If The Shoe Fits: Emulating A Winner
by Miki SaxonA Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.
Winning takes many forms, as Ryan pointed out yesterday.
Let’s face it, we are not all going to be the next Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.
But there seems to be plenty of room for us all to push a bit harder each day and surround ourselves with winners.
It is up to us to make that happen.
Not all winners desire to be founders anymore than all founders are winners.
I doubt anyone would/could/should minimize the abilities, skills, intelligence, and sheer grit that lands a person in a top senior role at a multibillion dollar tech company, such as Microsoft.
Achieving positions at that level are neither accidental nor serendipitous.
Now, imagine a future in which you are a winner of whatever kind and writing the summary paragraph of your LinkedIn profile.
What would you say when summing up what you did and how you accomplished it? What would you consider your major accomplishments?
Would it read anything like this? (Emphasis mine.)
“I am passionate about building technology that gets out of the way so you can focus on what matters most. My mantra ‘people first, technology second’ has been the driving force in my career. My focus has been leading teams and incubating new technologies and experiences to re-imagine the platform for intelligent work. In my career, I’ve helped build products, including Office, Windows, Internet Explorer, Xbox and Surface, that touch more than a billion people every day. As a leader, it’s important that my door always be open — to embrace everyone’s individual perspective, personality, style and abilities to makes my teams stronger — and creating a culture that the best ideas can come from anyone and anywhere.”
Is this someone worth emulating? Someone you’d want to hire?
Would your answer change when you learned this someone is a woman?
Because it is; she is Julie Larson-Green.
And it is the last 14 words of her summary that truly proclaim her a winner — by any standard.
Image credit: HikingArtist
