Bootstrapping for Billions

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Philip Montrowe, a manager of development support, says that Wang serves as the master inquisitor in a business in which technology often seduces its creators, obscuring the market's needs in the process. "The road to being a $2-billion company is littered with software companies that built better mousetraps but couldn't persuade people that they needed to catch mice," Montrowe says.

Computer Associates is run by a triumvirate of programmers: Wang, president Sanjay Kumar, and Artzt. Under them are three more seasoned technicians, and together all six track every one of the company's 300 products. "I take products home myself on the weekend" for quality testing, says Wang. "I love technology -- and I know ours is better than other people's."

Wang's assured zeal filters down through the organization and creates a mentality more Parris Island than Long Island. "People feel good when you push them. People who push themselves, we take care of them," says Artzt.

At Computer Associates the bootstrapping ethic comes down mostly from the top, rather than through worker initiative. "In the Computer Associates' Bill of Rights, you have the right to make a mistake," says Sanjay Kumar, echoing a dictum of Wang's. "You don't have the right to cover your ass over that mistake." Yet mention of a bill of rights does not guarantee democracy. "We're really more of a benevolent dictatorship," Kumar concedes.

Wang's "benevolence" keeps the organization on edge. And his omniscience penetrates, it seems, to all corners of the company. Last year Wang heard from customers that the sales force was making excessive promises. Ever the hands-on leader, he herded a handful of salespeople into a conference room. "I told them, 'OK guys, 'fess up," Wang recalls. Soon a tense session turned into a mass confessional. "This is fundamental to how we operate," says Wang.

The Workforce: A willingness to be 'reinvented'
A bootstrapper of any size, Charles Wang believes, cannot succeed with workers who are just smart and hard charging. In the people who work for him, Wang prizes flexibility above all. In most big companies, that quality is lost as roles become narrowly defined, fiefdoms spring up, and the organization ossifies. "I don't want people whose livelihood depends on fulfilling a certain function," says Wang, verbally hammering away, as usual, in his sixth-floor office.

Flexibility is a virtue at Computer Associates because an essential part of the management's strategy is its dogged "reinvention" of the workforce. With his markets always shifting, Wang takes radical steps, such as routinely moving programmers to projects to which they bring little, if any, apparent knowledge.

For instance, Wang and Kumar reassigned John Kane, a programmer, to a crash project developing Unix-based software for midrange computers, even though Kane had earlier worked only with mainframes. And Kane had no prior experience with Unix, a computer language first made popular in scientific and technical circles. "It was a daunting task," Kane recalls with a wearied look. "It was less than a year from the time Computer Associates announced the concept to delivery of the product. Many of our vendors said it couldn't be done, to design a solution for a platform I had never worked on before."

But at Computer Associates, the management looks for character as much as for skill. "John knew nothing about Unix, but we knew he could take a problem, dissect it, find the solution -- and in the process learn Unix," says Kumar. He claims that most large software companies would have gone on a hiring binge and brought in a host of "Unix gurus off the street." Kumar adds that it's only later on that the companies learn they have created a system that robs those bright recruits of their creative edge. His label for that transformation: "Eagles in, turkeys out."

Nucor, like Computer Associates, looks for flexible minds to ensure a turkeyless workplace. The company does extensive psychological testing and routinely screens for possible drug use. Nucor insists on nonunion workforces and locates its plants in rural areas, where chairman Iverson believes a strong work ethic still prevails. Crawfordsville has no personnel department. Because the company knows what it's looking for -- "Teamwork, a positive attitude, aggressiveness, and a strong work ethic," says Larry Roos -- supervisors simply reach a consensus on potential hires. As Paul Rokosz, a supervisor in the cold mill, notes, "Ninety-nine percent of the people we hire have no steel-plant experience." But since 1988, adds Rokosz, the cold mill has lost just four employees, two for poor work performance and two for drug use.

Those whose psyches survive the hiring gantlet make good money and have a secure job. Nucor claims it has not had a layoff in 22 years. Short of a depression, it keeps its mills running, even at the risk of flooding the market. In return, workers must produce. Base pay for the typical production worker is about $10 an hour, but incentives can add another $15 on top of that. Such a bonus-laden pay scale pushes employees not just to work hard but also to maintain equipment to ensure it will not break down. The Crawfordsville plant, for instance, uses about .8 man-hours to produce a ton of steel -- about one-fifth what its larger competitors require.

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