Welcome to 1986: Microsoft celebrated its listing on the New York Stock Exchange, IBM had just introduced the 101-key keyboard, and Apple’s Mac Plus with one megabyte of RAM sold for US$2,600. The personal computer industry’s heroes — Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates — were far from being the celebrated geeks they are now. Women in this field were hardly heard of.

That same year, Mary McDowell, now the executive vice president (EVP) and chief development officer at Nokia, got into the industry with her first job at Compaq. Since then, she has taken on a variety of roles ranging from photoshoots of hardware (“A little more light on that diode, please”) to strategising the mobile phone’s move into the Internet age.

“When you’re the daughter of an engineer and a science teacher, I guess it is not that unusual to pursue a technology-oriented field,” says McDowell who had initially wanted to pursue a career in law. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Illinois to support herself for a couple of years before heading to law school.

“What I did not count on was the thrill of working for a fast-paced technology company and the chance to continuously learn new skills, work with really smart people, and create really cool products,” she says.

She got hands-on experience creating those “cool products” when she worked in the system engineering department of Compaq. McDowell was then 21 years old, and Compaq was still basking in the glow of introducing the Compaq Deskpro 386 — the first PC based on Intel’s standard-setting 8086 processor. She was part of the team tasked with making the company’s first x86 server.

“We also had to re-design core processes of the company,” she says. “For example, one of our battles was with the service department where we had to convince them that a customer who called with a server crash needed to be prioritised over a laptop crash since the server crash impacted more people.”

She stayed with Compaq for 17 years, taking on multiple roles from systems engineering to product marketing. “Some days you’d be working on how to best position the product or brainstorming with development teams on functionality, and on others you’d be schlepping demo units to a photo shoot,” she says.

Before she left Hewlett-Packard (Compaq was bought over by HP in 2002) in 2004 to join Nokia, McDowell had become the senior VP and general manager of industry-standard servers in 2003. By then, HP’s server sector was a multi-billion dollar business and the world’s largest server franchise.

With that career background, it’s no surprise that she relished the challenge that Nokia, the global market leader, offered her. As in 1986 when she first joined Compaq, McDowell found herself to be an outsider of sorts: Nokia had never hired a non-Finn directly to their executive board before, nor headquartered one of their business divisions outside Finland.

But her 17 years of service with HP-Compaq had prepared her well for her new role. “There couldn’t have been a better training ground”, says McDowell.

In the five years since she joined Nokia as EVP and general manager of enterprise solutions — which included the development of the popular E-series phones — she has risen to become the only woman on the group executive board. Based in White Plains, New York, McDowell, in her role as chief development officer, is tasked with spearheading the handphone-maker’s strategies to bring its current 1.1 billion customers, and the next untapped billion, into the fast-moving age of the mobile Internet.

The 11-man group executive board (seven of whom are Finns) oversees three main divisions of the company: devices, services and markets. These three units in turn receive support from the corporate development office (CDO) led by McDowell. The CDO employs some 2,800 people (Nokia’s workforce is some 120,000-strong) who make up eight teams to drive projects that lead to Nokia’s current and future projects. The eight teams are: compatibility and industry collaboration; corporate business development; corporate strategy; mobile software sales and marketing; Nokia IT; Nokia Research Centre; operational excellence and quality and solutions portfolio management.

Mobile phones now stand at the crossroads of product evolution: with the rise of mobile Internet access, they are now considered to be mini-computers in your pocket, constantly connected to the world’s largest information database.

Yet, for all this talk about smartphones leading us into a sci-fi future, there are those billions in emerging markets like India and China who can’t afford it. It is in these countries that Nokia plans to embrace “the next billion” into the age of mobile communications, and chart the evolutionary course of the mobile phone. Finding the balance between the two ends of the market is where McDowell’s challenge lies.

“We realise that the web is not just for rich people,” she said in her opening keynote address at the “The Way We Live Next 3.0” conference at Nokia’s headquarters in Espoo, Finland, from Nov 10 to 11.

“Besides thinking of the current four billion owners of mobile phones, we’re also thinking of how we bring the next billion consumers into the world of mobile communications; what does that mean for new classes of devices and services?”
As the market leader with 38.6% of global market share last year, or 472 million units sold according to IT research and advisory firm Gartner, Nokia is in a prime position to lead the industry into an all-inclusive future.

To emphasise the point, equal attention was paid during the conference to talking up the features on its US$649 (RM2,223) N900 as its US$40 Nokia 1202 sold in India. For the emerging markets, features such as Nokia Life Tools were introduced to show how the mobile phone can improve the life of farmers in India and Indonesia by sending them daily updates on prices of crops, seeds and fertiliser, alongside the latest cricket and Bollywood gossip.

All this sounds like a heavy task for the soft-spoken yet direct 45-year-old. But over the years, regardless of what role she has played, McDowell has abided by three management principles. First, she says, is the importance of getting close to the customer.

“Everyone in the company needs to know who their customers are and what they want,” she says. “Otherwise, nothing else matters in business. I don’t see business as an academic exercise. If you don’t have passion for what your company makes, then you’re in the wrong job.”

Secondly, every team she forms should have a mix of personality and strengths. “I like to build teams that have a diversity of talent: a combination of creative thinkers, strong process-oriented thinkers, challengers, and influencers,” says McDowell.
Thirdly, pragmatism: without it, no idea — no matter how innovative it is — gets off the drawing board. “The goal of business innovation is to drive growth and that is typically only possible if the innovation leverages an existing strength or capability of the company.

“The delicate balance of encouraging and empowering innovation with sound business processes, or even innovation around business processes, is what I strive for as a leader,” she adds.

So leading the evolution of the mobile phone? It doesn’t sound all that impossible for McDowell.



This article appeared in Manager@Work, the monthly management pullout of The Edge Malaysia, Issue 786, Dec 21 - Dec 6, 2009.