Alumni Video Spotlight: Howard Lo MBA 00

Twenty-five years after graduating from the UC Davis Graduate School of Management, Howard Lo MBA 00, vice president of sales and marketing at DataON, returned for the GSM Alumni Weekend to reflect on the power of enduring relationships, collaborative leadership and staying resilient through career highs and lows.

Lo shares how the bonds built in business school continue to shape his life and career, why leading with empathy and alignment matters and how trusting your community can carry you through uncertainty.

Whether you're just starting your career or charting your next chapter, his message is clear: success is a journey built on connection, persistence and purpose.

Video Transcript

I tell everybody here that I was here with all the classmates. I said, you know, we’re 25-year graduates of GSM. It took us 25 years to get to where we're at. We get through ups and downs, and we're really at the top, the peak of our career, right?

We have an ability to make good things happen. We have the ability to help others and give back. I think at the end of the day, you're being successful. You're making money. You're having friends. But I want to make sure that everybody's happy and everybody is enjoying where we are.

Our class is so close! Twenty-five years, 25 years, and almost everybody is here! You have no idea how close we are. So, that's what it means.

Collaborative leadership, it really means working with others to achieve a common goal. A leader is not about you. A leader is about how you can empower people around you and be successful. Collaboration is a foundational business. Everything we do on a daily basis is how we work with others and how we make each other successful.

So. collaboration is a key piece ingredient in any business applications, interfaces. So being a leader really needs to know how to collaborate with other people and to be successful.

Being one of the persons that runs a business on a day-to-day basis, the key is your decision is a decision that's aligned with the objective of everybody else. How do you make sure that your team are aligned with you? How do you make sure you listen to their inputs? You listen to their feedback and appreciate their work with you. You're not ultimately the decision-maker. You're not authoritarian. You're the one here to listen to other people and make decisions that's right for everybody and for the company. And that's how you work with your team and how you work with everybody around you.

I'm in the tech industry all my life. I think it's just uncertainty of the market. I think it's a fact that new college graduates, even business school, it's not as easy to find the right job. And I would tell them, “Hey, don't give up.” You know, what you learned in school will go a long way. You know, a lot of stuff I learned at GSM, I'm still applying it today. Knowledge about people, knowledge about finance, marketing. But ultimately, it comes together. As you continue to grow your business and your career, you will learn that everything comes together in a way that makes you successful. And I think for all the people here and the next couple of years, it might be challenging, but, you know, it's cyclical. You'll come back and just keep going at it, and don't give up. Success will come to you.

Number one is go with your guts. Go with what you want to do. When I started, I did a startup. It was not successful, but I kept on going. Go with your passion. Do something you enjoy. You have to grind through a lot of stuff. Go find stuff that you can learn and really understand the technology and the market. Eventually, you'll filter through it.

Build relationships. You know, in this world, wherever are not it’s friends, partners, classmates, customers. These are built by relationships. Your classmates take you a long way. I still talk to my classmates today, and many of them are business partners. So, maintain that relationship. Be genuine and be realistic, and just continue to drive that, and look for the best, and be optimistic. You’ll do fine.