Account and territory changes often happen. Business leaders want salespeople that can speak their language and challenge them to be great.
Account and territory changes often happen, especially around this time of the year. While its important to ensure a smooth transition, I’ve also found it useful to be intentional about understanding what made the relationship flourish.
A couple of years ago, while transitioning one of my top accounts to a new account team, I emailed my executive contact informing him of the news. In the note, I thanked him for a great partnership over the years and asked if we could stay in touch.
He could have replied with one or two words like most busy executives do.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he took his time to pen a thoughtful reply. In the note, he was full of gratitude for all the milestones we reached together. He ended his message by saying,“Thanks for being an extension of my team.”
In a follow-up telephone conversation, he made a comment that stood out to me:
“You and your team spoke our language.”
As an immigrant from Nigeria, one of the small joys I experience is meeting a fellow Nigerian that speaks Igbo. Our fake American accents immediately vanish from our lips as we hail each other.
Seeing us from afar, you’d think we grew up in the same household. What makes it easy to open up to each other is the shared dialect weaving an invisible chord between us.
The same feeling is evident among business leaders when they meet sales professionals who understand their business so well that it seems like they both speak the same language. They become more forthcoming with their challenges, aspirations, and objectives because the salesperson can empathize with their view of the world and is equipped with the depth of knowledge to be a true partner.
Learning to speak a customer’s language isn’t a one-time event like cramming the night before a big exam. Instead, it’s a continuous, round-the-clock process.
Some of my go-to resources are the company’s website, press releases, industry publications, earnings transcripts, annual statements, letters to shareholders, interviews (print and digital), social media posts, news articles, user conferences, conference & keynote presentations, competitor’s press releases, analyst reports, LinkedIn profiles, YouTube channel, google alerts, research papers, books, business publications, experts within your company…it’s nonstop.
An additional resource to learn how to speak a customer’s language is by speaking directly to my customer’s customer. I also enjoy reading product and software reviews. If you sell to software companies, a great resource is G2 reviews.
Executives also want humble yet bold salespeople who will tell them when they are heading in the wrong direction. My executive contact shared that whenever his department was having a problem, it felt natural to reach out to my team.
He didn’t expect us always to have the answers, but he valued our ability to ask the right questions and infuse a refreshing outlook that would eventually get them unstuck.
The ability to ask relevant questions comes from years of exposure to various customer challenges and solutions. This constant exposure creates an arsenal of decision-making and problem-solving frameworks.
Forward-thinking business leaders crave this knowledge from salespeople, and smart salespeople proactively share this knowledge with business leaders.
An example of all these coming together was when I wore my customer’s branded T-shirt while traveling from Seattle to San Francisco for a meeting. While at the airport, my customer’s client approached me and struck up a conversation. This individual shared some constructive feedback on my customer’s product and suggested a few feature requests to address his company’s specific requirements.
In my meeting later that day, I kicked it off by saying,
“I had a conversation with one of your clients who offered a few ideas on how to make things easier for him….”
This led to a productive and collaborative meeting.
In 2021, I hope you make it a goal to be an extension of your customer’s team by learning to speak their language and hailing them to success.
#1 — Invest the time required for a smooth account transition and be intentional about finding out the true temperature of each executive relationship. Not only would this help jumpstart the new account team, it’ll also be learning to take to a new account and territory.
#2 — Learn to speak your customer’s language by taking small steps everyday. It can be as easy as setting up Google alerts for specific keywords related to the company, industry, executive team, and competitors. Reviewing these alerts at least twice a week will keep you updated on relevant news about your customer.
#3 — Ask for your customer’s branded T-shirt and wear it with pride.
I asked the CEO of a fast-growing startup in Silicon Valley his approach to selling to other Executives.
His response was simple: “Executives are people.”
How so?
Executives are busy.
Executives are overwhelmed with requests for their time.
Executives are under pressure to deliver results.
Executives are responsible for setting the vision and making the toughest decisions.
Knowing these truths, he approaches each interaction with an Executive with deep empathy and extensive preparation.
What does this look like?
Executives are busy and overwhelmed, so he streamlines his agenda to give them back some time.
Executives are under pressure to deliver results, so he is precise with how his solution can provide the results the Executive cares about the most.
Executives are responsible for making the toughest decisions, so he does everything in his power to show how his solution reduces risk for the Executive.
To establish credibility with the Executive, he aligns with their vision and priorities.
Speaking of priorities, how do you know the priorities that matter most?
Research.
