Management Motivations is a new series of articles by Quectel’s senior executives that explores their management styles, approaches to the challenges of further developing the company and what drives them to lead and succeed.

No. 1: Follow your interests and play to your strengths

I was always interested in technology and my high school education was focused towards engineering so it was a logical step for me to gain my master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering and Industrial Engineering from the Munich University of Applied Sciences in Germany. Although I’m passionate about technology and innovation, it became clear to me at University that I’m not patient enough to be a developer and go through years of research to create a solution, so I started towards a career in a sales. My career began as a sales engineer in trunked radio systems at test and measurement equipment specialist Rohde & Schwarz and has progressed rapidly through this and adjacent areas of the technology industry.

It’s the diversity of the technology market that I find stimulating. You get to run into huge companies that are technology-driven and have a vision for their future. It’s very exciting for me to understand their issues, get to know them and hear in detail what they need.

A key part of my character is that I’m a curious person so the beauty of the IoT market is the huge variety of end-customer applications I encounter. Even though the market started 20 years ago, every day you get to know a new and different application and it is a pleasure to listen to enthusiastic people who are creating new business segments and ideas. My entire 26-year career has been spent dealing with professional communications and IoT – well, it was called M2M at the beginning. The vision of pervasive communications has always been in my mind.

I’ve been fortunate to work in some of the world’s largest companies and that obviously puts you in relationships with enormous enterprises and enables you to gain in-depth experiences of how large corporations operate, how they address challenges and their attitudes to embracing new technologies. After Rohde & Schwarz, I joined Siemens and rose to be global vice president for business development at Siemens Wireless Modules where I was responsible for the strategy and business development of the division and a member of the management board.

Of course, Siemens is a blue chip organization but the modules department was run as a start-up so I was able to gain dual experience – leading in a large corporate and in a fast-moving start-up at the same. As CMO of Telit Wireless Solutions, I was able to build the global IoT business from scratch and ran it up to a quarter billion of revenue. I then spent my last two years at Telit serving as CEO of the Automotive Solutions division. Telit is larger now but it was also effectively a start-up and then a scale-up and I was able to develop further my skills in sales, marketing and product management.

Look out for my next blog in this series: “Speed is stimulating so seek out dynamic environments”