BY CASSIMIR MEDFORD Network World, 4/24/00 Bobby Johnson Sr. spent 26 years on combat alert. He kept a leather bag packed, ready for a call that could come at any time, be it the middle of the night or during a Sunday barbecue. Bobby Jr. remembers his father grabbing that bag, patting him on the head and appointing him man of the house. "If anything happens to me, you take over the job of protecting this family. Do you understand?" Then off he'd go. Bobby Sr. was a member of an elite U.S. Army Special Forces unit. His discipline and commitment in the face of life-threatening circumstances made a lasting impression on his son. Today, the younger Johnson is more than three decades removed from those days when his father would issue him field commissions to take charge of the family unit. Just returned from his own "mission," a business trip to Japan with a pit stop in southern California, he is distracted and jetlagged. It comes with the territory, running gigabit switch vendor Foundry Networks, one of the hottest network vendors in the world, and an absolute darling of Wall Street. Based in San Jose, Foundry posted one of the highest first-day percentage gains in IPO history when its share price more than quintupled last September. Leading a company on the fast track through start-up and into its early growth phase can be stressful, particularly on days like today.
"When I get stressed, all I have to do is think back to my father's job. My job is a piece of cake in comparison; it's not life and death," says Johnson, who is Foundry's president and CEO.
 Well, maybe not literally. But Johnson, by his admission, runs Foundry as if it is do or die. He is a demanding perfectionist. "'Do it over until you get it right' is his mantra," says Ken Cheng, Foundry's vice president of marketing. "Bobby is as demanding as anybody in this industry." Johnson runs the company with a drill sergeant's attention to detail - the hours are long and the mood is sober. His in-your-face style can be taxing, but the rewards are uniquely attractive at Foundry, which is 60% employee-owned. "I demand a lot, but I lead by example. No one puts in more hours than I do," Johnson says. "My style, which I learned at Hewlett-Packard, is management by walking around. I meet with my staff informally all the time. But for all my demands, our decisions are made by the group." A student of military history and strategy, Johnson brings a lot of combat techniques to the ultracompetitive world of networking. "The goal of business is pleasing the customer but you have to get to the customer first, and military strategy is useful in gaining market leverage," he says. "We're a fast-moving company and we are trying to outmaneuver our competitors." That's an apt job description for the few dozen executives, most of them men, who call the shots in the roller coaster world of networking. The potential rewards are astronomical, but the personal costs are steep - many of them routinely work 70- to 80-hour weeks and spend at least 40% of their time on the road. They must keep the sometimes-competing interests of stockholders, employees, customers and a horde of hungry analysts in precarious balance when making key decisions.No fear, no failure"There isn't a heck of a lot of room for failure in this business," says Gordon Stitt, president and CEO of Extreme Networks, a Foundry competitor based in Santa Clara. "This environment is changing so fast that you need to nudge people and ask, 'Have you looked at different alternatives or did you use only the mindset you came here with?' I think that's the most important aspect of leadership for me." Prodding people to look at things differently is common among networking leaders. Many have lived through disruptive technological changes that have relegated whole segments of the networking industry to the technological junkyard. They cannot afford to become complacent, or apply old formulas to new problems.
For Stitt, that means creating an ever-widening field of options. In twice-weekly executive meetings and quarterly brainstorming sessions, Stitt prods his executive team with rapid-fire questions designed to uncover new ways of doing things.
"Everything is challenged at these meetings. That has become such a part of the company culture," Stitt says.
The meetings are casual in style but combative in content and procedure. For Stitt, this aggressiveness is part of a chain reaction triggered by Extreme's board of directors and investors who hold his feet to fire. They demand that he challenge convention, and Stitt in turn exhorts his lieutenants to think unconventionally.
 "The way you make your mark as a small company is to be disruptive - to bring out new technology and make business moves that cause people to take notice," Stitt says.
Taking it on the roadFor larger, established companies, particularly those in the staid telecommunications industry, the executive style is surprisingly informal. John Roth, president and CEO of Nortel Networks, keeps meetings to a minimum. He prefers e-mail. At any given point in the day he will have a number of discussion threads going among his executives, and these threads extend out on the road. That may be a good thing because Nortel executives, particularly Roth, travel three to four days per week. In fact, Nortel executives travel so much that they meet more often at customer sites than they do in the office. "We come in to the city we are traveling to one night early and hold our meetings then," Roth says.
