The Reformed Bully

John Hansen: Serial entrepreneur who cashed out at the bubble's peak. Sold software start-up Metapath to Marconi for $720 million. Became Colorado's secretary of technology, took a $1 salary. Returned to the private sector as CEO of OSS firm Watchmark-Comnitel. Got a raise.

At my root I'm just a benevolent dictator. I like to make decisions move quickly. Government is about consensus. Decisions take time, and you have to convince a lot of people. But in government, spending authority is power. I controlled Colorado's $600 million technology budget and would use that sword judiciously, but the real power came from the bully pulpit. It was a high-profile position. I lectured probably four times a week and used that bully pulpit to talk about what needs to be changed and rallied the troops behind it. And because I worked for $1 a year, it created a buzz. No one could say I was just another bureaucrat.

Every day was like Business 101: Let me educate you on how you run these $100 million projects. One 10-year project that's just now being completed had been restarted three times. We had 11 different database vendors. Every little bitty agency did their own procurement. I said, “Let's consolidate our buying power.” I held monthly roundtables and said, “Don't you see why we're doing this?” I brought in outside people. I uncovered and exposed an agency that was building its own $2 million human resource system. There was tremendous resistance at first from what we call in government the “weebies,” as in, “We be here before you, and we be here after you.”

It was the most fascinating three years of my life. When I was at Metapath, I was impatient. I'd make decisions based on perhaps 50% or 60% of the data. I didn't suffer fools lightly. I'd just say, “You're gone.” I was arrogant. Three years in government really took the rough edges off. I couldn't fire people, so I started to try to understand other peoples' perspectives and realize they had valid points. I'm still decisive, but I listen more.

If I'd have come into Watchmark before, I probably would have fired six top people. Instead I made a change in human resources and a change in legal counsel. (That's philosophical. I don't believe in in-house legal for the size of company we are.) In a company of almost 300 employees, that's not bad. That doesn't mean there won't be other changes. But I'm much more open to helping people reach their potential than I am like Donald Trump: “You're fired!” Or at Watchmark: “We be gone.”