Guest Speakers

On Tuesday, September 28, we had two guest speakers in our Systems Analysis & Design class.  The speakers were Brian McManus, Director of IT at Under Armour and John Wolff, the Assistant Vice President of Global Data Services at Legg Mason.

Brian McManus was very interesting.  He started out with a video that he says they present at all of their big sales meetings.  It showed all of the athletes that they sponsor.  I was unaware that Under Armour had that many athletes.  Brian asked us if we would rather be shown a PowerPoint presentation or have an interactive presentation where we would basically have an hour long question and answer session.  We decided that we would rather have a question and answer session, and he told us all about Under Armour’s marketing campaign and how they go about signing their athletes.  He has worked there for 7 and a half years, and it seems like he has bounced around the company a lot, so he was very knowledgeable about everything in the company.  Someone in class asked him how Under Armour reacted a couple of years ago when their Super Bowl commercial brought too much traffic for the site to handle.  He said that in the future they are not going to do any more Super Bowl advertisements because they do not want to spend that much money on a single commercial.  He said that they can reach a lot more people using banner advertisements on websites such as Facebook for millions of dollars less.  He also talked about how they use social media as a way to see how customers feel about their customer service.  Since Brian has moved around the company, I can see that I could do a lot of things at a company and still contribute.  He said that unless you show them that you can’t do something, they will put you in new positions, which can show how valuable you are to a company.

John Wolff talked about his work life, and it seemed to be very different than Brian’s.  John has worked at Bank of America, which is a large company, Legg Mason, which is a medium company, and he started his own company.  I thought it was most interesting to hear about his experiences at the start-up company, because at some point in my life I hope to come up with an idea for a company to start. He said that it was a good experience, but you must make sure you have an alternate source of income in case the company has some periods of economic difficulty.

Both of the speakers were very knowledgeable and it was definitely beneficial to hear their stories.  It was good to hear from two people who seem to be successful in what they are doing.  I’m glad that we got to listen to their stories and I hope to hear from more people that can teach me about the professional world.