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Hoov's Musings (volume 3, number 11) |
Genetic
Engineering
Mark Hoover,
President, Acuitive, Inc.
Over the years, from observing various people work
at large and small companies, the approach they take to their jobs,
and the intrinsic satisfaction they achieve, I’ve become pretty
convinced that there is an unmapped gene yet to be discovered which
predisposes people to be either a Big Company Person or a Small
Company Person. Due to societal trends, peer pressure, and just
plain ignorance, people often find themselves employed at a company
that is not the right fit for them.
It can often take people a long time before individuals learn
which gene they possess.
The result can be extended periods of personal turmoil and
angst, until people “come out,” admit who they are to themselves
and to their friends, and publicly and proudly live the life that
they were pre-disposed to live.
I know that in my own case, I was completely
unaware that such pre-dispositions even existed. I went from college
directly to Bell Laboratories (at the pre-divestiture, pre-Lucent
AT&T), for what turned out to be a ten-year post-graduate
education. I thought I
had hit the big time and was set for life.
Technically, Bell Labs seemed like the place to be.
It was where the transistor was invented, the “big bang”
theory was sort-of proven, and the highly robust telephony system
was evolved. At the
time, I thought those were big things that would somehow rub off on
me and allow me to deliver on similar achievements.
And in the beginning, things were great. I was heavily mentored by some seriously smart people, given
projects that stepped up in challenge as I was deemed capable of
tackling them, and had access to all the state-of-the-art design and
test tools that the money of a company given a guaranteed
return-on-investment by the U.S. Government could buy.
But, over the years, I began a subconscious process
of pattern recognition that I can really only understand now,
looking back on it. Time
and time again, projects were cancelled halfway into them,
organizations were continually re-organized, and most the few
products that actually made it to production generally failed the
test of the market. To
me, AT&T became known as the place where smart people gathered
en masse to do stupid things.
Of course, some organizations were more successful
than others. Some
digital cross-connect, SONET, and optical organizations within what
is now Lucent have performed quite well.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence however, that all of
those organizations have a history that is anchored deeply in the
development of pre-divestiture voice networking technology.
I, on the other hand, found myself working for the last few
years of my AT&T career in an organization focused on data
networking. My first
experience in this area involved helping to develop proprietary
terminal-to-UNIX packet switches.
These products hit the market just about the same time that
Ethernet did. As a typical example of the company arrogance and
ignorance at the time, my organization refused to believe that
Ethernet was a threat, because Ethernet’s 10 Mhz was not nearly as
efficient as our product’s 8.192 MHz.
And we could prove that with a lot of PhD-like treatises.
That was a tough battle to fight in the marketplace, but it
turns out that battle had nothing much to do with the war.
The real fight was proprietary vs. standard.
We just didn’t understand at the time the leveraged impact
that standards have on a marketplace, especially one like
networking, which is all about ubiquitous connectivity.
In the end, the only customers were internal customers (many
of AT&T’s operational support systems are still built around
these products) and the U.S. Government, especially the defense
segment, because I guess they figured there is nothing more secure
than using technology that nobody else in the world uses.
But I recognized the value of standards pretty
quickly. One of the
nice things about a big company is that you can move around and do a
lot of different things within that same company.
The big advantage of that is that you don’t have to change
your e-mail address.
So, I moved to an organization more focused on
standards like FDDI. This
organization had in it some of the wizards who helped develop
10BASE-T. We were developing Ethernet hubs, FDDI, bridges,
terminal servers, IP routers, SNMP-based network management, local
file sharing, and a whole bunch of other products that have since
been recognized in aggregate as the networking industry; long
before Cisco, SynOptics, Wellfleet, Cabletron, and HP OpenView
became leaders in various different areas of this industry, and
infinitely long before Cisco mopped up and wiped all the others out.
Yet, this organization didn’t succeed either.
This time, it wasn’t from a lack of recognition of the
power of standards-oriented solutions, but for other big
company-related cancerous factors.
First of all, within AT&T, we were pariahs.
IP networking was considered a fad.
It just seemed chaotic to the ordered mind of
telephony-oriented people, working on incremental advancement of
technology that had been invented decades ago.
Ironically, even the Frame Relay people didn’t “get
it.” Thus we didn’t
benefit from any of the resource leverage across organizations that
one is theoretically supposed to enjoy at a big company.
Even worse, we were a data networking division within a
struggling computer business unit.
Our mission and focus was extremely distorted because of
this. Here is a
distillation of the company direction to us over time:
“OK, you guys, you are the vanguard of the new
age of technology. All
of the analysts we talk to say there is going to be considerably
more growth in your area than any other areas we are working in.
