The Turning Point in a Career...

What was the Turning Point in your Career?

I'll take a minute and share mine...

While my career started at two great firms (what is today Accenture and PriceWaterhouseCoopers), I feel I gained my street smarts in the relatively early days of Oracle. Shortly after being hired as a consulting leader for the oil and gas vertical, we won (what at the time was) the largest application license and implementation contract ever at Oracle. We beat SAP as we promised to go live on three continents (Europe, North America and Asia) with a fully functional ERP solution in less than a year. SAP had said it would take at least two years and cost at least twice Oracle's price... oh and we had to extend the core Oracle financial software application to add functionality specific to the oil and gas industry (as SAP already had ISOil). That year (1995) was a grind... 80 hour weeks, most weekends and I wound up spending countless hours a day in the client's executive offices reassuring them we would make the date and it would work... and it did. Many, many others were the true reason we actually pulled it off from the head of our Oracle Energy practice Doug Dickey, to Trip Ray, John Foster, Gary Birdwell, Donna Owens, Rajat Khurana, Frank Naccarati and 100+ others that worked tirelessly. My job was to interface the client and convince them to do as little customization as possible and encourage them to work as a team with us side by side rather than in opposite locations. After we were live, word spread at Oracle all the way to the top of the 500 building to Larry, Ray and Mark Jarvis (CMO) that we had pulled off a great success. Late in March of 1996, I received a call from Mark Jarvis that Oracle was running an advertising campaign to tout client success stories with Oracle applications. They were planning to run a handful of 1/4 or 1/8th page ads in tech publications. I then went to meet with Chuck McDowell VP & Comptroller who was our project signature to ask him if we could run some low profile ads highlighting our success at Unocal. Chuck was more than twice my age as I was still in my 20's and he was approaching 60, yet he and I had built a close relationship in the trenches together through this grinding project. He was as proud as I that we had pulled it off and agreed to do the ads and in true maverick oil and gas bravado gave us a salacious quote and signed a release without checking with Unocal marketing. Less than 24 hours later Oracle ran full page advertisements in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, NY Times and the Economist. As you can imagine the statement "Oracle Applications delivered in half the time and for half the cost of SAP" was a quote Larry Ellison loved and went from an obscure tech focused campaign to the largest ad spend by Oracle that year. Only problem was, Unocal's CEO and CFO were not happy to see a quiet $8 billion oil company get in the middle of two technology companies. A day later Chuck was in my office asking that Oracle not run the ads any longer. I left message after message, email after email that we had to stop, but Larry kept running the ads. Needless to say I finally got to talk live to Larry and Oracle did stop running the ads, but from that moment forward my career changed. Shortly afterward, I was working in Oracle HQ next to Ray and across from Larry on our go to market for the Oracle e-Business Suite and then became an Oracle Sales VP. While the marketing got the attention, it never would have happened without a client and delivery team committed to meeting the client objective.