Since the beginning of the 20th century, technologies have acquired a growing relevance in modern societies. As technology becomes more and more intrinsic in our everyday lives, companies need to transform businesses. The demand for a new type of leadership presents an opportunity for women to become the change agent in the organization and move towards more senior leadership positions. Limor Sinay is one such enthusiastic tech leader with extensive experience in enterprise software delivery, operations, and product management. She is a Senior Manager at Akamai Technologies which deals in cloud and enterprise solutions. She is also experienced in managing enterprise accounts across primary industries: Financial, Healthcare, Communication, Retail, Oil & Gas, Manufacturing, and Legal.
Early in her career, she believed leadership was about seniority and title and sought to become a VP/C-level or member of a founding team. She moved from Israel to the US in pursuit of her MBA at MIT Sloan, with the goal of getting the credentials to become a future business leader. For her, today, leadership is about influence, impact and ability to drive change. In addition, she loves spending time mentoring young women leaders as they navigate their opportunities, challenges, and careers.
Below is her story,
Limor has studied her MBA from MIT Sloan in 2004. Out of school, as an entrepreneur at heart, she helped grow start-up companies off the ground and found her way into the executive team of a smaller company. As life would have it, the timing was not always right for her. The demands of the executive suite coupled with 3 girls under the age of 5 did not work for her.
While she made the conscious choice to take some steps back title wise in order to enjoy those precious years, she found out that leadership comes from within regardless of title or role. While there were many business challenges throughout her career: downturns in economy, legislative impact to the business, bankruptcy, high employee turnover, cutting significant costs where the only choice is cutting people’s livelihood, new competitive pressures on successful business and more, her toughest challenge of all was her family journey through her husband’s cancer while working.
The most important skill throughout this and any challenge she has faced was keeping positive and asking for help. Help from family, help from colleagues, help from her boss, help from the community, help from teachers, help from the school. The list goes on. “If you are open and honest about your challenge, whatever it may be, you keep a positive outlook and you ask for help, 99/100 people around you will be there. You just need to ask,” says Limor. By stating the above statement, she suggests that a person must have a bold and honest way to deal with the challenges.
As she works in the technology industry, it is crucial for her to stay on top of technology trends and genuinely understand where the company has the potential to provide future business value. She measures her personal growth by her personal learning more than anything else. More she learns, more she has a solid opinion to bring to the table. To learn, she’ll go to reputable industry reports and courses. For example, her latest course was on Blockchain use cases provided by MIT online executive education. She genuinely enjoyed learning about new ideas and strives to get recommendations from people she looks up to.
“Just do it” is probably her favorite tagline and her style too. She’d rather go fast, get it wrong and adapt than debate for endless hours on the path forward. It makes the decisions fast based on the data available, rather than chase down every detail in every angle. This approach is not appropriate for every industry, but it works for her. She also says, every woman should have an opinion and not be afraid to share it. It is vital to chase those decisions and activities you are passionate about with rigor.
She is a big believer in a customer first approach. She says, meet with your customers often, listen to them more than you talk to them and good things will happen. This is also very much aligned with Akamai’s core values as a company. It cares about how it can make the customers successful through the company’s digital transformations. If the customers are successful, the company will be as well.
About Akamai
Akamai is the globally distributed intelligent edge platform that surrounds everything, from the enterprise to the cloud, so customers and businesses can be fast, smart, and secure. It keeps decisions, apps and experiences closer to users than anyone and attacks & threats far away. It allows companies to easily manage security across all devices and locations. This commitment to security is trusted by 18 of the largest asset managers, 12 of the top insurers, and 8 of the top financial technology companies. Whether it is middle of the afternoon or the middle of the night, it is supported by unmatched customer service and 24/7/365 monitoring. It has 20 years of experience and a team of more than 1900 experts supporting with strategic expertise, comprehensive outsourcing, proactive monitoring, and responsive troubleshooting.