Leadership in a Technological World Lecture Series

Dave Hitz '86, Founder and Executive Vice President of NetApp gave the second talk in this year's "Leadership in a Technological World" lecture series on December 2nd in the Friend Center Convocation Room.

In his talk titled "How to Engineer Your Way From the Lab to the Boardroom," Dave shareed stories and lessons on his journey from Princeton CS student to the boardroom of a major technology company. Many of these lessons are highlighted in his forthcoming book, titled "How to Castrate a Bull: Unexpected Lessons on Risk, Growth, and Success in Business."

Dave Hitz co-founded NetApp in 1992 with James Lau and Michael Malcolm. He served as a programmer, marketing evangelist, technical architect, and vice president of engineering. Currently, he focuses on future strategy and setting the direction for the company. Dave graduated from Princeton in 1986 with a BSE in computer science.

Mark Jung '82, Chairman of Songbird gave the first talk in this year's "Leadership in a Technological World" lecture series November 24th in the Friend Center Convocation Room.

Mark's talk, titled "The Entrepreneurial Career," provided members of the Princeton community with a sense of what to expect from the decision to pursue an entrepreneurial career, focusing on personal growth & development, challenge, and reward.

Mark has spent the last 20 years as a successful internet media CEO and entrepreneur. Most recently, Mark was the CEO at Vudu, a leading provider of digital home entertainment and interactive television services. Prior to Vudu, Mark was the Chief Operating Officer of Fox Interactive Media (FIM) where he was responsible for all of its internet properties including MySpace, IGN Entertainment, FoxSports.com, AmericanIdol.com, and Scout Media. Prior to Fox Interactive Media, Mark was the co-founder and CEO of IGN Entertainment, a leading Internet media and services company for videogaming and other forms of digital entertainment that he took public in 2000 and then private in 2003. Mark led IGN's sale to NewsCorp, the parent company of Fox Interactive Media in 2005. Mark holds an MBA from Stanford Business School and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University.

He is currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Songbird (POTI), and is a member of the Board of Directors of 3PAR. He is also a member of the Management Board of the Stanford Graduate School of Business as well as a member of the Board of Governors of the San Francisco Symphony.

Teamwork, trust and collaboration are key to helping a startup grow in a constantly changing marketplace, Advertising.com chief executive Lynda Clarizio '82 said at a Feb. 7 talk.

"It's not about individual contribution," Clarizio said. "You can't make anything successful unless you have teamwork."

In her talk, "Advancing a Startup: Becoming a Big Business," Clarizio shared insights from her experiences at Advertising.com since joining the company as CEO in 2006 with a mandate to grow the organization.

"How do you achieve great results?" she asked. "You have to make sure everyone understands how their work contributes to the success of the business."

The talk was part of the "Leadership in a Technological World" lecture series, sponsored by Princeton's Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education. The annual series is underwritten by the William Pierson Field Lectureship fund.

Prior to joining the Baltimore-based Advertising.com, Clarizio spent seven years at AOL, holding a variety of senior positions, including executive vice president of AOL's audience business and senior vice president for corporate strategic and financial planning. Before joining AOL, she was a partner in the Washington, D.C.-based law firm of Arnold & Porter. She is on the board of Human Rights First and the Princeton University Women in Leadership Steering Committee.

Advertisting.com is the largest online display advertising marketplace in the United States and Europe, supplying more than 2.5 billion ad impressions from 1,000 advertisers to some 8,000 websites every day. The technology at the core of the company's success is a complicated computer system, called Adlearn, which optimizes ad placement to produce the advertisers' desired results.

Designing computer systems to keep pace with the ever-changing Internet is a never-ending task, said Clarizio, noting that Advertising.com, Google and eBay have all had to overcome challenges during growth when existing systems couldn't handle the additional demand.

"Scale is really, really important," she said, emphasizing that start-ups should start preparing early on for a time when they'll be running billions of transactions every day. "It's all about scale and planning for future growth."

As important as growth is to a venture's success, Clarizio said managers must be prepared to navigate potential problems wrought by a changing company. One of the biggest challenges is to preserve the entrepreneurial spirit and avoid developing a bureaucratic corporate culture.

