Job Q&A
by Naomi Wax
[more Q&A's]

Melissa Grossman is the managing director of Zefer's New York office. Headquartered in Boston, Zefer is an Internet professional services firm with clients that include Morgan Stanley, Citibank, Lucent and a range of dotcom companies. Zefer has offices in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Pittsburgh. Grossman graduated from Duke University with a degree in psychology, has worked in magazines and owned her own consulting firm. After earning an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School, she spent a year at iXL (a competitor of Zefer's) and then signed on in her current position.

Monster.com: What exactly does Zefer do?

Melissa Grossman: Well, we're strategy-led, so we help companies understand from a business-model perspective what they need to be doing on the Internet. We work with a range of dotcom and Fortune 1000 companies who come to us at different life-cycle stages. For instance, sometimes we'll get a client that's already worked with a management consulting company, so they'll already have come up with a strategy and now they're looking to do an implementation around it. On the other hand, some companies come to us with nothing, in which case we're creating their whole business from scratch.

MG: It's a general management position, so I'm really dealing with all the parts of the business. We have quite a lot of projects going on at a given time, and I keep up with what's going on and make sure things are running smoothly.

MG: I usually get in by 8 and typically don't leave till 8 in the evening. I spend the first couple hours catching up on email and voice mail, which seems to take longer and longer lately. Every week I have status update meetings with the leadership teams in the office as well as with our competency leaders and various other "culture stewards" -- people who are sort of cultural leaders throughout the office. I'll spend a couple hours just touching base with everyone. Then, I deal with management issues like walking the pipeline with both new and existing clients, understanding how the delivery's going, figuring out what can we be doing better and what our current and future needs for staffing are. I also update corporate on what's going on in the office and with the different projects. We just moved into a new office space, so I'm also doing operational work with the construction people.

MG: On Broadway between Bleecker and Houston, right in the heart of Silicon Alley.

MG: Yes. New York is such a vibrant, incredible place to be doing the work we're doing. We're sort of at the heart of what's going on in the industry. New York has the concentration of Fortune 500 companies, there's incredible innovation going on in its dotcom companies and there's a lot of venture capital situated here.

MG: Yes. Zefer's ideal because it spans industries and competencies, so you get a very broad as well as a fairly deep perspective off all the different areas.

MG: I'm generally the big cheerleader. We have people from the various competencies who do skill-set tests and various other assessments. So, by the time applicants get to me, I'm doing more cultural fit, answering questions about the company and making people excited about working here.

MG: We have four different competency groups to consider. In Program Management, you generally want people who have experience with project management, are very organized, able to be diplomatic and stay cool when things get crazy. There's the Business Strategy group, which typically is made up of more logical, strategic, visionary type people who come from a variety of backgrounds. The Experience Design group is responsible for the overall impression the interaction of text, image, sound, structure and movement of a client's brand will have on a user. And then there's the Technology Competency, which covers everything from physical networking and platform infrastructure to package integration and custom development. We try to promote what we call "spiky generalists", people who have spikes of expertise in various areas. We want to help them become knowledgeable about a lot of things rather than just honing their capabilities in one area.

MG: When you have really strong people who are capable of managing a lot of things at once, you create processes around that. So, we have a fairly good system. Also, because Zefer has such a team-based environment, we make an effort to cultivate that through everything from ropes classes to mobile desks that allow people to sit in clusters with the team they're working with. There's also a group training program with classes, sort of an assimilation program, which employees from all our offices participate in.

MG: They can visit our Web site at www.zefer.com, which has an interactive case study that you can test your skills on. There's also contact information for each of our offices.

MG: Primarily, we look for skill sets and people who have interesting ideas and backgrounds. We have a pretty diverse staff, and some of the best insights come from people who have worked in other industries. Because we're a strategically led firm, we want candidates who have an understanding of strategic visioning. People with backgrounds in management consulting or systems implementation work out well, as do people who've worked for large systems integrators or taken university courses on e-commerce and business in general. Basically, we want people coming with an open mind, a real excitement for the field and understanding that there's a lot to learn. It's really important in a team-based environment to have people who'll really roll up their sleeves, pitch in and do what needs to be done.

MG: No, not at all. I was pre-med and a psych major. I decided to take time off before med school, so I came to New York and worked in special projects for News Corporation's magazine group, News America Publishing. I did all sorts of funky stuff, and one of the things that came out of it was that in 1990 we began working with Minitel companies. Minitel, sort of the precursor to the Internet, was basically a network system of dumb terminals throughout Western Europe. It started in the early '80s as a means of making an electronic phone directory and then expanded to include chat, games and all sorts of things. A French company decided to expand it into the U.S. and wanted to work with New York Magazine, which was one of our magazines, so we created one of the first consumer online services using little Minitel dumb terminals.

MG: Yes. I can't say I'm a huge tech head now, but I know enough of it to get around.

MG: I was having too much fun.

MG: Well, Rupert Murdoch sold off the magazine group, but I continued with New York Magazine online. Then, I went back to News Corporation where I created TV Guide Online, among other projects. After that, I started my own consulting company to help large consumer media publications with business development and editorial design. I worked with companies like Yahoo and Condé Nast, and then I went to business school.

MG: I didn't have a strong business background and people were asking me lots of questions I couldn't answer, so I wanted to fill in my weak areas. Harvard was wonderful, both in terms of the curriculum and for increasing my network. You can't discount the value of having a great network of people you can go to.

MG: We have an Innovation Center staffed with stewards who are out capturing innovative thinking and ideas in the industries. They also keep up on innovative processes within the company so they can be shared. We also have an advisory council, made up of sort of "thought leaders" in various industries around the world, we have someone at the Institute for the Future in California, someone at the Copenhagen Center for Future Studies. We have seminars on different issues and, just from the work we do in the field, we're keeping up with what's going on, who's doing what successfully or not so successfully. But it's tough. I also read Red Herring (Anthony Chan, one of our co-founders, is a columnist for them), the Industry Standard, Fast Company, a lot of the business trades like Crain's New York, and I read or skimmed The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. There's so much out there that I need two assistants and a filter mechanism software that goes through and culls the things that are truly useful. We also have our own research group that gathers and circulates interesting articles to the organization.

MG: In a way, all the things I like are also the things I don't like. I love that I have responsibility for an entire organization, but at the same time that makes it a very pressure-filled environment for me. Right now we have over 50 people in this office alone, plus people from other offices who are here working on projects temporarily. I'm responsible for everyone's well-being, happiness and productivity. It's stressful, but I also like it. It was the next step for me in my career, a stretch move rather than lateral, but I'm learning a lot and that makes it enjoyable.

MG: I see staying where I am for a while. I've finally found a company that's exciting and a good place for both employees and clients. It's a new concept in professional services, a combination of best-of-breed business strategy combined with best-of-breed implementation capability, which is not something anyone's done successfully yet. And there are a lot of really smart people here. Everyone has tremendous backgrounds and experiences, and it's something Zefer tries diligently to preserve. I suppose after this, my aspiration would be either to start my own company or run a larger company. But for now I'm very happy where I am.