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 Marcus Ryu, the C.E.O. of Guidewire Software, a maker of software for the insurance industry.
To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.
Photo credit: Librado Romero/The New York Times
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Bryant: Tell me about the culture you’re trying to foster.
Ryu: A little background about our origins as a company will help. Guidewire was founded in 2001, right after the tech crash and right after 9/11. It was a very contrarian time to start a company, so one of our earliest principles was that we have to embrace adversity. We have to embrace difficulty. We won’t be rewarded just for being insightful. We’re going to be rewarded for solving a difficult problem. And if it’s not difficult, it means that we’re not actually doing the right thing.
We wanted to create an enduring business with a very strong set of values. We chose integrity, rationality and collegiality. Integrity is: simply tell the truth. There’s such a temptation to exaggerate, because if you have enough time and wishful thinking, you can build anything. So we said first and foremost, tell the simple truth. There’s never any ambiguity. We’re either going to win honestly or we’re going to not win at all, and that’s the way it’s going to be.
No. 2 is rationality, which is to make decisions based on facts and logic. That seems so simple, and yet organizations really struggle to be rational. So every decision, to the maximum degree possible, will be informed by objective criteria, by facts and by logic. And that means that titles don’t matter, and gut instinct doesn’t matter. Even experience is of very limited value. The facts have to speak. That translates into one of our mantras, which is “no wishful thinking.”
The final one is collegiality, which means minimum hierarchy. We’re going to create a community of equal professionals. There are some kinds of businesses where it’s hard to do that, because you have to have people who do relatively low-level tasks and then people who just manage them. The beauty of the kind of software we build is that you can actually build a very equal and collegial community of professionals.
Bryant: How did you come up with those values?
Ryu: There were six founders, which is pretty large for a founding group. We spent the first week just pondering these longer-term questions. We said we have to consecrate our principles in a document that we will refer to over and over. This will be our DNA and every new person who joins the company will read the document. We put a great deal of thought into this, thinking of it almost like a constitution that will guide our future actions.
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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 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. To contact him, please click here.