MEET THE PROFESSIONAL
September 2019
Abbas (Tom) Halabi
Sr. Data Analyst at Microsoft
Tom is a supporter of professional networking and our mentoring program within our community. We are very excited to feature him as our professional in this month’s “Meet the Professional” series.
Below are a few questions to help facilitate this interactive connection. At the end of the page you will have an opportunity to post your own questions for Tom.
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Describe your current Occupation & Degree/s and Universities.
Currently, I am running the data analytics and insights team in the Microsoft for the Startups program. That sounds boring, I know. Millions of data rows and columns. Staring at numbers, charts, lines, and graphs. My eyes are drooping just thinking about it. However, from that thicket of data slowly emerges a somewhat clearer picture of how we’re helping startups (young entrepreneurs) succeed, and how our team can craft a strategy with eyes wide open.
That has been my passion for the last twelve years at Microsoft: helping startups around the world succeed. I have taken lead roles in operations, engineering and event planning, and supporting roles in marketing and PR campaigns. At times, I’ve gotten lost in the weeds of each position, but the focus has always been that my job helps reduce the risk that entrepreneurs take. Essentially, I take Microsoft technology and transfer them into something that a startup needs to run, grow, and succeed in their business.
- Bachelor of Science in Biology, Baylor University
- Master of Science in Genetics, Baylor University
- Master of Business Administration (MBA) in Finance, Texas A&M
Please list any awards/recognitions/honors:
- MBA: Venture Challenge
- Microsoft: 2014 Program of the Year
- Microsoft: 2015 Startup Web Development
Discuss a moment or turning point in your life that led you to your career path:
Following my graduate work in Biology, I worked in various research departments at MD Anderson and Baylor Research, which included a short stint with the genome project in 1999 as supporting researcher in mapping the human genome. My initial goal was to continue towards a doctorate in genetics. However, a few years into research, I began facing a motivational barrier. I had lost interest in deepening my skillset in that field, which made the challenge of pushing through towards a doctorate less appealing.
I spent another year standing at that fork in the road, trying to answer the question: do I push through towards a doctorate despite my lack of interest or do I change course, try something new? Do I discard a dozen years of education and toil spent in achieving a bachelors and masters in science and an initial personal and family hope of a doctorate, or do I pivot towards the unknown and the unfamiliar?
I’ll spare you Robert Frost’s thinking about roads and forks and less travelled paths. And, you, you know the choice and the path I took. It really is not a tale of courage, nor one of certainty and plotted goals towards a dream or vision. Rather it was a series of practical choices that I decided to take that helped me decide. Over the course of 18 months, I enrolled in several basic evening courses in economics, accounting, and finance classes at the local university. With that, finance was the most interesting, and an MBA was going to be the quickest way for me to pivot towards a career in finance.
Granted, I have never worked a day in finance. But, the tools, models, and data organization that I gained in the MBA with emphasis in finance were essential frameworks that I have relied on with every opportunity I have taken the last dozen years at Microsoft.
Discuss a role model or mentor who influenced your career choice:
So many. One of the more recent mentors who has been instrumental was my hiring manager at Microsoft. Even though I moved on from his team and he’s no longer with Microsoft, he continues to be a great resource with incredible business acumen and insight.
Hiring me as an intern and then a full-time employee, he took a big risk by bringing me on his team although I didn’t have any business, finance, or even basic corporate experience. To that end, he wanted to ensure my success and became a mentor who constantly drove me to share my work and become more visible to others on the team and the organization. Although am a big believer that we can accomplish so much, if we’re not interested in taking any credit, he slowly helped me better compartmentalize that ideal without discarding it.
Do you recall any specific challenges you encountered and overcame?
I hope it’s acceptable for me to sidestep this question and rather seek advice on two continuing challenges I am constantly working on improving. So, if anyone has any specific advice or methods on how to master these, please shoot me a note.
- Time management – two aspects of time management that challenge me is how to best prioritize and how to avoid multi-tasking.
- Next set of skills – I have several extension educational certifications lined up. However, I am always looking for advise on great managerial, leadership, and ‘time management’ courses and personal examples.
Where do you see yourself in the next 10 years?
Pivoting to a teaching environment. It’s a vision, not a goal, and that is important for me to distinguish. In other words, the focus is not on any one specific destination. I don’t necessarily need to teach in a class or a forum. It’s more of an open-ended vision not strictly defined nor currently confining.
However, there are certain short-term goals that feed the framework of that vision. For, example, I recently began working with the Big Brothers/Sisters in the Seattle area. My commitment is to work with the school system to find various ways my skills can help boys/teens (K-12) achieve more. However, I expect I will be the one growing and learning.
Another example is also a current project where am helping build a data visual framework that will help Puget Sound School Districts track performance of all mentored students. With that, we can then draw direct insight on how mentoring is changing/affecting grades, attendance, behavior, and overall performance.
These are just two recent endeavors that will hopefully help me build on and learn from as I slowly zigzag towards that nebulous ten-year march.
What advice would you give to someone starting out in your field?
I would like to stress that newbies understand that performance and success are mutually exclusive. Good performance, even at a high level, does not automatically invite success. You must intentionally relate performance with success.
Performance is about objectifying or measuring the work you are doing. Success is about the value the business network (a manager or a company or the market) receives or find from your output. From day one, with any business field you enter, it’s best to take time to directly plot your work, how you’ll be measured, and who specifically will find value in your work. Be ready to constantly change that plot depending on your environment, the type of work you’re doing and the audience who will judge your work.
Also, as early on as possible, identify your strengths and develop them even further. Make sure your weaknesses are not a detriment to your success but only focus on improving your strengths. If you’re a good communicator, then get better at it. If you’re not, then make sure you’re good enough. Then focus your energy and education on improving another favored skill (maybe you’re a good presenter or detail oriented or collaborator – then be great at those). Generally, if you’re good at something, then becoming great at it takes a lot less effort, builds more confidence and is more motivating than working on a weakness.
Most importantly, take time to provide a helping hand to a colleague, even at a minor cost to your time and work. Gratitude is essential. And, please don’t be a complainer. Complaining is never a desirable skill to have. There is enough complaining – it’s destructive to team morale, reduces overall confidence, and demonstrates that you’re not a problem solver.
Tell us a little bit about your hobbies outside of your field:
In order of preference but certainly not of competence.
Tennis! I certainly am an incomplete person without smashing the yellow fuzzy for a few hours every week. I’ll spare you my philosophical musings on the sport. However, playing, studying, and struggling at tennis has been a constant since I was twelve. Tennis is extremely difficult to master, especially as an amateur, and an incredibly lonely sport. Over the years, the sport has been physically, emotionally, and psychologically stressing. However, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I did manage to achieve a soft amateur ranking with USTA at the Houston Memorial Tennis Club almost two decades ago and competed in several tournaments, which am hoping to get back into soon.
At work, am referred to as ‘Onenote journaling Tom’. I save everything on OneNote. From daily activities, gardening journals, my kids’ pictures and notes, prayers, crap poetry, economic statistics, great folks of history, to my current research on native American history.
Reading – With two young kiddos, I haven’t prioritized reading as much the last few years but still try and squeeze three to four books a year. I take so many notes on the books I read, that I generally don’t have time to read many. I generally stick to scientific, biographical, economic, historical, religious, and science fiction books mostly. And, a shout out to my awesome brother-in-law, M.M. Najjar, who always manages to throw a favorite book my way every year.
A Q&A form will be uploaded shortly. In the meantime feel free to send any questions you would like to ask Tom to admin@network1017.com
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