However, since the markets for voice services, PBXs, and PCs
are flattening due to commoditization, we are going to have to put
more resources into those areas to protect our investments.
Therefore we are going to have to cut your budget for next
year. But in return we need for you to increase your revenue
commitment since we can’t really ask that of the other areas whose
addressable market is decreasing.
Also, we need for you to allocate most of your resources
towards building NICs for our new high-end user-servers that we are
going to ship several of within 15-60 months.
In addition, we need for you to delay introduction of several
of your products, or maybe de-feature them a bit, because they offer
a better solution than what we are selling now, which will aggravate
our customer base – and I know that for a fact because I’m
personal friends with all four customers of our present solutions.
We also need for you to concentrate your standards-based networking
products on interoperating with all of the proprietary systems we
have built over the past few years, so that we can protect our
installed base of universities that we donated those systems to over
the years. What?
You tell me that doesn’t leave you enough resource to build
competitive products? Well
then, let’s OEM some of those products so that we can support
these key educational accounts. Hmm.
What looks good? It looks like that router product development requires a lot
of resources. Why don’t we OEM that from someone else for a year
or two, until the market for routers fades away?
We want you to build a great OEM plan, sourcing the
technology from Cisco, but supporting it globally in a value-added
way for large customers, consistent with the high standards of
AT&T. In fact, to
make sure it’s a great OEM program, feel free to put up to two
of your best people on it to cover product management, system
engineering, marketing, system test, and field support, just in case
one has to go to the bathroom occasionally.
But since there is going to be as many as two people
assigned, let’s also use this as a chance to pro-actively help out
Cisco and help guide them on a path to the real future of networking
– OSI. And if the two
assigned employees work really hard and do a good job, give them an
extra vector in their end-of-year performance review so they can see
the fruits of their labor via a $785 dollar higher raise than their
peers. OK. Now that
we’ve decided all of this for you, let’s start our 15-month
annual budget review and begging process with a look at your
detailed 10 year product roadmap…”
It all seems pretty silly but I swear the above
paragraph is actually a pretty accurate representation of how it
was. The managers
providing this distorted direction were not stupid on an individual
basis (with a couple of noted exceptions). It’s just that in a big
company no one can step back and develop a big picture theme that is
easily driven down though all the organizational layers, because
each organization has a different history that leads to quite
different optimizations that rarely fit smoothly into the big
picture. This is one of the reasons why mature companies never
develop interesting new technology.
As evidenced above, they just get totally wrapped up around
themselves in the process of trying.
At some point, the major asset of a successful technology
company becomes their channel. And ultimately the appetite of this
channel exceeds the ability of internal R&D to keep a flow of
interesting products into that channel.
So OEMing and M&A starts in earnest, and a technology
company has just officially moved from Small to Large.
For me, I recognized that somehow I just didn’t
fit in. Although I had
title and salary and (supposed) middle management power at AT&T,
it didn’t seem like I was growing.
All I was learning year-after-year were new political
techniques for how to work within the AT&T system.
But one day I was watching one of the old 60’s Batman
shows, where at the end Batman says about the evil super-hero he
just conquered, “if only he could have used his super powers for
good instead of evil.” It was then that I knew I had to put my
AT&T bureaucracy skills behind me and learn a set of new skills
that wouldn’t incur the wrath of Batman.
So, in 1990, with much fear and trepidation, I got
out of AT&T and New Jersey and came to work in the Silicon
Valley at SynOptics, which was a relatively small company, certainly
by AT&T standards, at the time. And I’ve never looked back.
At SynOptics there was no mentoring, no careful metering out
of responsibilities, and few rules on how to get jobs done. Instead
you took as much responsibility as you wanted and went off and did
useful stuff. Nobody cared about protecting their turf because everybody
had way more on their plate than they could get to. In fact, there was much more cooperation between employees
than I had ever experienced before because each had a significant
financial interest in ensuring the success of SynOptics due to
owning a reasonable number of stock options.
So, as long as you were viewed as doing something good for
the company, the attitude of all those around you was “how can I
help?” and the attitude of the management team was “here is some
more stock – keep doing what you are doing.” And one couldn’t
hide. Everyone knew who
was contributing and who wasn’t, but you had to get to know the
ones not contributing fast because they were gone in the blink of
eye. Somehow the people
at SynOptics hadn’t been trained in the process that I learned at
AT&T about the proper way to fire people via a twelve month
probation and recovery process, which generally led to the manager
quitting in frustration before the employee was fired (I wonder how
many of the employees under probation were then promoted at AT&T
to fill that void). SynOptics
at that time was the closest thing to a meritocracy I had ever
experienced up until then. I
didn’t need to use any of my AT&T power-grabbing skills at
SynOptics, and in fact when the occasional opportunity came up to do
so, I refused to.
