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Maximizing IT potential
Syed Hoda ’96EMBA
Managing Director
Cisco System’s
Internet Business Solutions Group
Paris, France
A drive through Paris, France, is a visual feast of monuments and medieval buildings. For Syed Hoda ’96EMBA, living and working in this creative landscape is “like when you’re a kid, thirteen or fourteen, and you have your first crush. And then, imagine your first crush never ending.”
Hoda, thirty-eight, is managing director of Retail/CPG/Transportation Industries for Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
The Internet Business Solutions Group “doesn’t actually sell anything,” Hoda says. Its main goal is to help companies apply technology to improve business, such as helping them “go paperless” in back-office functions, or web-enable their supply chain to reduce costs and decrease out-of-stocks.
“Essentially, we provide strategic consulting services and thought leadership at the intersection of business and technology. Our success is measured in two primary ways—customer success and customer satisfaction,” he explains. “We help people get the most out of their IT investments, to maximize potential. They don’t have to use our products. But if Nike helps turn someone into a marathon runner, and that person discovers he or she needs more advanced and complex shoes, guess where they will go? Nike. When we become a trusted adviser to large, global companies, it helps us to develop deep customer relationships and drives brand loyalty for Cisco.”
Hoda’s path to Europe began in the mid-’90s while working in Atlanta for IBM, which offered to pay for his education at Goizueta. One year after graduation, Hoda became a strategy consultant at Kurt Salmon Associates, which included an extended engagement in Japan, then joined Ernst & Young where he worked as a senior manager in retail/consumer product strategy, which included experience in Caribbean/Latin America.
Hoda moved to Minneapolis in 2000 when he joined Cisco, and eventually, he and his family—wife Sahba, seven-year-old Shaan, and four-year-old Kamran—relocated from the Minneapolis suburbs to a large apartment in central Paris, near the Arc d’Triomph.
Hoda credits his Goizueta experience with “teaching me to think in more complex ways, thanks to challenging professors and fellow students. I still use examples from a number of professors, such as Dr. Jagdish Sheth, Dr. Jeffrey Rosensweig, and Dr. Benn Konsynski.
Concepts like Sheth’s ‘Rule of Three’ are alive and well in my professional work.” Learning to work in small study groups and interacting with a diverse group of students from around the globe were other benefits.
For those interested in overseas employment, Hoda notes, “Successful global managers will continue to be in high demand, as international business boundaries continue to disappear. Tell your mentors and management about your interest in working abroad and build your language skills.”
—Mary Loftus