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| Home - CEO Spotlight - Mar 03 Issue |
CEO Spotlight: Pete Cittadini, Actuate Software
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Angel Mehta: You came up, again, through sales. Do you have any opinions as to what functional path there is to prepare someone to run a software company?
Peter Cittadini: There are some superb CEO’s that came up through the engineering, marketing, finance, sales ranks, and virtually every discipline. I think what’s important are a lot of the intangibles you have as a human being in order to be an effective CEO.
Angel Mehta: Such as?
Peter Cittadini: It’s more like you become the spiritual leader. It’s really a weird thing. You walk around and people are looking at your face wondering…if your scowling, whether the sky is falling and if you’re smiling, what that might mean. I mean, it’s a pretty wild thing being a CEO. If you think about it there’s not that many public company CEO’s in the world. I’m sure some of us are really good, I’m sure some of us are not very good at all and I’m certain the real good ones have an intangible that you just can’t groom, you can’t teach that’s just there innately in that human being and that’s what makes them effective.
Angel Mehta: Can you talk about lessons learned from Oracle and Interleaf…comment on how those experiences shaped you as the CEO that you are right now.
Peter Cittadini: Oracle was great because it was an aggressive place to evolve. I remember having Larry Ellison in the first Mercedes I ever bought. I was dropping Larry off at the Hartford Airport in Connecticut, after a sales call with the Hartford Insurance Group. It was so aggressive that you’d always try to get each other pumped up regardless of who the two employees were; it didn’t have to be Larry involved in the conversation. When Larry would fly in, he would be yelling, “Pete this is an amazing opportunity for us! We are going to crush IBM!”; so as we’re driving back to the airport, he’s screaming and pounding my dashboard and I’m thinking, “Larry, I just picked up this car - would you layoff of the dashboard!”. [Laughter] Here he is all excited about the vision of Oracle beating out IBM in the marketplace and its stuff like that that is a tremendous lessoned learned. If you really want to be a $10 billion dollar company, as Oracle is these days, you have to at some point be a $23 million dollar company looking up at IBM…and you’ve got to believe you can take them out someday. It was a great environment.”
I will tell you, Oracle was also a very unique experience because there were a lot of young people doing things for the first time, getting promoted because high-tech and the software business was a very young person’s business. You couldn’t find a 50-year-old with that skillset and bring he or she into the job. We made a lot of mistakes and it was great because for people like me who LEARNED from mistakes, you just learned a ton. So it was very aggressive, a youthful organization…they allowed you a lot of rope and experimentation.
But bottom line, virtually everyday, I think of something I learned at Oracle and how it applies here.
At Interleaf it was a different deal. We were already a public company, the Charter was to turn them from a desktop publishing company to a mainstream IT company by leveraging document management as the new facet of technology that we would embrace…lots learned there. We took our eye off the ball on the desktop publishing side, which was the lion share of the revenues. Document management back then was not accepted as a generic technology for IT, it was never budgeted for or thought of by CIO’s when putting together their budgets. Since we strategically just teeter tottered all the way over to the document management side and left the desktop publishing side to die it died very rapidly; it wasn’t appropriately offset in growing revenues from the doc management side. Plus, it wasn’t database-oriented. Prior to Oracle, I had many years of database management experience both on the sales and technical side and I just didn’t feel I had the intuition that I have associated with mainstream system software, infrastructure-type stuff like databases that run on back-end servers. So I decided I wasn’t a good turnaround-type guy. I was always best with a fresh new opportunity where I could grow it from scratch, where I had the opportunity to create culture in the way I like to create culture versus acquiring a very large legacy culture and trying to change hundreds of people to a new culture; it’s very very difficult to do. I learned I’m not interested in being that distant from system software and database management-type stuff so that’s why Actuate was a godsend to me it had all of the elements of being very tightly tied to database management systems, server-centric system software-type stuff, as well as the potential for brand new opportunities to be created from scratch.
