When Dave Hitz co-founded NetApp Inc. in 1992, he went through the typical growing pains of a start-up. But when he grew to about 50 employees in size, things started getting really crazy. Revenue and head count were doubling each year, and he found himself buying a Polaroid camera and running around taking photos of every employee, writing their names on them and hanging them on the board because nobody knew each other.
These new challenges clued him in that a new era was emerging at his storage and data management solutions company.
“You start to see you’re doing things like that, and it should raise alarm bells in your head of, ‘Is this the early sign of a new era, and if it is, what might that mean?’” Hitz says.
Just like with a country’s history, companies have eras, as well.
“I would define an era as when the strategic issues are completely different from the things you focus on during the period before or after,” Hitz says.
Sometimes those eras are very clearly defined, and sometimes they tend to blur together, but Hitz says you have to recognize when eras are changing.
“If you can predict a future era, that would be awesome,” he says. “I’m not even sure it’s possible in general to predict future eras, but the next best thing to predicting one is to get an early hint that your era might be changing.”
Hitz has been through a few eras at NetApp — start-up, crazy growth, tech crash, building back up to pre-tech-crash numbers and, most recently, the recession. Similarly, your company may be facing a new era right now. Hitz has survived it all, and last fiscal year, NetApp did $3.3 billion, but it’s taken tenacity and adaptability to weather the ups and downs of all the eras he has encountered. No matter the era, you have to always be looking for new opportunities and creating a new vision to ensure that your business will be around 10 years from now.
