Leaders.com

Andrew Jarecki

Cofounder and CEO
MovieFone Inc.
New York, New York

The primary job of a Net-company leader is to show restraint. We have a principle at MovieFone: "Don't just do something -- stand there." In a world where deals are flying and opportunities abound, sometimes letting them all cook for a while is the best policy. All too often, I see people who are so eager to make deals and to take stands that they limit their options. For instance, before we agreed to the AOL acquisition earlier this year, people kept asking, "How come you're not making a deal with a big portal? If you announced one, your stock price would really pop."

If I had made such a deal, or if I had even made a statement about one, that would have ruined the deal with AOL. It wasn't until I sat with Bob Pittman, AOL's president and COO, at the premiere of "You've Got Mail" that the opportunity defined itself. We were at the premiere because both of our businesses were featured in the movie -- and because we care about the movie-going population. Then we had one of those mystical moments when both of us laughed at something, and I thought to myself, "This company has a smart guy running it. We could give that company the kind of Hollywood presence that it needs. There's a love connection here."

Besides imposing restraint, the other major challenge of leading a Net company is keeping the right people. If a company can apply the same talent to a problem for an entire year, it can make twice the progress of a company that has high turnover. That's particularly important in the world of the Internet, where entire teams of senior-level people have often been with a company for less than a year and where the average tenure is less than 18 months.

Andrew Jarecki (ajarecki@moviefone.com) founded MovieFone with three partners in 1988, at the age of 25. Today the ubiquitous 777-FILM (or 333-film) listings and ticketing business covers more than 17,000 movie screens in 42 cities and serves more than 150 million users a year. This year, AOL bought MovieFone for $388 million in stock.

Joseph Nacchio

Chairman and CEO
Qwest Communications International Inc.
Denver, Colorado

When you're trying to make a big play in a space that remains undefined -- as we're doing by laying the groundwork for convergence -- the leader's job is to make sure that all people in your organization understand where they can work autonomously and where they must collaborate. In this environment, good organizational-design principles become more important, not less important. Lots of people like to talk about culture -- I like to talk about governance. Who has the authority to spend money, to negotiate ventures, and to experiment with technology? What's your plan for creating shareholder value? Those processes may not be sexy, but they are important. And it's not only necessary to implement those processes; it's also vital to communicate them to everyone in the organization.

Good governance doesn't mean becoming a control freak. Rather, it means knowing what to structure and what to leave alone. For example, my network-design engineers are digging up the ground to lay 18,500 miles of fiber-optic cable. That project has very traditional construction, community, and environmental concerns, all of which require structured work. In contrast, the folks in our e-commerce group in Sunnyvale, California are working with young Silicon Valley companies, cooking up innovative new ideas. We don't want any tight controls on them. My job is recognizing what needs structure and what doesn't.

Joseph Nacchio (qwestnews@qwest.com) joined Qwest in early 1997. A multimedia-communications company, Qwest is now building a high-capacity Internet-based fiber-optic network to serve more than 130 cities in the United States and Mexico. Previously, in his 26 years at AT&T, Nacchio held a variety of top jobs and played a central role both in developing the brand and in running the consumer and business long-distance unit.

Jay Walker

Founder and vice chairman
Priceline.com
Stamford, Connecticut

Being a leader today requires constant conceptual reinvention. Market leadership typically means that you're the best at solving a certain type of problem. But Net businesses don't have the luxury of narrowly defining the task at hand. They have to envision a future in which customers are going to behave in new ways because new solutions have become available. The real challenge for any leader in this environment is to execute a solution to a problem. Last quarter, we were selling 750 airline tickets a day. Now we're selling more than 2,000 tickets a day. The systems that are handling this quarter's business won't be able to handle business for the next quarter.