Qualcomm CMO Don McGuire: How to Stay Relevant, Resilient, and Ready for Change

When I decided to get the startup bug, I had three small children and a mortgage and a lot of responsibilities. And it turns out that, like most startups, it didn't work out. And so I found myself one day with that moment of what am I going to do? We all go through this in times in our life. And it's good to take a pause.

I fell in love with tech and I fell in love with the fact that this industry is always moving. It's always changing, always innovating, luckily fairly recession proof. I think it's really easy to kind of fall into an ethos of where you work or who you work for. And then you wake up one day and you're like, 'Oh my gosh, it's been 10 years. How am I still here?' For me, I was always like, look ahead, pick your head up every once in a while, see what's going on, and then when an opportunity opened up, put your fear aside, and go for it.

I think as leaders, we go through a lot.

I'm super glad to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

So many things, but I think a couple that sort of stand out is, I think when you fail or when you lose or when you don't achieve your goals throughout growing up or early on in your career, your life, you can either use that as an opportunity to grow or you can let it kind of take you down a different path. And so I think that there was lots of examples of kind of skinning my knees and falling down and not achieving what I thought I wanted to achieve. And it hurts, right? It bruises.

So I did a speech in college at a speech class and I had to do an informational speech. So, I was trying to figure out what am I going to do this speech on? And so I said, 'What do I know? What do I really know how to do?' And one of the things I said, 'Well, I know how to lose.' Because I had lost up to that point every election I'd ever run for. So, you know, I ran for senior class president. I ran for ASB. I ran in college. I actually ran for student government as well. And I'd not been picked or I'd not won an election. And so I said, 'Well, I'm going to do this speech on how to be a loser.' And so I got up in front of everybody and I had a big cardboard L that I cut out and I taped it to my forehead, like this. And I talked about how to be a loser. And people of course laughed and it was funny and it was sort of a little bit self-deprecating, but it was all about this idea that losing actually is something that can be used as a launchpad, right? It can actually teach you humility and it can help you reflect and then it can help you sort of craft yourself for the future. And so I think without that, and I think sales experience also kind of gives you that grit because you have to learn how to handle rejection, right? And you have to learn how to read people's verbal and non-verbal cues and you have to get a certain amount of nos before you get a yes. And so those types of struggles or those types of things that you face that are adverse sort of make you stronger and help you become more resilient.

A little bit, you know, a little bit who you're surrounded by, right? Whatever sort of parental guidance or figures, your siblings, your immediate ecosystem of people that influence in your life on a day-to-day basis. I come from an Italian Irish Catholic family. And I'm the youngest of four boys, so I used to get the crap kicked out of me on a daily basis. And so that in itself teaches you resilience. My parents were that nice mix of empathy and nurture and grit and sort of, suck it up, right? And so I had to suck it up from my father, who was super driven and super ambitious and climbing the corporate ladder and kind of didn't have time for the squishy stuff. And then I had my Italian emotional mother who was nurturing and often times used food as a way to make up for bad things. But she was very nurturing and very loving unconditionally. And so I think it was a nice kind of yin and yang to help with things like that. And again being the youngest, it was so funny. I used to joke with my parents that by the time I got into high school, my parents were so exhausted, having raised three other boys. And for me it was like if I woke up in the morning and I was in my room and I came down to breakfast, they were like, 'Good, right? Good. We're success.' You know? Yeah, we're success. So because my other three brothers had kind of put them through the ringer. And so I got the advantage of that. And you learn from, if you're a younger sibling you kind of watch what goes on with your older siblings and you observe a lot and you learn a lot from that. And even with my children, I have three kids and my youngest, they observe, right? And so I think that was sort of helpful as well is like how did my brother handle something that went wrong or how did my, whether it's with sports or with school or relationships or whatever that might be. So that was also helpful. So I think yeah, I think your environment of who you surround yourself with and what you're sort of born into in that environment can be helpful or not. Depending on the environment and then how do you extract from that, right? And then sort of how do you then apply what you've learned or how you felt in that moment to that next time. And call it naivety, but I just never thought about like giving up. I licked my wounds, right? I felt bad. I sulked, right? And then I moved on. And I know that's not everybody, right? I know things deeply affect people and it's not everybody, but it's just sort of this, life's not fair, right? And I grew up in an era, I'm a Gen Xer and I grew up in an era where not everyone got a trophy just for showing up. So we were taught by my parents, life's not fair, right? Both my grandparents were immigrants to the US from Italy and from Ireland and I grew up in a relatively middle class situation between the Midwest and California, two completely diametrically different places. And so that also helped me and we moved around a lot and so I had to make friends a lot. I had to make new friends a lot. And I think that's another thing that helped me just put myself out there because I didn't grow up in the same house from birth all the way through high school and then on to college. We moved on average every 3 years. So, oh I got to start over. Got to start over. And it was tough.

