894: The Opportunity That Everyone Must See | Julie Swinney, CFO, Zendesk

By the time the general manager of Intel’s data center chipset business parted ways with the company, Julie Swinney had already advanced into one of their coveted business unit CFO positions.

To Swinney—who had already served in a series of senior finance roles—the GM’s departure seemed to leave a startling void in a business that served as a key enabler for Intel’s server business at large.

The unexpected opening prompted Swinney to raise her hand and issue what perhaps was a bold proposal to be coming from an executive who had thus far resided within Intel’s career ropes—the functional restraints that gingerly guide the chip maker’s finance career builders.

To jump beyond finance, Swinney tells us, with little hesitation she put forth her solution to the challenge at hand: “We absolutely need a GM. We don’t have one, and I want to step in and run this business.”

It perhaps goes without saying that Intel management accepted Swinney’s bid, allowing her to establish a career point for comparison with the finance roles that she had previously played.

“You don’t always appreciate the gravity of responsibility that a GM experiences when their territory spans from sales and supply chain management to people and culture,” remarks Swinney, who in turn promoted one of her finance team members into the business unit CFO role that she had been required to vacate.

For Swinney, the GM position became just the latest twist in a career that had not always featured traditional moves. In the past, for example, while many of her finance peers had set their sights on Intel’s larger business units, Swinney had opted for a CFO role in Intel’s Software-as-a-Service start-up group.

“I was told by several of my peers that it was not the obvious choice for me,” she recalls, “but that experience turned out to be foundational to building my Software-as-a-Service knowledge.”

Similarly, Swinney tells us that her career chapter as a GM added an indelible lesson to her CFO leadership skillset that she regularly seeks to teach to her finance team members and reports:

“Ultimately, what that experience cemented for me was the enterprise mind-set: Firm over function. It was important that I step into a different role because that is what the company needed of me at that point in time.” –Jack Sweeney