Trident University International CH10 Larry Ellisons Leadership Traits Essay How would you describe Ellison’s personality and leadership traits? Refer to t

Trident University International CH10 Larry Ellisons Leadership Traits Essay How would you describe Ellison’s personality and leadership traits? Refer to the specific leadership traits discussed in Hiriyappa (2009) or Bauer and Erdogan (2012).
Would you describe Ellison’s behavior as being task-oriented, or people/relationship-oriented? Refer to Hiriyappa (2009) and Bauer and Erdogan (2012).
How would you describe Ellison’s leadership style? Consider the leadership styles discussed in the “Types of Leaders/Leadership Styles” section of Chapter 10 of Hiriyappa (2010). WHY IT PAYS TO BE A JERK
Mendleson, Rachel . Canadian Business ; Toronto Vol. 83, Iss. 18, (Nov 8, 2010): 28-30,32,34.
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ABSTRACT
Since co-founding the Redwood Shores, CA-based Oracle in 1977, CEO Larry Ellison’s antics, which have included
everything from hiring a private investigator to snoop through Microsoft’s garbage to unceremoniously punting a
series of would-be successors to his throne, have earned him the distinction of Silicon Valley’s consummate
meanie. The incredible success that he has enjoyed is a marvel to anyone familiar with the accepted literature on
what it takes to make a great leader, qualities like empathy, mediation skills and humility. Ellison acknowledges
that he needs a foil. Leaving the traditional management duties to trusted associates, says psychoanalyst Michael
Maccoby, author of Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, The Inevitable Cons, has enabled him to focus on
thinking big — a crucial element for success in today’s tech world. As Oracle increasingly dominated in database
software and began to move to applications and, most recently, hardware, experts agree that Ellison’s willingness
to buy out the competition has been essential to sustaining growth.
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Headnote
The success of Larry Ellison and what it says about leadership
On the battlefield of Silicon Valley, it takes a lot to distinguish oneself as more bloodthirsty than the rest. But in
recent months, Oracle CEO and founder Larry Ellison reminded observers why, even in an industry dominated by
barbarians, he has earned a reputation as a first-class SOB.
In early August, Ellison launched a public attack on Hewlett-Packard, throwing what had for decades been an
amicable business relationship into jeopardy with a few choice words. Following the ousting of CEO Mark Hurd,
who was forced to step down after a sexual harassment inquiry, Ellison lashed out at HP in an e-mail to The New
York Times. HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs
many years ago,” he wrote, invoking one of the most infamous board blunders in tech industry lore. Ellison argued
that the company’s decision to make public the sexual harassment claims, which had been proven “utterly false,”
constituted “cowardly corporate political correctness.” And if there’s one thing Ellison can’t abide, it’s pansypicking ninnies interfering with genius at work.
His assault on HP continued through September, when he hired Hurd, a close personal friend, as co-president of
Oracle (a title he’ll share with Safra Catz, who has been Ellison’s second-in-command since 2004.) The move
prompted HP to launch a lawsuit over concerns about the protection of its trade secrets. The legal dispute was
quickly resolved, with both firms pledging to mend fences, but it wasn’t long before Ellison went about tearing
them down again. When HP tapped Léo Apotheker, the former CEO of SAP, Oracle’s archrival in businessapplication programs, as its new commander-in-chief, Ellison charged HP with “[picking] a guy who was recently
fired because he did such a bad job of running SAP,” and called for the board’s immediate, “en masse” resignation.
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All of which, onlookers agree, is classic Ellison. Bloomberg Businessweek described the outbursts as a return to
his “old strategy of ridiculing the competition”; the Associated Press, meanwhile, noted that he “thrives on.
..insulting rivals in public.”
Since co-founding the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle in 1977, Ellison’s antics, which have included
everything from hiring a private investigator to snoop through Microsoft’s garbage to unceremoniously punting a
series of would-be successors to his throne, have earned him the distinction of Silicon Valley’s consummate
meanie. “Ellison,” observes Karen Southwick in her unauthorized 2003 biography Everyone Else Must Fail, “is like a
modernday Genghis Khan who has elevated ruthlessness in business to a carefully cultivated art form. His
weapons are not the marauding hordes but his company’s possession of a key technology platform, his
willingness to exploit it, and his disdain for anyone who gets in his way.”
