Selker Leadership

Virginia Gambale is a successful investor and technology leader. As Managing Partner of Azimuth Partners LLC, which she founded in 2003, Gambale operates globally, developing growth strategies, business partnerships and executing successful exits for technology and business service companies. She is highly regarded for her innovative thinking, personal involvement, concern for people and ability to deliver results.

Gambale garnered such prestigious awards as the Forbes Great Communicators in 1999 and was named one of the top three CIOs on Wall Street in 1997. Most recently, she was named by Directors and Boards Magazine as one of 12 “Directors To Watch” for in their special 30th anniversary celebration publication in 2006.

She has served on over 20 public and private boards including: JetBlue (NASDAQ-BLU), Motive (NASDAQ-MOTV), Workbrain (TSE-WB), Voxpath, IQ Financial (Chairman) and Synchronoss Technologies (NASDAQ-SNCR). She has often served as Board Chair and Compensation & Transaction Committee Chair. Gambale’s work on Advisory Boards is extensive and includes: DB Capital Partners, FT Ventures, Apax Technology Ventures, New York City Investment Fund, Mobius Ventures, Gartner Group & SIM CIO Roundtables, CPM Brazil, MPI Professionals, Knoa Software, and RWD Executive Search.

Prior to 2003, Gambale held senior management positions, including CIO, at global corporations including: Merrill Lynch, Marsh & McLennan, Bankers Trust Alex Brown and Deutsche Bank. Additionally, she headed DB Strategic Ventures, where she successfully liquidated their 100M investment portfolio. This lead to her appointment as general partner in ABS Ventures where all investments she led resulted in successful IPOs; Workbrain (TSE-WB) and Synchronoss Technologies (NASDAQ-SNCR). She was subsequently a partner at DB Capital Partners.
A former senior executive in large multinationals, she has recruited senior level executives and understands how a firm becomes the employer of choice. An advocate of performance management systems and metrics, she is known for her success in employee development and satisfaction.

Gambale’s memberships include: National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD), Association for Corporate Growth (ACG), Economic Club of New York, Women’s Hi-Tech Coalition and Women on Wall Street. She is a member of the Mentor Faculty and Thesis Evaluation board for Columbia University’s Graduate Masters in Technology Leadership. Ms. Gambale is also an active mentor and financial sponsor for the education of underprivileged minority women at St. Michael’s Academy in New York City.

Gambale earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics and Computer Science with a minor in Business from the New York Institute of Technology. She also studied at Julliard and Hartt Conservatories.

For the complete interview with Virginia Gambale, click here: Virginia Gambale Complete Interview

Greg Selker: As an active board director what do you see a board director’s role should be in helping their companies get their arms around identifying and developing their next generation of leaders earlier and quicker?

Virginia Gambale: I think responsibility for this should initially reside at the board level, because the board should be worried about their fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders on a long term basis and in doing so it’s a quality of the asset as a whole, and a very big part of that asset is the talent residing in the company. So I think requiring and instituting developmental programs should come from the board.

Greg Selker: Do you find that is often the case?

Virginia Gambale: No. I think as we begin to populate boards with more operationally experienced people as opposed to just former CEO’s and academics and rock stars, I think you begin to hear the discussions around doing identifying, building and developing leadership- and then it’s building consensus with the other board members to try to do that. So it happens - it’s being discussed for sure.

Greg Selker: And this is kind of where we started the conversation, where you were talking about the group of people that you’re participating with on the NYSE where this is being discussed.

Virginia Gambale: Yes.

Greg Selker: What are some of the solutions you are seeing for this and how are these solutions being implemented?

Virginia Gambale: You know what our conclusion is in a lot of these discussions? It is that until there is a presence of a different mentality - either at the board level or on the executive management committee, that these things are not going to be moved forward very far - unless there’s a corporate structure that allows for the delegation of more radical programs.

Greg Selker: And if this different kind of mentality was present at both the board and executive management level, what would that look like?

Virginia Gambale: I think one piece of evidence that this is being addressed would be that the need to institute leadership that is more environmentally - what’s the term I’m looking for, leadership that is more compatible with the new talent base that is coming into the work force, this issue would be raised and talked about

Greg Selker: Got it. So a kind of mentality or a mental model that says that this is important, that we need to address this - and that here are the things that we are going to try to do about leadership and not just talk about it.

Virginia Gambale: Right.

Greg Selker: Very good. And so in kind of following along this… if it’s the board’s responsibility to make certain of this, what are the ways in which you see that a board director or board collectively can kind of awaken the consciousness within the executive team and the rest of the board to the importance of leadership as an issue?

Virginia Gambale: Well like anything else, either critical mass is accumulated at the board level or there are regulatory requirements which force attention to be paid.

Greg Selker: Yes.

Virginia Gambale: And I think actually a lot of people are not fans of SOX, but I am a fan of it in that it’s a start. Yes, it needs to be refined. But I think just as board directors of public companies are answering questions around succession planning that need to be checked off on the D&O questionnaire to meet SOX compliancy requirements - in order to kick start these issues of leadership there may need to be some regulatory moves.

Greg Selker: Well that was exactly my next question, because we actually see that as well. In fact, it’s been our belief that a natural outgrowth of SOX is to move into this area of leadership and accountability at the board level for the leadership of a company.

Virginia Gambale: Ultimately, I think this is true as well. But unfortunately before that is going to happen I believe there’s going to be a little bit of backlash against SOX as it exists today resulting in that SOX will be relaxed a bit from its present form.

Greg Selker: Yes.

Virginia Gambale: There are a number of groups which are rallying around the relaxation of SOX who have some strength, although it may be interesting to see how the upcoming 2008 elections play into this. So I think there will be some backlash to lessen the requirements of SOX, but SOX will not disappear. I think that while this backlash will take SOX a step back in a sense, it will actually serve to have SOX be more thoughtful going forward. You see, big failures in public companies are not going away. They will continue to occur - and it’s natural that we’re going to try and regulate around these failures as a response. And at the heart of a lot of these failures are the absence of some very basic skills and capabilities around leadership. These failures are not happening because people do not read or understand accounting regulations.

Greg Selker: Yes. The failures that have occurred are not just about accounting improprieties.

Virginia Gambale: Correct. These failures exist due to the interpretation of, and then the execution, or lack of execution, around specific guidelines. I always give this example. I sit on an audit committee and the question being asked of us is how do you know you are in compliance with SOX 404? And my response is I don’t really care whether we meet the specific number of day criteria for Sarbanes Oxley. What I care about is, are we ready to implement, or roll out this new product, or implement this new system? As an organization, are we ready? And that means much more than X number of days of testing. Are we ready in total? I mean are our people ready? Is our advertising ready? Is our brand ready? Looked at in this context SOX is much broader than meeting a set of accounting regulations. And while these regulations need to be met, it really is a result of these larger issues that SOX was even developed and implemented in the first place. And central to these broader issues are concerns and actions which are representative of leadership and help create leadership within a company’s culture.

For the complete interview with Virginia Gambale, click here: Virginia Gambale Complete Interview

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