Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/61367
Corporate Culture It's fine for business students to know how to crunch the numbers, says SAS CEO Jim Goodnight. It's more important, however, that they under- stand IT, appreciate the value of human capital, and have plenty of good, old-fashioned common sense. by Tricia Bisoux Best Companies to Work For" seven years in a row; the com- pany was also featured on "60 Minutes" and "The Oprah Winfrey Show" as a great place for employees. In addition to focusing on employee well-being, Goodnight short-term numbers-based management. With their eyes only on the short term, they fail to recognize and cultivate long-term opportunities such as research and development, employee and customer longevity, and education for the next generation. Creating a company where good customers never want to leave and great employees never want to quit is Goodnight's simple formula for success. And foresight, he maintains, is one of the most important skills in a business leader's repertoire— and perhaps one of the most underutilized in business today. inSchool provides online resources to help teachers teach tech- nology to their students more effectively. The company's Campus Innovation Grants Program and the SAS Academic Initiative also provide grants and other incentives to students and educators. Goodnight believes many executives are too obsessed with places great value on providing educational opportunities that ensure that students grow up to be comfortable with technolo- gy. He has opened Cary Academy, a technology-oriented school for middle school and high school students. SAS You were a full-time professor at your alma mater, North Carolina State University, from 1972 to 1976 before officially incorporating SAS. Why did you want to make the leap from academia into starting your own company? While working on my graduate studies in statistics, I became involved with the project at NCSU that launched SAS. The original SAS grew out of a grant to focus on software to ana- lyze agricultural data. Fromthere, we started getting inquiries from insurance and pharmaceutical customers. When we got up to 110 customers, we decided to take the business off the campus and incorporate. It was very risky, but we knew that we had something special—but in no way could we predict that it would be this successful. In SAS' first years, you kept a pretty low profile, but in recent years you've placed yourself and SAS in the spotlight through print and television interviews. As business students prepare to assume executive posi- tions, should they also be prepared to play more pub- lic roles for companies than top executives may have played in the past? In 1976, SAS was too small to attract much attention, and ourmarketing budget was relatively small.Unlike CEOs who ran the high-tech startups of the '90s, I chose to focus our dollars and effort on R&D and quality assurance instead of seeking out huge venture capital infusions to buy ad space during the Super Bowl. But SAS has generatedmore interest since it crossed the $1 billion revenuemark, and new competitive pressures have also made it clear that we need to make more noise about our company and products. As the public face of SAS, I know it's my job to be visible and available to the people who drive our business. There's no substitute for meeting with employees and customers face-to-face. And as the company's revenue and worldwide presence grow, so does my public role and so do the roles of all our executives. There are many advantages to being a privately held company—specifically, you run the show and don't have to answer to a board! How—and why—do you resist the pressure to go public, especially when many analysts argue that a company with a growth rate such as yours can't survive forever as a privately held company? We considered going public during the technology boom of the '90s when tech companies were so overvalued and tiny competitors were grabbing headlines in the media. We BizEd NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2004 17 Counter