At Netscape, the Attitude Is Can Do and the Competitor Is . . . Itself
Any high-tech wizard with a garage and an idea can only dream of the sort of warp-speed growth that has catapulted Netscape Communications Corp. into the public consciousness.
Netscape epitomizes a new kind of company, with a market that seemingly changes by the nanosecond and a “flat” organization filled mostly with technologically oriented, youngish workers.
How does such a company develop a corporate culture--the underlying values that will drive behavior and provide the glue to meld a disparate bunch of employees into a team with common goals?
And how does it keep from luring workers who might see in Netscape a quick path to riches, given that the company has in short order made millionaires of secretaries, engineers and salespeople?
Does a cutting-edge business--taming the Internet with software that makes it easy to find information--call for a newfangled corporate philosophy? Well, yes and no.
“The word ‘culture’ is almost too soft a word,” says Chief Executive James Barksdale. “We want to build employment practices and business practices that are conducive to creating a good and effective place to work.”
He hastens to add: “I don’t necessarily want people to say it’s a nice place to work. That’s almost too Pollyannaish. As I say to employees, ‘Look, I’m not your mommy and I’m not your daddy. It’s not a family. It’s a team, and we want to win.’ ”
Mountain View, Calif.-based Netscape, at 700 employees and climbing, is best known for its Netscape Navigator “browser,” which allows people to locate and “jump” to information on the Internet’s fast-growing World Wide Web. More than 10 million copies have been distributed, mostly for free over the global network.
Given Barksdale’s hard-charging attitude, it might follow that he favors a work force of slavish techie followers delighted to plug away in their cubicles 24 hours a day until they burn out. Quite the contrary, says engineer Brendan Eich, 34, who has worked at Netscape just over 11 months (or about half the company’s lifetime).
“Management is concerned about people working too many crazy hours,” he says.
When members of the technical staff began spending the night at the office, sacking out on company-provided futons, their bosses worried that the place would turn into a sweatshop and so they threatened to remove the mattresses. Engineers got the point and curbed some of their all-nighters.
To encourage leisure, Netscape also provides free memberships at local health clubs and has revived a flagging Silicon Valley tradition: the Friday afternoon beer bust. When the calendar failed to provide a three-day weekend between the Presidents Day and Memorial Day weekends, Netscape created one by declaring Good Friday a holiday.
One bit of recreation that is frowned on is yakking about the volatile stock price around the water cooler. There is an unwritten (if not easily enforceable) policy against that.
Because of the company’s whirlwind pace, it’s tough to pinpoint a culture in the making, Eich (pronounced Ike) acknowledges. But among employees, he says, there is a “can do, carry your own weight” philosophy. Supervisory layers are purposely kept shallow, he adds, because both engineers and managers “are aware of the need for speed and efficiency.”
“People come here with a mission,” he says, “to make the Web faster, better-looking and more usable. [We’re] competing with ourselves.”
That’s not how Microsoft sees it. The software giant, which is belatedly seeking to become master of the Internet, seems to have targeted Netscape for extinction. But Barksdale, who knows about bare-knuckle corporate sparring from his days at Federal Express and McCaw Communications, says it would be foolish for Netscape to launch a countercampaign.
One of the worst things a company can do, he says, is become focused on a single rival. Look what happened when Apple Computer Inc. became focused on IBM Corp. IBM ended up not being the enemy. The enemy “came out of right and left field, and they were Intel and Microsoft,” Barksdale says. Microsoft right now “seems intent on putting me out of business,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean we have to behave that way.”
For now, Netscape is trying to stay focused on keeping its young troops hyped up and simply beating rivals to the punch. At monthly all-hands meetings, Barksdale exhorts everyone to join him in spelling out N-E-T with their fingers “to demonstrate our goal to get Netscape everywhere.”
Hokey? Maybe. But to Barksdale, reared in Mississippi, it’s all part of building a winning team.
“If we’re effective,” he says, “we can look forward to increasing prosperity.”
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