The Talent Scout

Jim Vogt: VP and GM gig in Bay Networks' workgroup product and distributed networks division. Big break: Nortel acquired Bay, he's named president of small business solutions. Next helmed data security firm Ingrian Networks. Now president and CEO of mobile enterprise service provider Trapeze Networks. Still keeping the "i" out of "team."

I started as an electrical engineer with Bell-Northern Research. I worked in voice and tone research for five years, and during that time I got my MBA at Santa Clara University. I wanted to get into product line management. In that matrix, you get to touch every aspect of the business. It's a great training ground.

When Chairman and CEO Dave House came into Bay, he had a large impact on me. We took that company down to the bone and put it all back together again. We learned a lot along the way, but we always used to say we couldn't write a book about it when we were done. It was all about having the discipline, the common sense and the patience to take something apart and then reconstruct the elements that would sustain growth. You can't write a Harvard Business Review paper on that. You just have to figure it out for yourself.

Ingrian was a tremendous experience. Anybody who has led a private company in the last two years, as opposed to the three years before that, is going to build a strong character and a unique skill set. My mission there was to get them to a reasonable growth level and figure out where they fit in the grand scale of things. The biggest challenge was the economic climate. There is such a bias against small companies. People think you may not still be here in a year. The biggest thing is that we couldn't rely on doing things old-school. We had to be creative and aggressive. It was like carving out of granite.

What I saw in Trapeze was a product for the enterprise with all the flexibility of a wired solution, but in a wireless environment. My success has always relied on the right opportunities presenting themselves. Also, I've always had a great team. You're only as good and successful as the people around you. There's a guy I like: Washington Redskins Head Coach Joe Gibbs. He's a great leader because he's proved he can win not only three Super Bowls but also a Winston Cup in racing. He knows how to create an environment of success wherever he goes, and it doesn't matter which sport he's playing. You just have to find the right people to fix problems. So it's not about me — it's about what I can do to get the right people.