What's New, What's Not

David Duffield

President, Chairman, and CEO
PeopleSoft Inc.
Pleasanton, California

I don't think people realize just how "new" the Internet is. We have yet to scratch the surface of what the Net makes possible for business. Until recently, the Net has involved an almost mindless convergence of information: You do a search using one of the popular search engines, and you still have to sift through 10,000 or 20,000 pieces of information. That kind of search is frustrating and time-consuming, and it just doesn't make sense as a business tool.

The critical next step for the Net involves increasing its relevance. That means giving people the information they need, when they need it, and eliminating the clutter that prevents people from making good decisions. That also means bringing together information from inside and outside of organizations -- from partners, service providers, and merchants -- to provide a console from which people can do their work. For business, that's the real promise of the Web.

The more the technology of the Web changes how we do business, the more we need to focus on people. Financial performance, growth, and wealth are all wonderful things, but it's people -- your employees, your customers, your business partners -- who make those things happen. When we founded PeopleSoft, we had three core principles: Make customers happy. Have fun. Be profitable. Having fun at PeopleSoft is mandatory. People who are having fun are more productive, they are nicer to the other people in the organization, they become evangelists for the company, and they deliver fantastic customer service.

The most important part of my job involves working with our employees and our customers. That's another thing that's new about the new economy: The job of leadership has changed. Leadership is not about having all the answers or about issuing directives. Leadership is about getting people to do things for you without your having to ask them to. That's a real challenge, and that's where those core principles take over.

Dave Duffield (dad@peoplesoft.com) is PeopleSoft's foremost "people person." A software-industry veteran, he started out at IBM and went on to launch two mainframe-application software companies: Integral Systems Inc. and Information Associates. His current company, PeopleSoft, is an enterprise resource-planning software firm with annual revenues of $5 billion. Duffield is serious about encouraging fun at work: He funded -- and has been known to play guitar with -- the PeopleSoft house band, the Raving Daves.

William F. Powers

Vice President
Research Ford Motor Co.
Dearborn, Michigan

I'm a scientist. I believe there are certain laws that hold anywhere in the world, at any time in history. They might get updated every 100 years or so -- as Einstein modified Newton's law of gravity -- but certainly they don't change every decade. I keep looking for the business equivalent of Newtonian laws, but I haven't found many. There's the law of supply and demand, there's the age-old battle of the unpredictable, low-cost competitor versus the dominant industry player, and that's about it. The point is, if you let yourself think that you've found natural laws in business, you'll end up kicking yourself in the head.

One thing that has held steady throughout my career -- from my days of working on the Apollo program to my days of developing cars at Ford -- is that in any successful innovation, there is one magic ingredient: a strong, motivating goal that everyone on a team can easily understand and embrace. With Apollo, we wanted to get to the moon by the end of the 1960s. At Ford, we wanted to develop a car for the 1980s -- a time when the company was down and out. That car, the Taurus, was the first high-volume, aerodynamically styled car that featured fuel economy. And it represented a big risk. But the goal behind it was special enough to overcome that hurdle: As we saw it, the Taurus program was not only going to help save the company -- it was going to establish a new path in automotive engineering.

In the early 1960s, Bill Powers helped to develop the Saturn Booster guidance system, and to conduct Apollo mission analyses, at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. He spent the next decade consulting for the space-shuttle program at the Johnson Space Center. He joined Ford Motor Co. in 1979.