"Always keep small teams. And empower them," Clarizio said, discussing the importance of ensuring that employees can accomplish tasks without becoming entangled in bureaucratic red tape.

An inclusive environment is another "must," she said, referring to Advertising.com's practice of giving out silly awards to build team spirit as well as the company's daily morning meeting, which is led by the most junior people in the company.

But at the end of the day, and regardless of any past or current success, a company's continued progress in today's technological marketplace is never a foregone conclusion, Clarizio concluded.

"There is nothing more dynamic than the Internet, nothing changing as quickly as Internet advertising," she said. "You never can rest, you have to constantly be thinking about what you can do next. You have to be able to respond to changes in this industry every day."

From conducting "dreaming sessions" with customers to hiring a high school student to run errands, Xerox executive Sophie Vandebroek shared professional and personal insights into leadership and technology at a talk Nov. 15.

"You have to create an environment where the researchers and the scientists and all the people working with you have fun," said Vandebroek, Xerox's chief technology officer, as she outlined five basic principles that guide her work and personal interactions.

"It's all about making someone passionate because only if you're passionate do you do really great work."

Her talk, "Xerox Innovation," was part of the "Leadership in a Technological World," lecture series sponsored by Princeton's Center for Innovation in Engineering Education and underwritten by the William Pierson Field Lectureship fund.

In addition to creating an inspiring environment, Vandebroek said she focuses on hiring the best and most diverse group of people and building strong working relationships within the company; listening to customers; supporting open innovation and partnering with outside companies with strong ideas; and looking for opportunity even in the worst of situations.

The principles have all been important as Xerox has executed one of the most dramatic corporate turn-arounds in recent history. The company was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2000 when its current chief executive Anne Mulcahy (who delivered a previous address in the same lecture series) took over. Refocusing its products and level of innovation, the company quickly returned to profitability, going from a loss of $400 million per year to a net income of $1.2 billion. In the last two years, the company refreshed 95 percent of its product line, Vandebroek said.

One major change for the company is its increasing attention to services -- helping customers deal with the volumes of information and paper they produce. The company also continues to develop new products, from a reusable paper that wipes itself clean a couple days after it comes out of a printer to personalized book printing.

In one example of putting her principles into practice, Vandebroek described how the company developed liquid chemical toners to replace dry powder toners that have been used for many years. Although the new product was higher quality, less costly to use and better for the environment, inventing it was only part of the challenge.

"It was very difficult even within the company to commercialize the technology, she said, describing how people were invested in producing and selling powdered toner. "Understanding and having respect for the relationships was the only way this all got resolved." Many products and services grow from and are refined by "dreaming sessions" at which technologists, marketing experts and anthropologists meet to figure out what would be most helpful in real work environments. The sessions involve showing customers nascent technology asking how it might be useful. "If Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse," Vandebroek said. "People don't know the capabilities of future technologies."

Vandebroek also described how she keeps balance in her life especially after the death of her husband 11 years ago, which left her to raise three children by herself. Among her tricks for maximizing her time with her family: automating her grocery list and hiring a high school student to go buy them.

"Life is too short not to have fun in what you do each and every day," she said.

The next event in the lecture series will be a Feb. 7, 2008, lecture by Lynda Clarizio, the president of Advertising.com.

Leaders are able to paint a vivid picture of a better future and inspire others to that vision, Frank Moss told a Princeton audience Sept. 26, kicking off the second year of a popular leadership lecture series.

Moss illustrated his point by sharing his own vision for the future and how he is making it come true as the director of the world-renowned Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His talk was part of the "Leadership in a Technological World" lecture series, which is sponsored by the Center for Innovation in Engineering Education.

Under Moss' direction, the lab is broadening its mission from the development of "gadgets and gizmos" to creating technologies that blur the distinction between human ability and disability, he said.

"What is going to be my success in my tenure at the media lab?" he asked. "If, in ten years when somebody drives by ... they say 'Thank you, Media Lab,' that will be success." Many have already expressed their gratitude to the lab, from people with autism benefiting from computers that help interpret emotions to Iraq war veterans testing "smart" prostheses that behave indistinguishably from actual limbs.

