1) What was your first job?
I was seven years old when I got my first paid job. I delivered magazines on Sunday mornings door-to-door. People were not always nice and I needed to make sure they paid for the magazines as my salary was 10 percent of the money I was bringing back. I used the money to buy gelato and to play video games.
2) What led you into a career in telecoms?
I never intended to. In fact, I studied computer science and then electronic engineering. However, I met a professor at the university in Padova and when I passed his exam he asked me if I was interested in doing my thesis at a company where he was the President. That company was NECSY in Italy and was owned by HP and Telecom Italia and successively was acquired by Tektronix. The rest is history. As part of my thesis I wrote the software for a base station to handle call control and mobility management. Handling multi-tasking and the timers was not easy, back then.
3) Without naming and shaming, tell us about your worst ever boss.
Glad you asked. I recall the words of my best ever manager, who used to say that there are no bad people, there are only bad managers. I encountered a few of those. They were in general people afraid of hiring people smarter than themselves, afraid of losing their job to their direct reports, not clear about their role as managers, and not effective at delegating. I recommend the book “Start with why”. It has helped me and my direct reports develop an effective mutual relationship.
4) What has been your worst business travel experience?
It’s not easy to find one because in general I try to get something positive out of every experience. But there was a time when I felt I was risking my life. It was after 10pm when I landed at the airport in a large city in Asia. I told my local colleagues there was no need to send someone to pick me up. The airport was outside the city, some 30km away, so I jumped into what I thought was a taxi. The driver was a big man with eyes as black as the night outside and he stared at me in the rear view mirror. I didn’t speak his language, the meter was fake, and I thought that he could kill me and throw me in a ditch and nobody would ever find out. He took me close enough to my hotel, wanted all my cash, dropped my luggage, and left.
5) What has been the proudest moment in your career?
When JDSU acquired Trendium. I felt proud about the innovation we created with our own hands and the fact that several companies, the industry leaders, were interested in it.
6) Where do you see yourself in five years?
I like everything that has to do with innovation, challenging the status quo, and shaping the future. With the xSIGHT portfolio for assurance and analytics, JDSU has embarked on a journey that is premised on those principles and I’m glad to be part of it. Service providers, and our industry at large, are going through a major inflection point over the next five years and our environment, and business models, will look entirely different. I want to keep JDSU at the forefront of innovation to enable and accelerate a successful evolution for our customers. Stay tuned!