The incredible success that he has enjoyed is a marvel to anyone familiar with the accepted literature on what it
takes to make a great leader, qualities like empathy, mediation skills and humility. By all accounts, he is a bad
listener and a big talker, whose brash, take-no-prisoners approach tends to alienate employees and customers
alike. Yet, in the past 35 years, the jet-flying, sailboat-racing renegade has built Oracle into one of the most
important tech firms on the planet, with annual revenues of $27 billion-about a billion dollars shy of his personal
fortune. (AU figures are in U.S. dollars.) While many of his contemporaries have moved to arms-length positions or
other projects, Ellison remains the driving force behind the computing juggernaut, continuing to fashion it
according to his own design. After acquiring more than 65 tech firms in the past five years, the mercurial CEO
announced in September that he would be “buying chip companies,” suggesting that Oracle is positioning itself for
what Bill Tatham, head of Toronto-based enterprise software firm NexJ Systems, describes as ‘another level of
world domination.”
But while it may be tempting to single out Ellison as the ruthless villain of high technology, “none of these guys are
nice,” says Jeffrey Pfeffer, a business professor at Stanford University and author of Power: Why Some People
Have It-And Others Don’t. Before his ousting from Apple, Steve Jobs is said to have become increasingly difficult to
work with, refusing to acknowledge that sales were tumbling; since his return, he has often been criticized for his
obsessive secrecy, and ruling the company with an iron fist. Meanwhile, it was Bill Gates’s attempt to snuff out the
competition that led to antitrust allegations-and sent Ellison rooting through Microsoft’s trash. “It’s very unpopular
to say in today’s world, where we have these Kumbaya theories of leadership,” says Pfeffer, “but it actually doesn’t
work well.” If anything, Ellison is merely the poster boy for what it takes to thrive in an increasingly ruthless
environment. His rare combination of hubris and self-awareness enables him to skid recklessly to the edge,
stopping just short of the cliff. And his stunning trajectory offers a valuable lesson: in the cutthroat arena of big
business, sometimes it pays to be a jerk.
When asked to explain why he is the way he is, Ellison, who declined our request for an interview, has been known
to scoff at obvious theories. “So my biological mother abandoned me, and my mother who raised me abandoned
me when she died of cancer,” he told The Washington Post in 2000. “I’ve thought of all those things, and that just
sounds so good, the reasons are all there. But is it really true?” But whatever caused his infamous bravado, the
evidence suggests it took root early on.
Born in Manhattan in 1944, Ellison’s unwed, teenage mother sent him to live with her aunt and uncle on Chicago’s
south side when he was nine months old. Even as a teenager, Ellison had a propensity to pump up the facts. “When
reality was not interesting enough for him, he simply made up delightful and often plausible details as he went
along,” writes Mike Wilson in his 1997 biography The Difference Between God And Larry Ellison (God Doesn’t Think
He’s Larry Ellison). “His stories all had certain things in common: They were funny, they glorified Larry Ellison, and
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unless you had the authority to issue subpoenas, they were damned near impossible to disprove.” The alleged
fabrications often centred on his education. Though he never graduated from collegehe dropped out of the
University of Illinois and the University of Chicago-he regularly suggested otherwise, says first wife Adda Quinn.
“He told me these big, whopping lies, and stuck to them,” she told The Washington Post. Indeed, The New York
Times identified Ellison in 1988 as holding “B.S. and M.S. degrees in physics from the University of Chicago.”
And while his tendency to embellish may have wreaked havoc on his personal life (he is currently on his fourth
marriage), it proved a tremendous asset in Silicon Valley, enabling him to seem like a competitor long before he
actually was one. After bouncing between different computer programming jobs (he discovered his bent for
programming at college, and reportedly carried a manual around with him), he secured a gig at Ampex, a firm that
did contracts for the U.S. government, in the mid-1970s. There, he got his first taste of database software while
working on a project for the CIA with the code name “Oracle.” Around the same time, he read a paper published by
IBM, which outlined a way to make it easier to store and retrieve data-a prototype for the first relational database.
