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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (5497)	8/30/2002 12:08:11 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

TOM WALSH: Ballmer learned to manage early BY TOM WALSH DETROIT FREE PRESS COLUMNIST August 30, 2002 When Steve Ballmer was in high school at Birmingham Detroit Country Day, he wasn't much of an athlete. But he was a GREAT team manager for Country Day's basketball and track squads. You know, the kid who makes sure there are towels and water bottles for the star athletes and keeps stats for the coaching staff. Today, as chief executive officer of Microsoft, Ballmer says his days as a teenage team manager prepared him well for his most important duties now -- the recruitment, care and feeding of very talented people. "The CEO doesn't need to be brilliant, but must be able to interact with brilliant people," Ballmer said, after a speech Thursday to the Detroit Economic Club. "You've got to be able to attract the best and the brightest." He said Microsoft will spend nearly $5 billion on research and development this year, and 10 percent more next year. In an interview en route from Detroit to his Dearborn hotel, Ballmer, 46, talked about his youth in suburban Detroit and its influence on his career. The son of a Ford Motor Co. worker, Ballmer was raised mostly in Oak Park and Farmington Hills. He attended Country Day on a scholarship. He was a smart kid, scoring a perfect 1600 on his SAT tests, and taking college-level math at Lawrence Tech when high school math proved too easy. And he was enthusiastic about sports, though not very talented. He didn't get to compete in track meets as a shot putter until his senior year at Country Day, but he earned his first letter in track as a junior. "I discovered a scoring mistake as the team manager. Somebody made a math error and I caught it. So because I earned some points for our team, they gave me a letter," he laughed. At Harvard, where he first met Bill Gates, whom he would later succeed as Microsoft CEO, Ballmer did the team-manager thing again. "I decided early at Harvard that I wasn't going to be the brilliant PhD math genius or scientist, and that my career would probably be in business," he said. He'd heard that previous Harvard football team managers had been successful in business, so he signed up. He was also influenced by a course he took at Harvard called Managing Arts Organizations -- symphony orchestras and other groups where the performers are not motivated by business principles like profit and loss. "When you think about it, that's true of musicians, and football players, and writers for magazines or newspapers," Ballmer said. "And I would argue that it's also true of software people, engineers. They tend to be craft-motivated." Ballmer gravitated to those kinds of people. He worked briefly for Procter & Gamble after Harvard, long enough to know it wasn't for him. "It wasn't zany enough for me, wild enough. I wanted a certain pizzazz." He enrolled in Stanford University's Business School, but didn't finish. Gates came calling, Ballmer signed on as the 28th employee of a little software company near Seattle and the rest is history. He's as loud and enthusiastic a CEO as you'll find anywhere, but Ballmer had one job he liked even better -- caddying for golfers at Franklin Hills Country Club outside Detroit. "You learn a lot about how to support people when you're on the bag. Some players want you to be sociable, some want you quiet. Some want you to watch their swing and give advice, even if you're not a good golfer." Ballmer then related a story about playing golf at a recent outing with pro star Vijay Singh. Caddying for Singh that day was a 42-year-old former Microsoft executive, who retired early and wealthy, and was having a ball toting Singh's golf bag. Ballmer sounded just a tad envious. ----------------------------------------- Contact TOM WALSH at twalsh@freepress.com or 313-223-4430. freep.com