Keyword: industry icon

Bill Gates

With the announcement today that he’s going to step aside, a load of my Bill Gates memories have flooded back for me.  Forgive me while I share those with you.

I’m a fortunate man; I’m among a very small group of people who’ve had the priviledge of working closely with Bill Gates.  When I was VP of HR, he and I had a number of private and quite frank conversations about key members of the Microsoft leadership team.  We worked together to set compensation, decide assignments, and make tough corrective choices.

I’ll never forget the time we worked on his own salary together — it was almost comical.  I had to implore him to take a reasonable number that even vaguely reflected his peers at the top of the Fortune 500.  There I was, trying to convince the world’s richest man to take a reasonable salary.  The company was moving to deemphasize stock and put more weight on salary; I wanted him to lead by example.  To his credit, he pushed back relentlessly and I ended up recommending to the board’s compensation committee a number about 33% lower than what I thought was right.

Bill is a very special person, with legendary business insight to be sure, but it is coupled with a remarkable sensitivty and concern for his key associates.  He treats them much like family-members, with all the good and bad that goes with that.  Yes, his blow-ups are legendary, and he can carve new orifaces with the best of them.  But more often than not, he is concerned about their welfare, about their family, about their mood and attitude.  He values loyalty above most other things, and does not handle defection well at all.

I can think of no one in the world for whom I have more respect, and I know his presence at Microsoft will be sorely missed.  Although well divorced from the day-to-day in recent years, he always served as a settling and humanizing force in the company.  In the face of Steve Ballmer, a legendarily gruff and difficult manager (which I can personally confirm), this influence should not be underestimated.

I will have much to say about the future of the company in the hands of the new management team, but that will have to wait.  Now I’m just too busy enjoying reliving the time I had working with one of the most special people in the world.

Boyd Coddington

It’s my guilty pleasure that some reality TV shows draw me like a moth to a flame.  One of my favorites is Discovery Channel’s “American Hot Rod”.  The show ostensibly chronicles Boyd Coddington and his team while they build world-class custom cars.  For anyone who knows much about cars (and I speak as a reformed addict), Boyd’s name is well known.  He was one of the originators of the over-the-top custom car back in the late seventies, and is an icon in the field.  But you don’t have to even care about cars to gain huge insights into team building and management from this show.

I’m sure the creators of the show (including the reknowned Thom Beers who discovered Jesse James) went into it expecting simply a spin off from the world of custom motorcycles that made them, Jesse, Monster Garage, and other shows like it huge hits.  These shows are among the most profitable for DSC.

But they got much more than they bargained for with American Hot Rod.  Boyd and crew are perhaps the most disfunctional team since the Bundys of “Married with Children”.  The show features such teambuilding highlights as:

• A CEO (Boyd) who is gifted, revered, an industry icon, and a teddy bear, but who also micro-manages, sets ridiculous schedules with no input from below, ignores criticism, changes his mind depending on who he last spoke to, won’t admit when he’s wrong, and thinks everyone with a differing opinion “has a problem”.
• A line manager (Duane) who is a worse micro-manager, has little patience for the challenge of managing his team, treats everyone like dirt, curses like a sailor, blames everyone but himself for the problems, and lets Boyd walk all over him.
• Projects that routinely are underscheduled by half, causing the team to have to work 18 hour days seven days a week on a routine basis.
• Line employee turnover that is terrible, with the team going from 20 to 5 in the most recent episodes — with people leaving for lousy reasons, and leaving to no other job (a clear sign of major cultural issues).
• A business model that clearly is bankrupt — the only new customers are Boyd’s old friends, and the shop is always half-full.

I watch on a weekly basis as these factors collide in fantastic displays.  Of course, they always finish the car, and of course the team always is smiling on conclusion, but the show couldn’t be a better teambuilding course without resorting to PowerPoint slides.  I find myself pausing the Tivo about every five minutes: “hmmm, let’s see, can I think of five better ways to have handled that?”  Usually the answer is “yes.”

I watched an episode from a week or two ago last night, and I caught myself screaming at the TV.  The team lost two members, one who actually called Boyd and Duane on their ridiculous behavior, and another long-time, well-respected member left “to freelance”.  Boyd’s response to the former was “he really must have some problems” and to the latter it was “well, he had made up his mind”.  And to top it off, Boyd had to shut down his wheel business due to poor sales.  I was in pain, as I always am when I watch teams disintegrate due to lousy managment.  I wanted to call him up and offer my services for free…  but I guess I’ll wait for him to find me.

Anyway, if you are looking for a guilty pleasure, and some killer lessons on how NOT to run a team, catch Discovery Channel’s “American Hot Rod”.