Angel Mehta: You talked about mistakes and learning from mistakes. If you could identify three critical mistakes you’ve made over the course of the past 10 years - what would they be?
Peter Cittadini: It’s a generic mistake, in the cultures that I produce where within companies I’m almost building a family-oriented environment because real successful people at successful companies often have to make sacrifices and choices between family and company and, at times, they get blurred if you’re doing it right. So, at times, my wife will be pissed…my kids will be pissed because I have something PRESSING at work…and, at times, people at work will be pissed because I have stuff that’s pressing at home that I decide I’m going to have to do versus work and that’s just great. I mean, I hope the Actuate employees are always torn because if you choose family all the time I don’t think you can be a great company employee and if you choose the company all the time I don’t think you can be a great personal human being that necessarily is a good contributor to a family. With that culture, however, you create loyalties that, at times, you’ll know an individual from a talent standpoint or a fit standpoint is probably not the best person for the job. Because they fit the culture so well you won’t take action on taking someone out and bringing in someone who is more appropriate for the company. In other words, you become a lot less ruthless because the types of cultures that I feel most comfortable with are clearly humanistic-oriented cultures.
Angel Mehta: What are the ongoing initiatives, if any, to maintain the culture you want as you get larger? That’s obviously a very difficulty task.
Peter Cittadini: I stay plugged in with employees. I have, in the last number of years become less hands-on than I used to be, especially in the sales ranks. I’m not going to be able to directly participate on the operational aspects of things but when I have more time to do stuff that’s less operationally-oriented where I can impact the culture just by having a lot of one-on-one’s, a lot of hallway chats with employees, go downstairs and crank up the Margarita machine once in a while which is part of our culture!
Angel Mehta: There is a statement or an opinion that you’ve thrown around a lot, especially in the bubble years: “The right team with a mediocre offering or business plan is better than a mediocre team with a killer offering”. What’s your opinion on that? True then, not true now?
Peter Cittadini: In the bubble years, you could have a mediocre offering with a mediocre team and go and knock it dead. I think anything would work between ’98 and 2000 to tell you the truth. I think it was an outrageous time in this industry cycle that I don’t think will be replicated in our lifetime.
Angel Mehta: Were you ever tempted to go the entrepreneurial route in the bubble?
Peter Cittadini: You mean split and do something different?
Angel Mehta: Yes.
Peter Cittadini: No, absolutely not.
Angel Mehta: Why not?
Peter Cittadini: First of all, I don’t think I would be a good entrepreneur. I’m not an inventor, if you will. What I need to do is be coupled with an entrepreneur during the early years of a company’s lifecycle because if it’s a bunch of clay that’s in the midst of being molded and you can’t visualize what it is. I’m not very good at creating an end result out of the hunk of clay…in replicating the pottery and enhancing the pottery on a going forward basis but as far as me making something of nothing that’s not my thing.
Angel Mehta: What advice would you have for operating executives that are being tempted by the idea of starting their own company? What thought process should they take themselves through?
Peter Cittadini: Don’t let your ego fool you. Be extremely cognizant of what your capabilities are, what your strengths are, what the weaknesses are and make sure the weaknesses are extremely well supplemented in whatever deal you do.
Peter Cittadini is CEO of Actuate Corporation. Prior to joining Actuate, he was SVP of Worldwide Operations at Interleaf. Pete also served six years at Oracle where as VP of the North East Region, he led the company’s most successful sales group. Pete has also held sales management and technical positions at Applied Data Research, CSC Infonet and MacMillan, Inc. Pete has a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Boston College. For more information about Actuate or Pete Cittadini, email: lmukhey@actuate.com
Angel Mehta is Managing Director at Sterling-Hoffman Management Consultants, a retained executive-search firm focused on CEO, VP Sales, and VP Marketing searches exclusively for enterprise software companies. He can be reached via email at: amehta@sterlinghoffman.net
 
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