Two career alternatives after graduation

An interesting interview appeared in the WSJ a few days back. Mr. David Wei, CEO of Alibaba.com was interviewed and he made two interesting comments / observations which I am sharing.

- What was your first job and what was the biggest lesson you learned from it?
Mr. Wei: My first job was the starting point for the balance in my career. I had a very legendary boss. His name is Mr. Guan [Jinsheng], the founder and CEO of Shanghai International Securities. I started my career as his secretary and then went on to become his assistant and executive assistant. I think that experience made my life so different than if I had joined as a junior clerk in any of the departments of a business. You start to get the vision, the entrepreneurship, the strategic thinking from the first boss. I think his success and failure gave me lessons, good and bad, respectively.[In 1997, a Shanghai court found Mr. Guan guilty on corruption charges and sentenced him to a 17-year prison term.]

- Who gave you the best business advice and what was it?
Mr. Wei: Our customers. That''s the lesson I learned from the first partner I worked with in PricewaterhouseCoopers. Although we were in an advisory business, your customer always knows more than you.

I had taken a course last term called LEM (Laboratory in Entrepreneurial Motivation). I guess I haven't mentioned that upto now. But that was by the best course that I have done during my graduation. The best thing about the course is the Prof. (Prof. SH). As he himself says in the first class, since there are no control measures in the course (attendance, exams etc.), he has to make every session such that people are kept interested and they keep coming. Though I cant say this about every session, but classes are in general interesting.

The Prof. is a very good speaker and also gives general life fundas (which I liked). One kind of develops large amount of respect for the Prof. and people remain in touch with him even many years after graduation (something which is very uncommon).

I guess you will hear a lot about the course and the Prof. henceforth. But the reason I brought this up here is that the first of the above two points is what he used to tell us. That instead of taking a normal finance / consulting etc. job which the grads tends to do in my institute, one has two other options which are far superior and which would allow you to see your full potential and put them to proper use. These two options are

1. Becoming the assistant of a senior executive (like the CEO etc.) of a firm. You being the assistant would be exposed to everything that the CEO does. The CEO does much more than just finance or marketing or HR. It is in some sense the most comprehensive of jobs and you would get a first hand experience of everything.

2. Getting yourself involved in a new project / division / department / business which some company is looking to build. Again, building something from scratch would give very good exposure and a great chance of learning.