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Jim Barksdale has three "snake rules."
If you see a snake, kill it.
Don't play with dead snakes.
All opportunities start out looking like snakes.
As described by Barksdale, a keynote speaker at Cyberposium and arguably one of the most influential business leaders in the United States, the snake is an apt metaphor for any problem encountered by new companies as they struggle to be successful.
As the former president and CEO of Netscape Communications Corporation from 1995 to 1999, Barksdale now heads his own company, the eponymous Barksdale Group, which finances, advises, and services Internet start-ups. (His Netscape tenure ended when Netscape merged with America Online.) A native of Mississippi, Barksdale also held top positions at AT&T Wireless Services, Federal Express Corporation, and IBM. Now, in addition to running his own company, he's on the board of directors of AOL Time Warner, Federal Express, Sun Microsystems, Inc., and a number of other technology-oriented firms.
Referring to his 35 years of operational experience, in remarks that were delivered in a relaxed, off-the-cuff manner, Barksdale told the Cyberposium audience that getting rid of a snake is sometimes a greater problem than the snake itself. People within a company want to have meetings about the snake, he said. They write memos about the snake.
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| If you can get Internet penetration above 66 percent, well, I'll buy you a beer. | |
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| — Jim Barksdale |
And after the snake is officially dead, he suggested, sometimes people in an organization continue to insist that the snake is still around. They're the people "who lost the argument" and were overruled, Barksdale told the HBS group.
"It's just the nature of us. We just don't like to lose arguments," he said. "Even if you're wrong, keep going."
Barksdale said he's always on the lookout for the next one, or two, technological "pings," as he called them, that have the potential for being "the next big thing" in the same way that overnight delivery and the Internet changed lives while rewriting the rules of doing business.
The biggest snake of all
These days, Barksdale told the Cyberposium audience, the greatest problem facing America's future is illiteracy. Though the United States is one of the most industrially and technologically sophisticated countries in the world, 22 percent of its population, he noted soberly, cannot read a map or a newspaper, nor do simple math.
"This is a sin," he declared. People who cannot read will be hopelessly left behind in the information age, he asserted.
Barksdale's personal solution to this crisis, he said, was a $100-million grant for establishing a center for literacy training in his home state of Mississippi. The center, called the Barksdale Reading Institute, aims to improve the basic reading skills of young children as well as help educators become better teachers of reading.
The project is a joint venture with the University of Mississippi School of Education, the Mississippi Department of Education, and Mississippi's seven other public universities.
Barksdale told the audience at HBS that he had formed the Barksdale Reading Institute with his wife, Sally, when they learned that children who cannot read by the third grade will probably never catch up in reading skills, and will drop out of school later. Such children, he added, were also at potentially greater risk for criminal behavior and imprisonment in adulthood.
Barksdale said that the literacy effort by himself and his wife was also instigated by a prediction in the business world that more than half of all U.S. workers would most likely be employed in the technology sector by the year 2006. Conversations they had had with high-tech colleagues convinced them of the need to do what they could to improve literacy, so that a future workforce would keep the U.S. globally competitive.
"As we see it," Barksdale said, "you spend the first third of your life learning, the second third earning, and the final third giving back. And if there's anything left over, well, I guess we didn't plan well."
The next big ping
In business and high technology, Barksdale said, he believes the Internet will continue to grow and change the ways people learn and conduct business. "I could read all the statistics," he remarked, eyeing his notes with a grimace, "but trust me, the Internet's a big thing. It's doing all kind of good things, and some bad things."
Internet penetration in the United States, even with initiatives to wire schools and rural areas, he suggested, will probably never break a certain plateau of about 66-percent penetration, due to the current levels of illiteracy and indifference.
"If you can get it above 66 percent, well, I'll buy you a beer," Barksdale said.
Among trends to watch, he observed, are indications that big companies would become bigger through mergers and acquisitions. Internet infrastructure will probably grow as a business, along with innovations in photonics.
Regardless of what lies in store, Barksdale seemed keenly aware that there are snakes aplenty still to be killed. He pointed out that online shopping has not gained universal acceptance because so many consumers have had bad experiences with delivery, customer service, or credit card fraud. Some consumers also just plain mistrust the medium.
"That's a big snake," he stated. "But it's a big opportunity."
Quoting the influential management expert Peter Drucker, whom Barksdale called "the father of modern management," he said, "The greatest opportunities for wealth are the ones that solve that last link in the chain."
And the next big thing? According to Barksdale, it's as difficult to predict as the "pings" of a pinball.
"Nobody that I know can predict the next two pings of the pinball," Barksdale told the group.
"Go ahead and try for three. You'd own the world."
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