Gary Smith of Ciena, on Tenacity and Teamwork I WAS born in Birmingham, England. My father was a machine tool fitter for the factory that produced the first Austin Mini car, and my mother was a seamstress at a factory. My parents worked hard to raise my older brother and me. Marshall Clarke Gary B. Smith is the president and C.E.O. of Ciena Corporation in Linthicum, Md. CURRENT BOOK "Churchill on Leadership: Executive Success in the Face of Adversity," by Steven F. Hayward While my parents valued education, I was more interested in playing soccer and rugby. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew that I didn't want to become a factory worker or a coal miner. I didn't want any of the industrial jobs available around my home city. I left school at 15 and worked menial jobs before eventually entering the photography industry in London. In my early 20s, I was hired by a telephone equipment company to sell internal phone systems and fax machines door to door around office parks. After a few months, I became one of the top sales people in the company. In the early 1980s, I was recruited by Case Communications, which sold data networking solutions to corporations. I worked in various roles around Europe, eventually running the company's European sales. I then moved to Hong Kong, where I was the general manager tasked with developing its Asia-Pacific business. It was the beginning of the telecom revolution and a great time to be involved in China, South Korea and other emerging markets. In that role, I traveled around China and other Asia-Pacific countries for several years. During that time I married my wife, Stacia, an American interior designer I met on a blind date while on a business trip to San Francisco. We now have two teenage boys. I returned to London in 1989 and worked briefly for a start-up before joining Cray Communications, which had acquired my previous employer, Case. After serving as a vice president for Cray in Europe, I moved to the United States in 1994 to be its vice president for sales and marketing. While at Cray, I enrolled part time in a business management program at Ashridge Management College in England, commuting between countries. I earned my master's in business administration in 1995. That same year, I was offered a job to head sales and marketing for Intelsat, the global satellite services company. Two years later, in 1997, I became head of international operations at Ciena, a start-up that was developing optical equipment to enable carriers to scale up their communications networks. After a year, I was promoted to lead Ciena's worldwide sales. I was named C.E.O. in 2001, the same year the telecom bubble burst and our annual revenue plummeted. In my first 12 months on the job, our revenue went from $1.6 billion to $361 million. It was a baptism of fire. We resisted pressure to drastically cut back the company. It was a contrarian approach, but we pushed ahead to develop and invest in the optical switching technology to allow movement of large amounts of data at high speeds. Since 2002, Ciena has acquired seven companies, including, in 2010, the optical networking and Ethernet assets of Nortel Networks, which had filed for bankruptcy. The acquisition doubled Ciena's size to more than 4,000 employees. We have about 1,000 clients globally. Despite some turbulent years, the telecom marketplace began to turn around as Internet and wireless use rose rapidly and customers looked for more bandwidth. Our growth would not have happened without our really strong board and very good people around me who helped find our way out of a very challenging period. It is all about the people, as well as tenacity and teamwork - things I learned long ago when I was playing sports. As told to Elizabeth Olson.