And SynOptics was not unique. Employees at all well-managed companies of roughly the same
size in the Silicon Valley had a similar culture.
It took me roughly three hours to perceive and appreciate
this culture. And it
should have taken me even less time because it was at this point
that I realized I had the Small Company Gene.
And I’ve understood it ever since.
Ultimately, if you have the Small Company Gene and
are at a company that achieves some reasonable level of success, you
become a Small Company guy at a Big Company again.
That happened to me with the merger of Wellfleet and
SynOptics to create Bay Networks.
That was a time of great opportunity if you were a Big
Company guy. Strategies
and resources were all up in the air.
If one wanted to play the game, one could navigate
politically in a situation like that to gain various ends.
But the only end I wanted was the end of my employment at Bay
Networks because it had become a Big Company.
I didn’t want to have to coordinate with five VPs to go the
men’s room. And I certainly didn’t want to be in a position
where I felt that peer-level managers in other organizations were my
competitors for budget and resources, and therefore I had to promote
my interests over theirs. As soon as that happens, customers and
real competitors are forgotten, and the company starts its downward
spiral into mediocrity.
So I got out of Bay Networks and started Acuitive,
largely because it allows me to be not just a Small Company Guy, but
a flaming Small Company guy.
I love to work with small groups of very focused people to
get a concept and company launched.
It makes me feel young, alive, and energized.
I’ve gotten to the point where some companies of even as
few as 50 people start to feel inefficient and unfocused to me.
With great management, maybe that number pushes to 200 or
300. I do some work
with large public companies, but mostly just high-level consulting
or training -- never any major projects where I have to interact
with the organizational infrastructure and all of the related
conflicting interests and communications overhead that implies. I have completely lost my desire to do that because I have
learned what my genetic composition is.
This whole Musing sounds like it is all about me,
but it is really not. This
Musing is a plea to you to think about what gene you were born with
and based on that, find the work environment that embraces that
gene. It’s sad to
sometimes see others who have not figured out what their genetic
composition is and therefore work in situations that are
tremendously stressful for them.
And it goes both ways. Because
start-ups have been perceived as the “thing to do” in the
Silicon Valley and elsewhere, and because up until recently the
short term past has indicated that start-ups are safe, many people
have joined start-ups who are really Big Company people.
They have problems with the lack of infrastructure, rapid
fire decision and re-decision making processes, sequential moving of
facilities, ever shifting market and product strategies, continually
evolving teams and responsibilities, roller-coaster perception of
the company prospects, uncertainty about company funding,
expectation that they be able to execute a broad range of functions
and perform, perform, perform, and Friday afternoon beer breaks, all
of which are part and parcel of a start-up.
I either love or accept all those things.
Plus, I’ve got the Small Company gene, so I don’t even
perceive much risk in any situation where my contribution can
significantly impact the probability of success of the company.
When you have my kind of gene, you view big companies as
riskier (with far less reward), because projects can be cancelled,
re-organizations can occur, and large groups of employees can be
laid off with no warning, due to events and decisions far out of
your control.
Some Big Company people are still tempted by
start-ups because of the potential rewards.
But, without knowing it themselves, these people are
genetically pre-disposed towards decisions-by committee, quality
controls, all day meetings, regular management seminars, on-site
cafeterias, and the “safety” of working in a company whose
success is not fundamentally tied to the individual’s
contribution. You
can always sniff them out at the interviewing stage when they ask
for a big salary, a sign-on bonus, a lucrative relocation package to
move from Podunk to the Silicon Valley, an office with a window, a
guarantee for a minimum future for their options, and two full-time
administrative assistants. I
always urge my clients to pass on hiring these people if they have
more than five years of experience and it is all in Big Companies. No matter how enticing the resume, and no matter how
vociferously the applicant swears that he or she is leaving the Big
Company life behind in order to embrace the Small Company life, one
just can’t be sure what their genetic make-up really is. For a
Small Company, give me serial Small Company individual contributor
with good references from peers over a Director or VP of la-de-da at
a Big Company any day.
Conversely, for a Big Company, give me someone who
has proven his or her Big Company genetic material any day.
Managing large organizations and operating successfully
with-in a Large Company is a science in and of itself that requires
the right genetic make-up. It
is not something I could do well.
Don’t try to hire some proven entrepreneur to try and give
a Small Company energy boost to a Big Company.
You’d be better off trying to figure out how to turn lead
into gold.
If only there was a test to determine candidate’s genetic make-up, and if only it were legal to administer such a test…
(volume3,
number 11)
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