In KPMG’s interview of over 1300 CEOs, the company identified three key priorities for CEOs in 2019: 1) Make digital a personal crusade 2) Navigate through geopolitical headwinds 3) Find the right balance between data and intuition.
PwC’s global CEO survey identified approaches to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and navigating fissures in policy frameworks as the underlying trends shaping the US CEO agenda for 2019.
Research from Workday identified six priorities CEOs care most about which are: 1) Finding growth 2) Taking on risk 3) Managing regulatory changes 4) Leveraging technology 5) Pursuing innovation 6) People and culture
Gartner also recently published their survey of 473 CEO and senior business executives. The top 11 business priorities are 1) Growth 2) IT related 3) Corporate (structural development) 4) Financial performance 5) Workforce management 6) Customer 7) Product improvements 8) Cost management 9) Efficiency and productivity 10) Innovation and 11) Risk management
While these publications are informative and help inform an approach, nothing replaces asking the Executives directly to articulate their priorities in their own words.
Anything else?
Communication style.
Tell me more.
Having the right communication style comes with experience and repetition. It’s a skill that can be developed, but it requires practice, practice, and more practice. Your choice of words matter. Your self-confidence matters. Your tone matters. Your cadence matters. Your body language matters.
Communication at its core is the successful conveying or sharing of ideas and feelings. If your ideas and feelings are not getting across then you’re not communicating.
Also, authenticity matters.
Why?
Savvy, and somewhat cynical Executives can detect inauthentic communication in less than one millisecond.
So, be yourself.
Being yourself is the foundation for building trust. And trust is the anchor for all business relationships that last for generations.
In Dr. Praya Agarwal’s article on Forbes, she cites research that shows it takes less than 30 seconds to linguistically profile a speaker, and make quick decisions on their ethnic origin, socio-economic class, and background. Additionally, we assign values such as pleasantness and prestige but also intelligence based on accents. In Executive Presence: The Missing Link Between Merit and Success, by Sylvia Ann, she found that executive presence rests of three pillars: gravitas, communication, and appearance. In the communication pillar, some of the executives she interviewed cited off-putting accents as an example of a verbal tic that undermines an individual’s ability to have superior speaking skills and ultimately, executive presence. Essentially, accents are part of our identity, whether good or bad.
My family journeyed from a village in Nigeria (Avu) to the United States (Texas) when I was fifteen years old. I immediately enrolled in high school with big dreams and a thick accent. Almost instantaneously, I became the punchline of many name-calling jokes, including the very degrading “African booty scratcher.” Maybe it was bullying, or perhaps it was just high school kids having fun; either way, it made me feel uneasy, unwelcome, and isolated.
One day, I shifted my perspective and made the conscious decision to fully embrace my accent and turn what many labeled as a disadvantage into an advantage. Luckily, my English Teacher acted as a mentor and assured me that with practice I could become as eloquent as a young Sidney Poitier (she thought we resembled each other). Her coaching helped me master my pace, tone, and cadence. These coaching exercises helped me find my voice and ensured I was not only heard but understood.
In my first sales job after college, one of my prospects was convinced I was calling from an “offshore” country during a cold call. My accent was the culprit, again. Granted, he was partly right; the monotony of the job probably caused my mind to wander off to the bustling streets of Lagos with suya in both hands. However, physically, I was definitely in the United States trying to make the almighty dollar. Let’s just say the sale never happened with that prospect.
Over the years, I’ve noticed my accent thickens during big presentations which could be distracting for the audience. So at the start of a big presentation, I often let the audience know that it is okay to interrupt me if my accent hinders their ability to understand me. By saying this, it diffuses tension for me and the audience; they empathize and become invested in my success. I call this reverse accent profiling. Is that a thing? It should be. #LoveAllAccents
So how do you empathize with someone with a thick accent at work?
Resist the desire to make fun of the accent, in private or in public. A mentor once told me when someone makes fun of you with the intent to demoralize and belittle you, what they’re actually doing is projecting their insecurities. Secure people are usually looking for opportunities to uplift others rather than make them feel insignificant.
Reach out and offer to coach and mentor the person. If you’re someone with an accent who thinks it is inhibiting your success, don’t be shy to ask for help. Reach out to colleagues, leaders in your community, senior management, or seek out professional coaching.
For those in leadership, encourage those with thick accents to speak in front of the team or group and provide ongoing feedback, coaching, and mentoring.
