HTCAB: Chapter 3

Chapter 2 ends with Dave Hitz about to fire NetApp's first CEO Mike Malcolm. In Chapter 3, he explains that the reason Mike needed to go was because "good CEOs have magic pixie dust that they can sprinkle on problems to make them go away. You don't have any pixie dust." I totally know what Dave Hitz is saying. There are some people who really can work magic like that, and apparently Mike wasn't one of them. It might sound like a crazy reason to fire someone or kind of whimsical, but Dave Hitz writes:

I was a tense time at the office, especially since it took the board almost a year to act. Fourteen years later, with much more management experience under my belt, I still think I was right.

It sounds like it was a really hard decision. Dave Hitz wrote he "woke up in the middle of the night shaking." But after all, NetApp was his baby, and Dave Hitz knew what was best.

As an aside, I learned something new about English. It turns out the word for politics comes from the word for city:

Some people think that politics is a dirty word, but not me. Politics is simply the art of making decisions in groups. It comes from the Greek word polis, meaning city. Any group working together - whether it has ten people or ten thousand - needs some mechanism to keep everyone aligned: that's politics.

That kind of changes the way I think about politics.

So NetApp hired a new CEO, Dan Warmenhoven, and a new sales guy, Tom Mendoza. The chapter ends like this:

Both Tom and Dan brought us great stills in those areas, which was fortunate, because for the next few years at NetApp, the good news was that everything was broken.

Now, I don't know how everything could possibly have been broken much less how that could have been good news, but I can't wait to find out!