Product Description
The intellectual power of the high–tech industry is awesome – but so are the egos. To keep people working together productively requires an individual style of management, and at the top of these companies are a new breed of executives. Their attitudes to work create fluid cultures where nothing is sacred and everything is open to challenge.
The Digerati Glitterati are a select group of the most admired leaders in this remarkable world. Several have founded great companies, while others have transformed existing organisations into world leaders or blazed entrepreneurial trails for others to follow. Some are just beginning to leave their dynamic individual mark. All have a story to tell and priceless advice to offer.
The Digerati Glitterati are:
Hermann Hauser, Acorn
Andrew Rickman, Bookham Technology
Malcolm Miller, Pace Micro Technology
Robin Saxby, ARM
Gordon Moore, Intel
Ulrich Schumacher, Infineon
Jorma Ollila, Nokia
Sir Clive Sinclair, Sinclair Research
Pasquale Pistorio, ST Microelectronics
Dick Skipworth, Memec
David Potter, Psion
Hans Snook, Orange
Now, the Digerati Glitterati reveal the inside secrets of what it takes to build great companies. In candid interviews they explain how, why and when they got started, how they conceived the idea for their businesses and sold it to others, what motivated them, what kept them going in adversity and how they overcame their biggest challenges.When they speak, smart people listen.
From the Author
Sir John Harvey-Jones says " "I strongly recommend Digerati Glitterati to all who are interested in the IT revolution and its application to business. It demonstrates very clearly the different approaches to business, innovation and risk which are the foundations for success in this new and ubiquitous world"
From the Back Cover
The intellectual power of the high–tech industry is awesome – but so are the egos. To keep people working together productively requires an individual style of management, and at the top of these companies are a new breed of executives. Their attitudes to work create fluid cultures where nothing is sacred and everything is open to challenge.
The Digerati Glitterati are a select group of the most admired leaders in this remarkable world. Several have founded great companies, while others have transformed existing organisations into world leaders or blazed entrepreneurial trails for others to follow. Some are just beginning to leave their dynamic individual mark. All have a story to tell and priceless advice to offer.
The Digerati Glitterati are:
Hermann Hauser, Acorn
Andrew Rickman, Bookham Technology
Malcolm Miller, Pace Micro Technology
Robin Saxby, ARM
Gordon Moore, Intel
Ulrich Schumacher, Infineon
Jorma Ollila, Nokia
Sir Clive Sinclair, Sinclair Research
Pasquale Pistorio, STMicroelectronics
Dick Skipworth, Memec
David Potter, Psion
Hans Snook, Orange
Now, the Digerati Glitterati reveal the inside secrets of what it takes to build great companies. In candid interviews they explain how, why and when they got started, how they conceived the idea for their businesses and sold it to others, what motivated them, what kept them going in adversity and how they overcame their biggest challenges.
When they speak, smart people listen.
About the Author
Andrew Rickman, Founder and Chairman, Bookham Technology
Gordon Moore, Founder and Chairman Emeritus, Intel
Sir Clive Sinclair, Founder and Chairman, Sinclair Research
David Potter, Founder and Chairman, Psion
Hermann Hauser, Entrepreneur and Venture Capitalist, Acorn and Amadeus
Robin Saxby, Chairman and CEO, ARM
Jorma Ollila, Chairman and CEO, Nokia
Pasquale Pistorio, President and CEO, STMicroelectronics
Ulrich Schumacher, President and CEO, Infineon Technologies
Dick Skipworth, Founder and Chairman, Memec
Hans Snook, Founder and CEO, Orange
Malcolm Miller, CEO, Pace Micro Technology
Thematic Index
Excerpted from Digerati Glitterati by C Langdon. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
Hans Snook is the founder and CEO of Orange, the mobile telecommunications network operator which, in 2000, he was sold to France Telecom for #30 billion. Driven by a thirst for adventure and travel, he caught up in the beginnings of the wireless phone boom Hong Kong. Later he went to the UK where he set up Orange, one of the greatest success stories of the mobile revolution.