Highlight the person when they contribute ideas to team meetings. A brilliant African pharmacist I spoke to described how she would make a suggestion in a meeting but get little acknowledgment. A few minutes later in the same meeting, someone else would suggest her exact idea and get all the admonition and praise. This act happened multiple times until one day she got frustrated and responded to the individual that kept repeating her ideas “I might have said it with an accent, but that’s exactly what I just said.” It stopped happening.
Make a genuine attempt to understand the person with a thick accent, and meet them where they are. It’s fair to say we all have beautiful accents; if they can understand you, why not make an effort to understand them.
Special thanks to Jennifer Obiyo, AG Ukwa, Beth Fatusin, Emilia Lusia Fomuso, Ale Esposito, Jacob Alao, Stephen Ozoigbo, Garrett Mihelich, David Chau, for their inspiration and contribution.
Based in Brussels, Dorothy is a Global Talent Management Strategist, Coach & Trainer, and supports gender bilingualism. She is constantly being sought after for her thought leadership on executive placement and career advancement. I met Dorothy when she came to speak to us during one of my MBA classes at École des Ponts Business School in Paris.
She shared insights on how to enhance our online profile to maximize our chances of landing our dream jobs. Her advice and tips were instrumental in helping my classmates and I book interviews with top companies and ultimately, land jobs with these top companies. I’m excited to feature her on the F.I.V.E Questions with an Entrepreneur series.
Briefly describe how you got started. What is the most exciting or rewarding aspect of what you do? What could make it even more exciting or rewarding?
I have two business lines in the HR consulting sector. One is gender neutral and the other is for gender balance. They frequently overlap!
My early career was in Corporate HR in the steel and television industries. None of this was particularly out of the ordinary, although I enjoyed early career success, rising to second in command of a large HR department before I was 30. I decided to move to Luxembourg (with my now ex-husband!) taking a leap with no job to go to. Ladies do not do this today! I joined an office services start-up in the embryonic financial services sector. My interview question was could I “answer the phone.” I said I could, even though I spoke very little French at the time.
Here I graduated from general factotum to become the Sales and Marketing Director.
Sometime later our family relocated to Brussels, where I found an opportunity to combine my newly acquired European sales experience with my HR background in an executive search company. It meant going to the bottom of the pile (again!) to update all my skills. After a few years working for someone else, I branched out on my own, offering international executive search and research services on a global market.
I had qualified as a corporate trainer and coach at the beginning of my career, training with Sir John Whitmore (before he became Sir). When the global recession came in 2007/2008 there was a renewed demand for career coaching. I went back to college and re-certified. I wanted to make sure I was completely current. I then formally added coaching to my service offerings.
As an early adapter to social media, I could see the potential of it immediately. I grew a reputation of being an expert in the field in relation to HR and career issues. I wrote an award winning blog and developed training programs for organisations and job seekers on Personal Branding and job search. I then added training to my repertoire list, completing the circle to my post- graduation skill set.
Coaching women and promoting gender balance is something I have always believed in. I established 3Plus International which supports gender balance in the workplace offering services in recruitment, coaching and training to support organisations who want to strengthen the female talent pipeline.
I love the variety of what I do and how all the elements feed into each other and overlap.
Going forward, I need to write a book – that would be really exciting and rewarding. Currently I am very operational, which I enjoy, but I should make time to step back.
2. Flash back and then fast forward to the present, what has surprised you the most about mastering your unique set of skills and what advice do you have for others looking to master similar skills?
I think what surprised me was the social media element. I just got it. It came easily to me and I was able to pick it up and adapt what I needed to know and reject what I didn’t. I am not a particularly intuitive learner, but was able to play around and understand the basics and even the more advanced aspects pretty quickly.
Truthfully, it’s not that the skill is vital in in itself. It’s not at all. For younger generations it’s in their D.N.A. But what it represents is a mind-set. When I go into business schools and the class sees my age, they are always surprised. But it’s a great marketing and teaching message. If I can get it – how easy will it be for you?
So my advice is whatever is new – explore, learn and try. You never know what will happen. Be open! Be very careful before you rule anything out. I found out that I am very adaptable can re-invent myself. If I can do it – so can you.
I think never being afraid about going back to basics and not letting ego interfere is important. I have done that twice in my career.
3. What is your unfair advantage and what would your best customers or clients say are the main reasons they do business with you?
I don’t have an unfair advantage. I don’t believe in that. All the skills I’ve acquired have been via hard work, flexibility and energy. As a woman in the steel industry you can imagine what that was like! My clients say they work with me because I am efficient, direct and fun. Life is too short not to enjoy what you are doing. For executive search I have strong sales skills, so can coach my team. Having a visible international online profile helps. I rarely have difficulty getting candidates to take my calls.