Moss graduated from Princeton in 1971 with a B.S.E. in mechanical and aerospace engineering and earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT. A Princeton trustee and a member of the School of Engineering and Applied Science Leadership Council, Moss received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award and was named one of Forbes Magazine's "Leaders for Tomorrow."

In addition to having a clear and inspiring vision, Moss said, true leaders design environments to help people turn that vision into a reality.

"The most important thing is to create an environment where people have trust," he said. "There are no right or wrong decisions -- the only decision that is wrong is the one that is not made. There are many ways to get from A to B."

Moss drew on examples from his professional and personal life to prove his point. For instance, after starting out at IBM, he ultimately moved on to Apollo Computer Inc. when senior leadership at IBM wasn't open to new ideas. This led to a 25-year career in the software and computer industries, including executive management positions at Apollo and Lotus Development Corp. More recently, when his children asked him to think about his contributions to society, he decided to exit his company -- at the time he was chief executive officer and chairman of Tivoli Systems Inc. -- by selling it to IBM.

"I began to look for more meaning in my life," he said. "I wanted to take what I've learned and do something good for human beings." This ultimately led to his co-founding Infinity Pharmaceuticals, Inc., an early-stage cancer drug discovery company at the intersection of technology and the life sciences. This paved the way for him to become the director of the Media Lab in 2006, after he visited the lab and realized the contributions it could make to society.

He ended his lecture with a video clip of Dan Ellsey, a patient at the Tewksbury State Hospital who suffers from severe cerebral palsy. Through the use of innovative software, Ellsey is able to compose music even though his motion is limited to movements of his head. In the video, Ellsey is on stage in front of a huge audience at MIT, performing one of his pieces expressively thanks to a Media Lab computer interface that measures and interprets his movements.

The ecstasy on Ellsey's face when he finished, accompanied by the thunderous applause of the audience at MIT, is a clear indication of the future Moss is helping to create.

Future events in the lecture series, which is underwritten by the William Pierson Field Lectureship Fund, will include a Nov. 15 talk by Sophie Vandebroek, chief technology officer of Xerox Corp., and a Feb. 7, 2008, lecture by Lynda Clarizio, the president of Advertising.com.

Great leaders envision the future and create what they see by making decisions for the long run rather than short-sighted choices, Amazon.com senior vice president Jeff Wilke '89 told a Princeton audience April 18.

Wilke, who holds a B.S.E. in chemical engineering from Princeton, illustrated the power of this forward-looking approach using examples from Amazon's wildly successful transformation from online bookstore to Internet retailer of just-about-everything. His talk, "Tough Choices: Leadership is All About the Long Run," was the fourth and final event in the "Leadership in a Technological World" lecture series, sponsored by the Center for Innovation in Engineering Education.

Focusing on the long run is not a conventional tactic in today's business environment, Wilke said. And so, the onus was on Amazon's leadership to convince investors of their strategy's strength. A 1997 letter to shareholders written by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who earned his B.S.E. in electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton in 1986, did just this -- and inspired Wilke to join the company.

"By the third paragraph, the letter literally gave me chills," Wilke said as he shared highlights from the memo.

"Because of our emphasis on the long term, we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies," Bezos wrote. "Accordingly, we want to share with you our fundamental management and decision-making approach so that you, our shareholders, may confirm that it is consistent with your investment philosophy..."

Even this openness did not stop the barrage of news articles in the late 1990s that predicted the downfall of the company many pundits dubbed "Amazon.bomb," which Wilke presented in a multimedia collage that drew laughter from the audience. The focus on the long run led Amazon's leaders to make choices that were potentially risky short-term, but which have clearly paid off, Wilke said. These include decisions to include customer reviews of products on Amazon.com, invite other retailers to sell items on the website, and dramatically increase inventory selection.

Just as making decisions for the long run can herald success, a failure to do so can lead to disaster, Wilke said. Such a lack of foresight can be blamed, in part, for the current crisis in the nation's production and retention of talented scientists and engineers, he said. The decisions made by individual leaders and plant managers to move manufacturing operations to lower-wage countries overseas may have made sense at the time when taken alone, but together they have taken a dramatic toll on America's competitive edge, according to Wilke.

