Tell us about your most significant accomplishment.

Having worked on both the hardware and software sides of Microsoft, I was exposed to two of the company’s three main offerings: hardware, software and services. In doing so, I realized there was an absence of knowledge sharing among the groups that would leverage Microsoft’s biggest strength: being a one stop shop. Although Microsoft encourages innovation in their product development and services, I found it somewhat lacking in terms of breaking down barriers between departments. Though it would be a challenge to change their traditional modes of operating, I saw it as an opportunity to transform and grow the brand. First I needed to convince management and the individual teams that my idea would be beneficial to each separate unit and the company as a whole. With upper managements support, I organized classes where the three sides would be cross-trained on the missions of the other teams. Then, we created a task force that developed ideas to cross-sell their missions. We created “ready to buy” bundled offers for small customers that included the hardware, software and service teams. Thus we started a new offering. By applying some fresh thinking to an on-going problem I was able to change the mindset of my colleagues to illustrate that by working together as a larger team, we could achieve much greater results than three individual components working separately. The impact was significant on customer satisfaction and business development. We saw an increase in leads of 150% where more than one Microsoft team was involved.