Training to Work

And yet the value of education has its limits, which I experienced in my first job after college as a programmer at Computer Sciences Corp. A white woman, who became a good friend of mine, was hired a few months after me but was paid $10,000 more a year than what I was making. I had been a computer-science major, and I'd hit the ground running. She was the same age as I was, but she'd been a psychology major, and the company had to train her in how to program. A lot of people say that everything's changed now, but it hasn't. Sure, there are more African-Americans online, but we're just consumers like we've always been. Not all people are created equally in corporate America, no matter what their skills are.

Trish Millines Dziko (trishmi@techaccess.org) joined Microsoft as a program manager in 1988 and retired in 1996 as a millionaire. Together with her life partner, Jill Hull Dziko, a social worker, she founded the Technology Access Foundation, a nonprofit organization that offers training, summer jobs, and scholarship programs to children of color who live in the Seattle area.

Frank Quattrone

Managing Director
Credit Suisse First Boston Technology Group
Palo Alto, California

There's a brilliant coverage officer who works at Morgan Stanley named Jim Runde. He was there in 1977, when I worked as an analyst right after I graduated from college, and he's still there today. He was the key guy who won the United Parcel Service IPO deal for Morgan Stanley in 1999. He is so great at what he does because he gets to know his clients on a very personal level. The first thing that he says to someone that he meets is, "I'm Jim Runde. Let's get to know each other. My wife's name is Barbara. I have three kids: a girl and two boys. Here are their ages. Here is what's important to me." Then he gets the same information from the client, and before you know it, they are playing golf or going to a ball game together. All of a sudden, it's a lot harder for that client to say to him, "No, Jim, you can't have my business," because it feels as if Jim is a part of the client's family.

I saw a lot of really smart people working at Morgan Stanley who did not fare so well because they weren't personable. People like Jim Runde turned out to be the most successful. If you relate to clients as people, and if you show them that you're vulnerable and human too, they're going to want to work with you.

Frank Quattrone, an avid karaoke singer, is head of the 350-member Credit Suisse First Boston Technology Group. He spent 17 years at Morgan Stanley, where, as head of that firm's global-technology investment-banking group, he led the landmark 1995 IPO of Netscape Communications.

Robert Joss

Dean of the Graduate School of Business
Stanford University
Stanford, California

When I was a kid, I worked almost every summer at my grandfather's dairy farm in upstate New York. My grandfather was a unique character. Instead of selling his milk wholesale, he bottled it, took it to town, and sold it retail. He also sold eggs from the chickens that my grandmother raised. Other farmers sold their milk wholesale, in 40-quart cans, and that was it. They didn't add value, separate cream, do marketing, or deliver eggs. My grandfather invested in equipment, but the return that he got was incredibly high for that time and place: Those other farmers got 3 cents a quart; he got 15 cents. That 12-cent difference was enough to send his two children off to very good private colleges. And that's probably why I'm working where I am today, instead of being back on that farm.

I remember when my grandfather, my brother, and I would go door to door delivering milk, cream, and eggs. I learned firsthand how you get customers: one at a time. I also learned the value of being different from your competitors. My grandfather's little delivery business might seem like small peas, but the lessons that I learned there are some of the great lessons of business life -- and never in history have they been more true than they are today. Some multinational companies ignore them, and then they fail because of it. A lot of people think that the new economy has new truths. It doesn't. The old truths are still there -- the new economy just has new risks and new opportunities.

Robert Joss (rjoss@gsb.stanford.edu), former CEO of Westpac Banking Corp., Australia's oldest bank, was appointed dean of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University in September 1999.