MBA Program

Vice President, Strategy – Business Development
Motorola Mobile Devices
Lexington, Mass.

A mechanical engineer with an undergraduate degree from Cornell, Liz Altman worked at Polaroid before pursuing a graduate degree. Unsure whether to go for an engineering master's or an MBA, she chose MIT Sloan because its Leaders for Manufacturing (LFM) program allowed her to do both.

“I wanted to be somewhere where all things are done in a big way, and that's MIT,” she says. Altman credits MIT Sloan and the Institute overall for giving her the tools and frameworks she needed to go from engineering to management and for opening the doors to contacts she can call on around the world.

Still finding new challenges

When Altman graduated in 1992, she was recruited by Motorola for a job in its paging division.

“I wanted to go into consumer electronics,” she explains, “and this was just when pagers were becoming a hot consumer item and cell phones were getting smaller. It was a big sandbox for me. I thought I would rotate through several divisions at Motorola and move on after a few years, but here I am, still finding new challenges.”

Altman's current charge is putting together acquisitions, investments, and alliances around the world that enable Motorola to provide seamless mobility of communication to its customers.

Motorola, she observes, is at the forefront of this revolutionary approach to communication and media because it provides the electronics for all environments — the office, the home, the car — so that people can take their information with them.

“Seamless mobility gives people more flexibility and control over what they want to do and when and where they want to do it — like being available to coworkers while watching your kid's soccer game,” says Altman.

She is also quick to point out that seamless mobility can create a spectrum of impact throughout the world. Creative applications and lower-cost solutions have massive implications for tapping the resources and skills in emerging markets — for example, by putting a mobile communications device in the hands of someone who otherwise would have to walk two days to reach a phone.

Recognizing base assumptions

When Altman puts together an international deal, she draws on her experience of total immersion in a new culture.

Early in her career at Motorola, she was recruited to work in Japan through a Motorola-affiliated program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Japanese government. For a year, Altman was the only Westerner — and the only female engineer — in a 2,000-person Sony camcorder factory, an experience that Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas chronicled in the Harvard Business Review and their book Geeks and Geezers.

Speaking of what she learned, Altman elaborates, “It can be difficult to realize that others truly do have different base assumptions that must be understood and taken into account. That knowledge is critical to doing successful deals, even if both parties are speaking English. You see it between Americans and Europeans, or between an engineering group and a marketing group.”

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