Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Jack Dangermond, founder and president of Esri, a company that develops geographic information systems and is based in Redlands, Calif. “In your garden or in your company,” he says, “you inherently have responsibilities to take care of things.”

To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.

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Cultivating His Plants, and His Company

Bryant: Do you remember the first time you were somebody’s boss?

Dangermond: I was a teenager. My parents owned a plants nursery. We all grew up growing things, and planting things, and selling things, and I also managed landscape crews.

Bryant: So how old were you when you first started running a crew?

Dangermond: Sixteen.

Bryant: Was that hard for you?

Dangermond: No.  Growing up in a family business like that was really a happy time.  When my parents started it, they had little education and were immigrants from Holland. We all just worked together as a team in the nursery. It basically gave me all the lessons of business school when I was growing up — issues like cash flow, customer service and how to grow a business.

My parents had no money, but they had strong values that I’ve carried throughout my life — things like not going into debt, never borrowing money, never leveraging, paying your bills on time, keeping your agreements, selling customers the right things, treating employees right and growing things.

Bryant: So, at 16, you’re managing a crew.  I assume that these people were older than you.

Dangermond: Yes. We worked as a team. Part of my management style today is not being elitist, but rather being involved with the people doing the actual work. On the landscape crew I learned a lot from the other workers. We treated everybody equally, and we worked hard.  I also remember my father and I were once walking through the nursery, and one of the plants was wilting.  And he said, “Did you notice something?”

I looked down and realized the plant was wilting.  He said: “Don’t ever walk by a wilting plant. Get water on it right away.”  Which sort of stuck with me — you inherently have responsibilities to take care of things. In a nursery, if you don’t take care of those plants, your profits get lost real quickly.  You have to weed.  You have to water.  You have to nurture.  Also, you have to take care of your employees in such a way that they do the same.

Bryant: What other lessons from the nursery?

Dangermond: One of the guiding principles was to take care of your customers.  Don’t sell them something they don’t need. So we would simply listen to our customers, and work with them, show them some alternatives, sketch some things out and create a successful design for their yard.  And that kind of customer relationship was something that was genuine and also endeared our family to people. People loved going to that nursery, and having somebody actually care for them rather than just shove some product in their face.

Bryant: How do you apply all those lessons at Esri?

Dangermond: I have four priorities. The first one is to focus on what customers need and want. And, second, make my company a really great place to work.  So when we hire somebody, we have in mind finding a person who really fits so well that they realize their life’s work with us.

The third is to make sure we’re a very strong business that supports the first two priorities. In a public company, the first thing is taking care of stockholders, and then you keep the employees happy, and then, O.K., the customers. I was very lucky to start this company and keep it my own. And the fourth priority was added about 20 years ago when we started to work seriously with business partners. Today we have about 2,000 business partners all around the world.

Bryant: Can you talk about hiring?

Dangermond: Our H.R. department screens applicants to make sure they would fit in a certain job.  Then they have interviews with as many as 10 different people they would be working with if they got hired. We want to have peer review of the person so that we are sure that they really want to do the work we do. We’re very passionate about our work.  We want to make sure that they’re skillful, that their motives are right, that they can work on a team and that they’re nice.

Bryant: Can you give me more of a sense of how the conversation goes during an interview? What do you ask?

Dangermond: I’ll ask provocative questions that help me quickly get a sense of someone, like, “What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” In their professional life, the issues they bring up are often associated with challenges like laying people off. And so I’ve heard every story of a public company’s ups and downs where people were confronted with doing dirty work for others and not feeling good about it. I learn a lot about people’s values and their judgment about things based on how they act in those situations. I’m just trying to figure out who they are.

Bryant: What other questions do you ask?

Dangermond: “What do you like to do?” It’s an open-ended question. A lot of people start off saying. “I like to go skiing” or “I like to go on vacations.”  This is always nice, but I’m interested in people who have a passion for the work I want them to do.

When I got into college, I found what ultimately became my life’s work.  I couldn’t sleep at night I was so excited about it.  So I’m attracted to people who play at that level.  They actually want to play in their professional life. I’m fishing around for people who really want to do what I want them to do, without me having to tell them what to do. Then I’ve got a really good colleague.

I am hunting for people who would be a good colleague or a teammate, not someone who works for me.  I don’t have the skills, frankly, to be a top-down manager.  I prefer to find craftspeople I can be colleagues with and who take an area of responsibility and run with it.

I guess I’m describing my management philosophy. I like to listen to our customers and figure out solutions they need. And with employees, I like to hire responsible people who really see their life’s work meshing with the goals of our business.

Bryant: What else do you ask?

Dangermond: Writing is a key skill.  That’s usually another question I ask: “How good of a writer are you on a scale of 1 to 10?”  I also actually ask a lot of skill-related questions like, “How good of a software engineer are you?” or “How good are you at public presentations?”

These self-evaluations are very insightful. And once in a while you’ll hear somebody say, “I’m a 10.”  And then you have to judge, are they just saying that because of ego, or they want the job? Or do they really feel so strongly about their work that they’re willing to say, “I’m a 10?” Writing and engineering skills are of particular interest to me.

Bryant: The story that you told about your father and the wilting plant —  how do you get all of your employees today to care about, metaphorically, the wilting plant?

Dangermond: By showing my own values when there’s a wilting plant. When I see an unresolved issue, I jump in.  When I’m walking around our campus, if there’s some trash there, I pick it up.  There’s no elitism here and no detail’s too small. In the landscape crew, it was management by leadership.  It wasn’t management by, “O.K., you guys do this; I’m going to sit back and watch you.”  That style makes me irritated. The guys that I worked with in the landscape crews growing up still work for me.  They manage the landscape of our campus. And I’ll still work with them occasionally on Saturday, doing new projects.

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To read the complete interview, please click here.

Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times‘ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his new book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here.

 

 

 

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TABs: Adam Bryant, Corner Office column, SundayBusiness section, The New York Times, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, Times Books, Jack Dangermond, Ángel Franco, Esri