“Pretty early on, I recognized that more is the same than is different — fundamental values, wanting to give your children more opportunity or at least as much as you had in life, etc. It’s present all around the world, and that happens to be true in a lot of aspects of business as well. More is the same than is different, but we tend to focus on differences, and perhaps exaggerate or accentuate those beyond the reality of what we have to worry about.”
“I think that was an important lesson. It is too easy to let the person with great presentation or language skills buffalo you into thinking that they are better or more knowledgeable than someone else who might not necessarily have that particular set of skills.
So that was something that sounds obvious in hindsight, but as I was sitting there, boy, for me this was a thunderbolt. I think that’s another thing that sort of served me well, not letting the veneer distract you from the substance.”
“The top two are leadership and results. From a leadership standpoint, I would expect you, as a more senior executive, to be able to talk about where you’ve provided strategic leadership. It doesn’t mean you’re a brilliant strategist, but you’ve been able to get a team together to agree on who the target customer is, what products and services you’re going to offer them, and the value and competitive advantage you’re going to create.”
“Underpinning those would be multifunctional, multinational and presence. I’m looking for multifunctional people who have been in different activities — marketing, sales, operations, finance, human resources — who bring a richer perspective and texture to problems and opportunities than someone who’s just had a straight shot in one function.
I’m looking for somebody who’s had multinational experience. We do business everywhere in the world. I’m looking for people who have lived and worked in different markets and recognize that there are nuances that have to be considered.
And the final one is presence. You deal with different folks at different levels of the company. It depends on the exact role, but you should ensure that there is an ability to interact with and effectively represent the company.”
“So it’s a combination of not only how you convey things, but what you convey to these various stakeholders. Presence is learning to deal with different audiences in a way that allows them to get what they need out of this interaction and ensures that the well-being of the company is looked after.”
“I think you can be a good communicator and you still may not have presence. There may be someone who is very articulate on a subject and they know levels of detail. When you get with a particular audience, it may not be appropriate to go into those levels of detail, or you may create doubt by even going into the subject matter. There’s inside information in a company, for example. You never cross that bright line, but you can get varying degrees of proximity to that line, depending on your audience.”
“Q. What’s your best career advice for new college grads?
A. I think when you come out of undergraduate school, going out and getting some work experience is really very helpful. I found that I learned more about what I didn’t want to do in some of my early jobs. Getting experience in bigger, broader companies where there are more things that you can learn and do is a good idea, because the likelihood of exactly picking out your career from the get-go is very low. So I would encourage, for a first job, that you try to find generally a larger company where there are more things that you can get involved with, where there may be more comprehensive planned training activities to help you with certain skills that you’re going to need.”
Interview with Robert W. Selander, chief executive ofMasterCard, [which] was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.
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