It was hard. I mean I don't have any resentment. I did tell myself that I was not going to do that to my children. You know, my kids have grown up in the same environment, the same sort of place geographically speaking. And because I think that does offer stability and long-term relationships and all those types of things. A lot of positives there. But I think having to uproot yourself and start over also builds skills and no not really resentment but yeah did I wish I didn't have to, after I was just getting settled and just getting established, oh my gosh I have my peer group I have my people, oh sorry we're moving, you know, push the reset button. And again it was my father's like you'll get over it, this is an opportunity for me and for the family because he was very like my role is provider, that was his generation. And my mom of course was more empathetic about it and she understood and was there as a shoulder to cry on. You know when I went to school for that first day in a new city in a new place and I hated it and I didn't want to be there and the people were different and I was different and all those types of things and she was there for all of those ups and downs. So, it was a really nice sort of again balance of get over it, move on, and hey, I feel for you. I understand and empathy. And I think that's kind of defines me a little bit in my leadership style, too. It's like you got to balance that empathy, that understanding, that listening with we still have to achieve results. We still have to produce outcomes. And so, it's probably impacted a little bit that.

Sure. Well I mean I think it starts with when I fell in love with marketing and that was really in college. I took a consumer behavior class as part of my marketing major. I decided to declare as a part of my business degree that I was going to go the marketing route. Partly because I hated math and I did not want to go with the financial route. But I took a consumer behavior class and really really loved my professor and kind of fell in love with this whole idea of how images and messages and the things that we see in the world influence our behaviors and specifically in this instance our purchasing behaviors and our buying behaviors. And so that's when I really sort of said oh this is super interesting I like this. And I'd always had an affinity, you mentioned the grocery store analogy, when I go to a grocery store I literally walk up and down the aisles and look at everything. It drives my wife crazy because she's like, 'Get in there, get this stuff, get out.' And I actually browse, and I'm looking at, oh, wow, this is interesting merchandising on the floor. Like, why are they putting these stickers on the floor? Or why are these endcaps, things like this? And I really, that's super interesting to me because it's again, it's merchandising. It's marketing. It's how they're telling their story and getting someone to sort of look at them or understand their product and then possibly buy it. And so, for me, that's interesting. I fell in love with marketing first and but then I really didn't know what to do with it coming out of college. And so I went like a lot of college graduates who didn't know where they wanted to end up. I did a little interviewing, on campus interviewing, sell me this pencil, do this, do that. But there weren't a lot of entry-level marketing jobs at that time out of college. You pretty much had to go a sales route. And so I was like, I'm not sure about this whole thing. And I was lucky enough or I'd saved a little bit of money and when my parents asked me what I wanted for graduation, I said, I would love a plane ticket to Europe and a backpack. And I would love to just go backpack around Europe for as long as my money would last me. And they granted that wish. And I flew to Europe like 3 days after graduation, backpacked around for about seven months, ran out of money, figured out how to get some more money. And my parents actually came through because I was like literally stranded I think in Greece with no money and I think they wired me some to American Express. But I stayed as long as I could and then finally they're like, 'Okay, you got to come home and get a job.' But it was a great life experience. Met some amazing people. Traveled around, slept in train stations on park benches and under people's laundry and all sorts of crap. And it was really really fun. I had the time of my life. I actually wrote about how traveling alone made me a better leader. Like I truly believe in that. So I did my own sense of a few months in South America. And my and the fact that I had to make new friends every three years on average made it easy for me to engage with people who I didn't know. I wasn't even afraid of it. So, I made some really good friends and traveled with some great people and had a lot of fun. And then I came back and I just again still kind of didn't know what I wanted to do and it was really my father and he was one of those dads like I said he was like the provider when we were growing up and that was his main role and he made a lot of mistakes because of that as far as relationships go. I didn't really have a good relationship with him until I was in college and he could address me more as an adult because that was his wheelhouse. Wasn't so good with the younger years, but when he could have an adult conversation, he was good with that because he could talk about what he knew. So, when I came back, he was like, 'What are you thinking?' I was like, 'I don't know.' He's like, 'Well, you know, there's this new thing. It's called like cellular technology and it's going to be big.' And he'd been in telecommunications and aerospace and networking and kind of all that boring stuff. And I had no desire to go that direction. And I said, 'You mean like car phones?' He said, 'Yeah, like car phones.' I said, 'Dad, I don't want to go to an auto stereo store and sell car phones. Like I have a college degree.' But he said, 'No, go to work for one of the companies that's building this and making this happen because it's the future.' And so I actually got this magazine that my parents had a subscription to and on the cover, it was like Fortune or Forbes or something like that. And the guy named Craig McCaw was on the cover and he had like a snake around his neck and there was a whole article on this guy who was like a rebel and he went and took his father's cable money and dropped out of Stanford and bought up all these licenses and was going to launch this cellular telephone company. And I was like, 'Wow, this guy looks pretty cool. He's got a snake around his neck.' And I said he'd be fun to work for. And I literally interviewed with the local McCaw Cellular office in Monterey County which was closest to my parents lived in Santa Cruz at the time and I got a sales job and that's where it all started.

