Cisco's Quick Study

Of Iron Butts and Bonsai Trees

The quickest way to learn what makes Tom Kelly tick is to explore the three photographs that are taped to a cream-colored file cabinet behind his desk. Two of those photographs are of motorcycles. Kelly is an unabashed motorcycle enthusiast. Having tried out 24 different bikes, he is relieved to report that he's finally found a motorcycle that matches his personality: a Harley-Davidson Wide Glide. Thanks to some custom motor work, Kelly's Harley can now do 110 MPH in third gear. "What it does in fourth and fifth gear, I don't know," he says.

Kelly's deep, at times gruff, voice takes on a decidedly softer tone when he talks about his bikes. This is a man who loves motorcycles because of where they take him and how they make him feel. In fact, his whole face lights up as he describes an upcoming motorcycle "adventure" (he insists that he does not take vacations) that he's planning. The Saddle Sore 1000 requires that Kelly cover 1,000 miles in 24 hours. If he completes it, he'll qualify for an even more hard-core adventure called the Iron Butt rally. The rally -- sponsored by the Iron Butt Association (the "World's Toughest Motorcycle Riders," as its Web site proclaims) -- is an 11-day, 11,000-mile endurance ride across the United States. And just why does Kelly want to do this? Without a trace of bravado, he says, "Because not many people do."

But just when you've had enough talk of motorcycles and saddle sores, your eye is drawn to the third picture behind Kelly's desk: a soothing shot of a sprawling, verdant garden. In addition to his love of hogs, Kelly is an accomplished bonsai gardener. He takes on an almost Zen-like disposition when he mentions the 80 bonsai trees that he tends in the garden behind his house. "For the most part, a bonsai tree is not a small tree," he explains. "The art comes from creating the illusion of age and mass in a very unnatural setting. It's about achieving balance through asymmetry, not symmetry." Kelly has been exhibiting his trees for eight years. Last year, he displayed a few of them in a local show. Even though several of the trees broke most of the rules -- for example, by not meeting restrictions pertaining to how tall a tree should be before its first branch appears or how big a tree's pot should be -- Kelly still won several awards for the sheer elegance of his bonsais. "One thing that I love about tending bonsai trees is that they are living sculptures that keep changing," he says. "They require you to change how you see them, and your work is never done."

That is something of a surprising statement from a hard-charging executive who, in his professional life, manages to accomplish so much work -- and has done so at three of Silicon Valley's most prominent companies. As a senior manager of global course development at Sun Microsystems, Kelly waged a war against paper. He recalls the enormous manuals that used to accompany Sun's Solaris operating systems -- manuals that were so thick that they were delivered in a 5-foot-long "docubox." Kelly and his team launched the company's first Web site in order to distribute training documentation electronically -- a move that accelerated access to information, made it easier to revise documents quickly, and saved Sun millions of dollars in development and printing costs.

But that incremental success taught Kelly a more deep-seated lesson: the importance of figuring out how to link training and education right to the product-development process itself. "At that time, Sun did not believe that training should be an integral part of the product-development process," he says. "But I knew that if training was not engaged early on, then we would continually be in catch-up mode and therefore would never really be relevant or successful. People were always impressed when we would come out with training materials three months after a new product had been released. It didn't really make much sense to me at all."

Kelly eventually moved on to Oracle, where he became vice president of the education-products division and helped grow the business to one of the largest and most profitable vendor-training organizations in the world. His "success criteria" was to help centralize the company's global-education business and, more specifically, to make sure that training materials for a new product came out on the same day that the software was released. The only way to do that, he had learned from Sun, was to assign training people to the product teams from the beginning. "While I was at Oracle, the company's biggest product release was Oracle8," he says. "We released training for customers two months before the product came out. Back then, that was unheard of."