“I saw the paper, and thought that, on the basis of this research, we could build a commercial system,” Ellison, who
solicited the assistance of fellow programmers Bob Miner and Ed Oates, recalled in a 1995 interview. “If we were
clever, we could take IBM’s research… and beat IBM to the marketplace with this technology. Because we thought
we could move faster than they could.” He was right. By 1984, the company he founded with Miner and Oates,
originally called Software Development Laboratories, was logging nearly $13 million in annual sales. (Miner died in
1994; Oates retired in 1996.)
Though Oracle’s critics have complained over the years about Ellison’s tendency to promise a product prematurely,
or sacrifice quality for early delivery, he clearly understands the benefit of first-mover advantage. “Once Ellison
anticipates something. ..to him it’s done,” writes Southwick. “Ellison is serene in his conviction. It’s a quality that
has enabled much of his success as well as his difficulties with the rest of the world.”
As Oracle’s influence has grown, so has Ellison’s bluster. By the mid-1990s, when Oracle had effectively neutered
its competition, Ellison had begun making a sport of taking pot shots at Microsoft and its founder Bill Gates,
though both were, by most measures, entirely out of his league. Ellison went so far as to declare in 1995 that the
era of personal computing was over. But the fact that Ellison consistently bit off more than he could chew-Oracle
has never outpaced Microsoft’s revenue, and the personal computing era lives on-is largely beside the point. “If
Larry could make the world think there was a contest between him and Bill Gates,” Wilson told Canadian Business,
“that was good for Larry and bad for Bill.” Pfeffer concurs: “A lot of this is posturing, but it works.” Ellison’s knack
for intimidation appears to have been cultivated with a clear sense of its effect. “He knows he has a reputation for
popping off and being provocative,” says Wilson, “and he likes that very much.” This fierce reputation is beneficial.
“It intimidates. It scares people off,” says Pfeffer. “If he can get the competition to engage in peremptory surrender,
all the better.”
From the outset, Ellison’s oversized ego has made him shameless about highlighting the significance of his
personal contribution to his company’s success. The sixth-richest person in the world, his net worth is currently
estimated at $28 billion. In explaining why Ellison had majority ownership from the get-go (he initially purchased
60% of the company’s shares, while his partners split the rest), Oates told Wilson, “There was no question about
the fact that Larry was pushing this idea a lot harder than either Bob or I would have pushed it. He had more
chutzpah than the two of us combined.” Geoff Squire, who ran various divisions of Oracle’s world operations from
1984 to 1993, told Canadian Business that Ellison sketched out his plan to start with database software and move
into tools and applications “years before any code was written on those areas…. Call it passion, call it visionthe
confidence was definitely there.”
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On more than one occasion, Ellison has said that everyone wants to be loved,” including him-a peculiar statement
considering the callousness with which he has been known to treat employees. He has no regard for anyone’s
schedule but his own; even early in his career his tendency to show up at meetings 60 or 90 minutes behind
schedule prompted employee Stuart Feigin to begin referring to him as “the late Larry Ellison.” Yet more damning
than his lateness is his habit of casting off previously trusted executives, oftentimes shortly before their stock
options are due to vest. Accounts of former Oracle employees paint a picture of a boss with an infectious energy,
and a propensity to elevate his charges to incredible heights only to dump them later. As one journalist put it, “He’s
like a juicer, he squeezes people dry and then discards them.” Employees are often tossed when they emerge as
possible successors. Observers have suggested that Ray Lane, whose leadership was instrumental in pulling
Oracle out of the red, was ousted because he was beginning to outshine his boss.
But Squire has a different take. Describing the manner in which Ellison selected new programmers and
salespeople as “clinical,” Squire attributes Oracle’s success largely to the premium he has always placed on
choosing the right candidates. “He really did hire very, very good people,” says Squire. Though Squire
acknowledges that Ellison could quickly turn on his charges-as he puts it, “He backs people until he doesn’t”he
sees Ellison’s willingness to constantly refresh the talent pool as a strength. “People who do a great job don’t just
get to stick around in companies forever,” says Squire, who is currently the non-executive chairman of Kognito, a
U.K.-based data management firm. Despite the fact that he was cut loose shortly before the last of his stock
options would have vested, Squire harbours no ill will, insisting that the fortune and experience he amassed at
Oracle “set me up for life.” Squire’s trajectory is not unique: Oracle is often credited with creating the most
millionaires in Silicon Valley; many of those ousted by Ellison went on to head tech firms that competed in the
same highprofile realm. (Incidentally, in the midst of the Hurd debacle, Lane was named nonexecutive chairman of
HP.)
