Management vs. Leadership

When it comes to your team, how much of your time is spent managing the members of your team or company, and how has the allocation of that time and those duties changed throughout your career?

It was a lot more management in the early days. And now it’s a lot more what I call leadership. The team works really well with one another, we’re clear on what we want to achieve. People have meetings in their touchpoints as needed. We think of our business as a value, as a service business, which is really a flywheel. It begins with awareness of our value proposition, scaling sales and alliances, development, implementations, referenceable, customers and background. So wherever the bottlenecks are, is where my team typically engages with one another to remove those bottlenecks wherever they may be.
So it’s a lot more leadership than it is management. In the early days, I had to do literally everything. But that helped me because I know where everything’s buried, and I could now look to take the business to the next level.

You probably could do just about every job in your organization.

Well, you know, I purposely created an apprenticeship for myself in enterprise software. I started as a programmer, and then I did implementations of SAP software for years. I did product management, product marketing, marketing, some sales, I did in large companies and small companies. So, by the time I got going with Coupa, I had a pretty good sense of every area. And truth be told, none of it is rocket science. It’s all about the will and the passionate desire to do something great with a bunch of like-minded colleagues.

And did you do that intentionally, working in so many different areas, or it just kind of happened?

I did it very much intentionally, initially driven by my own insecurity to begin with, but I committed in 1994, to building my career in the world of enterprise software. I just felt that the way businesses used information technology is something you could build an entire, many, many decades career in. And I thought, “Well, let me try all these different areas.: And I literally mapped out my own kind of apprenticeship. So, by the time I was in my 30s, I felt like I was ready to go take a run at something myself.

Well, that is the ultimate strategic thinking right there. You had a whole strategy for your career ever since you were in your 20s.

I did. That is true, I did. I have a little bit of OCD in me, so that’s where that comes from, for sure.