What I learned from Mr. Dino Diperna at Nortel

Switching back from last week, I will share today another lesson from a leader in my own life.

It feels like I have known Dino forever, and that he has always been at R&D. I am fortunate to have worked with him in my Nortel days. I worked closely with him during the days when I was leading the India Business unit for Metro Ethernet Networks (MEN). He was the R&D leader and helped me solve key customer issues and deliver on the commitments that we made to our customers. Subsequently I have had a chance to work with him, when I was his customer and now again, we are on same team. Today I am going to share one lesson from him.

Leader must be able to Demystify….

Dino used to help us manage the escalations, I remember having a discussion with him in India long back. I was explaining to him what I need for achieving business success in India. He listened to me patiently and asked many questions to get clarifications on the requirements. His questions made me think and gave me an idea about his own thought process as well. I asked him what his take on the discussion was? He said well invariably people ask for the same three things and that he feels good when he is able break things down in to the simplest form and that way he can help his teams work towards achieving these objectives. I was curious as to how we can break down complex stuff into just three things and that too same every time. I requested him to elaborate and what he said rings true even today.

 People invariably ask one or more of the three things in some form or fashion:

1. Make it cheaper: If you are giving me the same thing as last year, please make it cheaper.
2. Make it faster: Can you deliver more speed? In the parlance of telecommunications, it can mean higher throughput.
3. Make it sooner: Whatever improvements you are planning, please deliver them earlier, speed up the development process, I cannot wait anymore.

I was pleasantly surprised, the simple methodology of breaking down requirements into such simple terminology makes the decision making very easy and helped the teams understand the requirements in a clear context. If we are steadily on the path of delivering consistent improvements in these three domains, we cannot go wrong.

It is the leader’s job to cut through the clutter and I hope that you can simplify complex things for your teams.

Stay tuned for more next week. Access the complete blog here.