Past Featured Chairmen

<p>It was J Paul Getty, the oil magnate who said the secret to success was simple. 'Get up early. work hard. Find Oil'.</p> <p>For Dr Steve Garnett 'My oil was an outstanding maths teacher.</p> <p>'I went to a hard school. Where I grew up if you got through school to 16, stayed out of trouble then that was a success. There was a terrible poverty of expectation.</p> <p>'But I had a maths teacher who was able to show me the beauty of the subject, who unlocked it for me. He stimulated and kindled the flame.'</p> <p>Breaking away from his background, Garnett went to university to read maths, and then - and this puts him in a very select group of senior leaders in the IT industry - he took a PhD in theoretical physics.</p> <p>Was he ever tempted to stay in academia? 'I seriously thought about it and people were trying to persuade me. But to be frank, I had to earn a living and the pay outside of academia was much better.'</p> <p>Garnett's first job was a programmer for Logica. It was while working there that he had the first of his many lucky breaks.</p> <p>'One day a colleague announced he was packing it in and off to work for a new company called Oracle. He disappeared and I didn't expect to hear from him again. But about two months later he called me up and said the company was expanding and was I interested.</p> <p>To jump from a solid, if unspectacular, organisation like Logica only 12 months into your career, for an American start up with no track record was a huge gamble. 'It was the quality of the people I met. These were outstanding people. I was excited by their vision and by what they were doing.'</p> <p>So in June 1986 Garnett joined the fledgling Oracle. At that time there were some 100 people working for the company world wide. A very long away from the leviathan of today, the world's second largest software company.</p> <p>Like so many successful IT leaders, Garnett quickly found himself in sales and marketing.</p> <p>Starting in a technical role, Garnett would hitch along on sales visits, and realised that the buzz of the sales pitch was what fired him. He switched roles. Starting with a team of four, Garnett eventually ended up director of UK sales, and then vice president European marketing and alliances.</p> <p>'There is a very unfortunate attitude to sales in the UK. People see salesmen as something rather undesirable, something rather unseemly. In the US the attitude is totally different. If you say you are in sales, people will ask what do you sell and how will help my company.</p> <p>'If you look at the woeful performance of the European IT industry I wonder if a lot of it is down to that.'</p> <p>Having ridden the frenetic journey of a small company rocketing to success - and very nearly crashing to earth - with Oracle, when Garnett was approached by another fledgling start up - this time run by former Oracle employee Tom Siebel - the chance to relive that excitement was too strong.</p> <p>So jump he did. And for the same reasons. 'It was the quality of people that Tom had assembled. These were people at the very top of their fields. They were top drawer.'</p> <p>Life at Siebel was never going to be easy. For all his undisputed brilliance, Tom Siebel is notorious for his aggressive management style. 'He was the kind of leader who would say nine against, one in favour, motion carried.</p> <p>'As a CEO he was incredibly driven, incredibly successful and consistently unreasonable.'</p> <p>Garnett thrived in the maelstrom environment. And once again found himself managing a company growing at a phenomenal rate - a few dozen when he joined, to over 8000 employees.</p> <p>His recruitment policy is a simple one. 'I always try and hire people who are better than me. I want my sales director to be better at sales than me, my technical staff to be more knowledgeable than me. If you have the right people, the right team, you can succeed even if you don't have the best products.'</p> <p>But life at Siebel was hard. 'There comes a point when you are at Heathrow at 5am again about to leave for another three weeks in a hotel and you start to question why you are doing this. I had plenty of money in the bank, I had a young family I never saw. I was burning out.'</p> <p>He took a sabbatical, which was supposed to last six months, but ended up nearer 12 and at the end realised that he had to leave.</p> <p>It was another former Oracle employee - Mark Benioff - who approached Garnett to join yet another fledgling company, Salesforce.com, the enfant terrible of the front office software world.</p> <p>'I knew about Mark from his reputation at Oracle so went to see him. When I came back my wife looked at me and said 'You have got that look in your eyes'. And I did.' Lightning had struck a third time.</p> <p>Although he carries the title of Chairman of Salesforce, Garnett is not really a Chairman in the traditional sense. He runs no board, he has no fiduciary duties. He is more a chairman-at-large, although he bristles at the suggestion that he is the company's 'grand old man'. 'I am only 50 for heaven's sake'.</p> <p>Garnett's management experience is second to none, and has seen at first hand the 'great man' view of history. Working firstly for Larry Ellison, and then Tom Siebel, is a unique - if challenging - view of management style. Does he think it is a good model?</p> <p>'I think it is very hard on people. I contrast it with the style of Mark Benioff, who is a listener. He builds consensus. He goes out of his way to seek people's counsel to find out what they want. This extends right through to the customers - you can email feedback to salesforce and you will get a reply. Getting people to join in is very important to Mark. That was never Tom's way.'</p> <p>One of the stark differences between the Benioff approach and that of Garnett's previous employers is the role of philanthropy. At salesforce a charitable foundation was set up at the start .One percent of stock and six days of every employee's time goes to philanthropic work.</p> <p>This isn't just liberal do-gooding. It has very positive benefits to the company - not only through the executive contacts that can be made, but also through helping to attract and more importantly retain, the right kind of staff.</p> <p>For Garnett this is a way to pay back the huge debt he feels he owes. His chosen project is the very successful Teach First campaign - aimed at getting young top-flight graduates to spend two years teaching in problem inner-city schools.</p> <p>For Garnett the symmetry is obvious. He owes his career, his success, his wealth to a maths teacher at a Liverpool school. If through his work and with his support he can do the same for another child ensnared by their background and history, then that is a debt repaid in full.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><em>Ben Rooney is a freelance business journalist. Ben can be contacted at </em><a href="mailto:ben@benrooney.com"><em>ben@benrooney.com</em></a><em><br /> </em></p>