How I Got Here

Even before the Arab Spring erupted last year, Microsoft executive Ali Faramawy knew he had a cool job. As the company vice president in charge of the Middle East and Africa, Faramawy was doing business in one of the world's most dangerous and volatile regions, but also one of its largest untapped technology markets.

General Electric's Chief Technology Officer, Mark Little, talks with FINS about how he overcame being demoted and rose to become one of GE's top executives.

FINS talked to Robert Hohman, founder of Glassdoor.com, about what makes a good mentor-mentee relationship, when to trust others' opinions and why engineering know-how isn't enough become successful in tech.

It's not unusual in Silicon Valley for a 20-something entrepreneur to sell a start-up for millions. But when Sizhao Yang sold MyMiniLife to Zynga in 2009, he helped make its chief executive, Mark Pincus, into a paper billionaire.

Clutching his last six performance evaluations, the man in his 40s walked crying into the office of Howard McNally, a former chief operating officer at AT&T. Why, he asked, was he being let go after so many outstanding reviews?

In 1983, when John Sculley was 43, he had a choice. He could stay at Pepsi-Cola Co. and jockey with several other executives to be named successor to then-PepsiCo Chief Executive Donald Kendall in a typical corporate executive shootout. Or, as Apple's Steve Jobs put it to him then, he could give up selling "sugar water" and "come with me and change the world."