regardless of size you go through. Now let me just mention something about innovation for a second and how that works in the size of companies. And the reason why I say this is I think it's pretty important as you think about where you go. This university in particular has been all around innovation. It just embraces the whole notion of creativity and entrepreneurship. It embraces the notion of bringing whatever size company, but certainly has stimulated the creativity of all the startups which now some of the ones that are biggest. And it's hard to actually tell them this because when you think about the likes of intel and whatnot, some of the first venture backed companies, they're middle aged or older, right? They're no longer the big startup, but they started that way too.

Go Google.

Google is getting, they're more than teenage years, right? They're getting into their 30s, 20s and 30s, right? So when you start to think about that, the whole change with regards to where you want to go and where you're trying to seek out what you're looking for has been important for me. Fundamentally innovation has been the important element. What I saw through my career and what I have really enjoyed from the very beginning, be it when I was in academics, be it when I went to big or small companies is regardless of where I was, I found a way to surround myself with innovative processes, with innovation in terms of technology, with people who are very, very creative, and to almost always start something that was different from what the rest of the organization was doing. And then it didn't matter what size company I was at.