In his infancy, his father used to read The Eagle to him. He has never forgotten the interest in new ideas, and especially in new technological ideas, which the magazine triggered in his boyhood imagination. Later on, it was Arthur C. Clarke and philosophy that fed his voracious appetite for reading.
His early boyhood was spent in England. His parents - his father was English and his mother German - had met after the war in Germany where he was born. The family moved to England when he was two then, when he was eight, emigrated to Canada where he completed his secondary education and enrolled in university in British Columbia. "I kept switching subjects," he says. He tried economics, political science and philosophy, eventually doing his major in English Literature and his minor in psychology. He was not a conventional student. "I did not read any of the novels in my English literature class, and I never turned up to any of my psychology classes." He admits to being distracted in the sociable attractions of a nearby beach, and the companionability of the cafeteria.
An ingrained instinct to make a buck surfaced early and, in his last year of university, he worked the graveyard shift in a hotel. The combined effects of social life and holding down a job took their inevitable toll on his academic studies. Realising he had neglected his books, he decided to go to summer school to catch up on the credits he needed to graduate - but fate intervened.
A job as credit manager came up at the hotel. He applied for it, got it, and plans for summer school and graduation went out of the window.
Few people would give a job as a hotel credit manager priority over taking their degrees. That he did so stemmed from two aspects of his character - a longing for independence, and a susceptibility to the lure of adventure.
His time in England, when he'd seen his parents wait on a council house list, made him feel that he needed to be the master of his own fate. His view of life as being an adventure had been implanted by reading. That people could go out into the world and decide the course of their lives was something that books had convinced him was possible. Believing in it, he wanted to plough his own furrow.
There was also another factor in his decision - he loved the hotel business. He liked the twenty-four hour working of the business and the fact that it was all to do with people. "Lots of strange things happen with people - that part was fun," he says.
Typically, he was determined to be not a good credit manager, but a great credit manager. As soon as he started, the controller of the hotel had told him that his predecessor had been excellent in the job, and that he'd be doing really well if he performed even close to her standard. This fired him to do better than she had, and he worked for eight months secure in the knowledge that he'd outperformed this paragon. Then a new controller came in with quite different ideas. After questioning his performance targets, the following conversation took place: "You've got these big piles of paper on your desk."
"I'm still trying to get to them."
"Pick them all up and throw them in the waste basket," said the controller. "Whatever's in that pile, if it's important, will come back to you. If it's not important, it will never come back to you. So forget about it."
It was advice which appealed to his free-thinking nature. Moreover, it turned out to be effective. Within a year, the hotel's credit management was judged to be the best in the entire group of 52 hotels. Years later it was advice he was to remember and implement when he was setting up the Orange network in the UK.
His success as credit manager led to promotion as assistant controller of the flagship Westin Hotel - the Bayshore Inn. This, in turn, led to Hans being requested to open a new hotel for the group as controller in Calgary. Having no desire to leave Vancouver, he quit to become controller of a smaller group of hotels based in that city. Subsequent to that, he was general manager of another large Vancouver hotel and opened a brand new hotel. He later left Vancouver and the hotel industry to pursue a love interest (who later became his wife) who was living in, of all places, Calgary. In Calgary, he became an estate agent, selling residential property, but eventually something in him made him rebel against having to persuade people to buy houses. Although successful, he didn't like many of the high-pressure sales techniques used in the real estate industry.
He then opened and managed a new hotel in Calgary before leaving to go back-packing: "the best decision of my life," he now says.
The housing market in Calgary was, at that time, in a deep depression. He actually owned two houses in the town, both of which were worth less than their mortgages. He sold them both for one dollar. With $15,000 in savings he set off to see the world.
He started his travels in Asia and, after six months, found himself in Hong Kong. There he was offered a job with a local paging and computer company called Young Generation. He told them he would give up his back-packing for one year and work for them.
