How Christine King Became the World’s First Female Semiconductor Company CEO
An uneducated, single mother at 20, Christine King climbed the tech ladder to become the world’s first female CEO of a semiconductor company. Now she’s sharing her hard-won lessons for personal and professional triumph in her own words.
Lesson 1
Without Skills or an Education, You Are Nowhere
We all make questionable decisions in our lives, and one of my earliest was deciding to marry a hippie. He looked great, played a mean guitar, and I just went for that. And then one day, my husband came home and said, “I got to go to California, this marriage thing’s not for me. It’s nothing personal against you. Bye-bye,” and he was gone, leaving me with an 18-month-old son in a run-down trailer park and almost no money.
I quickly realized that without an education or skills, I was nowhere and wasn’t going to get very far in life. I couldn’t do much about being a woman or being a single mom, but I could tackle my lack of education and at least give myself a fighting chance to stand out from the crowd.
I immediately started looking for a job – any job – to fix the increasingly desperate situation we were in, but quickly discovered I was starting with three strikes against me.
- I was a woman, with all that meant in the 1970s. One company said they wanted to offer me a clerical job, but they couldn’t because I was “too pretty” and would distract the men on the factory floor.
- I was a young, single mom. One bank wouldn’t hire me as a teller because they “couldn’t count on me to show up for my work shift if my son got sick.”
- I didn’t have any higher education or marketable skills; I only had a high school diploma. I was just one of millions of unemployed, minimally skilled people in the middle.
Of course, you don’t just snap your fingers and get an education, especially if you’re poor and have a child to take care of. I started by applying for welfare and the financial assistance that would keep us from starving, but I never let our present needs distract me from that longterm goal of getting an education.
It wasn’t easy to sell my social worker on letting me use a portion of my welfare check to get an education at a local community college. That monthly stipend was meant to pay for living expenses, not luxuries like a college education. But in my mind, college wasn’t a luxury; it was a necessity. It was the only thing I could think of that would allow me to finally get a job and independently support my family. I remember the exhilaration I felt when I successfully made my case and she finally agreed to let me pay for college.
If you want to be the captain of your fate and transform your potential into your reality, you need a differentiator. In the professional world, that differentiator comes in the form of skills or an education. For me, pursuing an education was the beginning, the catalyst, for an incredibly vibrant and rewarding life. That’s not to say that college is the only path to a successful life. It is to say that building an area of expertise, a foundation of knowledge and skills that differentiates you from others, is essential. Whatever you pursue, strive to learn as much as you can and apply it to the best of your ability to actualize your potential and become the best that you can be. You only get one life, so don’t settle for anything less.
Lesson 2
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff
Once, in my early days as an engineer, I stood at a copy machine making copies of my latest circuit design, feeling pretty good about myself, and looking forward to its review by my colleagues. I was shocked out of my reverie when a male engineer walked in, assumed that I was a secretary because I was a woman, and ordered me to make his copies for him. As the copier whirred away, I had a moment to decide how to respond to his clueless request. Would correcting the engineer and seeking an apology further my goal of advancing my engineering capabilities and reputation at IBM? What benefit would I gain? The reality was that the only benefit would be to my ego, and it would only be a small momentary victory in the larger war I would fight over the course of my career. Would I allow my ego to control my actions, and by extension, my life, or would I choose to use my ego more productively? I decided to not sweat the small stuff and save my power and energy for the important battles.
Some might view my decision to smile and agree to make the male engineer’s copies and drop them off at his office as “being a doormat,” but there is a difference between acquiescing out of weakness or lack of courage and being confident enough in yourself and your value to keep your ego in check and to pick your battles.
We are living through an era where we have made much progress in the rights of women, people of color, and other marginalized individuals. At the same time, we are more easily offended than at any other time I can remember. Perhaps that’s a sign of how much progress we have
made; we can afford to be incensed by others’ slights.
But I can’t help but think that there is still a long way for us to go and that we need to be wise and stay laser-focused on the larger battle. Until women, people of color, and other marginalized individuals have full equity and access to opportunity, I don’t have time to sweat the small stuff. I’m too busy working on the big stuff. In that war, indignance is a poison that weakens the offended person more than the person causing the offense, while humility and taking the high road is a battlefield advantage worth its weight in gold.
I’m surprised by how often people – men and women – miss this simple principle and can’t rise to the call to set their own egos aside in support of the larger team or mission. I remember helping negotiate the sale of a company once where the CEO of the company being sold wanted a benefit that would likely never be needed. This benefit, if it was ever actually needed, would cost such a small fraction of the deal’s value that it was the equivalent of a rounding error in the calculation. The CEO of the purchasing company, however, was a cost-cutter and was irritated by the request, so a battle of egos emerged. It became so bad that this very large deal would have fallen apart over a relatively
small sum of money if I hadn’t stepped in to personally guarantee the benefit (which was never needed!). That’s what can happen when egos lead the way.
Lesson 3
Success Is a Team Sport
I’ve known many brilliant people in my career, and I’m fairly smart myself, but none of us is as smart or capable as several of us. Teams have the capacity to accomplish far more than individuals by leveraging the broader scope and power of team members’ unique expertise, experience, and perspectives in a concerted effort. It’s the concerted effort that determines how successful a team can be.
We’ve all been part of or seen teams that accomplished far less than expected based on the capabilities and potential of the individual members. Aligning and coordinating those individual capabilities is the secret to team success and to achieving far more than any individual can. This principle applies at all stages in your career – at the beginning when you are a junior member of a team and learning and building your network, and in its later stages when you are the one managing people and working to maximize a team’s impact.
When I accepted an offer as a manager in the testing department at IBM, I had big plans. But it was one of those situations where you can’t do it alone. I would never have had the impact I did if I didn’t focus on aligning and motivating my team to work together to achieve the goals. That team included Joe, an engineer who was thoroughly disinclined to work with or even like me, and he was one of those people who carried an outsized impact on the team. If he remained out of alignment, the team would never achieve its potential. Winning Joe over wasn’t easy, and it meant my ego came second occasionally, but if I hadn’t taken the high road with Joe and continuously looked for pathways to connect with him, I never would have achieved what we did and, ultimately, been promoted.
The importance of your team to your success was driven further home when I took over managing IBM’s analog semiconductor chips business and was no longer the technical lead or “smartest kid in the room.” At that point, my technological expertise became less important than my people expertise. I stopped operating as “Chris, the sole proprietor,” and started operating as “Chris, the leader of a team of experts and member of something far bigger than herself.” That was the start of a more exciting, enjoyable, and rewarding phase of my career. The interesting irony of life is that once we get beyond ourselves, we can achieve far more personal success.
Christine’s book Breaking Through the Silicon Ceiling follows her path from the trailer park to the boardroom and highlights the 12 essential principles that guided her along the way. Christine’s principles are hard-earned truths that have been proven time and again in her professional, avocational, and personal lives. Breaking Through the Silicon Ceiling is now available for order on Amazon and other leading e-commerce sites.
