Would you work for this man? Invest in his company? Consider him a role model? Read about a chief executive who boxes for pleasure and tears office doors off their hinges. Then tell us, have (other) American managers gone soft?
Listen up, all you nice, sensitive chief executives out there: Not everyone in the business world is like you.
In fact, there are a few company builders who are pretty much the exact opposite and who believe that you are a bunch of simpering, sissified CEOs likely to be eaten alive. Case in point? One Thomas Charlton, 36, CEO of systems-management software company Tidal Software, in Mountain View, Calif. Charlton's style: no mincing of words, no coddling of employees. Zero tolerance of anything less than all-out effort.
So tell us, is this a man that more American managers should emulate? Check out his story, register your opinions -- and then log on to Inc.com to read the verdict of your peers on whether Charlton is merely tough (in a good way) or tyrannical (in a not-so-good way), and whether the rest of us are just a bunch of softies.
The CEO. Not for Thomas Charlton the usual off-hour stress relievers like running or rounds of golf. A former Golden Gloves boxing semifinalist, Charlton spends his leisure time pounding punching bags -- and pummeling his personal boxing trainer's face. "I don't have too many people I train who want to go at it that hard," says David Morris, Charlton's coach. "He's pretty heavy-duty."
People who have worked closely with Charlton say he brings the same hypercompetitive drive to everything he does. "Here was a kid who absolutely just would give it his all," says Carlos Babini, a former boss, recalling that even as a sales representative Charlton had asked questions and scribbled down notes with burning intensity. In just two years with Babini's company, the numbers that Charlton put up got him promoted from rep to regional sales manager. "It was easy to motivate that guy," says Babini. "He always wanted to know where he stood compared to other people, so he could outperform them."
TAKE NO PRISONERS: "Burnout is a term I don't even recognize," scoffs Tidal Software CEO Thomas Charlton.
The intensity was bred into Charlton from the start. His father, Robert Charlton, was also a boxer -- he once fought on the same bill as Gene Tunney -- and he brought up Thomas and four siblings on a character-building regimen of Catholic schools, boxing lessons, and constant admonitions to strive for excellence. Oh, yes: and to never, ever give up a fight. Today Thomas still talks to the elder Charlton several times a week -- and still brags about how, at his father's urging, he trotted back onto his high school football field to finish a game in spite of a severely broken hand.
The boardroom coup. Charlton first learned about Tidal through Lacy Edwards, now cochairman of the company's board, whom he met through mutual friends in San Francisco. In 1999, Charlton was running the sales team for another Silicon Valley software maker. But Edwards convinced him that Tidal, with a new job-scheduling product and an influx of venture capital, had huge growth potential. Charlton, who liked the idea of building his own sales team from scratch, agreed to come on as vice-president of sales. Within four months he had landed the biggest sale in company history, a $325,000 deal with Microsoft. By the end of his first year, Tidal's sales had more than doubled, from $4 million to $9.5 million.
But Charlton was butting heads with just about everybody. He argued that the company's new logo was ugly. ("It looked like a toilet bowl.") He argued that Tidal's new software was underpriced and that the company's marketing efforts were a joke. ("We'd go to trade shows and throw the marketing materials in the garbage. Then we went to Kinko's and made our own.") Above all he argued that the company's culture was all wrong. It was too soft. Too complacent. Tidal, as he put it, had a "real loser's stench."
Charlton was ready to walk. First, though, he gave Edwards a detailed reorganization plan blasting the "disease of mediocrity" that had infected the company and proposing the "bold initiative" that he, Thomas Charlton, be named president and CEO. "To say that the management team at Tidal is dysfunctional is an understatement," he wrote. Charlton had the full backing of Edwards, who persuaded founder Gary Leight and subsequently other board members to give Charlton's plan a chance. On May 15, 2000, roughly half of the employees, including then-CEO Terry Ewing and the heads of marketing, customer support, IT, and consulting services, were summarily fired. Charlton took command of Tidal.
How he manages people. The legends of Charlton's early days at Tidal are numerous and, uh, colorful. There was the time he told Tidal's head of marketing he didn't know what the hell he was talking about. "God, he was pissed," remembers Charlton. "It was awesome." And the time he picked up a screwdriver and literally took the door off a sales support staffer's office, after that hapless individual ignored orders not to keep the door shut. And the time, lest anyone forget, that Charlton was so eager to get a certain customer's files from another exec's locked credenza that he grabbed a hammer and pried the lock open. "He just appeared to me to be crazy," says Patti Stephenson, who was Tidal's leading sales rep at the time. Not to mention an arrogant young know-it-all whom, she adds, she once told to "fuck off." (Charlton says Stephenson's bluntness won his respect.)
The first several weeks after the coup are also the stuff of Tidal lore. Charlton making calls and racing to meetings. Charlton conducting breakfast-through-dinner job interviews. Charlton walking around in his pajamas with a cup of coffee because he hadn't gone home. Charlton making a Do Not Disturb sign in Spanish so that Tidal's cleaning staff would stop trying to vacuum around him.
