"1-2-3" Creator Mitch Kapor

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INC.: But let's oversimplify things for a moment.If running a company of almost any size is really just a matter of getting a group of people to work together efficiently, creatively, then why should it really matter whether you're talking about a start-up or something larger?

KAPOR: Because as organizations grow larger, what one has to do to get them to work together changes. And what I found was that my skills are not very evenly distributed across that spectrum. At Lotus, I was really good at working one-to-one with people -- or maybe two- or three-to-one -- because it had an intimacy and directness of conversation. And I also tended to be really good at giving speeches to a hundred or a thousand people at a staff meeting. But in the intermediate stage, where you're attempting to run an organization that consists of a mass of people, with an internal structure in which authority is delegated, where other people are really carrying the ball and where one is sort of leading by coordinating -- well, I'm just not very good at that. I don't have the patience for it. I'm too proactive to just let other people work stuff out for themselves and just give a little nudge here and a little shove there.

INC.: Was there some incident that best illustrates that frustration?

KAPOR: I'm not sure there was an incident so much as something that really got to me several times, and that is the effect of organizational inertia. What happens is that a bunch of people are hired over a period of time in some part of the company that is supposed to be doing something to support the company, and you discover through the management process that things aren't going as expected. Because it's been delegated to somebody else, it's not under your direct control, and now you find out it's been screwed up. And every time that happens, you get a sinking feeling. And you think to yourself, "I could do it better."

Maybe somebody didn't hire the right people, or didn't use the resources effectively, or didn't set the agenda properly. Whichever -- the result was that you had a big mess. And it was almost an unfixable mess -- it would take more time to fix it than the elapsed time during which the damage occurred. First you'd have to undo the damage and then start over again. And that means you'd probably have to realign the personnel properly and spend a lot of time in meetings explaining what was going on and making sure that the process was being fair to people. You had to take the time to try to reduce the pain level, and rebuild the team, and let the new team get up to speed. And to put it bluntly, I hated that.

INC.: But you did it.

KAPOR: Not very well. Other people did it much better. I'm too much of a perfectionist -- and in a big company, that's not a great thing to be.

INC.: Is it great in a small one?

KAPOR: In a small one, if you pick your spots carefully, you can be a perfectionist.

INC.: Do you think it's possible to somehow build a company, a large company, that avoids the frustrations that you encountered as a CEO?

KAPOR: Let's put it this way: I'm not convinced that it can't be done. It's in the large category of open questions, like "Is there life after death?" But I do know that if it could be done, it would be new and radically different. Certainly, it would be a harder thing to do than starting a company. I mean, before Lotus there was Apple and before Apple there was Intel -- all high-growth, good-culture, successful start-ups. But how many really, really first-rate, highly innovative large companies are there? You know, there really aren't any. There aren't even any role models for what I'm talking about.

INC.: Presumably, you saw your own company lose a bit of its innovative edge. What did you think as you saw that happening?

KAPOR: Well, the thing that I wound up spending a lot of time thinking about was the split between the senior-management people on one hand and the technical people on the other. And emotionally, I would line up with the technical people, not the senior managers, even though I knew, intellectually, that I couldn't do that. I mean, we had 2 million users and a huge investment in our current technology. And just because somebody has come up with a better wizzy in the lab doesn't mean that you can go out and try to get all 2 million people to use the wizzy. It's nuts -- and we learned that lesson.

But the technical people, at some fundamental level, don't understand that because they're thinking only in terms of how they can make the product better -- not in terms of the overall system of customers and the costs of training and future plans for capital investment. And so you get differences of opinion -- differences that are not simple to sort out. And the technical people -- or some of them, anyway -- say, "Management has no room for good ideas anymore. I'll go off and start my own company." And management goes around saying, "Those technical people are such babies, they are so unrealistic." That kind of debate is very senseless, and I think at Lotus there was an absolute minimum of it. Yet the dynamic was still there, because it is fundamental to almost any company -- and not a simple thing to sort out.

INC.: It sounds, in part, as if you are referring to Lotus's slow start with its Symphony program, which never quite reached the success of 1-2-3.

KAPOR: I'd say about Symphony that I had a very different reaction to it as an executive than as a designer. As an executive, I could be much happier with what happened with Symphony: the big expectation followed by the big disappointment, then a year of repositioning the product and bringing it back to the point where we were able to come out with a second release that had its place and grossed some $60 million. As an executive, that was something to be proud of -- absolutely. As a designer, however, I had a different reaction, which was to focus on flaws in the program that I wished weren't there. And it was that tension that became a fundamental source of ambivalence and frustration for me.

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