Management Lessons from Hernando Cortez

In 1519, Hernando Cortez began his conquest of Mexico. He “motivated” his soldiers to fight by burning all his ships, making retreat impossible.

Here’s the thing: It’s tough being a big boss. You can try ordering people around, but it’s hard to make hundreds or thousands of people do what you want. Sometimes they don’t pay attention or don’t understand. Sometimes they hear you clearly but decide to do something different anyway. Cortez’s management technique left no escape: fight or die.

Several years ago, our CEO Dan Warmenhoven applied this technique to force NetApp managers to hire more people outside of Sunnyvale. We had development centers in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, in Pittsburgh, in Bangalore India, but most of our employees were in Sunnyvale and their natural inclination was to hire more people in Sunnyvale. I remember the executive staff meeting where our VP of facilities was explaining why we needed to start construction on a new building in Sunnyvale: “It will take 18 to 24 months to complete construction, and at the rate we’re growing, we must start now to be ready.” Dan replied that he didn’t want to continue the same growth rate in Sunnyvale, but the head of facilities pointed out that Dan had been saying this for years, and the hiring rate in Sunnyvale was faster than ever. “We really need to start those buildings now.”

Dan has this little vein in his forehead that pops up when he is frustrated: it pulsed pinkly. “If we build more buildings, the hiring will get faster still. I don’t want to hear another proposal for buildings in Sunnyvale for at least 12 months. If managers hire more people in Sunnyvale, they’ll have to work standing in hallways.” Cortez management in action. We eventually did do more construction in Sunnyvale, years later, but not until the hiring trajectory had changed dramatically.

In many companies, the tightest control systems are for large capital purchases. Perhaps bosses can’t control what workers do on a day-to-day basis, but they can control what gets purchased.

This was a common tool in the transition from Mainframes to UNIX servers in the eighties and nineties. CIOs said, “It’s not that I don’t like mainframes, but they’re too expensive, and I won’t buy another one.” The boss didn’t need to specify details about how many UNIX systems to purchase or what applications to move over. One top-level decision forced the transition, and the IT staff handled the details on their own.

A popular use of Cortez management these days is for CIOs to announce that they aren’t going to build another data center: “I know the current data center is almost full and has no more power, but I’m not building another one. Figure it out.” This is the best way I know for a CIO to drive faster adoption of Server Virtualization.

Comments

[Devang Panchigar]

Dave,

Really liked this article. I have never left any comments on your blogs, but have been a regular reader of them for the past 6 months.

This article kind of reemphasizes the unused power and talent pools we have in our organization but because of poor management, vision or lack of direction, tend to deviate from focus.

Its was a do or die mission for Cortez.....because he saw victory with the number of people he had and had no other options but to win.

The Cortez Management lesson should be part of a new management books that would further explain the importance of utilization factor associated with productivity and accomplishments.

[Dave Davidson]

This style of management denies reality, destroys morale and provides senior leadership an easy opportunity to avoid their responsibilities.

Constricting infrastructure without clear alternatives is especially stupid. It leads to production failures that hit the bottom line quite quickly. Is this the reason why it's taking extraordinary amounts of time for NetApp to ship a converged product?

"Managment" by fear and fiat is not leadership.

Disgusting and sad.

[Devang Panchigar]

Unfortunately in business these days where everything is driven based on numbers, its a bit tough to achieve agendas and goals without pushing people to the limits.

This management technique allows a manager to achieving not only his management goals but also push the corporation to being more competitive and help flourish employee talent.

Partially i do agree with the previous comment, but in this day and age, its very important new management techniques should be implemented to do all the necessary to achieve business goals which are unfortunately set not for failure but for achievement.

[Jose T]

Hernan Cortes story reminds me to this famous quote about Columbus:

"If Columbus had turned back, no one would have blamed him. Of course, no one would have remembered him either."

Sometimes we must take brave decisions if we want to succeed. If we don't take them nobody will blame us but we won't do anything special either. Don't you agree ?

[Peter Mojica]

Dave, if I may; here is the last sentence re-worded for what I see happening today, well actually for awhile now;

“The current data center is full and we have no idea what is running where, and g-d forbid we make another provisioning error that takes down a major application; nonetheless we can't afford more real-estate, wires, power, racks, servers, or disk when what we have is so poorly managed; as a matter-a-fact, those management tools that we never implemented correctly was supposed to replace at least 5 of you; anyway we over extended the environment and mixed to many vendor devices together, not to mention protocols; and now we have even more management tools, that all of you are still learning and I still don't have a clear picture of the overall environment, or what it even costs; even worse is I don't see a clear path to solving our problem and I bet we don't even know what half the problem even is; well being brutally honest we got ourselves into this mess and the well has run dry we can't just buy more disk and servers for every new application and our SAN is a mess. We need to get this right or we will all be replaced, including me. Go figure it out!.”

--->> NOW, this is the best way I know for a CIO to drive faster adoption of Server Virtualization.

[Shibin Zhang]

This lesson can be applied to people's daily life. Sometimes, I really want to escape from a difficult situation, but I found I didn't have a ship (maybe someone burn it for me :)).