My Story: A Baby, A Degree and the Telephone Company

I LOVE technology! Why? My passion lies deep in the heart of my personal story. A teenage girl, in the 70s, I discovered I was pregnant and I had to break the news to the two most important men in my life: my boyfriend and my dad.

"What are we going to do?" I cried and he said matter of factly, "We're going to get married." Good answer. "But, what about my Dad?" I asked. "I'll tell him." That's when I knew I'd made a good choice among men.

"Tucker, Debi and I are going to get married and have a baby - in 7 months." My dad pushed back his chair from the table and stared at him man to man. My mom cried.

"Ok. You want to marry my daughter? I'll help you out. I have the perfect place for the two of you to live."

Relieved, knowing he could allow us to live in any of a dozen rental homes that he owned, I was regaining my courage and asked, "Where, Daddy?"

"At the University dorms." he stated. "You will both need to enroll in college. Debi will work for me at the camera store and you're going to need a better job than at the department store warehouse, Mike."

So, we did as he said. I went to classes in the morning and worked until 6pm. Mike became a civil servant and went to night school after work. When the baby was born, I took 5 days off and went back to work....and back to school. My mom and my Nana were always there to babysit. We studied on the weekends.

It sure wasn't easy juggling a baby, a marriage, a job and a college curriculum but after 4 years, it was done - for me, anyway. For Mike, it took six more years of night school to become a Civil Engineer and to his credit, he persevered. I thought it would be a great relief when I graduated and I would have time on my hands for work/life balance. Not really.

AT&T hired me, based on an interview and a multi-tasking test that evidently was difficult for 198 people out of 200 applicants to pass. So began my foray into technology as I attended another university: AT&T's University of Excellence. We went to Cincinnatti for 1 month and learned to program a PBX while practicing the Xerox method of consultative selling, on video cameras.

At the end of class, my instructor, a New Yorker, said to me. "Debi, you came in with your southern drawl and your easygoing demeanor and I didn't think you were cut out for this job. But, somehow, you made the material your own and you are graduating #1 in the class. You have a great future ahead of you but remember one thing: Sometimes you have to toot your own horn. (I still haven't learned that lesson).

I went on to break sales records, attend "Millionairre's Club" and win countless prizes and awards at AT&T. One day, a new Director joined the company and took over our local office. He brought in a fraternity brother and told him how successful I was and to learn from me. I coached him and showed him how I prospected every night from 6pm to 9pm on an MS-Dos machine and prepared for my sales calls the next day. Understandably, that didn't seem to fit his work-life balance.

However, his sales results were impressive and he began to compete with me for awards and bonuses. I was up for the challenge until I found out there was quite a bit of fraudulent activity on his part. There wasn't an HR hotline back then and women didn't talk about these things. He was, as we used to say, the Director's "golden boy". So, I persevered, confident that my experience and successful track record would be recognized in the end.

In fact, that December, I received a call from a client at Oreck vacuum cleaners whom I'd been meeting with throughout the year. I'd consulted with him about his call center and how I could save long distance charges, eliminate outages, and increase sales with a new PBX and AT&T call center services. I submitted a proposal for $3M and his only concern was an existing MCI contract. Then, MCI had a catastrophic outage that put him out of business for 2 days and he called me in to sign the AT&T contract.

I was ecstatic! This was the biggest AT&T sale in my region for the year. It was, what we called a "winback" because everyone used to be an AT&T client before divestiture. My commission would be $30,000 and that was half of my total annual compensation in 1986.

One problem: channel conflict. Although Oreck wasn't on a named list of accounts because they were an MCI customer, the powers at be decided that the client was "too big" for me and transitioned it to another division. I took the Christmas holidays to think of my next move and returned after New Year's with my decision to resign. Upon resignation, I was offered a promotion to stay at AT&T but my emotions got the best of me.

I drove to Sprint's office, walked right in and asked to see the Director. He knew who I was because I'd been winning contracts, including Oreck, against his team. He hired me on the spot. I went on to have a great career at Sprint, a midwestern company that was inclusive and collaborative. I made great friends, accepted a rotation to train the national sales force on strategic selling and data networking. Sprint announced an innovative product named ION and I immediately received two offers from former students to manage either the ExxonMobile or EDS accounts and sell ION. I chose ExxonMobil and moved to Houston. A few years later, I moved to Dallas to lead Sprint's strategic alliances with EDS, HP and Cisco.

I LOVE technology and Sprint was very innovative with aspirations to converge wireline, wireless and cable to create better customer experiences. My deep understanding of the analog to digital network transformation taking place in telco enabled me to help our clients deploy Global SAP, mobile enterprise apps, embedded devices and location based services. The underlying technology fascinated me and I learned more and more about the network operations and servers that enabled SIP signaling, APIs, 4G and LTE. The technologies that make iPhones possible today.

Today, I am equally fascinated by IBM and Watson. It's so fabulous to see the visions of the "Internet Super Highway", "Personal Communications Services", and "Personal Assistants" come to life. The names have changed but the vision is very much the same. Voice, Data, Video and Sensors along with AI and IoT are delivering intelligent, customer experiences that may still help us find the illusive work/life balance.

I thrive among the intelligentsia at IBM. I also enjoy the collaboration with our clients who are so much better informed than in the 1980s, pre-internet, when they relied on their carriers and vendors to educate them.

I have persevered, confident that my experience and successful track record would be recognized in the end. Yes, my expertise is recognized by my colleagues, my friends, family and leaders. However, 30 years later, I'm still struggling to "toot my own horn"!

Toot. Toot.