On the coaching side if I have done my job well, I don’t need to see clients again because they have the necessary skills for life. They know what they need to do. I usually see them for an annual session which is a happy/sad feeling.
4. Reflect on all of the key sacrifices and trade-offs you’ve had to make to get to where you are today. Which of these would you say was the most pivotal and why?
I don’t feel as if I have made trade-offs in the past and definitely no sacrifices. I made a decision to be trailing spouse years ago. But although I exited my HR career, I started a career in sales. I would certainly advise women to be more strategic than I was, which is advice I conveyed to my own daughter when she recently relocated to the U.A.E.
But despite everything, that was possibly the most pivotal moment. If we hadn’t moved internationally, I would have had a very different career path, probably in U.K. based H.R. It has taken me down a very different route where I have learned languages and skills I possibly would have never needed to learn. I have had the advantage of living in a number of different countries and being truly multi-cultural.
I am perhaps making more trade-offs today. Many of my friends are starting to take long trips and vacations. If you run your own businesses you can never check out totally. When I travel, the first thing I ask about in a hotel is not the bed, but the wifi connection! I’m like Miranda in Sex and the City!
5. What is the best piece of actionable advice that you’ve received that not only influenced your decision to launch your business, but also continues to be source of inspiration?
The best advice I would give is centered around self-awareness. Do your inner work. Know yourself, your strengths, weaknesses and core values. Make sure you have cover for the things you are not so good at. Trust yourself and stay centered. If something feels off – it probably is – listen to your gut instincts. Never stop being open to learning something new. That is linked to your faith in yourself and your ability to make the right choices. This fosters consistency, which feeds trust from others. Just because you don’t know about it now, doesn’t mean to say you never will.
My one actionable tip: do your inner work!
“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom” Aristotle
Dorothy Dalton Biography
Dorothy works globally in talent management strategy and coaching, covering the whole spectrum of career transition challenges from “hire to retire” in coaching and executive search. An Economist and CIPD Associate, she has placed, trained and coached thousands of men and women in her career, working with leading international companies and organizations. She is a certified Coach (Cognitive Behavior) and trainer including e-learning.
She has successfully combined an early career in corporate H.R. with a stint in European Sales and Marketing before moving into global Executive Search and HR Consulting, running two businesses as an entrepreneur. She has lived and worked internationally throughout her career and has strong cross-cultural exposure.
Co-Founder and CEO of 3Plus set up to support organizations develop their female talent pipelines to achieve gender balance, as well as supporting individual women professional women to advance their careers. 3Plus offers career and leadership and coaching as well as mentoring services. She created the 3Plus eGazine and online resource for professional women with daily posts and the 3Plus Mini-Mentoring event already held in different locations in Europe and U.S.A.
Digitally savvy, with an internationally-recognized blog on career transition and a strong niche-market social media presence (a ranked coach, recruiter and HR influencer on Twitter) Dorothy successfully embraced new technology to combine the best of old-style methodologies with the new. She is a VIP blogger for HR Tech World, speaker and contributor on HR and workplace trends. She is also a visiting career coach for the MBA and Executive MBA programs of top tier business schools.
I’m excited to launch the “Find Insights Via Engaging™ (F.I.V.E) Questions with an Executive” series. This will complement the F.I.V.E Questions with an Entrepreneur series. Same as the original series, it will feature answers to five unique questions posed to an Executive. Their answers will enable every reader to learn how they advanced in their career, discover how they honed their unfair advantage, and gain from any piece of actionable advice that has continued to deliver dividends. It will be fun, insightful, and inspiring. The goal is that you are able to take away an actionable insight that you can apply to your career, business, or venture and get immediate results.
John Aisien, Photo credit: BlueCedar.com
To launch this new series, I’m excited to introduce you to John Aisien. John is an experienced and result-oriented technology executive, with a track record of leading go-to-market functions or entities within high-growth software businesses. I connected with John a few years ago while I was at Oracle. At the time, John was a VP of Product Management for Oracle Fusion Middleware. After many successful years at Oracle, John left in 2014 to join Mocana, a venture-backed San Francisco based company with a focus on embedded systems & app security, as their President and COO. John is now the CEO of Blue Cedar Networks, which was spun out of Mocana in March 2016.
