MBAs from Venus; Engineers from Mars

August, 2003

She has taken jobs she hasn't wanted because they were "rites of passage," Ann Livermore, Hewlett-Packard corporate vice president and president of HP Services, told Business School students recently. Trained in economics and business, Livermore went to work for Hewlett Packard after graduation from the Stanford Business School in 1982 and kept getting promoted. She eventually realized, however that "if I ever wanted to be a general manager, I was going to need to run R&D." In her first R&D meeting, she said, I didn't understand half of what they were saying."

Before long however, she figured out that the managers were trying to make decisions that should have been made by the engineers. Her job was to change the conversation to costs, resources, time, deliverables—not tech standards. "What is going to unleash the power of the team? That's what I had to figure out."

Teamwork and time management, she said, were the most important lessons she learned as a GSB student. "A lot of the dynamics you learn from working in groups is key."

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For the Record: Class of 2003 Commencement