What I learned from Mr. Richard Yee at Nortel
Continuing on from last week, I am happy to share another lesson from my Nortel days this week, but from Mr. Richard Yee, who was the Business Development lead for India and some of the other countries in APAC and my manager at that time. He also worked for James Demers at that time. I had been looking to expand my role and acting upon the advice from James, I started doing a lot of business development work in addition to being the engineering leader for India. Initially, I acted an intermediary between the BD team based out of HongKong and soon a time came when quite a few sales leaders within India became comfortable with me doing the job. After that, it was a matter of time that I was offered the role of Business Development under the leadership of Richard Yee.
Richard was one the most balanced and grounded managers I have ever had. I learned quite a few things from him, and today I will share just a simple lesson.
No PO (Purchase order) just lands into your lap by accident.
It is another version the age-old axiom, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch (TANSTAAFL)”. He told me that for every purchase order we get, someone has had to put an effort. Initially, I thought that since we have running contracts with our customers and that their expansions are their own plans, so even if no one really worked from Nortel, we will still end up getting the PO. I was soon to be proven wrong. When you are driving rather than being driven, you must remember that you will have to put in an effort to drive (Sorry, this may sound rhetorical now that we are actually experiencing driverless cars, but this story is from 2006).
You may think of this in any day to day project that you are driving. If you want to make something happen, you cannot just sit and wait for it to happen, you will actually have to work to make it happen.
I soon learned various stages of business development and realized that someone has to keep on taking actions to convert an opportunity from one stage to the next till the time it reaches the climax.
I hope you have already realized that nothing really happens on its own. So when you see some movement on any project, task or activity, please do think about the person who has made that moment happen. Sometimes these people can be invisible, and we may leave them out from our successes. Think of the various back office teams, such as supply chain, legal, logistics, order management etc, people who do not get the limelight but contribute significantly to the results that you achieve.
Please do take time to acknowledge the work done.
Stay tuned next week for another lesson from my Nortel days.