John’s trajectory is impressive. He continues to rise despite the numerous headlines about the lack of African Americans in leadership positions at tech companies in Silicon Valley. To put this into perspective, a USA Today article in 2014 reported that leading technology companies based in Silicon Valley vastly under-employ African Americans and Hispanics. These groups make up 5% of the companies’ workforce, compared to 14% nationally. The figures are even more alarming when you consider the even smaller percentage of African Americans in leadership positions. Those that achieve this milestone are often seen as superhuman. So it wasn’t a surprise last year when we were all intrigued by the public exit of the only black Twitter engineer in a leadership position. I remember thumbing frantically through my timeline to follow the discussion. #DiversityIsGoodForBusiness
This conversation with John is designed to provide actionable insights; it’s also designed to celebrate him as he paves the way and sets a great example of the art of the possible.
1. Provide a brief overview of what you do. What are some of the most exciting aspects of your role?
I am Co-Founder & CEO of Blue Cedar Networks. We are a new company, a new legal entity, but we are running a long standing business, because Blue Cedar is a spinout from an existing venture funded company called Mocana. For two years, I was essentially running the business that eventually spun out of Mocana into Blue Cedar. I originally became aware of the Mocana opportunity through a mentor and former boss, with whom I had long-standing personal & professional ties. We had worked closely with each other in the past and we successfully built and sold an enterprise security company to Oracle, during the middle part of the last decade. What excites me about what I’m doing right now? Well, three big things. One is the opportunity to not only sell into a market but help to also create that market and then sell into it. That to me is unique and exciting. Market creators generally generate unique returns and experiences. Two, it’s an opportunity at this stage of my career to work with a group of people that I have effectively cherry picked, because we spun out of Mocana together and I hired a good number of them. This brings a tremendous amount of trust and longstanding history between us. One of them & I actually co-wrote a blog about this. The third thing that excites me about what I am doing is that for the first time in my career, I own the ultimate responsibility for generating enterprise value for a company. I’ve been in leadership roles in small and large companies for over 16 years, but this is the first time that as the leader of a company, I’m ultimately responsible for creating enterprise value for the company. So, that’s exciting, and brings with it uniquely different dimensions of responsibility, compared to my previous experiences. One specific example is the experience of running a Board of Directors, with savvy & highly experienced board members.
2. Flash back and then fast forward to the present. What has surprised you the most about advancing in your career and what advice do you have for others looking to take a similar path?
Generally, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the degree of willingness that the vast majority of people have to help. Seriously, you read stories about office political machinations and people not always having one’s best interests at heart. Conventional wisdom creates an image of a very cutthroat, unforgiving corporate world. To be clear, I’m a realist and suspect that there could be some truth in this. And it’s highly likely that I’ve been an oblivious recipient of such bad experiences. But what I have consciously experienced is that the number of times I’ve asked for help from investors (even those who are not investing in my company), from customers, from partners, even sometimes from competitors, and others, and have received that help, has been way greater than my expectations, or conventional wisdom. I would say my biggest takeaway is – ask a lot more regularly than perhaps logic will suggest, because in more cases than not, you are likely to get a positive response from your ask. In terms of advice, I’ve focused on things I know I do well and I’ve been very honest and dispassionate about things I know I don’t do so well. And I’ve optimized my execution towards the things I do well because it has allowed me to stand out in every role I’ve had. Reflecting on it all, I would say that this is the positive side of the ledger, and is perhaps something I wish I had done a bit more quickly in my career. Looking back though, I think I could have achieved this milestone that I have achieved now if I had simply asked for or created the opportunity a bit earlier. I don’t feel ten times more ready today than I was ten years ago. So my recommendation for anybody looking to tread a similar path is – when you get the sense that you’re close to being reasonably ready, you probably are. And then at that point all you have to do is ask, or create the opportunity for yourself.
3. What is your unfair advantage and what would your colleagues or clients say are the main reasons that make working with you rewarding?
I’ve actually thought about this a lot. One has to be dispassionate about answering a question like this. My unfair advantage is probably not what I would prefer it to be. I like to regard myself as a deep intellectual thinker who really understands in very great detail whatever topic or concept I’m required to understand. I still think that there is some truth in this, but others perceive me as primarily a very good communicator, both in written and in verbal form. This is the dimension across which most people would rank me higher than the mean. So it may not be how I would like to see myself, but it’s how others see me. I’ve learned to accept this over time and play towards this unfair advantage. As an example, over the course of the last three months, one of the big things we had to do to spin out and create this new business was intensively reach out, communicate with, and secure commitments from the entity’s founding investors. For this exercise, I played the role of primary communicator, but accepted that there was somebody better than me at representing the underlying concepts behind our technology. So I made sure I paired myself up with our CTO, Kevin Fox, and this combination ended up being way more powerful than me by myself, or my CTO by himself. So the takeaways are: understand your unfair advantage, accept this unfair advantage, and complement yourself with others who have other unfair advantages, to enable you to achieve your objectives.
