Profile

Arvind Salian
Automotive New Production Introduction PE Manager, Freescale Semiconductor

With a doctorate in hand, Salian began his career in Tempe, AZ, at Motorola (now Freescale) as a new-product-development engineer. In three years, he moved up to program manager, leading a cross-functional team through a product launch. It was then that Salian, with the financial backing of his employer, decided to go back to school part time at Arizona State University to get his MBA. He wanted to “build his intellectual capital” and improve in areas such as risk and cost-benefit analyses and project planning.

Depending on the trimester, Salian took two or three classes a week in the evenings from 6:00 to 10:00. Thursday evenings and weekends were spent studying, reading, and preparing for the next week’s classes. Fridays were Salian’s only night off. The amount of coursework proved daunting, and he learned quickly that the key to survival was to divide and conquer.

“I cannot underscore this enough: You have to have good team members to get some value out of the cases and projects,” he says. “We had to break things down and distribute among team members and then rely on each other to bring each other up to speed, focusing on the essence of each section, article, or reading assignment.”

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