On Friday, I was granted a private interview with Dr. Jim Goodnight, co-founder and CEO of SAS. We met in Atlanta during the Chick-fil-A Leadercast where 50,000 individuals participated live or via simulcast from locations around the world.
Goodnight, who has a Ph.D in statistics, founded SAS more than 30 years ago with colleagues from North Carolina State University. Today, SAS is on a roll having achieved an enviable long-term record of revenue and profit growth. The firm was named number 1 on Fortune’s “Best Places to Work” list for 2010. Harvard Business School named Goodnight as one of the “20th Century’s Great American Business Leaders.” He was also recently named one of “America’s 25 Most Fascinating Entrepreneurs” by Inc magazine.
During the Leadercast program and prior to my meeting with Goodnight, author Jim Collins interviewed him on stage. Collins has written about the Level 5 leaders who experienced a catalyst in their lives — death of a loved one, near death experience, religious conversion — that developed humility in their character and made them better leaders. Collins seemed to be looking for something similar in Goodnight to explain SAS’s benevolent corporate culture where the average work week is 35 hours and the bucolic SAS campus has nearly every employee perk imaginable. Despite Collins’ attempts to draw out Goodnight, he hit a dead end. Typical of Goodnight, he answered several of Collins’ questions with a “yes” or “no.” When Collins asked Goodnight why most SAS employees were given offices rather than the standard cubicles that the typical software company employee has, Goodnight replied tongue in cheek that if an employee were watching porn from the privacy of his office it would not be the problem that it would be if he were in a cubicle out in the open. The audience responded with tentative laughter. They weren’t quite sure what to make of Goodnight.
Like Collins, I have known and written about many great leaders who experienced adversity that made them better leaders. Goodnight is a different breed, a leader who by all accounts has not gone through a Level 5-type transformation and yet has at least in some respects cracked the code on corporate culture. For every job opening, SAS receives 100 or more resumes. Over a business cycle, SAS’s employee turnover in the low single digits is a fraction of the software industry’s that at times reaches into the mid-20 percent plus range.
My interview with Goodnight and some additional research led me to believe that Jim Goodnight is among the most important role models for leaders to emulate today. This week I’m working on an article that explains why. If you have thoughts about Jim Goodnight or SAS’s corporate culture that you would like to share, please post them here or email me at mstallard [at] epluribuspartners [dot] com.
