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Aliza Knox is the former Head of APAC Twitter, APAC and has held leadership positions for APAC at some other dynamic tech companies such as Google APAC and Cloudflare. Paul Hellard spoke to her at home in Singapore. Prior to forging a career in tech, Aliza Knox spent decades as a global finance and consulting executive and is now a Board Director as well as a Senior Advisor for Boston Consulting Group. Awarded 2020 APAC IT Woman of The Year, she has recently launched her new book titled ‘Don’t Quit Your Day Job’. AMT: What drove you to write 'Don't Quit Your Day Job'? Aliza Knox: I’ve been doing a lot of casual mentoring via one-off coffees. If there’s one idea I learned from tech, it’s that things need to be scalable. Also, I don’t really like coffee. So I thought I’d write down a lot of what I share in these sessions. In the climate of #TheGreatResignation, many people believe they need to quit their jobs to get what they want. I don’t think that’s always the case, so I want to explain my views on how to get what you need from your career and your life. The title doesn’t mean you should never quit, only that you may not need to quit. AMT: Can you share some of the mindshifts in the book? AK: One of the key mindshifts is that you need to nurture your relationship with your career, just as you do with a partner. Once upon a time the mindset was that work was just something you did to earn money for whatever you needed, whether that be housing or raising kids or your equestrian passion. We’ve moved through phases, which included finding meaning and fulfillment, and maybe even fun in your job, to looking for missiondriven companies, to then having work fulfill your passions. I think that sets too high an expectation for most people. For some, it works out that everything they want in life is fulfilled in their career, but for most it doesn't. People are multi-faceted, and have different aspects to their life. This means that a career probably cannot deliver on everything you need, as is the case with a life partner. If you're in a relationship with another person - marriage or long-term relationship or even a short term one - most therapists will tell you that you cannot expect that person to fulfill all your needs. To be honest, most people are in their career even longer than they're in a relationship, maybe until the age at which they stop working. In my case, I've worked about 40 years, and I've been in my current relationship for about 34. Very early on, I learned not to put all my demands, all my personal needs, on this one person, in my case, my husband. I also talk about your career and your life being on the same side and to stay away from that word, “Balance.” That word, when talking about Work and Life, brings up visions of a seesaw, and that means, if one side goes up, the other side goes down. I admit, I don't think you can do absolutely everything you want, all the time, even if you never slept. But, as in the case with Cindy Carpenter, who carved out time to Chair The Bread and Butter Project in Australia because she cared deeply about the refugee situation, it not only fulfilled her personally and did not detract from her role
AMT AUG 2022
running her business. It actually added to her career by attracting attention from new clients. This can also apply to parenting while building a career. I found myself able to have kids and to keep going with my work at Boston Consulting Group. I'm not saying everybody should do this, but I don't like the idea that people who are new to parenting feel that they must make an either-or decision. In the book, I share the example of Suzy Nicoletti, who had convinced herself she couldn't do those two things at the same time, but ultimately gave it a try (with some nudging). She went on to become the Head of Twitter in Australia and New Zealand and recently move to run Yotpo across APAC - oh, and she's had three kids while doing this. AMT: Tell me about your move from banking across to technology. AK: I was living in the Bay Area in Northern California, which includes Silicon Valley. We'd had the first dot-com boom and bust. I was at a meeting between VISA and Google where I met Vint Cerf, one of the real founders of the Internet. I followed up on the meeting appropriately for business and then I thought, I just met this amazing guy at an amazing company. Maybe I should take action. And so I wrote another note to him, this time from my personal email. I said that I hoped I wasn’t being too audacious and that I liked financial services and certainly hadn’t mastered it, but had been in it for a long time, but that I felt like I was missing out on a new industry. I noted I was new to online media and to tech but was keen to be part of it and learn. He responded and that led to me moving to Google. Google went through all my credentials to make sure I was appropriately smart/capable but then they asked, ‘what do we do with someone like you?’ I said all my roles, from being a partner at Boston Consulting Group to running the Commercial Card at VISA international, involve sales and product. Ultimately, I took on a sales role responsible for about two thirds of the Asia Pacific revenue. AMT: Talk to us about your other ways of using serendipity in business. AK: There is the kind of serendipity where Kate Moss, who became supermodel, was spotted in a New York airport. I'm still waiting for that and get hopeful very time I show up at Kingsford Smith. But the kind of serendipity that I talk to people about is not that passive. It's opportunity, plus action. When I met Vint Cerf I could have said, “Oh, it's nice to meet you,” and have left it at that. And he might not have responded. But I seized the opportunity to reach out, which led to a career pivot for me. I really encourage people to be open minded and think about when opportunities present themselves.
