boston.internet.com/news/article.php/974251
By February 13, 2002 By Erin Joyce Case. Chambers. Bezos. Gates. Ellison. The names read like trailer copy for the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Actually, the bigger-than-life personalities attached to those surnames are the base of a new book by Mark Leibovich called "The New Imperialists: How Five Restless Kids Grew Up to Virtually Rule the World" (Prentice Hall Press). They are, of course, Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of Oracle, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com; John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems; Bill Gates, founder and chairman of Microsoft and Steve Case, founder of AOL and CEO (emeritus) of AOL Time-Warner. Leibovich, a reporter for The Washington Post, built on prior stories about them for the newspaper in order to produce a book with some of the deepest profiles available about these five "Titans of Tech." Among the discoveries: Gates' "enduring grief over the death of his boyhood best friend," glimpses of Case's "craving for stature" and Ellison's "persistent belief that he would never amount to anything." Leibovich, who chronicled the Internet boom from 1994 with the San Jose Mercury News before joining the Post in 1997, spent 18 months on the book and interviewed more than 400 people in order to reveal new details about what makes these men tick. AtNewYork.com chatted by phone with the award-winning Leibovich about the book, some lessons he picked up along the way, and the big tech picture. Q: What did they have in common? What differences stood out? And who did you like the most? The thing I think they have in common is that they're all control freaks. They all had some adversity growing up, but who among us doesn't? One thing they do have in common is they saw computing as a means of self-reinvention. Gates was this social cripple growing up. He had no friends, he was small for his age, he was precocious, and he found computing in his early adolescence and it became his social and intellectual lifeline. (He's) obviously thrown himself into it to a degree that's been remarkable. Case and Chambers were toiling around in middle management and obscurity, Case at Procter & Gamble and at Pizza Hut and Chambers at Wang and IBM. They sort of looked at other areas of computing and jumped in. That was their means of self-reinvention. Ellison was a college dropout. He had a proclivity for programming and then he went west. On who I liked the most? Probably Bezos. He seemed to have the right mix of not taking himself too seriously but taking his work very seriously. Ellison was a lot of fun. He was very thoughtful, but he wasn't always candid, he's a big time exaggerator. But he is someone who cannot be controlled by the PR apparatus of Oracle. These people are very competitive, very cutthroat. They're killers in business, and the qualities that make people killers in business and successes are often not the qualities I would look for in a friend or in a boss or someone I want to rely on. Q: Given the economy and the state of the tech industry, Internet cynics would question the book's sub-title. Can you talk about technology's role in the economy? A couple of things come to mind. As far as them ruling the world and ruling their industry, it would be virtually impossible for a citizen of the world to go an entire week without at least some indirect contact with an Oracle database, whether it's at an ATM machine or when using a credit card or an e-mail, or with an Internet connection going over some kind of Cisco product. If you use a PC, you're almost certainly going to be using Microsoft (products), given their market share numbers. AOL is everywhere now. And if you want to buy something online, Amazon is the first logical place to go. Having said that, what we now know is twofold. One, the hype and hysteria of the late 1990s was hype and hysteria. But in large part it was justified and I think the revolutionary parts of the Internet boom and the digital economy are still very much in place today, (such as) more people shopping online. The growth of the Internet, while it's slowed, is still going at an enormous rate. By the same proportion, the influence of these companies is growing despite the stock market, which has certainly calmed down, and an economy in recession. I think you could still make a case for the fact that technology is still driving the economy whether it's in a slowdown or in an uptick. Q: Do you still feel the same way about AOL-TW's merger as you did a year or two ago? If so, why? Absolutely. It's the king of all media. (The company) certainly had some missteps. But look at the cable lines it owns, the media brands. It's just stunning. Nothing comes close. Q: Let's linger on Case. He's supposed to be taking care of big picture stuff. Did he strike you as a big thinker? No. I would say he's less of a big thinker and more of a strategic thinker. He struck me as uniquely uncomfortable with the whole process of talking about himself. Of the five, he was by far the most reluctant to really engage in any big thinking beyond the cliches. Having said that, I've talked to enough people who use the phrase cunningly pragmatic (to describe him). He does have that really weird knack for three-dimensional thinking from a strategic sense, and (what companies) might be worth an