Oh yeah. Well, obviously interviewing was difficult. I was just fresh out of college. I think a lot of life is just showing up and being in the right place at the right time. So, I think it was a lot of that right place, right time. They needed, they just opened up the market. They needed to hire people and I showed up, naive and fresh-faced and ready to go and full of vigor and the GM just liked that and so he gave me a chance. And it was tough. It was direct sales, driving up into farmers' locations in the Salinas Valley trying to sell them this new technology, fortunately, which they saw value in because of their occupation and what they did. But it was like one hour I'm selling to a farmer who's growing broccoli in the Salinas Valley and then two hours later I'm selling to some wealthy person in Pebble Beach. And it was sort of this really interesting mix of customer base. And so you have to adjust your style. Take the tie off when you go out to the valley because they think you're trying to convert them to some religion or put your tie back on when you go to Pebble Beach because they want a little bit more formal interaction. But that's where that was the groundwork that kind of started it all. And I fell in love with tech and I fell in love with the fact that this industry and the broader tech industry is always moving. It's always changing, always innovating. Luckily fairly recession proof over the years. And so I really fell in love with that dynamic and so that's sort of led me and that's why I kind of have stayed in tech.

Yeah, fortunately, after spending two years in sales, I really want to get out of sales. I mean, like it was great. I think sales has made me a better marketer and having that experience because you understand that dynamic, but I really wanted to get out of sales. And there was a sort of bridge position, which was called product management, product marketing. I can't remember exactly the title, but it was sort of you had a quota but you also had to build a marketing plan for a product. And so instead of going out there and beating the street and going direct face to face with a customer, you had to build a marketing plan and then you had to present that to the sales organization so they could go sell your product. And so it was kind of one step sort of outside of the sales process and then more I got to put some of my marketing school skills to work and understanding the four Ps and value proposition and how to convince people through the marketing lens to buy. And that was my first bridge over into marketing and then I just kind of went for it.

Price, place, and promotion. And so that's where I got to put that to work for the first time and that discipline. And I early on in my marketing career I got to play in the different disciplines of marketing, right? I was a marketing manager in a small area where I had to do PR, I had to write press releases, I had to buy media locally, I had to understand that and learn that. A lot of good great people that helped me and taught me those disciplines. But I got to play across the marketing mix really really early in my career which I think also has contributed to me kind of understanding because every CMO can't be good at everything or great at everything. Everyone has sort of their secret sauce but you need to have a basic understanding of the disciplines of marketing and at least a basic understanding. And so the more time you've spent across the spectrum of disciplines I think the better sort of overall CMO you can be. And so I really valued that early on experience of rolling up my sleeves and learning how to write a press release, learning how to buy media across different channels, whether it's print or television or radio, those types of things. So that was super helpful to me and that's helped me sort of grow my career up through the marketing ranks. And then that coupled with your recipe of being at the right place at the right time and being prepared when you get there helped me a tremendous amount because window of opportunity open. I literally would jump through and ask questions later. And that's one of my philosophical things is like always stay in control of your own destiny.

I just think it's really easy to kind of fall into an ethos of where you work or who you work for and it's super easy and it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just corporations or companies or environments they want you to conform to ultimately to what that entity wants you to do. And so it's easy to get into a rut. It's easy to get complacent. And again, if people kind of like that day-to-day and just want to kind of be where they want to be and they're happy, peace. But it's easy to sort of get lost, right? And then you wake up one day and you're like, 'Oh my gosh, it's been 10 years. How am I still here? What did I miss?' Because you get into the day-to-day and you kind of can't see the forest through the trees anymore. And then you kind of hate your job or you don't like yourself anymore or you don't like your career and where it's headed and then you're bitter or then it's maybe too late to start making some decisions. So, for me, I was always like, look ahead, pick your head up every once in a while so see what's going on so you don't run into a or jump off a cliff or run into a moving car or whatever. And then when an opportunity opened up, put your fear aside. And if you think that it can help you grow vertically, horizontally, give you new skills, maybe it's two steps sideways to go one step forward, go for it. And that's kind of what I've did and what I've done and it's served me well. I have worked for some horrible people and I've been in some horrible job situations and I've been in some amazing job situations and worked for some amazing people. And current, including the current company and role that I'm in. But you learn as much from both, right? And I made mistakes. I made the wrong decision. Which then I had to go self-correct. Because I just couldn't be in that environment or I couldn't work for this person and their moral code or their values or whatever it was were misaligned with mine. So I had to make those adjustments and it was painful and it hurt and you almost have to press the reset button and then pick yourself up and start over in some ways. A lot of people go through that. And again it serves you well as you kind of decide kind of where you're heading and career paths and life paths are not like single laned and linear right in most cases especially not right now. You got to zig to the right, you got to zig to the left and sometimes you feel like, oh, I'm really not going anywhere. But then all of a sudden, boop, you've made advancement.