Scott McNealy has four sons and he named the first one Maverick.  That gives you a clue as to what to expect from the co-founder and chairman of Sun Microsystems , who was on fine form today, as he shared some of his top tips with a group of entrepreneurial Brits, gathered at London’s Le Meridien Hotel, facilitated by the excellent Stewart Townsend of Sun’s UK Start-Up team.

Scott’s first hope for the assembled group was that they were busy being controversial.  If most people weren’t looking at their businesses, predicting they were crazy, then they were probably doing something wrong.  This hope was followed swiftly by the next guideline;  needing to be correct.  The scene was set, and with a final exhortation to ‘Go Big’ and to use ‘Somebody Else’s Money’, the brief opening remarks were over and the floor was open for questions.

Today, Sun has revenues of almost 14 billion dollars and employs over 33,000 people. Scott McNealy co -founded the company in 1982, at the age of 27. To this day, his best advice to budding entrepreneurs is to “do it while you’re single and don’t yet have kids”.  On a touchingly personal note, he reflected that “your choice of spouse is the most important decision you’ll ever make”.  Asked about the biggest obstacle he’d faced in business during the early years he replied “staying awake” and, at the time, he would joke that he “led an extremely balanced life.  I spend time in sales, marketing, manufacturing…”

Some of Scott’s most interesting insights related to his views on management.  He’s a great believer in what he calls the ‘rule of 11’; that is that every executive should have 11 reports, rather than the 6 so often prescribed by so-called management gurus.  His rationale is simple;  With 6 reports, you’re tempted to manage – with 11 you have no choice but to lead.  He remembers that one of his greatest realisations was that “you work for the people who report to you, not the other way round”.  As Sun grew, keeping in touch with the staff became more and more difficult and so his friday night beers evolved into a regular radio show to all employees.  Unlike Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who is a highly regarded blogger (“I’m not a great writer”), Scott found that radio worked even better than video, where people can get distracted looking at someone’s face.  “With radio, they can concentrate on what you’re saying.”

Another great insight was the idea that “meetings are not the place to make decisions”.  He described how he would often use meetings to become clear on each person’s perspective before thanking them for their input and telling them that he would be making a decision within the next 48 hours. 

On the subject of risk, Scott’s view is that “the biggest gambles are always people gambles” and in one of the more serious answers of an often light-hearted session, he concluded that, in all of his time with Sun, he “never took any, legal, financial or ethical risks”.  He is careful here, to distinguish these from business or engineering risks, which he sees as entirely healthy and continues to take and encourage.

With his statesmanlike presence, it is easy to imagine Scott McNealy chairing the board of a multi-billion dollar company.  What makes him different though, is that it is equally easy to imagine him chilling out, holding a hotdog and a beer on a Saturday afternoon.  He smiles easily, and tells stories with a likeable degree of self-deprecation.  Throughout, it was clear that he is an incredibly smart communicator who would make an incredible mentor for a CEO of any stage in their business.  From the heights of his role today, he seemed to genuinely enjoy spending time with a roomful of Brits from companies including Last.fm, GlassesDirect and Favor.it.  He encouraged all of us to write to him and, as he shared his email address, he told us that he was “almost all caught up on email”…

The chairman of Sun, with 33,350 employees, who is on a business trip to London on GMT, and has spent the last twenty years with “just email me” as one of his catch phrases, is ALMOST ALL CAUGHT UP ON EMAIL. This, reader, is a man who walks his talk.  And his talk ended on a suitably ambitious and inspiring note.  Moving towards the door, he bade us farewell with the words;  

“Good Luck, kick some butt.  Google aint the last answer here”

 

 

 

I’ve just popped into my local branch of HSBC.  After withdrawing some cash, I was presented with a list of options, most of which I normally ignore.  Today, I was after a mini-statement, so my eye was drawn to the list, one of which was;

“Give Money To Charity”

Sure enough, a few taps later and a small donation was winging its way towards Help The Aged.  Food for thought as I strode out into Covent Garden, past no less than half a dozen vested collectors for a range of national charities.

