Posts Tagged Ali Master

5 Keys to Success You Didn’t Learn in College (Part 5 of 5)

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Find a Sponsor and Know your Role as a Protégé Sponsors—I’ve had them throughout my career. In my early days, I didn’t know that’s what one should call them. Nor did I fully appreciate the crucial role they could play in one’s advancement. To better understand this sponsor-protégé relationship, let’s first go over a common misunderstanding. What a sponsor is not: A sponsor is not a mentor. These two roles should not be confused. While at times the same person can wear both hats, a mentor-mentee relationship is generally one where someone with greater experience offers advice and coaching to

5 Keys to Success You Didn’t Learn in College (Part 4 of 5)

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Build Your Personal Brand Everyone has a “personal brand”—you, me, and that new hire who sat right next to you at orientation who made all that nervous small-talk. Each of us are either building up our personal brand or letting it dissolve. So what is a personal brand anyway? Personal brand refers to the first thoughts, feelings, or images that people immediately think of when they hear or read your name. Let’s play a game to help elaborate. I will throw out a name, and then suggest their brand. See if you agree or disagree: Steelers fans may vehemently disagree

5 Keys to Success You Didn’t Learn in College (Part 2 of 5)

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Understand your company’s value chain. A simple but profound lesson that has helped me throughout my career is understanding my company’s value chain. Simply put, no matter what your position, you need to understand how your employer ultimately makes money. When we think of companies, most of us think of their end-product—a Chick-fil-A sandwich, an H&M T-shirt, an Amazon everything! The “value chain” is the chain of value-adding activities that bring the product or service to the customer. As a young crewperson at McDonald’s, I observed the various steps prior to handing that delicious breakfast sandwich to the customer. Days

5 Keys to Success You Didn’t Learn in College (Part 1 of 5)

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I recently watched my daughter Mollie walk across the stage with her business degree diploma from Samford University. It was an exceedingly proud moment, and it reminded me about my journey from being a new college graduate to making partner with Ernst & Young (EY) in a relatively short ten-year period of time. I found myself compiling a mental list of things that contributed to my success. While having an accounting degree with a high GPA and passing the CPA exam were viewed as gating criteria for a Big 4 firm like EY, I was fixated on the things that