acquisition. And if you look at AOL compared to almost all other companies, their major acquisitions in the last five years, whether it's been Compuserve, Netscape and Time Warner, they've arguably been master strokes. Q: What did your research on this book and your years covering technology tell you about how the business and tech press covered the Internet phenomenon? Obviously, the coverage was not skeptical enough. I was a tech reporter too. I did my share of non-skeptical stories that I would love to have back. It would be dishonest not to say that. One thing that was apparent to me as soon as I undertook this project was that there was plenty of room to deepen the record on these guys. There was plenty of room to expose their flaws, their demons, their relationships and their strengths. We were treated to this shorthand mythology of who these men and these companies were. I think you could talk about skepticism on a number of levels, such as the white 'male - ocracy' of the tech boom and the tech sector. It was apparent to everyone and to a stunning degree that really outstripped anything in corporate America. It was one of the most regressive demographic mixes in recent history as far as the sector goes. I think the media was very lazy in not pointing out things like poor working conditions at a place like Amazon.com, which had a terrible time with low wage employees in customer service centers and warehouses, where there was a union organizing effort. Amazon has a terrible reputation for treating its lower paid employees badly; same with Microsoft with their temporary workers, which we've heard a lot about. I think one of the misconceptions about the New Economy was that it is this level playing field and that anyone can succeed if you have a Web site and a little bit of money. Four of these five guys grew up in millionaire households -- if not literal millionaires, then certainly something that would be on a par with millionaires today. Gates was a trust fund kid. Case's dad was a very successful lawyer. Chambers' parents were doctors, Bezo's dad a very successful executive at Exxon. But I think the media, like Wall Street, like the auditors and like a lot of executive boards, was caught up in the hysteria, in the 'gee whiz' of new technology and the voyeurism of new wealth as anyone else. Q: Do you see any of it changing? I think it has to. I think the flaws in the system have been so blatantly exposed, both with the bubble bursting and the Enron (accounting scandal). It puts a fine point on the whole thing. Q: In some of the liner notes, Dave Kansas of the Wall Street Journal Online (formerly of TheStreet.com) calls the book a fuller portrait of the "un-elected corporate chieftains who bestride the global economy." Do you sense any awareness in Congress about ways to make sure unelected chieftains are not the ones who set our national policy? One thing that was striking to me was how pretty much all these guys started to view themselves as statesman. If you look at Steve Case's schedule, he's meeting with the president of Spain. He's briefing congressional leaders; he's spending time at the White House. John Chambers would drop the names of world leaders constantly and talk about two-hour meetings with George Bush or (President) Jiang Zemin of China in which he's preaching the Internet gospel to them. Ellison blew off a meeting with Tony Blair. I think it does speak to a level of influence that arguably exceeds that of any US Senator. If Microsoft decides to change its privacy policies for instance, or raise its prices, it probably will have more real world impact among users in Mauritius than any decision George W. Bush might make about it. Q: Can you talk about Gates? Of all the guys, I think Gates has been (profiled) the most. I was wondering what else could I say about the guy. But after two minutes I realized how much more. He was incredibly fascinating. He has a photographic memory. He's not a trained speed-reader but he speed reads. I asked him how many books he read on his vacation and he said 30. He writes up notes in the margins and sends them back to the author. Yes, he hates being touched. Q: What do you want people to take away from the book? Just a deeper understanding of what it takes to start a business and run a business and grow it at the scope and scale that they did. These are portraits of ambition. I don't want people to take it as a how-to guide. I wanted to give people a deeper look at the immersion it takes, the insanity it takes, the super humanity it takes, the ambition it takes, and the arrogance it takes to want to take over the world. That's something that they all in various ways have said with straight faces in the past few years. Steve Case has said repeatedly: I want AOL to be everywhere. Bezos wanted to get big fast. Gates wasn't selling software so much as he was, quote, 'putting a computer on every desktop.' This is ubiquity. And ubiquity is something that the networked world allowed for. I want people to come away from the book with a sense of what it takes and a deeper record of five men that arguably have come to define what is still one of the most perplexing and tumultuous years in our recent history. And that it's available on Amazon.com.
|
Legal Notices, Licensing, Reprints, Permissions, Privacy Policy.
Advertise | Newsletters | Shopping | E-mail Offers | Freelance Jobs 