I became the semiconductor industry’s first female CEO after being a broke, single mom in a trailer park. Here’s how I did it

I knew I needed more education to make myself employable, but I was now on welfare and few people saw welfare as a pathway to college. Being a natural salesperson, however, I was able to convince my case worker to allow me to use a portion of my monthly check to attend a local community college. I decided to take courses that would allow me to become a teacher, a natural fit for a woman, but in my second year, I started dating a radio station engineer and decided to take the first semester of the Electrical Engineering Technology curriculum to make myself a more attractive “catch.”

A difficult career path for women

As it turned out, I took to engineering like a fish to water, and that frivolous decision set me on a path to work in the semiconductor industry, one of the most male-dominated fields in the world. The career path I chose wasn’t easy—it still isn’t for women today. There were numerous heartbreaking setbacks, including the time I developed a billion-dollar business as a lowly manager only to have it handed over to someone else who knew virtually nothing about the business but was in the “ol’ boys club.” Actually, encountering and overcoming adversity helped me to find the grit and determination to pursue some of the biggest opportunities in my career—including becoming the first female CEO of a semiconductor company (AMI Semiconductor, later acquired by ON Semiconductor for nearly $1 billion) and subsequently holding several CEO positions and board roles.

Achieving success wasn’t easy, but a few guiding principles ensured that I would make progress regardless of the obstacles I encountered.

First, I learned to seek out and pursue the “white spaces” of opportunity where no one else was focused. I learned this early on when I was still in college. It was 1975, and microprocessors had just become available at $25, making them accessible to poor college students for the first time. I wanted to graduate at an accelerated pace, so I convinced my school and professors to let me build a computer from scratch for extra college credit. This involved a great deal of hardware design work, and there was no commercially available software yet, so I had to write that too (I later learned from Steve Wozniak that he was doing the same thing at that time).

Having sought out the microprocessor white space and gaining deep knowledge of a new technology gave me a leg up on others, even in a place as technologically strong as IBM. I was quickly recognized as an expert in the new technology and gained great visibility and opportunity. Today, one could do the same thing by exploring and leveraging the white spaces in AI.

Second, I learned the value of aligning yourself to the interests of most organizations’ primary stakeholder—the customer. In my career, many managers and peers were skeptical of my capabilities. I didn’t graduate from an Ivy League college, I had no substantive network of connections, and I was a woman. I didn’t transcend those “liabilities” by playing politics, but by focusing my energy and efforts on our customers and their needs.

The power of the customer to boost your career

For example, one of the white space opportunities I proposed was selling custom semiconductors manufactured by IBM to customers like Apple, HP, Cisco, and Qualcomm. No one else really wanted to pursue that new avenue, so I was freed of executive oversight and constraints and able to develop and sell the products these customers most wanted. In general, customers don’t care where your college degree is from—they just want you to deliver a great product with great support. When the revenue started rolling in from these stellar customers who were happy with my work, none of the other stuff mattered. The “power of the customer” is a superpower for anyone who understands and knows how to leverage it. Whether it is an internal or external customer, if you can be their advocate and deliver great customer service, you will find your career accelerated.

And finally, willingness to adapt is critical to career success. When I combined a strong team, great technology, close customer relationships, and excellent service to build my first billion-dollar business, I was not an executive. I just did it. I saw an opportunity and I pursued it. When senior management took that business away from me in favor of their trusted male leader, I learned that “when you can’t go through, go around.” I realized that if I could not be successful building a large and valuable enterprise within that organization, I wasn’t going to ever be successful in that organization. So, I pivoted to a new organization within IBM, proposing to the head of sales that he allow me to create a new Field Engineering group, with the requirement that he make me an executive in the role. He took me up on it, I became an executive in an entirely new area, built another billion-dollar-plus business, and kept moving.

The conventional wisdom is that success is reserved for those who have the resources and connections to start a few rungs up the ladder from the beginning. The conventional wisdom is that an uneducated, single mom is destined for a life of mediocrity. In my experience, success in business (or life) is not dictated by your demographic or the types of challenges that life may throw at you. The seeds of success are within you. By seeking white spaces, knowing that power lies with the customer, and being willing to pivot and adapt, you too can turn conventional wisdom on its head.

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