It's Not About Me

My First Company…

Westinghouse Electric Corporation is where it all began. Little did I realize at the time, but my thirteen years at Westinghouse Semiconductor Division would serve me well as the foundation of serving the customers’ needs for the remainder of my workplace career. What follows are some of the things I learned as well as some of my accomplishments: departments…Engineering, Purchasing, Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Finance, etc., but Westinghouse Semiconductor Division was open to experimentation. At the time, I was in Product Marketing responsible for low and medium power thyristor sales. What the company elected to do was to create teams consisting of a product marketing person, a customer service representative, and an application engineer. Each team of three covered a specific product area and sat together as a team. On my team, the Customer Service Rep sat on my left and the Application Engineer sat on my right. While we each still reported to our respective functional department managers, daily we worked and interacted with customers as a team. It did not matter which one of us the customer contacted because we could handle virtually any situation or question the customer had because we could more easily back each other up as we were physically sitting together as a team. We would frequently jump in on conference calls to address any issue that might require multiple functions to assist the customer or to resolve a problem. • Employee Involvement – At the time, I was responsible for Assembly Sales Product Marketing (rectifiers and/or thyristors mounted on heatsinks in various electrical configurations); we had an elderly lady, Emily, on our assembly production line; she could build anything from a simple schematic drawing; she would also be assigned to build the most complex jobs for our customers. I asked the Manufacturing floor supervisor one day if I might be allowed to give the production workers an overview of our assembly sales and the customers and applications we served. I showed them slides of many of our customer sites and discussed the various applications that our products (that they built) were used in. At the end of my presentation, Emily and the other production workers thanked me profusely for taking the time to explain to them where and how the products they made were used in the end applications by our customers. They stated that in all their years of employment, no one had ever actually sat down with them and taken the time to do this. From that time forward, I would always make it a point to make sure that our production personnel had a good understanding of how our products were used by our customers as well as the important role they had in making sure that that we delivered quality products on-time for our customers. As a side benefit, anytime I had a special job or a rush customer order, it always got special attention from Emily and the other ladies on the production line! • Teamwork in the Workplace – Most companies are organized around functional One of my most rewarding jobs at Westinghouse was as Manager of Marketing Communications. This job afforded me the opportunity to perform a variety of different tasks which greatly augmented my recently acquired product knowledge. • Sales Leads – This was the early 1970’s; there were no personal computers, no internet , no social media, no email. You had “snail mail” and telephones. Telexes were still used as a means of communication to our remote sales offices. When customers and prospects wanted information

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