The right people
Chen’s journey to turn around Sybase began with finding the right people, which proved a difficult task during the dot-com era when people were leaving faster than you could say IPO.
“Everybody walked around here thinking they should be a millionaire in the Silicon Valley,” Chen says. “All you have to say is, ‘We have an S-1 on file, and we’re going to be IPO any minute
now,’ and you have a bunch of people joining you, mostly wearing jeans and sandals.”
With the turnstile of employees constantly moving, Chen recognized the difficulty he faced.
“If you have so many people turning over, you really cannot put a plan together that has any prayer of being successful because once you put the plan together, people take off, and you
have to reset it and do it again,” he says.
To alleviate frequent changes, Chen devised a threefold blueprint of his management team. One-third of his team would consist of Sybase people from before his time because they could
help him save time by exposing all the skeletons in the closets.
The next third consisted of people who understood how he thought and whom he trusted to quickly execute based on his past experiences with them.
To form the final third, he found new people from other successful companies such as Apple, Oracle and HP who could generate new ideas within the company.
When looking for executives who would stick around for the long haul, he searched for people willing to root for the underdog and try new ideas. He also needed people who were not
easily discouraged and who were capable of working with a team.
“At a time where everything was kind of broken everywhere we looked, it was kind of laughable,” says Chen. “Not because someone did something stupid intentionally, but when things
are not well, everything starts looking pretty funny and stupid.”
He says he needed a sense of humor to laugh things off so he could focus on solving the underlying problems. Motivation came from the fact that most people, both internally and externally, had already written Sybase off.
“Other people may have rung the death bell too soon, and I kept making sure people were focused on not just letting conventional wisdom drag us down,” says Chen. “We have nothing to
lose. We might as well get committed and move forward, because if you second-guess anything, we’re going to run out of time.”
With no time for that employee turnstile to keep revolving, every potential executive interviewing with Sybase also interviewed with Chen, even if he or she would not ultimately report
to him. The reason was simple: Chen had a brutally honest message for anyone considering joining his efforts.
“It’s worse than you think,” he says. “They look at me and say, ‘Boy, I thought I was meeting you for a pep talk.’”
Chen wanted to make it crystal clear to interviewees that the job would not be easy, and he had no time for the negativity and resentment that would be created by misleading them, so
he refused to sugarcoat a thing.
“If I sweet-talk you into coming here, and you find out nothing got connected, everybody is busy updating their resumes, you’ll look at me and say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. I don’t know
what I’m getting myself into. I’ve got to get out of here.’
“If you come in and say, ‘Everything is broken, but I know how to fix things,’ and you have that attitude, then this is a great place for you.”