The most essential thing for us was to get the business model right, then put the world-class technology under it to support it. At Merrill, that meant not doing what people expected.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
One is that that's the way we started and we thought there would be more value and less confusion if the business model was just based on delivering news that's of value to Web sites.
We are driven by providing technology to enterprise customers.
We had to address information technology in the ways we had not before and give the agents the tools that they need to do their job more efficiently and more expeditiously.
If we can just take a few companies, and use those as models, as examples, to show the rest of corporate America how they can become more competitive, that's what I'd like to do and that's what I hope to do.
The goal wasn't to create a billion-dollar company. The goal was to create something useful where I could learn things.
Businesses need to proactively create models that make a difference in society and let everyone else use them, talk about them, emulate them - and build on them.
If I had learned more about business ahead of time, I would have been shaped into believing that it was only about finances and quality management.
Most people that derail as leaders in the corporate world, it's not because they couldn't do the math and calculate return on investment properly. The issues are communication and understanding. All of what typically would've been called the 'soft stuff.' You have to be authentic. You have to be dialed into the soft stuff.
We got bigger, much scarier competitors. We ended up with Microsoft, a company with all the money in the world, the way I look at those guys. And IBM, another company that, historically, dwarfed us.
We believe that the business system only is the key to success. It's no miracle, only day-to-day work in the appropriate way.