Tom Mendoza served as president and then vice chairman of data storage giant NetApp from 2000 to 2008.
The following anecdotes are taken from Stan Slap’s 2015 book Under The Hood, where Mendoza reflects on two incidents in the company where he deliberately took action for the sake of sending a message to NetApp’s employee culture.
“I hired a guy to run the Israel division of NetApp who was fantastic for us. His name is Shlomo Nataf, really just a fantastic guy. Number one market share, the whole thing. And then he retired, and our employees in Israel asked if two of the founders, Dave and James, and I, the CEO, would speak on film for a few minutes about what Shlomo has meant to the company, and, of course, we did that.
“So I went to a football game, in South Bend, Indiana, the weekend when they were going to hold his retirement event. And I’m sitting there telling somebody the stories about this guy, and they said, ‘He’s been with you how long?’ I said, ‘Only thirteen years, but he made an incredible contribution,’ and it hit me that I should go to Israel. And it was one of those things—as soon as I said it, I was embarrassed that I wasn’t going.
“Now it’s Saturday in South Bend, and Monday is the event in Israel—which is Sunday here—but I still have to see customers that weekend, and I have to be back in Silicon Valley on Tuesday. My assistant said, ‘Listen, you won’t even land in Israel until five on Monday and the event is at seven, and you’ll have to turn right around and fly back.’ I said, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’
“I’d had an exhausting weekend, but I got on the plane, and the whole way, I’m laughing, thinking how cool is this? Nobody in Israel knows I’m coming except one person, because I had to have somebody help me through security. So I get there, I walk backstage right as they’re showing the movie. And it’s like, we had about 500 people there, including customers, friends, family—I mean, it was a big, big deal. And when that screen came up, I was just sitting there. It didn’t matter what I said—I must have given some little talk—but that didn’t matter. That I was there meant something to the employee culture, and that it clearly meant something to me mattered even more.”
NetApp makes data storage solutions. Think: boxes of memory, coupled with software, to be installed in large enterprise data centres.
A stack of NetApp ASA A-Series storage systems. (Source, archive.is backup)
Tom continues:
“Another time I was in Singapore and I got a call from the person who ran the North Carolina division, where we run three shifts, and we’re having some motivational issues on the late shift. Could I come out there sometime in the next few months? I looked at my calendar and I realized that unless I go now, I can’t. I’m in the club that says Singapore Air, and so I said to my admin, ‘How would I get to North Carolina?’
Unfortunately, there’s not a Singapore—North Carolina shuttle service. I flew home seventeen hours to L.A., changed, repacked, and took the red-eye right out again. As people were getting off their shift, I was standing there the next day. And I spent, I’d say, eight hours speaking to groups of fifty every forty minutes—so almost every person. Just talked and listened and let them see me. And the next day, I was in New York City for meetings.
“I think it’s as simple as this: The culture doesn’t care what you know until it knows that you care. So when you say it, you’d better mean it, and the more uncomfortable it is, the harder it is, the better, because now when your employee culture says, ‘What can I give?’ you’re the example. ‘If he’s willing to do that, who am I to do less?’”