The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Autodesk Inc.’s Creative-Chaotic Balancing Act : Management: It took a firm executive hand to restore the software firm’s productivity and profits.
When Carol Bartz called her first executive staff meeting as chief executive of Autodesk Inc., it was standing room only.
“There were almost 20 people in the room,” she remembered. “There was no organization chart, so these were people who just presumed that they reported to me or thought they should be reporting to me.”
It was just that sort of chaos that Bartz had been brought in to straighten out.
And straighten it out she has, in the eyes of most industry watchers. In two years at the helm she has refocused the company on its core product, a computer-aided design program called AutoCAD. And several interesting but financially unpromising sidelines have been abandoned. Earnings improved 41% in her first year. Results for her second year, due out at the end of the month, are expected to be strong.
“Carol seems to be just what the company needed,” said Jeffrey Tarter, editor of Softletter.
The transition has been a painful one, however, both for Bartz and her employees. Her take-charge style, an asset with her previous employer, Sun Microsystems, often grated on nerves at Autodesk. “Carol is highly autocratic,” said one former employee. “People became afraid of Carol.” Not everyone is sure her approach will work over the long run.
Still, Bartz probably had little choice but to wield a stick when she arrived at Autodesk in 1992. Founded in 1982 by John Walker, a brilliant but highly eccentric programmer, and a handful of kindred spirits, the company in its early days was managed in a free-form fashion and achieved extraordinary success as the standard for PC-design programs.
But growth had rendered the lack of conventional management untenable. Walker promoted a genial finance man, Alvar Green, to chief executive, but then undermined him: a scathing memo accused Green and his team of emphasizing short-term financial gains at the expense of technological excellence, and Walker loyalists leaked it to the press. In short order, Green was out. Profits and growth were deteriorating, and something had to be done.
Enter Bartz, who had been vice president of field operations at Sun Microsystems. Before taking the job, she sought a promise from Walker that he would not interfere. (A promise, she says, he has mostly kept).
The honeymoon was especially short. A Wall Street Journal article about Autodesk, published shortly after Bartz arrived, was critical of the “coding cowboys,” and they were offended. “The programmers didn’t like being called cowboys in the press and they thought that I had said it,” Bartz said. “It didn’t come from me.”
When Bartz arrived, programmers were putting the finishing touches on Release 12 of AutoCAD. Almost immediately, work began on Release 13. Antagonism between Bartz and the programmers mounted as she insisted on what they saw as unrealistic deadlines.
“In the early Autodesk under John Walker we believed that products shouldn’t ship until they’re ready,” said John Forbes, a former product manager. “In this business it’s just not a smart thing to do.”
Although the programmers were struggling mightily to upgrade AutoCAD--some of the software’s code is almost as old as the company itself--Bartz would not bend the deadline. “She told everybody, if (Release 13) didn’t come out on time, heads were going to roll,” added another ex-employee. “That was the wrong method to use on these people. She needed them a lot more than they needed her.”
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Beer busts--weekly events at AutoCAD--were suspended until the software was shipped. Programmers became more and more disgruntled as management forced them to drop product features to meet the shipment date. A common theme was that neither Bartz nor any of the executives she had hired understood the special problems of writing software code, since they were hardware people from computer systems companies.
Their displeasure erupted into sniping on Autodesk’s electronic mail system. An unsanctioned Autodesk newsletter, called AutoSerfs, highly critical of Bartz and her executive team, was regularly circulated.
“Cutting out features that a programmer’s worked months on is death to them,” Forbes said “It’s important to keep the programmers happy.”
Bartz becomes defensive when she talks about the programmers and Release 13. “Did I put any more pressure on the programmers than I put on anyone else? No,” she says. “The thing that I’m proudest of is that I’m a fair, reasoned person. I am not hysterical, I don’t shoot from the hip, I don’t take people’s heads off and I don’t act outrageously in public. There’s nothing about my behavior that I’m embarrassed about.”
As for Release 13, which began shipping--almost on time--about three months ago, after two years of work: “What you do when you create a piece of software is you put down a whole set of features and then you go forward. As you go forward certain things are dropped. We never said, ‘Oh God, we have to cripple this product so that it will get done on time.’
“I’m very proud of Release 13,” she added.
Bartz will soon find out whether customers share her assessment. Good fourth-quarter results, which will reflect early sales of Release 13, will likely go a long way toward healing the rift between Bartz and the programmers.
The beer busts are back. “I told them they weren’t going to be gone forever, and I kept my promise,” Bartz said. Whether she can keep her promise to bring discipline without destroying creativity, though, remains to be seen.
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AutoDesk at a Glance
* Headquarters: San Rafael, Calif.
* Chief Executive: Carol Bartz
* Employees: 1,800
* Major products: Personal computer software featuring design automation and multimedia solutions
* 1994 revenue: $405.6 million
* 1994 profit: $62.2 million
* Earnings per share: $2.50
Tuesday stock price: $34.875, down 12.5 cents
Sources: Lexis / Nexis; Securities and Exchange Commission reports
Researched by JENNIFER OLDHAM / Los Angeles Times
