Stop the Fight

But there he was. Fadell was a high-ranking executive - and he was just 26 years old. "I had such chutzpah," he says of those days. "I was always right. I would never admit I was wrong. I was always questioning the direction of the company." But he never questioned the direction of his own life. During his three-and-a-half years at General Magic, Fadell lost touch with his family, screwed up his personal relationships, gained 40 pounds and then lost 50. He and his cohorts were totally one-dimensional. "I was a real jerk," Fadell says, "a know-it-all. I was loud, obnoxious, narrow-minded."

Now it's nearly four years later. Fadell's presence at Philips has certainly rubbed off on the company. As a condition for joining, he demanded that his team be allowed to operate like a startup. The Mobile Computing Group got its own building, with walls painted yellow and purple. There were open cubicles, free soda and fruit. The mandatory drug-testing policy didn't apply. At the group's launch party, Fadell served as the deejay.

But the impact of his presence went beyond matters of style. He fired a handful of older employees who wouldn't accept him as their manager: "They'd say, 'I've never worked for somebody this young,' or 'Who is this kid trying to tell me what to do?' " And the kid who'd mocked Philips's condescending orientation program got his own HR department - and began developing a new orientation program.

So much for the impact of Fadell on Philips. What about the impact of Philips on its young star? It's been surprisingly profound, he says. The toughest part was reinventing his personal style - making the transition from brash upstart to responsible leader, from know-it-all engineer to one-for-all peer and coach. "I'd hire people and say, 'You have to do things this way.' I wasn't leading - I was giving instructions. If people didn't do things my way, I went nuts. It took me a couple of months to realize that I was tearing the team apart."

Fadell also recognized the power of consistency. It's perfectly natural for young engineers to ride a roller coaster of exuberance and despair. It's destructive for leaders to take that same ride. "I've learned to control my emotions," Fadell says. "It's so easy for people to misunderstand - even when the emotions are positive. When I get excited, I get loud. It's amazing how many people think, 'Tony is yelling,' as opposed to, 'Tony is having a fun conversation.'"

Fadell's senior colleagues agree that he has made progress - and argue that he has plenty more to make. "There are lots of people here, even young people, who don't share Tony's urgent, high-energy style," says Alan Soucy, 43, general manager of Mobile Computing. "One of his challenges is to motivate people who need a quiet, predictable environment to get their work done."

Fadell has heard those criticisms: "The senior people here have helped me learn tolerance for different ways of working. It's about me becoming more emotionally mature."

Which is not to suggest that Fadell, at the ripe old age of 29, has forgotten his roots. This summer, he spent 10 days away from Philips attending industry conferences. When he returned, he walked into his first big meeting - with his hair bleached white. Two years ago, the older managers might have bristled at his fashion statement. This time, one marketing manager yelled, "Look! It's Billy Idol!" Fadell enjoyed the moment: "Let's put it this way. The guy who hired me is a gentlemanly Brit who reports to the head of a $55-billion business. And the last time he saw me, I had bleached-white hair."

"That's the kind of atmosphere Tony has created around here," says Dumont. "I've seen a lot of change in him. By the time he's 35, he'll have had so much experience organizing companies and managing people that he'll be one of the leaders of Silicon Valley."

You Call This Work?

The young programmers had been working 24 hours a day for weeks. And in just a few days, Sony Corp. was scheduled to launch The Station, its online entertainment network - already six months behind schedule. But the software had bugs. Mark Benerofe, 39, the senior executive in charge of the launch, worried that more delays would make Sony lose faith. He also worried that his programmers were about to crack.

The solution: He'd pull the next all-nighter. Benerofe asked his director of systems and operations, Mark Kortekaas, 29, for a little technical advice. Then he sent the entire crew home. He found a sleeping bag and an alarm clock, and spent the night monitoring the servers that had been crashing.

To his staff, virtually all in their twenties, Benerofe's all-nighter was proof that their boss wasn't one of those middle-aged, out-of-touch, empty suits who doesn't have a clue about what it takes to create great products on the Net. "I've had managers who had no idea what I did - and didn't even try to understand," Kortekaas says. "Mark is different. He gets it."