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War Stories: The "physical" challenge of managing in the New Economy An inside view of business in Pittsburgh Thursday, May 25, 2000 By Dave Nelsen, CEO, CoManage
I must have missed this part of CEO 101. I don't recall hearing that I'd be bouncing around on a mountain bike in 40-degree weather, dodging snowflakes as I splash through a stream.
Ah, the trials and tribulations of being CEO for a high-tech start-up. Forget any dreams of a Brooks Brothers suit; think bicycle shorts from Dick's.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
When I started CoManage with Andy Fraley two years ago, I wanted this to be a different kind of company - one with a playful, exciting, high-energy atmosphere. Partly, this is what I want CoManage to be. Partly, this is what I think you have to do -- one of many things -- to attract the best and brightest. So we did everything we could to create an unusual environment.
And it works. Employees sign on by the dozen (88 people on board today, triple where we were a year ago.) We've built a team that we're tremendously proud of.
Which brought us, two years after starting the company, to the formal, public launch of our first product.
Founded in 1998, CoManage Corp. makes software systems for carriers offering telecommunications and data network services. CoManage's Integrated Service Manager enables service providers to simplify their service processses, while creating and managing telecom and data services finely tailored to customers' needs.
Which brings me to mountain biking in shorts on a cold, windy day.
Our director of marketing, Razi Imam, had this great idea to shoot a video that would introduce our product and do so in a really cool way (although not literally). It would tell people a lot about our corporate culture. We could use parts of this video, Razi said, at a major upcoming trade show in Atlanta, in June (therefore, the shorts), for a company party and for potential recruits visiting us for interviews.
It would be pretty splashy, with lots of whizzing graphics, rock music and quick, MTV-like pans and cuts.
And, of course, what better way to illustrate the fun, "extreme" corporate culture than to feature your CEO getting radical on his mountain bike?
I always knew the cool corporate culture idea would boil down to leading by example. And that's fine with me.
I love mountain biking in what little spare time I have. Most CEOs spend their days in endless, stodgy meetings, dealing with countless brushfires, trying to keep a steady hand on the tiller of the corporate ship. Few get to burn off steam with some extreme sports on company time. Besides, it was late April -- a great time to break out the bike and get warmed up for the coming summer.
So I don my shorts and a very light jacket and grab my bike to head for the woods behind our building in Wexford. Our creative communications manager, Mike Murphy, leads me out, toting a brand-new professional digital video camera.
I'm about to learn a truism that actors and other on-air professionals must know well: When being shot for a video, you have to do the same things the same way a lot of times.
Murph stands at the bottom of a reasonably steep hill. He directs me to bike to the top of the hill. Then he tells me to bike down the hill. I do so, with what I hope is a devil-may-care expression on my face.
"Great," Murph says. "Got it. Now do it again."
Murph moves a fraction of an inch and holds the camera in a virtually imperceptibly different way. So I bike back to the top of the hill.
Then back to the bottom of the hill. Murph makes another microscopic adjustment that makes a brain surgeon's movements look like aerobics. I bike back to the top of the hill.
Then ... you get the picture. After about five repetitions, the hill changes from reasonably steep to annoyingly steep. Still, I pedal back up each time, so that Murph doesn't catch me on tape walking up the hill. I yearn for a stodgy meeting, some brushfires to put out.
Sometime around roundtrip number eight or nine, snowflakes appear. Naturally, that's when Murph decides it would be fun to have me splash through a stream on the bike.
Fast-forward three weeks. The whole company, plus families, is gathered in the IMAX theater at the Carnegie Science Center. We've rented this place to celebrate the successful launch of our product and winning our first customer, AT&T Canada, one of the biggest telecommunications companies on the continent.
Everyone's in a festive mood, and we wait expectantly as the lights go down and the video starts -- pulsing music, rapid-fire cuts, and brief, split-second glimpses of the company CEO on his mountain bike, roaring down a hill, then rushing through a very wet stream. And it's a hit.
The team seems genuinely excited and energized by the event. We have accomplished the goal for today.
But here's the key observation: What's playful, exciting, and high-energy today, quickly becomes old hat. Building a dynamic corporate culture is not a project simply started and completed. You have to keep investing your time in this everyday, or very soon, you're not exceeding expectations.
Pursuing the new American dream (11/28/99)
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We bake fresh bread every morning (Gene, one of our quality assurance engineers, is now producing three flavors each day).
