Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/59881
21st-Century Engineer S by Sharon Shinn photos by Robert Houser tratton Sclavos is constructing the equivalent of the modern-day railroad. He's laying down virtual tracks through Internet territory as he considers how to carry global commerce through the rest of the 21st century. Maybe even beyond. Sclavos thinks in terms of cen- turies and lasting legacies. The chairman and CEO of VeriSign Inc. runs a business not easily defined. The Mountain View, California, company offers "digital trust services"—security and authentication ser - vices for online buying and communication, as well as telecom services and domain name services. Recent acquisitions of Signio, which handles payments for online merchants, and Network Solutions, which assigns and tracks Web addresses, have made VeriSign a one-stop supplier of all Internet-based needs for corporations interested in online commerce. That's all according to plan. Sclavos has said he wants VeriSign to be the Internet's first utility—a pervasive, essen- tial, invisible part of the infrastructure that enables business to get done. He's focused on making Internet transactions as secure and trouble-free as possible, and he's constantly look- ing toward the future to help him determine what his choic- es should be now. Even in a field as volatile as technology, such focus has made Sclavos a recognized leader: He received the 2001 Morgan Stanley Leadership Award for Global Commerce and has been named to the Forbes list of Top 50 CEOs. Yet his definition of leadership is one that even an under- graduate business student can understand. "In many ways, it comes down to charting a course—having the ability to artic- ulate for your employees where you're headed and how you're going to get there," he says. "Even more important is choosing people to work with who have that same level of passion, commitment, fear, and competitiveness to drive toward those same goals. A lot of people talk about vision- ary leaders. I believe that you have to do the heavy lifting every day, make sure you have your best people on your biggest opportunities, and make sure you don't get compla- cent about where you are at any given point in time." Sclavos knows where he is right now. Where he takes VeriSign in the coming decades may shape the way the whole world interacts with the Internet. 18 BizEd JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2005 Forget about the information superhighway. Instead, picture the Internet as a global railroad