tive. An effective leader creates a vision, maintains the commitment to work towards success, and inspires others to follow. This is my belief, and it has guided me through every leadership position I've ever held. The most compelling example of my leadership ability was my initiative to improve the trouble-tracking process for a large Japanese corporation. NTT is Japan's largest telecommunications company. When trouble occurs, the customer calls the NTT call receipt center, where the operator creates a trouble ticket in SCARLET, a sixty-million-dollar information system developed by Lucent Technologies. I analyzed the system architecture and decided that the Internet could help NTT eliminate intermediate steps and reduce the workload of the call receipt center. So I developed a proposal for a new architecture in which customers could create trouble tickets and monitor trouble progress directly over the Internet. NTT initially rejected my proposal. Refusing to be deterred, however, I modified the system design and focused on appealing to NTT's interests. I assembled a team of developers and worked with them to create a prototype. Meanwhile, I worked closely with our sales team in Japan and seized every opportunity to persuade our client with various presentations and demonstrations. While in Japan, I successfully convinced a senior NTT manager of the strategic importance of the proposed system and won his strong endorsement. My endeavors paid off. NTT accepted the revised proposal and signed a two-million-dollar contract. The success of this proposal positioned Lucent as a technology leader in the growing Japanese Internet market and inspired several other Internet-related projects for NTT, in which I am also involved. In recognition of my success, Bell Labs invited me to present this experience at their annual Internet R&D conference.
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