Global Executive

Christine Wallace, '81 M.B.A.

Though she manages a $1.8 billion division with 12,500 employees around the world, Christine Wallace, senior vice president for Worldwide Customer Services at NCR Corporation, says, “I try to know who I’ve got in my organization.”

Wallace’s organization services about 10,000 customers worldwide who use NCR products and solutions in ATM machines, airline kiosks, point of sale terminals, and self-checkout lanes. Customers include IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Wal-Mart, Lowe’s, Home Depot, and many other companies who are much smaller but need just as much attention and service.

“We are a relationship management organization,” Wallace says. “Our goal is to facilitate an end-to-end customer experience from the time we sell a solution to a customer through its entire life cycle. The most important thing we can do is help our customers become successful.”

Along with her responsibilities, Wallace takes time to meet and talk with people about their career goals, knowing that it will help her identify people to groom for leadership positions in the company.

“There are usually high potential individuals who I might tend to spend a little bit more time with from the standpoint of making sure they have a project I can review and be involved in so I can have a chance to observe them,” Wallace says, who earned her B.S. in business from Wright State in 1977.

Wallace’s advice is to be aggressive in getting your name out there. “Call somebody senior and say, ‘I’d like to find out what engineering is like in a software business. Would you spend 30 minutes talking to me?’ A lot of people are reluctant to do that, but they also don’t realize how much people love for that to happen,” Wallace adds. “You can’t sit back and wait for something to happen to you.”