February 16, 2006

Dave Duffield back in the saddle

Good article on Dave Duffield and his new startup. Dave is quoted emphatically saying that he did not come back to Peoplesoft to sell it, but rather to try to keep it independent.

That jibes with my view of him. He once told me that what he most valued about his success as a CEO was the corporate culture he’d created. (#2 on the list was getting rich and giving lots of money to charity, specifically to animal-related causes.) I thought at the time* and now think again that he was sincere when he said this. He’s also pretty much the only CEO who’s ever said something like that to me. There certainly have been others who cared about their employees (John Cullinane was particularly proud of how many people he’d help make into millionaires), but Dave is one of the very few I’ve known who could talk about a “corporate culture” of the kind/gentle sort and not sound insincere, ineffective, or just plain delusional.

*I must confess, however, that I never knew Dave as well as I knew a lot of other CEOs. Somehow, I never managed to even meet him until Peoplesoft was on its IPO tour. We made up for lost time later, up to a point, but he’s not one of the guys like Larry Ellison or Bill Gates, with whom I’ve had multiple multihour conversations.

Comments

Leave a Reply




Feed including blog about enterprise technology strategy and public policy Subscribe to the Monash Research feed via RSS or email:

Login

Search our blogs and white papers

Monash Research blogs

User consulting

Building a short list? Refining your strategic plan? We can help.

Vendor advisory

We tell vendors what's happening -- and, more important, what they should do about it.

Monash Research highlights

Learn about white papers, webcasts, and blog highlights, by RSS or email.