BUSINESS LESSONS

A favourite piece of business advice? Improve, don’t perfect.

A lesson you have learned in your career? Business as usual is a myth.

How have the Irish activities of US tech companies changed in the decades since they first started coming here? Back in the dinosaur days you were looking at manufacturing activity, relatively low to medium-end value services, logistics, transportation, distribution... that sort of stuff.

Then came a move into more business services with customer-facing operations. That has further now morphed into production, engineering, development and even further into research and idea generation.

I think most successful operations now based in Dublin find themselves operating across that full value chain and have a direct link back to the company headquarters at a more advanced level than they would have had five or 10 years ago.