Speaking of charities, last night I dropped into the Mandrake Club to listen to a motivating and inspiring speech by Sir Nicholas Young, CEO of the British Red Cross.  He made the point that, when weighing up any purchasing decision, he would think long and hard about how many collecting tins would need to be filled to match that amount of money.  After the speech I quizzed him about bringing money into organisations using business methods (creating products or services) rather than by asking for donations.  Of course the Red Cross already does this through its chain of shops, as well as selling a number of things through its website.  We ended up discussing the fact that, in Make Your Mark with a Tenner, the average return (in one month) from the top 100 teams was £120, and yet none of them had asked anyone for donations, even though they could have done if they had wanted. I would love to talk to the Red Cross (or other organisations) about how they set their own members a form of ‘ten pound challenge’ which raises money by unleashing enterprise.

I helped the aged in a tiny way today by saving an older man as he fell down some steps in London’s Covent Garden.  As it turned out, he was on his way out of a Grand Masters luncheon and was a Freemason.  One set of pamphlets later, picked up from the Grand Lodge nearby, and I was suitably intrigued.  Did you know that there are 330,000 members of the Freemasons in England alone?  That’s how many members the Conservative Party had at the turn of the century…Anyway, the grateful Mason pushed a crisp fiver into my and which, after refusing half a dozen times, I accepted. 

Ten minutes later my fiver was winging its way to Help the Aged.  And until posting this entry, I’d not spotted the connection between those two random events…

Which reminds me, I must do a refresher course in First Aid.

 

What do you find when you search Twitter to discover what has so inspired someone that they use the phrase;

“This is Amazing”?…

1) Wallpaper which changes colour according to the heat.  Willy Wonka would have loved this

2) Photo shows Phoenix descending to the Martian surface underneath its parachute.  Read the words below the shot.

3) R2D2 translator; Admittedly seconds rather than hours of fun…

4) A moving story of a man who took a polaroid every day, until the day he died

5) Meanwhile, a woman comes back to life in Ohio

6) A GCSE exam paper had some of the answers carefully hidden…on the back.

7) A scary walk along a mountain path is one for the producers of Indiana Jones

8) Want to make a Long Bet?  Try making a 25 year prediction on this site.

Idea for TV or Radio show;  Use this concept to underpin a new show in which “Amazing” things are uncovered and discussed in a weekly, half hour format.

Supremely energised after my Speed Networking event last night at Adam Street.  The excellent Emma Mulqueeny has done a stunning job of writing it up here, which I’m grateful for. If I had given proper thought to the fact that I had invited a professional poker player to speak just before a Church of England Vicar, I would have dusted off my Guys and Dolls song sheets.  That would, I fear, have rocked the boat, and so I blew my whistle instead. 

You may have noticed, reader, that Daily Networker floated off into space recently, which in technical terms meant that it disappeared off the face of the web, and in boating terms means that it simply floated out to sea.  Thanks then to the wizardry of Ewan for manning the Lifeboats and ensuring that we are now back on air, water or ether, depending on your preference.

Luck being a Lady, normal service should now be resumed. 

I have filtered these for your interest;

UK Catalyst Awards (These awards for pro-social technology launch this evening…more about them soon)

Shine, the Unconference for Social Entrepreneurs (Jess Tyrell, one of the producers, is amazing and I’m a massive fan of Unltd)

Pangea Day (this is the output of one of the TED prizes – can’t believe it’s only just properly shown up on my radar)

DrinkTank (hats off to the team at Huddle for organising this, which meets again on the 14th May).

GeeKyoto 2008 [fixing the broken world] (co-organised by the excellent Ben Hammersley)

Thought for the day;

We’ll all have heard the analogy about ‘turning an oil tanker’, when speaking with a large organisation, whether in the public or private sector. A colleague mentioned yesterday that a friend’s father used to command oil tankers for a living. The time that it takes actually takes to perform this manoeuvre; Half and Hour.