Lessons - How Sandeep Chennakeshu Became President Of Blackberry | Sandeep Chennakeshu, Tech Exec & Author

Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot podcast network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upscale your personal and professional life. The levels that you have operated at are of some of the most senior levels and some of the largest companies in the world that are very well known household names. So I don't want to spend too much time on career because there's a lot of lessons that we're learning that can apply to people that are not working at some of the largest organizations in the world, but it is interesting to know like how did you get to those types of positions? The 20 years, was it, it was just spending the time, was it strategic, was it looking at certain companies that were disruptive or paving the way? Maybe there's some career lessons that you've learned as you grew. Yeah, I think there are a few lessons, you know. So I was a researcher and I was doing basic research on modern forms and because of the papers I wrote on the teams and the team I built, which was a very, very good team, but I realized that, hey, I was researching products that I could not build. I had no idea of building products. So I had to get out of my comfort zone. That's the first lesson I learned. I said, get out of your comfort zone and go and learn to build a product. So I basically went into, I got an opportunity, there was a manager who was, they were recruiting for a manager to run ASIC development or chip development for cell phones. I volunteered and I realized getting out of your comfort zone is the hardest thing because once you learn it, you can do it over and over again, but I suddenly went for being the expert to someone who knew nothing about product development. My own team was wondering, why did they bring this guy? So it gets a little, you have to get a little used to being the runt in the litter when you make a switch like that. But I realized that there's a way to adapt. So I started getting up every morning and studying. From everything I could learn from books and then during the day, I would dissect the products that we built, go to the lab, make measurements, have people who could make measurements teach me about it. And I learned from anyone and everyone who would teach me. And in a couple of years, I got really strong in this development aspect and I was able to lead better. So with that confidence, I had regularly rotated through multiple jobs in the company, always remembering that I would know less initially, but learn more with time. And in a few years by doing this repeatedly, I probably had a toolkit that not many possessed, so they promoted me to being the general manager of the business. And once again, I made huge mistakes because I knew about technology and operations, but not about business. And so I had to learn business and make a lot of mistakes by every stumbling. I always used the phrase, every stumbling block, became a stepping stone for success. And with time, I was able to learn how to run a business. And then once again, I said, hey, you know what? I've got to not not only learn to run a thriving business, but how about I volunteer for jobs where I have to fix a broken business, and especially in a foreign country, where the culture is different. And I got an opportunity to do that and that turned out to be successful. And I kept doing that for a while and then a little later, I said, you know what? Maybe I should leave my corporate role and go and become an independent consultant. And start my own company. So now I'm going to look at companies outside in, I would have no background of what problems they had. I would be thrown a problem and I had to go solve it. And because, and that was a completely new experience and I learned to do that. And then I got back into the corporate world because the last company I analyzed and said, you know, this is what we need to do to fix, I had to go back and actually fix it. So by repeatedly getting out of my comfort zone and learning, kind of gave me this perspective and also, you know, I got picked because of the toolkit I developed, I got picked for senior jobs. Actually, the odd thing is I've never applied for a job in my life. I was always picked. Really? Yeah. So when you're looking at, so I'm looking at the short resume that I have in front of me with some of these roles, right? So we're talking, uh, there was CTO of Ericsson mobile phones. You had president of Ericsson mobile platforms. You had senior vice president at free scale president of blackberry technology solutions, executive vice president at AMD. These were roles that you were picked for when you were, I was always invited to take the role. I never applied for any of these jobs. Wow. And when, what do you think, what do you think differentiated you in the corporate world? Because I think that there's so much focus now on, again, entrepreneurship, which is very important, even, even like the book that you've wrote, uh, and I'm assuming some of the lessons from it, they can be very much applied to people that are coming up and building businesses from scratch and founders, uh, but I mean, a lot of these lessons came from your, your corporate experience. So as an individual, first of all, what did you do? You said you made yourself almost the linchpin because you have so many different skill sets that you accumulated over your career, but even with that is, it seems so basic, so simple. So for somebody that is not interested in building a business or being an entrepreneur, you've, you've been placed at the highest levels of, of corporate. So you learn all these different skill sets, but then how do you position yourself to be picked for president, CTO of a multi-billion dollar corporation? I think there are a couple of things, right? You know, you can acquire as much knowledge and experience as possible. In any field, you don't have to be, uh, trained to be a general manager, you can be an expert in sales, or you can be an expert in marketing, or you can be expert in product management. But, uh, one of the things that I feel, uh, it depends on how you get, you know, the true test is when you're battle tested and you get results. Okay, you have to basically go through, like, when you're playing a game, I love cricket a lot, and I played some decent cricket. And you know, I always said that the people who are the best players have three things. They have talent, they have technique, but they have to have the temperament. Otherwise, you can never succeed at the senior level. And uh, what all your knowledge and everything you learn on the job depends on your talent and your skill, which is a technique. But how do you basically deal with difficult situations and bring results? Your ability to solve problems on the job in a practical manner and get results is what matters. And I think that's what differentiates people, you know, in tough situations, can you actually deliver, you know, how do you deal with adversity, how do you learn from success and failure, how do you say straight through to yourself, you know, and how do you basically deliver, you know, to the requirements of your stakeholders, which are your investors, your customers and your employees, that's what differentiates people.