"The aggregate of these choices is a long run outcome that should make Americans very nervous," he said, calling for a commitment from current and future leaders in industry, government and academia to support education in mathematics, science and engineering. Wilke echoed sentiments shared by Xerox chairman and CEO Anne Mulcahy at Princeton April 5 (see story).

Mulcahy's talk was the third in the lecture series, which was supported by the William Pierson Field lectureship fund. The series, which will continue next year, also included addresses by former Lockheed Martin Co. Norman Augustine '57 *59 (see story) and David Crane '81, CEO and president of NRG Energy (see story).

When handling a present-day crisis, don't forget to invest in the future, Anne Mulcahy, the chairman and chief executive officer of Xerox Corp., told a packed house April 5 at Princeton.

In a lecture titled "Leadership Lessons Learned on the Firing Line," Mulcahy shared the insights she gained as she assumed the helm of Xerox in the midst of a corporate crisis, and the practices she used to lead the remarkable turnaround of the multibillion-dollar corporation.

Mulcahy's talk was the third event in the "Leadership in a Technological World" lecture series, sponsored by Princeton's Center for Innovation in Engineering Education.

"We prepare students to lead by providing exposure to real-life leaders -- leaders who understand technology, great leaders, experienced leaders, leaders with courage and integrity," said H. Vincent Poor, dean of Princeton's School of Engineering and Applied Science. "Anne Mulcahy is recognized as this type of great leader."

When she became the head of the company in May of 2000, Mulcahy said, Xerox faced precipitously declining revenues, falling profits and debt just under $19 billion. At the same time, the faltering corporation was plagued by flagging customer and employee satisfaction.

Mulcahy said she learned quickly to be bold in her decision-making but humble about asking for help, turning to Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors of all time, for advice.

"Business is a lot simpler than most people make it look," he reassured her.

Armed with Buffett's support, but not his investment (Buffett told her he doesn't invest in technology companies), Mulcahy took a back-to-basics approach to the company's budget and businesses -- but she never stopped investing in the future.

In the past three years, the company has brought 100 new products and technologies to the market, and 70 percent of its revenue comes from products and technologies that were introduced in the past two years, Mulcahy said. The company has met or exceeded earning expectations in 17 out of the last 18 quarters.

"If there is a line between failure and success, it is certainly about the quality of your people and the innovation they bring to the market," Mulcahy said, drawing a parallel between Xerox's corporate crisis and the national shortage in the production of great engineers and scientists.

The growing technological prowess of other countries, especially China and India, can be viewed as good news for a competitive economy, according to Mulcahy. But the failure of the United States to nurture its own technological infrastructure will cause significant problems, she said, noting that federal funding for mathematics, science and engineering has declined by one-third since 1970.

Business, government and the educational system must collaborate to counter this trend, she said, in part by making the talent base more inclusive. Mulcahy praised Princeton for its focus on diversity, innovation and education, and said she looked forward to partnerships between Xerox and the University, where her son is currently enrolled as a sophomore.

The lecture series concludes April 18 with a talk by Jeff Wilke, a senior vice president with Amazon. The series is underwritten by the William Pierson Field lectureship fund.

The truth about carbon emissions in the United States is far more than inconvenient, it's terrifying, David Crane, the chief executive officer and president of NRG Energy, told a standing-room-only crowd Dec. 5 at Princeton.

"The time to debate the cause of global warming is over," said Crane, whose company owns power plants and is the nation's 10th largest producer of electricity. "The time to decide what to do about it is now."

This is particularly true, Crane said, because the U.S. is poised to decide in the next two years whether to increase dramatically the number of coal-fired power plants throughout the country. If erected, the plants would add the equivalent of the combined carbon emissions of France and Spain to the U.S. greenhouse gas output, already the largest in the world.

Crane's talk, "Global Warming, Not Al Gore's Movie: What are we doing about it? What are you going to do about it?" was the second event in the "Leadership in a Technological World" lecture series, sponsored by the Center for Innovation in Engineering Education.

"As the leader of an energy company, David is on the front lines of this issue from a social, political, economic, and technological perspective and we welcome the opportunity to learn," said Dean of Engineering H. Vincent Poor in his introduction.

