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Execution and Customer Focus Are Leadership Keys, Says Symantec's Thompson

March 2005

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—John Thompson, who as chief executive of software giant Symantec Corp. is one of the most prominent African American role models in the business world, said he discovered early in his career that good mentors come in all colors.

The really good ones, however, know a thing or two about fashion.

Thompson delivered the keynote at the conference of the School's Black Business Students Association in March, and kicked off his talk by recalling his entrée into the business world in 1971, when he became IBM Corp.'s first African American salesman in Tampa, Florida. He arrived for the job full of energy and enthusiasm, but dressed in a leisure suit.

"To my great pleasure, there were people who were interested enough to spend time with me," Thompson told the audience.

"I learned early on that mentoring is not about color. The most wonderful mentors I had were the ones who told me the truth about my leisure suits and my 8-pound afro."

Aside from that anecdote, however, Thompson made no mention of race in his talk, instead focusing on the challenges all business leaders face managing in turbulent economic times, competing with bigger and more powerful rivals, and keeping a relatively balanced life while holding an all-consuming job.

Having managed his company through the Internet bubble boom years of the late 1990s and the long, severe bust that followed, Thompson said he reached the counterintuitive conclusion that the good times are often the most challenging times for serious managers.

"It is far more difficult to lead in easy times," he said. "During the tough times, real leaders emerge and they go back to their roots."

In an indication of how far business leaders can stray from tried and true management strategies when business is good, Thompson shared the story of his arrival in Silicon Valley to head Symantec in 1999. During that heady time when executives as well as rank-and-file employees were regularly becoming millionaires on paper thanks to stock options, several people advised Thompson that he would be judged not on the basis of how he shaped Symantec but in terms of his own net worth. The implied message was that driving the company's share price was more critical than serving its customers.

Now, as he works to successfully merge Symantec and Veritas Software Corp. into an entity he hopes will be better equipped to compete with Microsoft Corp., Thompson has identified a few key attributes that the best managers possess in good times as well as bad.

He said execution is essential, since no strategy is good if it is not well executed, and hard business analysis backed up by numbers is critical. Personal and organizational integrity is far more valuable than any regulations imposed on a company, and a relentless focus on people—both employees and customers—needs to be the foundation for running the business. "No company succeeds without an unrelenting focus on the customer," he said.

The final requirement for an effective manager, Thompson said, is to take the time to rest and reflect. "You cannot run 24/7, 365 days a year. You need to take time to enjoy the fruits of your labors."

For managers like Thompson who travel the globe building their businesses, simply finding the time to rest is often the biggest challenge of all. Thompson, who admitted to often skimping on family time and missing regular exercise goals, offered an honest and realistic view of how much downtime the head of a multibillion-dollar organization might reasonably expect. Nonetheless, he insisted it was important to strive for balance.

"I can go for weeks at a time just sleeping three or four hours per night. That's just who I am," he said.

"But I find there is nothing better than a good power nap. It can be the most rejuvenating 15 minutes of your life. … And at the end of a long run of three-hour nights, a 15-hour sleep feels pretty good too."

—Andrea Orr