About me
I’m Keith Clarke.
I help STEM leaders create inclusive, collaborative, and innovative teams
My Strengths
Curious
I like to ask a lot of questions
Analytical
I like to understand how things work
Collaborative
I want to solve problems in partnership with others
Inclusive
I like to bring everyone into the conversation regardless of status or background
Non-judgemental
I like to stay objective and see things as they are
Action-orientated
I like to make plans and get things done
My career journey
Engineer
As a graduate Electronic Engineer, I started as a chip design engineer working for a UK aerospace company in 1989. I then moved to a start-up in Cambridge in 1992 which promptly ran out of money and made me redundant. As often in life, this was a blessing in disguise as I was put forward to the young Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) and was offered a job starting July 1993 as employee number 33. I spent some years in the technical team, including designing part of the famous ARM7TDMI ‘Thumb’ processor which gained design-wins at Nokia Mobile Phones and the Nintendo Gameboy Advance. This was ARM’s big commercial break which helped to propel it to the world’s largest semiconductor IP company with over 29 billion ARM processor based chips sold in 2021.
Engineering Management
In June 2000 I moved from a technical lead role to become the CPU group manager in Cambridge. This was my first full management and leadership role. I wish I knew then what I know now. I knew people management was important but perhaps I didn’t realise quite how much. As ARM, along with my experience, grew, I took on additional responsibilities and by end of 2003 become head of our IP development teams: VP Engineering. I wish I’d had a coach and mentor to help me through those early years – my managers were good but couldn’t provide everything an independent person would have.
Business Leadership
ARM created business divisions in mid-2005 and I moved on to the first of my business leadership roles. I took on the newly formed Technical Marketing group; three years later I became Business Unit manager for our Systems IP business; three years later Product Line lead for our Embedded Processors; three years later (there’s a pattern here) I moved to an Engineering Effectiveness role which evolved into an Operations role for our Engineering Infrastructure group.
In 2018, after 15 years as VP and senior leader, and 25 in total at ARM, I chose to leave for the next instalment of my career.
Coach and Consultant
I still love technology, however, when I left ARM, I realised that I wanted to spend the rest of my career focused on People development. Even an organisation with great products and strategy will falter without great people and the right culture. How people are organised and how they behave will make an enormous difference to an organisation’s growth and results.
I left ARM convinced that it was the engaging and collaborative culture that had the most difference to our performance and I believe engineers and technologists are extremely well placed to be leaders that create these cultures of excellence and innovation.
My mission:
To use collaborative coaching to help STEM people become great leaders, creating cultures of inclusiveness, collaboration and innovation.