NetApp - On The Edge

Four Great Places to Work!

So, at the start of the Board of Trustees meeting for The Anita Borg Institute at 8AM today we went around the table and introduced ourselves. Poor planning on my part was to sit next to board chair Bill Wulf who turned to me and asked me to go first.

I quipped "Two days ago I was the CTO of NetApp, and yesterday I became the CTO of the Number 1 Great Place to Work in the US."

Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Research at Google, sitting next to me said "Alan Eustace, Google. For the past two years we were the number 1 best place to work and now we're number 4, but we're not bitter."

Kathy Hill, Senior Vice President of Access Networking and Services, two people down introduced herself as "Kathy Hill, from Cisco where we are the sixth best place to work - but we have aspirations."

By this point we were laughing, in a very good natured way, and Rick Rashid, Senior Vice President heading research at Microsoft joined in the repartee.

No one thing makes a company a great place to work, unless you say it's the people that work there. The energy and passion that the member company board of trustees bring to The Anita Borg Institute to make a difference in providing career development opportunities, programs for students and recent graduates, and partnerships to improve their place to work is one reason why these companies are singled out for recognition and are successful in their business.

Congratulations to all the winners and people making a difference!

P.S. Four or more Great Places to Work perhaps? I want to congratulate Anita Borg Institute Partners Genentech, Intuit, and Juniper Networks also!

Baseball

Dave Hitz has written an autobiographical book primarily focusing on what prepared him to be a co-founder of NetApp and the challenges and successes NetApp had through its formative years.

I started at NetApp in January 1994, so I read a partial draft and the final copy from an inside viewpoint. I would observe that Dave has an engaging style that makes what is essentially a book on business readable.

It is with mixed feelings (which I didn't share with Dave) to see my name in close proximity to the word "chaotic" (and the single word separating "Brian" from "chaotic" is "is"). Dave does explain the Dungeons and Dragons reference (which was helpful to me) in the book. Because you see, this is a good thing.

I found a recent article in the NY Times about baseball player Rickey Henderson interesting and comforting. Realize I'm neither much into spectator sports nor sports analogies for business situations, but I am fascinated by nuanced strategy and balance of power. The book that really got me interested very late in life in baseball was George Will's extraordinarily detailed and well written book Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball. In many ways Rickey Henderson's style of playing is a strong expression of the skills Will identifies as needed to be a great player.

Tony La Russa labelled Henderson "dangerous" in a baseball sense. He had a strong hitting record and if he could get on base he could often flip that single into a move to second base and a clear sight to home. The opposing team knowing this had to adapt to Henderson - putting him in charge of the game dynamics everytime he stepped up to the plate.

The NY Times article went on "He [Henderson] also understood the value of getting on base and creating chaos."

I'll take comraderie and comfort where I find it. Maybe chaos is not a bad thing?

That said, I think maybe I better straighten up my office. My office mate John Edwards would probably appreciate it.

People

Carol Bartz was announced as the new CEO of Yahoo! yesterday. (Though not precisely true) I like to think of her as a NetApp alumnus because she is on our board, and I wanted to congratulate her.

The most interesting coverage I saw was a repost of an article from 1992 written one month after Carol became CEO of Autodesk outlining the challenges in front of her on-line in the Wall Street Journal. That article talks about the problems at Autodesk at the time, while contemporary coverage speaks to the success of Autodesk and Carol's role in driving that success.

Coming on the heels of my posting Monday talking of forces driving innovation, I felt the need to step back and consider that all my experience points to the tremendous impact people - individuals - have on the success of a company. Time and again I'm struck by this.

One book that talks about the impact people have in business, that I read long ago that I only have a general impression of now, is Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine. My memory of the book was of the carefully drawn descriptions of the people deeply involved at Data General, and their impact on a project to produce the next generation super mini-computer.

I was unable to refresh my memory quickly as there was no Kindle version of the book available for download, only old media support.

Dave Hitz has penned a book on on his career and the founding and growth of NetApp entitled How to Castrate a Bull (I believe a colleague of mine may have suggested the subtitle Unexpected Lessons on Risk, Growth, and Success in Business to avoid the book being filed in the wrong section of a library). Once again, we have a book that strikes me in describing how people were so fundamentally a part of the outcome that is NetApp today.

That book is available for download to my Kindle. It's a good read.

Innovation

I like thinking tools. Ways to consider a problem systematically that drive you to ask more questions and look at a problem in a broader way than you might off the top of your head. For example, functional specifications for a product. At many companies I've been at there has been a template for a functional specification with a section heading and a brief description of the expected content for that section. There is no one perfect template (so I don't spend a lot of time arguing about templates much) - it is simply a tool to help you think in an organized way about a particular task.

Innovation is an interesting puzzle. How should one think about it systematically?

Steve Kleiman is our Chief Scientist, and before that was the CTO here at NetApp (the role I am now in). I recruited Steve into NetApp not long after I came here because he is one very bright and effective engineer. Steve approaches problems systematically in a way that can engage other engineers to generate solutions.

Steve proposed a model, or thinking tool, for drivers of innovation which he calls The Three C's:

• Customers
  
• Technology Curves
  
• Competition
  

Steve feels that innovation, like many engineering challenges, can be approached systematically.

First and foremost is customers and their problems. I think in many ways this drove the fundamental conception of NetApp as a company that produces storage appliances. Before NetApp showed up storage deployment was considered fundamentally hard: hard to set up, hard to provision, hard to administer. NetApp tackled the complexity problem by simplifying the approach. This may seem trite, but NetApp decided to ship a product that was always configured with RAID protection. In 1993 protecting against disk failures was an option for other vendor's products, something that you enabled explicitly. Dave, and James, and Mike said "Why would anyone not protect their data, and in the most cost effective way possible?" RAID was enabled on all NetApp systems by default, simplifying storage setup and provisioning. We never run benchmarks without protection enabled, today running our benchmarking (internally and for external publication) with RAID DP on by default.

For an engineer, Technology Curves is very interesting. Kleiman fundamentally believes that major shifts in technology drive innovation. What I find most amusing about this 'C' is that it has the silent "Technology" in front. Disruption can occur with the introduction of an entirely new technology, or a massive shift in the economics and feasibility for deployment of an existing technology. Flash memory is a recent example of the latter - while not new, the prices (driven by volume consumer electronics, not by the traditional storage industry) have shifted so dramatically as to reestablish cost curves for deploying storage at a particular price/performance point. These disruptions present opportunities for rethinking existing customer problems in new and innovative ways.

The final driver is competition. This doesn't need a lot of analysis and in my mind follows the broader drivers of Customers and Technology Curves.

We have a tendency at NetApp to use the term Technology Trend now rather than Technology Curve, but I like the simplicity of the Three C's Model - I need that C.

The goal of the model is not to limit one's thinking to make you approach innovation systematically. We could engage in a lively debate on whether this is the right model, or should there be a fourth driver for innovation, or argue about the ordering. I'll leave that meta-discussion to others right now, more fun is actually driving innovation.