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 Wayne Jackson, chief executive of Sonatype, a software security firm. Early in his work life, he learned how to think big and to think less about the downside of new endeavors.
To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.
Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times
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Tell me about your college years.
When I was in high school, I was smart enough that I never really had to study. When I went to college, I figured it was going to be the same way — I’ll just go to class and listen and take a test and be fine. That worked for the first test, but the tests got a little harder. So I really struggled the first couple of years. For a while, I think I had the lowest G.P.A. possible without failing. Technology really saved me. I stumbled into a computer course and just fell in love, and then went from probation to dean’s list in a semester.
And after college?
I was teaching skiing, and I met a man, David Legere, who had bought a resort. I offered to teach his family to ski, and the friendship started there. I wound up working with him for five or six years, building network systems. He really made my career, and toward the end of his run in this resort conglomerate he built, he became obsessed with golf. We went from working together to playing golf together full time. We played every day for a couple of years, and I went from shooting in the 80s to shooting in the 60s.
When he eventually sold his 26 resorts to Marriott, he said: “You know what, Wayne? I think you should try the P.G.A. tour.” He didn’t think small about anything, so he paid me a salary to go play golf for a living, and I did it for about a year and a half until two things dawned on me. One was that I didn’t have the talent to be there. The other was that it was hard work, and I didn’t really enjoy it that much. It’s a lot harder and a lot more of a job than it looks.
What were some lessons you learned from that resort experience?
There are truly exceptional people in the world. We used to measure the efficiency of sales reps based on their close rate — how many tours they gave before they would get a sale. The average was one sale for every 10 tours. Every now and then you’d run into somebody who was one in three. So I try to seek out the truly extraordinary, because they exist. The difference they make in a business is so disproportionate to the average, it’s just astounding.
Other lessons from that time?
For the last couple of years I worked at the resort, I literally sat in David’s office. I became a fixture. He would interview people, conduct negotiations, fire people, strategize about deal-making and opportunities, and I got to hear all of it.
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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.comthat 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.
His more recent book, Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation, was also also published by Times Books (January 2014). To contact him, please click here.