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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

Listening to voices within, and outside

Harish Revanna
Thursday, February 1, 2007
Harish Revanna
Mohan Maheswaran is the chief executive
officer of Semtech (Nasdaq SMTC: market cap of $975.23 M), a supplier of analog and mixed signal semiconductor products.

My Beginning
To make a point right at the outset, my uniqueness starts with my being born in Srilanka. Even though I didn’t grow up there, since schooling happened in U.K and so did most part of my college and initial stages of work life, my culture is essentially Asian. I’d started off a career in chip designing, but soon changed focus to functional areas such as application software. Somehow as I experienced the business side of technology, and learnt about sales and marketing, I felt the need for a business degree. In two years time, I was out of Henley Executive Management College, armed with an MBA degree and working for Texas Instruments. MBA triggered my sense of appreciation for the people on the management, financial and operational departments in the organization. As I was enjoying this holistic view of my company, I had to fly down to Bangalore, India, to work with my team there.

My return to London had another surprise in store: an offer to work in TI’s U.S office. So even before I left to the America, I’d seen and dealt with the Asians, the Europeans and worked with a U.S firm, having a so-called culturally-global life and reciting my own global mantra: “In this world, all individuals are really the same except their difference in perspective, behavior and viewpoints. One needs to appreciate each of them to exploit their assets in terms of potential, abilities and character. ”

My days inside Behemoths
Right after my stint in India, I was relocated to work at Dallas, Texas Instruments’ headquarter in the early days. But I soon quit TI to work for IBM Microelectronics in Connecticut for the next 10-years of my life. I then made way to the Silicon Valley to work for a few more big corps like the Hewlett Packard and Nortel. Naturally, by then, I was motley of different organizational cultures; learning each companies’ varied (although for a singular goal) methods of human resource development strategies. But my trouble with blind acceptance of styles and unintelligible cultures set by a few individuals left few takers. Notwithstanding, there were very few attempts for explanation while constantly thwarting my views and perspective. Although today these small snubs add little value for thought, it has helped me maintain certain adaptability with a few young employees and their frustrated behavior at times. It has not only tooled me to help people overcome frustrations, but also show a ray of hope. Tell them there is always a dawn following darkness. Importantly, it is those thwarts in my early life that have charted my philosophy of management.

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