The discussions at the customer site are usually short because many of the issues have been vetted out in e-mail. "Usually all we have left to talk about are the deltas - the changes that have occurred in the last little bit," Roth says. "The management team at Nortel has been together a long time, and because we keep our discussions ongoing, we can get into each others' heads - we understand how the others think."
Even when he convenes formal meetings, Roth doesn't necessarily lead them. He lets his executives champion different causes and issues, and he expects them to own the issue during the meeting and long after it has ended.
For crucial issues, Roth arranges cross-functional teams mixed with veterans "who have scars" and young warriors who bring unbridled enthusiasm. The teams have a surprising degree of autonomy, but must check in periodically.
"I use e-mail to monitor the progress of the team. I will let account executives, for instance, decide if they need me to visit a customer or make some important call, but generally I give them autonomy," Roth says.
Sticking to the planWhile Roth eschews formal meetings, they are the order of the day at Sycamore Networks, a 2-year-old optical systems company in Chelmsford, Mass. President and CEO Dan Smith, a networking veteran, meets every Monday at 7:30 a.m. with his top executives and quarterly with director-level executives. At the quarterly off-site meetings, the executives set the company's business plan. It is very detailed so that functional groups can take ownership appropriately. The goal is to decentralize day-to-day decision-making so Smith can focus on the most critical issues. The weekly meetings begin with a series of functional reports meant to keep everyone up to date. Executives can measure progress against the overall business plan and its milestones. "Our meetings tend to be formal and thorough because the stakes in our business are high. If a 2.5-gigabit circuit goes down, that's the equivalent of 32,000 phone calls that drop on the floor," Smith says. "On the enterprise side, you lose a link, no big deal. But our mistakes turn into Congressional hearings." The weekly meetings are relatively routine and noncombative. Smith gives his executives autonomy as long as it doesn't conflict with the overall company strategy. The goal is neither consensus nor debate - it's adherence to plan. "We are decentralized, so we expect the different functional groups to make decisions. But there are times when I've got to make a decision, and say, 'This is where we are going to go,' " Smith says.Brainstorming and dogmaAt many of the leading networking companies, the business plan can take on biblical proportions. It's more than a reference guide; it's dogma. Every move is measured against that plan. At switch vendor Redback Networks, executives hash out and adjust the plan at quarterly off-site meetings. At these meetings, executives are divided into five working groups of two people each and charged with envisioning what the company will look like in three years. Each group presents its view, after which the common elements of the five reports are kept and everything else is discarded. The common elements are crystallized into a strategy. Then the executives group into threes and come up with 12-month intermediate plans based on the goals of the three-year strategy. "It's completely democratic. We vote at every step along the way," says Dennis Barsema, president and CEO of Redback in Sunnyvale, Calif. "We decide on what takes priority. We use a brainstorming technique where we go around the table until everyone has exhausted his last thought."
Like Sycamore's Smith, Barsema gives his executives autonomy within the constraints of the business plan, but he avoids other formal processes. Too many can stifle creativity, he says.
"I leave it up to the functional groups to decide whether they want input from the senior staff," Barsema says. "They could ask for information or more resources. They could use the two-week meetings to seek input or they can do it at any other time. We try to be flexible."
Making decisionsIn the high-flying world of networking, infant companies are extremely vulnerable. They live on a short financial leash, and must make their mark quickly or die. Established companies must jealously guard their turf from intruders. It's a pressure-cooker existence that forces the executives at the top to summon extraordinary resources to deal with complex market demands. They institute processes that cut down the degree of difficulty in decision-making, but sometimes the processes break down. "At times, not everybody is behind an idea but we have to make a call," Extreme's Stitt says. "Ultimately, it's my call. The worst thing to do in this business is to not make a decision." Medford is a longtime networking writer.Related links
Foundry Management and R & D
Foundry Networks
Extreme Networks
Buy from a LAN specialist
Nortel Networks
Power: John Roth
John Roth - Biography.
Sycamore Networks
Redback Networks
CEO Powermeter
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