On a hard drive to create team spirit
By Chris Nuttall
Published: January 27 2008 16:54 | Last updated: January 27 2008 16:54
Bill Watkins, the straight-talking chief executive of Seagate Technology, is renowned for his speeches to employees, reminding them they are going to die soon.
The blunt message is meant to check their commitment to the world’s biggest maker of hard-disk storage drives. Mr Watkins, 55, believes it shakes out the employees who would rather spend the rest of their days doing something else.
“I say: ‘You’re gonna die, so is this what you want to do?’ I’m a great believer that people who are doing what they want and are excited about it make the best workers.”
His “pep talk” comes during an annual outing for 250 Seagate staff in the wilds of New Zealand. Those invited to Eco Seagate spend four days learning skills such as abseiling, white-water rafting and mountain bike riding before competing in a gruelling race as a member of a five-person “tribe”.
The participants are drawn from all levels and regions of the 55,000-strong company. They take part in team-building exercises where the strong help the weak. There are also inspirational talks – this year from the late Sir Edmund Hillary’s son, Peter, and a woman astronaut as well as from Mr Watkins himself.
“About half the time I lose a person on my team because life’s too short and I care more about them finding what they want from life than working for Seagate. Every year we lose people and I haven’t done Eco Seagate right if someone doesn’t quit.”
While some have questioned whether the $2m team-building exercise can make a difference in such a large company, Mr Watkins feels it has brought people together and improved the culture.
“It’s not about us holding hands and singing “Kumbaya”, it’s about being the best storage solution company in the world and accepting no less, and our culture’s got to help us do that. When I sit in a room with people, I can tell who’s been to Eco Seagate.”
Sitting in a room with Mr Watkins is to witness a fidget of fearsome proportions. He twists in his chair, rattles his spectacles on the desk, makes chopping, stirring and punching actions with his hands and punctuates his shoot-from-the-hip comments with staccato laughter.
He occupies a corner office in Seagate’s headquarters at the top of the aptly named Disc Drive in Scotts Valley, California. There are calming vistas of the surrounding forests and mountains from his windows and models of sailboats on display – quite a contrast to the threatening grenade that Tom Mitchell, an ex-Marine and former chief operating officer, kept on his desk to intimidate employees.
Mr Watkins says he and Stephen Luczo, his predecessor as chief executive, had worked at defusing a high-pressure culture where “people were able to run their kingdoms and there was a lot of screaming and yelling”.
He recalls how a senior executive once gave him advice on how to improve falling yields for Seagate’s complex hardware. “He said: ‘Here’s how you get yields up. You go on the floor, you bring everybody to the middle and you say: ‘If you don’t get your fucking yields up, I’m going to fire you all.’ And you come back the next day and you’re going to have good yields.’”
He took a different approach. “There should be no motivation by fear. Yields go up by methodical engineering improvements.”
More important, he says his experience as a former Army medic taught him that teamwork that includes emotional bonds is the biggest motivator – another justification for Eco Seagate.
“When I was in the army, one of the things that amazed me was that people didn’t want to die for their country or their god and they absolutely wouldn’t die for money. But they would put their life on the line day in and day out so as not to let down the platoon or their fellow soldier.”
Mr Watkins did not have any early ambitions to join the hard-drive business. The son of an itinerant oilman, he was born in Venezuela, before his family moved to Alberta and then Texas, where he grew up and graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in political science.
He moved out to Silicon Valley in 1979 “because of a girl. I spent one week and that didn’t work out.”
A new job with a microfilm start-up did work out. It was followed by one with a floppy-disk start-up, which went public, and subsequently a thin-film media start-up. He then joined Conner, a hard-drive company, which was taken over by Seagate in 1996. He became head of disk-drive operations in 1997, chief operating officer in 1998, president of the company in 2000 and chief executive in 2004.
With his down-to-earth manner and ultra-casual blue jeans dress code, he is something of a throwback to Al Shugart, who founded Seagate in 1979. Mr Shugart favoured Hawaiian shirts, smoked, worked without a secretary and made coffee for his co-workers.
But Seagate today is a much bigger company, shipping hard drives in the hundreds of millions. Its second quarter results this month showed that revenues had grown 14 per cent since last year to $3.4bn. Its global market share was 35 per cent, up from 21 per cent in 2000. Its nearest rival, Western Digital, also of the US, has a share in the low 20s.
Mr Watkins says his factories cannot make enough of the latest terabyte computer disk drives - holding 1,000GB of data - and his business is benefiting from the inclusion of hard drives in a growing number of consumer electronics products, such as digital video recorders.
His own beach house in nearby Santa Cruz is a model for future digital homes. He has six terabytes of storage holding movies, music, photos and security camera pictures that can be called up on screens all over the house.
The chief executive sees a strong future for digital storage, and for Seagate under the brand of leadership he has established, with a management team that has worked together for more than a decade.
“I grew up in the Valley and a lot of times passion and being excited about your job and being aggressive and wanting to drive for outstanding results translated as having to be a total asshole to everybody,” he says.
“I don’t believe that. You can be nice, you can be motivational, you can get emotional, but you don’t have to be disrespectful. You don’t have to be an asshole, and that’s what it’s all about.”
Drop the formalities: bringing a start-up culture to big business
Bill Watkins believes that large companies should create a culture similar to the one he enjoyed in the four Silicon Valley start-ups he worked at before joining Seagate.
”What I loved about start-ups is that there were no titles, you were just a bunch of guys and girls, trying to get it done, everybody does everything, you’re totally focused on one thing and you try to accomplish that,” he says.
”What happens then is that you get scale, you have to create organisational structure to handle that. Now you’re no longer Bill Watkins, you’re the VP of sales and marketing or whatever and you start limiting your roles. Worse case, you become very ’silo-istic’.
”So my answer to that was every time I got into a company that scaled very large, I would go back to a small company again where I felt comfortable.”
He broke this cycle at Conner Peripherals: ”I got talked out of [leaving] by a guy who said: ’Why don’t you try to make a big company work that way?’
”So it got me intrigued and I stayed . . and that’s where I thought culture comes in. It’s my way of bringing back that relationship - that we’re just people.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Comments