4. Reflect on all of the key sacrifices and trade-offs you’ve had to make to get to where you are today. Which of these would you say was the most pivotal and why?
There are actually many that as I reflect fall under this category but if I had to select one, I would say it’s the number of times I’ve physically moved in my life, and specifically, in my career. Since 1991, I’ve moved 11 times. Nine of these times with my wife. I moved from the UK to Nigeria as a kid, and then back to the UK, and so on. Don’t worry, I don’t plan to go through all 11 moves in detail! I would say this, each of these moves have been increasingly difficult, particularly as one has gotten older and as one’s family has expanded in size and scope. The last move in particular from the UK to Silicon Valley five years ago obviously ended up being pivotal. If you want to achieve your potential as a baseball player, you want to play in the major leagues. If you want to achieve your potential as a chess player, you want to become a grandmaster. And ultimately for me, having a big objective and aspiration to become a leading technology executive, the best place to flex these muscles and achieve the art of the possible is in the Bay Area, here in Silicon Valley. So the number of times I’ve moved has been a burden on my personal life, but without these moves, it would have been difficult to achieve all that I have to this day. I’m in awe of the depth of family support I’ve enjoyed, and continue to enjoy.
5. What is the best piece of actionable advice that you’ve received that continues to be source of inspiration and further development?
It’s really difficult to select one so I’m going to cheat a bit and maybe select a couple.
A partner of mine at Blue Cedar told me this:
“Every day, you have to feed all three dimensions – physical, intellectual, and spiritual, of yourself as a human being.”
This may sound a bit metaphysical, but I practice this daily and it really works. Every day, you have to feed your physical dimension through some form of exercise. You also have to feed your intellectual dimension by acquiring some net new knowledge that you otherwise didn’t have, or enhance existing knowledge that you did have. Lastly, you have to feed your spiritual dimension. And this doesn’t mean some form of organized religion. It may not even mean religion. So every day I look back on what I’ve done and use these three axes as a compass to judge whether I’m living a balanced life and I can categorically say for me at least, it works. I always find some deficiency across one of these axes, daily, and this daily calendar entry serves as a compass to help me get conscious about the deficiency, and correct it before I go to bed.
Another actionable piece of advice is from my father, a man full of African wisdom. I come from Benin, Edo State (Benin City is capital of Edo State in southern Nigeria). The Benin people have this strong ethos towards the nurturing and establishment of self-confidence. And I’ve begun to practice this a lot more in my life. I’ve been a recipient of this gift from my parents. And now I’m beginning to impart this to my kids, as I’m increasingly aware of its impact on my life. I would say in summary, of all the innate attributes that one can have, I believe one of the most valuable long term is self-confidence. If you’re aware of this and you proactively nurture your self-confidence to maximize its benefits, while ensuring that it doesn’t spill over into conceit or unnecessary bravado, I think you maximize your chances of achieving the most in your personal and professional life.
“A focus on self-confidence, particularly in a crazy world where values evolve very quickly, is a very good way to maximize one’s own inherent value and the value of those around you that you love.”
John Aisien Biography
John graduated with a B.S. in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering from the University of Benin, Nigeria. He is a chartered member of the UK Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Early in his professional career, he performed a wide range of management training, strategy and IT consulting roles across numerous firms in the UK, including British Aerospace, Anglia Trains, Gemini Consulting and others. He then went on to earn his MBA, with a focus on Finance and Entrepreneurship, from Stern School of Business at New York University. Post Business School, he joined Thor Technologies, which ultimately became a leading enterprise identity and security management software company. At Thor, he ran marketing, product management, business development and strategic partnerships. He led Thor’s re-branding and market positioning efforts. Thor was acquired by Oracle in 2005. After 8 years at Oracle, John joined Mocana, eventually rising to the role of President and COO. He is now the Co-Founder & CEO of Blue Cedar Networks, which spun out from Mocana in March this year.
When John is not leading board meetings and running business operations for Blue Cedar, he is reading for pleasure, or leading the offense for his coed, over 40s soccer team. He is married with two children.
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