A 1981 graduate of Princeton who also holds a degree from Harvard Law School, Crane served as the CEO of United Kingdom-based bulk power generation company International Power PLC before taking the reins at NRG.

The power-generating sector emits 37 percent of the greenhouse gases in the nation, according to Crane, who previously characterized his industry's traditional stance on global warming as "See no carbon, hear no carbon, speak no carbon." Calling himself a modern muckraker, he said power generation companies have a responsibility to deal with global warming as "a moral issue."

Regardless of whether other power executives agree with his stance - he noted his viewpoint hasn't earned him invitations to industry cocktail parties - Crane said everyone must face three engineering challenges. The first is to capture and sequester carbon emissions that are separated, pre-combustion, from coal. The second is to capture and mitigate the emissions from existing power plant flues. Third, and equally important, is to approve and build the next generation of nuclear plants.

Crane challenged Princeton students to address these issues and said they are uniquely positioned to do so given their educations and proximity to leading experts in the field of global warming. He praised the strength of the University's faculty roster, which includes such world authorities as mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Robert Socolow, who received a round of applause from the audience when Crane pointed him out in the first row.

After outlining NRG's plans to address the challenges ahead, including a goal to add enough capacity to one of the company's existing nuclear power plants to offset the carbon emissions equivalent of Bulgaria, Crane called on attendees to do much more than shrink their personal "carbon footprints," which is a person's total contribution to carbon emissions through energy consumption and other activities.

Despite the attention received by "An Inconvenient Truth," former Vice President Al Gore's film about global warming, Crane said the movie may not have gone far enough in pushing personal responsibility for solving the problem.

Just as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. offered visionary leadership for Project Apollo and the civil rights movement, Crane said the next generation of leaders must educate and inspire not only the nation, but the world, to unite in a quest to stem carbon emissions and global warming.

"It's time to proactively exercise your rights as an informed citizen," he said, challenging each member of the audience to do their part to change the world.

The lecture series continues April 5, 2007, with a talk by Anne Mulcahy, chairwoman and chief executive of the Xerox Corporation. The series is made possible by generous support from the William Pierson Field lectureship.

Great leaders help create other great leaders, Norman Augustine '57 *59 told a Princeton audience Oct. 19 as he did just that, sharing his insights on leadership to inaugurate the engineering school's "Leadership in a Technological World" lecture series.

Augustine, the former chairman and chief executive officer of Lockheed Martin Corp. with leadership experience in industry, academia, government and the non-profit world, earned his bachelors and masters degrees in aeronautical engineering from Princeton. Calling him a leader who embodies Princeton's informal motto, "in the nation's service and the service of all nations," Dean of Engineering H. Vincent Poor said Augustine was the perfect choice to kick-off the new series, which is sponsored by the Center for Innovation in Engineering Education.

"The main goal of the center is to educate leaders, both engineers and non-engineers, who can lead what is becoming increasingly a technological world," Poor said.

Using positive and negative examples to illustrate twelve necessary "ingredients" for true leadership, Augustine touched on everything from the Boston Celtics basketball team to a fatal decision that led to the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster. Attributes including integrity, vision, courage and selflessness come together in diverse combinations in leaders who have a positive impact on the world, he said.

"You don't necessarily know (great leadership) when you see it in advance, but you'll sure recognize it when you see it in action" he said, humorously pointing to a 1978 photograph of Microsoft Corp.'s founders, which included a boyish looking Bill Gates.

Humor may have peppered his talk, but Augustine was serious as he discussed the challenges, particularly ethical ones, faced by leaders in today's world. Honesty is always the best policy, he said, even when it has short-term negative repercussions. He told of a time at Lockheed when he received an anonymous envelope containing a competing company's upcoming bid for a major contract; he informed the competitor and refused to alter his own bid, which ultimately lost.

People always face difficult decisions with incomplete information and conflicting advice, he said. Whether they become great leaders depends on how they rely on their own skills, and the talents of others, to rise to the occasion.

"Often, the difference between victory and defeat is very small," Augustine said.

The lecture series continues at 5 p.m. on Dec. 5 with a talk by David Crane '81, president and chief executive officer of NRG Energy Inc.