Leaders.com

Forget about today's problems: You've got to focus constantly on the next generation of problems. How do you do that? You have to believe. In the Internet world, people like to talk, but very few truly believe. If, for example, you really believe that you're going to double your business every year, then you've got to hire ahead of the curve. That's why, last year, when we were doing maybe $400,000 worth of business each week, we recruited Rick Braddock, the former president of Citicorp and a top-tier leader. Today we're doing 10 times as much business as we were then. Hiring Rick for a $20 million business may be overkill right now -- but we're going to need him to run a business that will be doing $500 million or $1 billion a year. If you wait until you're actually doing that much business to hire the necessary talent, then you'll be too late.

Jay Walker (j.walker@priceline.com) created "buyer-driven commerce." Through priceline.com's Web service, customers can name an agreed-on price in advance for tickets on airlines, for cars -- even for mortgages and hotel rooms. Walker is also chairman of Walker Digital Corp., a high-tech marketing lab that developed priceline.com's systems and that has received more than 20 related patents.

Mark Cuban

President and Cofounder
broadcast.com Inc.
Dallas, Texas

A leader's job is to recognize when a company is headed in the wrong direction and to get it back on the right track. That means understanding what the tear-down points in your business are -- and ripping into them before someone else does. When we started, we thought advertising would be the core of our business. We were wrong. We thought that the way to define our network was to distribute servers all over the country. We were wrong. We've had to recalibrate again and again -- and we'll have to keep doing it in the future. In the Net space, you have to chase disruption points every day.

Another part of my job as a leader is to be clear that winning in this world is all about selling. We're standing on the edge of a huge, expanding market; you've got to have the bodies to go out there and to reach customers first. That means scaling up your sales force. A few months ago, we created broadcast.com University, which provides our new folks with two weeks of intensive training. If you want to control your destiny, you have to start by asking, "What gets us to cash the fastest, and can we scale that?"

Mark Cuban and his business partner, Todd Wagner, started broadcast.com about four years ago, in a spare bedroom in Cuban's Dallas apartment. Yahoo! recently bought the company for $5.7 billion.

Christina Jones

Founder, President, and COO
PcOrder.com
Austin, Texas

We have a big goal for the future: we want every single computer vendor to be using pcOrder technology to sell computers. To get there, we have to respond very quickly to questions and challenges at all levels of the business. As a leader, the way I do that is by getting very extreme about handling "stuck" points -- and then moving on.

Take recruiting, for example: Like a lot of companies in the high-tech world, we find that recruiting can be a huge bottleneck. So I decided to move some of our best marketers into recruiting. Because we were already very good at college recruiting, we launched a campaign to "own" the city of Austin. We blitzed the city with paid advertisements, events, and direct mail. We created a "turn in your friend" campaign and rewarded employees with a $5,000 bonus and a chance to win a Porsche if we hired their friend. Not only did we end up adding more than 30 key people, but we also learned some great things about hiring: We now know how to turn an entire city into a recruiting pool.

Christina Jones (christy.jones@pcorder.com) launched pcOrder.com in June 1996 as a spin-off of Trilogy software Inc. Today companies such as Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM use pcOrder software and databases to buy and sell computer systems over the Net.