Remove the legend to become one — Remains of the Day

Early on, as a search technology company, we worried about Verity, PLS, Open Text. We were too young to realize that existing companies' biggest problem is legacy. Period. They can't focus on new businesses because they've got to manage their old ones. And so when we moved to web search, it was never clear to us that Verity, PLS, and Open Text woul

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This experience did, however, underscore two important lessons for me. First, I got the job because I had built a reputation as a great manager, and being a great manager can be a significant career differentiator. Second, no matter how brilliant a company is, it will not get far, let alone have an impact at scale, without strong management and sou

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I had often worried about being too successful. Success invited competition. The ongoing hand-to-hand combat with Revlon was bad enough. How could I prevent us from becoming everyone’s target—or, if we managed to become the front-runner, protect our position from another innovative upstart? I was inspired by the wonderful movie starring Cary Grant

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When I did the startup that was bought by Amazon, I said, "Leave us on our own. We're smart and independent enough to be able to do good work that will inject things from the side into your other organization." The thing that Jeff Bezos did that I thought was very smart was that he ran us through his organization and others through ours.

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