Leaders.com

Alan Naumann

President and CEO
Calico Technologies Inc.
San Jose, California

There's no getting around it: We have to make decisions faster because our customers are making decisions faster, and the industry is changing faster than ever before. That means that, as an organization, we have to work with less top-down control. The only way to do that, without falling to pieces, is to build a company that's made up 100% of leaders. My number-one priority is to give everybody in the organization the tools and the confidence to make decisions faster. We've created a three-day course -- "Eight Calico Leadership Practices" -- that everyone takes. These eight practices are deep behavioral principles that we integrate into performance reviews and use as a common vocabulary throughout the company. We've also instituted a lot of tactical mechanisms to make better decisions faster. For example, if anyone in the company has waited more than a week for an important decision to be made, that person has an open invitation to come find me, and I'll make the decision -- on the spot. It turns out that I rarely have to "unstick" a situation, because people all over the organization have adopted this policy within their teams.

Despite all of our focus on speed, we consciously slow down for one thing: hiring people. That's tough to do when you're growing as fast as we are, but it's the one aspect of business today in which the cost of mistakes is greater than the advantage of acting in real time. Within the hiring process, we do spend a good deal of time defining a job's requirements and checking an applicant's references. That way, we can build a better partnership when an employee does come on board.

Alan Naumann has had 16 years of experience in managing high-tech businesses. Before joining Calico, he was vice president and general manager at Cadence Design Systems. Calico's e-commerce software and services power such sites as Cisco Systems, Compaq Computers, Dell Computer, and Sun Microsystems.

Ruthann Quindlen

Partner
IVP (Institutional Venture Partners)
Menlo Park, California

Every leader today has to unlearn one lesson that was drilled into each one of them: You gather data so that you can make considered decisions. You can't do that on Internet time. Leaders have to develop the chops for real-time decision making. I learned that from Bill Gates. He always said to me, "I don't care if a manager makes five serious mistakes. At least that person is making decisions and learning from them." If your instinct is to wait, ponder, and perfect, then you're dead.

In practice, that means that leaders have to hit the undo key without flinching. Now that product cycles are being compressed from 18 months to 6 months or even 3 months, you have to be willing to try something and see if it works -- and, if it doesn't work, to change it fast.

The best leaders carry a mental map of the industry, of opportunities, and of discontinuities -- and they check that map constantly. Take Mpath, a company that we financed, that builds technology to support robust Web-based communities. Early on, Paul Mattuecci, Mpath's CEO, had directed all of the company's efforts into building a subscription model for Mpath's services. At some point, warning flags went up on his mental map, telling him that this model would never make the company big. So he quickly moved the whole organization to an advertising-based model.

Ruthann Quindlen (rquindlen@ivp.com) has worked on the leading edge of the software industry since the late 1970s. Previously, Quindlen was a managing director at Alex Brown & Sons, where she helped such firms as Microsoft and AOL go public. Her forthcoming book, "Confessions of a Venture Capitalist," will be published by Warner books.

Sky Dayton

Founder and Chairman
EarthLink Network Inc.
Pasadena, California

Leaders in the Internet arena can choose one of two frequencies: On the one hand, there's so much noise around the Net that it's tempting to run with the elite players and to follow their offers of deals, funds, and synergies. But you could easily end up with a bunch of decisions and partnerships that don't necessarily make sense.

On the other hand, you can take your deepest conviction, create a clear picture of the future, and then move forward on that vision -- even if it seems to be taking you into a desert. That's what my original effort at segmenting the Internet felt like. We decided to focus on the access business -- not to build networks, not to create browsers, not to develop content. People thought we were nuts. But we believed in our vision so wholeheartedly that we rejected all other moves and deals that didn't come from that initial hunger. More important, we were able to compel others to join us.

Sky Dayton (sky@earthlink.net) founded Earthlink in 1994 to provide direct and inexpensive connections to the Net "in every home and business." Since creating his Total-Access Internet software, Dayton has grown his company from 2 employees to 2,000 employees, has built it into the fourth-largest Internet-access provider in the United States, and has taken it public in a $2 billion market capitalization.