Create a new vision
After Hitz grew NetApp back up to $1 billion in revenue after it dropped during the tech crash, he was suddenly faced with a new challenge. When the company was doubling, he obviously just doubled the previous year’s numbers to create the new goal. When he was coming out of the tech crash, his goal was simply to get back to where he was before. This was uncharted water since he had never been above this mark.
“For the first time, I was very confused because for the first time, I didn’t have a good idea what our mission was,” he says.
He was so confused that he drew inspiration from literature to create a vision for NetApp. At the time, Hitz was reading Robert Heinlein’s “Future History” series, a story about what 500 years from now looks like and what happened in between to get there.
While Hitz didn’t go that far forward, he looked out a few years and saw NetApp at $3 billion in revenue, so he took a past-tense approach to determine how he would have gotten there in order to develop a new vision.
“Vision is describing as well as you can what the future should look like, but doing it in the, ‘How did we get there? What steps happened?’” Hitz says. “Talk to people from all different departments about what would have needed to work.”
Hitz did internal interviews and talked to every person in the CEO’s suite because a chief financial officer will have a different view than the chief operating officer. He walked people through his era concept and asked them to think about past eras. In defining an era, don’t be shortsighted.
“Think back as far as your company goes and just ask, ‘What are these big eras?’ — not six-month things, but typically two, three, five years kind of things,” Hitz says. “That gets your head a little bit in a better space, and you get more of the right time scale. Thinking of long periods in the past can help your head explore longer periods in the future.”
He also asked them to think about key drivers in past eras and key drivers for future eras.
“Our CEO once gave me advice on strategic planning,” Hitz says. “He says the goal of every strategy should be to gain market share, and therefore, every strategy should begin with a market analysis. Who else are you competing with? What other products are there? That’s the starting point.”
He also asked them to picture who their customers were and what they needed. What products and services do we know how to develop or what do we need to do different? How will they reach those customers, and how do they like to buy? Do we need offices in India or do we need better HR systems here to support who we hire?
He used all of this input to help develop steps to reach that $3 billion mark, but there was another element to creating a vision that is important to him, and that’s to take a positive approach, despite any problems you face. Although he founded the company, Hitz stayed a programmer evangelist until it hit about 1,000 people and was asked to run all of engineering, which was about 250 people. Upon doing so, he realized that when he complained, people ran around trying to fix the things he complained about.
“My first lesson from that is if I’m going to whine, I should whine as accurately as possible because if I don’t whine accurately, they’re likely to fix the wrong thing,” he says. “So I’m trying to do management by whining accurately, which perhaps isn’t the most inspiring way a boss could be.”
Through this management strategy he had an epiphany though.
“Whining is the evil twin of vision,” Hitz says. “When you’re trying to whine accurately, you’re describing as carefully as you can how you wish the world was not. The whole point of vision is to describe as accurately as you can how you wish the world would become. If only you can flip it around from a whine of all the things that you don’t like into a vision of the way things would be different. It’s almost the same stuff, but I can tell you that the vision version is a lot more inspiring than the whining version.”
For example, take the proverbial glass half-full versus half-empty concept. Most would say you’re either positive or negative when looking at that glass, but Hitz takes a different approach. He sees the glass and says it’s twice as large as it needs to be to hold the contents, so how can he better make the glass.
“You flip it from, ‘Jeez, that glass is too big — who designed it too big’ to, ‘Wow, we could save some glass if we made it smaller,’” he says. “It’s just expressing yourself a different way.”
How to reach: NetApp Inc., (408) 822-6000 or www.netapp.com
