Green Flag For Career Growth
Sean McLeod (MEM ‘07) talks about how his experience in MEM has helped him excel at Oracle, including supporting the Oracle Red Bull Racing team, and how he's looking to help future MEM students.
When Max Verstappen slammed the gas pedal of his Formula 1 race car March 5 to kick off the 2023 season at the Bahrain Grand Prix, he might not have realized it wasn’t actually the first race of the season for his team.
That first race was won back in December and was driven by Oracle’s Supply Chain Operations (SCO) group where Sean McLeod (MEM ‘07) is the Director of Oracle's Manufacturing and Operations. Oracle is the title sponsor of Verstappen's Oracle Red Bull Racing team.
The race McLeod and his co-workers won in December had nothing to do with actually driving fast laps, but instead the urgent delivery of the latest high performance compute racks to Oracle's data center to be used by the Red Bull Racing team.
“We jumped through a lot of extraordinary hoops to get a set of the latest hardware qualified and built through our supply chain," McLeod said. "We built a bunch of servers and racks and shipped it in before the year-end deadline. We got that going in time.”
F1 rules state that any equipment to be used during a racing season must be in place by the last day of the previous year.
The new Oracle technology enables Verstappen’s team to run billions of simulations of each race to explore different racing strategies in search of the one that has the best chance of ending in the winner’s circle, which is exactly where he found himself in Bahrain. It was the 36th career victory for the 25 year old.
Oracle's reach extends far beyond racing. The technology company works with clients in industries ranging from communications and consumer goods to manufacturing and higher education.
McLeod has been with Oracle since 2010. He began work in the company as an operations program manager, and has steadily risen through the company ranks since then, holding eight different titles — each with increasing responsibilities — before starting his current role in February 2022.
To succeed, McLeod leans heavily on the lessons he learned while in the Northwestern's Master of Engineering Management (MEM) program. Thanks to MEM, McLeod knows how to excel with the technological aspects of the job and also how to knowledgeably interact with people from a wide variety of departments inside Oracle.
“Everybody has a specialized role, but you need to be able to talk to people in all the different functions you interface with,” he said. “For example, I’m never going to be a finance guy, but I need to be able to talk to the VP of finance and convince him we can automate their purchasing process. I’m not going to manage logistics, but I need to know how to interface with a logistics colleague.”
His deep appreciation for what the MEM program did for his career led him to become the most recent addition to the program's Industry Advisory Board (IAB). The IAB is tasked with ensuring the skills taught in the MEM program’s courses remain relevant to companies.
McLeod interacted with a number of MEM students following his first IAB meeting, and he was impressed with their work and interests. The variety of backgrounds and passions is one the many reasons he advocates for MEM.
“There’s a lot of different specializations within the program itself," McLeod said. "MEM offers a lot of flexibility, and students truly can do with it what they want.”
