John graduated from Villanova University with a degree in economics and spent much of his career as the industrial head of a Fortune 500 New York Stock Exchange company. He now offers pro bono career consulting and advising for Villanova University.
Transcript
>> I love the custom interface. I love the marketing and sales component. And when you get into executive management you have the entire program. You have manufacturing. You got the technical and research and development people, the quality control people. The responsibility is brought and the profitability requirements are pretty significant. Most of our stockholder profile was with institutional investors and so if you missed your numbers, they could very quickly have a disastrous effect on the stock price, because large quantities of stock could be quickly manipulated and I guess you'd always have that pressure. I love dealing with the analyst though, you know that going to the quarterly shareholder meetings and listening to the cranks and the people that thought that they could do the business better than we could and that pretty high echelon and those meetings were, took place in the Union League in Philadelphia and it was definitely a suit and tie kind of environment. I would say political survival, learning how to read the tea leaves of politics in corporate America, knowing how to deal with some pretty heavy hitter type executives that usually were somewhat older than I was trying to climb the ladder at the time and basically surviving the process. Not only because I delivered their expectations in terms of objectives, but though I also had the correct image, the presentation skills, the capability to deal with them at the executive level even when I was a junior executive, you know I'm just trying to earn my sparse. It's a challenging thing and yet it's a very interesting thing to be able to survive the climb.
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