Networking Talent
Back in the 1960s when John Hart was a gymnast, a track star and a cheerleader at the University of Georgia, he majored in math because it came easily and he mostly wanted to goof off.
As chief technical officer of 3Com Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif., Hart gets little slack time these days, busy as he is devising the networking company’s technical strategy, chatting up customers around the globe and applying for patents on his many inventions.
One of his proudest engineering feats is his own job.
“We [3Com Chief Executive Eric Benhamou and Hart] sort of sculpted the job,” Hart said in an interview, conducted by e-mail from London, where he was attending a meeting of top 3Com staff, and by phone from his office in Silicon Valley.
“There is no typical job description for a CTO. It is defined around the strengths of the individual and the needs of the company.”
Throughout the nation’s high-tech havens, companies are finding that putting a key technical person in charge of setting strategy can help squeeze mileage from existing products and ensure that disparate business units are developing compatible new systems for customers.
This has given rise to a new category of job, the CTO--chief technology officer or chief technical officer. The executive combines technical expertise with at least limited knowledge of budgeting, accounting, strategizing and marketing to make innovation happen.
“Somebody in the company has to serve that role,” said Charles F. Larson, executive director of the Industrial Research Institute Inc., a Washington organization that promotes technological innovation. “It’s quite often the CTO.”
Many companies have someone who serves this function, even though that person doesn’t always carry the CTO title. At General Electric Co., Larson noted, CEO Jack Welch, a chemical engineer by training, in effect fills in. Elsewhere, the person playing the part might be a vice president of research and development, a senior vice president of corporate technology or, rarely, a vice president of technological innovation.
But the CTO title is gaining favor. Think of the post as the CEO’s technological alter ego.
Benhamou tapped Hart for the 3Com post in 1990 to breathe new life into the company’s wide-area network product development. The two had known each other for years while working at separate companies in nearby Mountain View--Hart, at a satellite company, now defunct, and Benhamou at a networking company from which Hart ordered equipment. Using that equipment, Hart invented remote “bridging,” which links local-area networks between buildings.
Hart got his first big dose of computers at Southern Bell, a regional phone company that hired him after college. When he began developing computer operating systems, his friends looked down their noses, viewing computer types as glorified key punchers. To them, it looked like a dead-end job.
When the company split off South-Central Bell in the early 1970s, Hart became part of a team developing a five-state network. His network solution became a Bell system standard.
He worked for a time at Control Data Corp., then made the leap to satellites, working for the short-lived Vitalink Communications Corp. Benhamou worked down the street.
If Benhamou is the brains of 3Com, Hart can be likened to the ears, the person who talks with customers to learn their needs and then serves as an interface with the marketing department.
“What you have to be willing to do is have an open mind, listen carefully and be willing to discard yesterday’s solution,” Hart said. “You also have to be someone who enjoys designing the overall system.”
Above all, a CTO must love getting out and talking to people. The title really stands for chief traveling officer, Hart quipped a few years ago to Eric Schmidt, who sought Hart’s counsel when he became CTO of Sun Microsystems Inc.
“John was a great advisor on this stuff,” said Schmidt, who nine months ago was named CEO of Novell Inc., an unusual leap for a CTO. “He had an enormous gift for convincing people that the [3Com] technology vision was not only sound, but compelling.”
Schmidt, himself one of the most respected technical minds in the industry, said Hart is one of “a few CTOs in Silicon Valley who pioneered the vision of the job.” Among others are Ed Kozel at Cisco Systems Inc., 3Com’s chief rival and the industry leader, and Mark Andreessen of Netscape Communications Corp., who recently left the CTO position to run the company’s product divisions.
Despite the stereotype of engineers as shy nerds, Hart said engineers discover early on that if they can’t schmooze and sell an idea, they won’t get very far.
For him, the test is this: “If there are 200 people in a room, you’re excited. If there are 2,000, you’re ecstatic.”
One challenge of late has been dealing with 3Com’s strategic acquisition last year of U.S. Robotics, which primarily makes modems. The union doubled the size of the products and technology with which Hart must deal, but he said the fact that there is very little product overlap makes his job of assimilating technologies somewhat easier.
Although he is in demand as a speaker at conferences, seminars and standards meetings, as well as for frequent visits to customers in the 145 countries where 3Com has offices, he tries to spend most weekends at home. To keep up on industry developments, he fanatically peruses the Web, which he says has become a more efficient source of up-to-date material than technical journals.
At 52, Hart, a native of Washington, D.C., who grew up in Atlanta, recognizes the value of having a life outside 3Com, even though he has at various times worked 80-hour weeks. He skis and plays tennis and works out three times a week, even while on the road, which is about half the time.
“I always advise people that life is a distance race; don’t run it as a sprint,” he said. “Burnout is something to avoid.”
Last year, he and his wife and teenage son took advantage of 3Com’s sabbatical program and spent six weeks touring Yellowstone and Glacier national parks.
When he is on home turf, he relishes “tele-working,” often operating from his family’s beach house in Capitola on Monterey Bay.
“There are great reasons to be in an office,” he said, “but there are also periods when being alone is great. You can do fantastic things.”
