How does living in Africa for the first 18 years of my life help my customers and my partners today? Growing up watching the impact of helping others has made all the difference for me in my sales career. It has enabled me to forge strong teams, relationships and alliances focused on the success of others. There are some things you can’t learn in school --things that ultimately shape who we are, how we live our life, and how we do our job.Many of my life lessons came from those early years in Africa. My parents worked for a NGO and although learning to speak Swahili and French while attending schools in Uganda and Kenya broadened my way of thinking, there were other life lessons that had a far greater impact.LESSON ONE—give people what they need to be successful. You probably know the proverb, “give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” I saw how true this was as I watched the NGO provide the tools and knowledge needed to transform lives. That lesson shapes how I work with my colleagues and customers—through empowerment, encouragement and by giving them the tools and support they need to succeed. The lesson that had the biggest impact was LESSON TWO—care more about the whole rather than just yourself. Every day, I watched workers who were singularly focused on helping others and on uniting people towards a common goal. They never lost sight of the whole—and they never focused on themselves. Today, my greatest professional passion is bringing people, teams, partners, and customers together for the good of the whole. Working with our Microsoft customers, I am singularly focused on ensuring that our customers stay in step with technology and ahead of their competition by maximizing the power of Microsoft. We work as a team towards one common goal—customer-centric solutions that give our customer's a competitive edge.