According to psychoanalyst Michael Maccoby, author of Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, The Inevitable
Cons, “What makes Ellison so successful, even though he’s a narcissist visionary and really not very good at
working with people, is that he understands himself, and he understands who he needs to work with.” His selfawareness became particularly apparent in the early 1990s, when poor accounting practices led the company,
which went public in 1986, to over-report revenues. In 1991, Oracle posted a loss of $12.4 million; its stock value,
meanwhile, dropped from $3.8 billion to $700 million. Ellison, who before the crash, was known to brag about
playing tennis on company time, and was so seldom at the office that, when he was spotted, employees joked
about “Elvis sightings,” was shaken to the core. “I was too depressed f to leave the house],” he told The Washington
Post, “I let everyone down.” But rather than let Oracle die, he swallowed his pride and “went out and got some
better managers to run the company,” says Wilson.
Ellison acknowledges that he needs a foil. Leaving the traditional management duties to trusted associates, says
Maccoby, has enabled him to focus on thinking big-a crucial element for success in today’s tech world. “It allows
him to be the visionary, the guy who determines what companies he’s going to buy and where he’s going to go,” he
says. “He’s the strategic leader.”
The aggressive way in which Oracle pursues expansion has prompted many to compare Ellison to a warlord. Of all
the acquisitions the company has made over the years, none is more emblematic of his unapologetically
conquering spirit than the hostile takeover of PeopleSoft he mounted in 2003. When Oracle announced it was
gunning for the software firm with an unwelcome $5.1-billion offer, observers were stunned at the audacity of the
move, which came as PeopleSoft was in the midst of inking its own $1.8 billion deal to acquire smaller software
firm J.D. Edwards &Co. Adding to the drama was the fact that the man leading PeopleSoft’s defence was CEO
Craig Conway, a disgruntled former Oracle employee. In 1999, Conway urged Siebel Systems founder and CEO Tom
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Siebel, another one-time Oracle associate embroiled in a public spat with Ellison, not to let his old boss get his
goat, telling Forbes, “Larry picks a fight, and since everyone loves a fight, they come to watch.”
Come watch they did. In the months that followed, Conway described Ellison as everything from a schoolyard bully
to a sociopath. Ellison, for his part, remained clear in his intention: in acquiring PeopleSoft, he would abandon its
product and most of its employees; what he was after, he said, was its customer base. When Conway compared
his former boss’s plot to “me asking if I could buy your dog so I can go out back and shoot it,” Ellison was quick to
issue a cutting retort. ‘I love animals,” he said. “If Craigy and [his dog] were standing next to each other and I only
had one bullet, trust me, it wouldn’t be for the dog.” Ruthless though it may have seemed, none denied the
brilliance of Ellison’s power play, and in the end, he emerged victorious. In 2004, PeopleSoft’s board fired Conway,
and sold the farm to Ellison for $11 billion. (Oracle acquired Siebel Systems the following year.)
As Oracle increasingly dominated in database software and began to move to applications and, most recently,
hardware, experts agree that Ellison’s willingness to buy out the competition has been essential to sustaining
growth. “This is an industry in which basically growth has slowed to a crawl. The only way.. .you as a company can
make progress is by acquisitions,” says Stanford’s Pfeffer, who points out that HP and Microsoft have also made
careers of gobbling up the little guys. “[Ellison] sees the software world as consolidating, and he wants to be the
consolidator rather than consolidatee.” Ellison’s perceived ruthlessness stems, in part, from a few juicy quotes that
have been frequently repeated in the press. But Ellison often argues his words were twisted. In 1988, The New York
Times reported that he identified his ideal vicepresident as Genghis Khan, paraphrasing the Mongol leader’s
famous mantra: “It is not sufficient that I succeed-all others must fail.” (Hence the title of Southwick’s book.) Ten
years later, in an interview with Forbes, Ellison maintained that the quote had been taken out of context, arguing
that he had merely been relaying a conversation he’d had with a Fujitsu executive during one of his many trips to
Japan. But in reiterating what the businessman had told him, he wound up adding more fuel to the fire. ‘We in
Japan think that our competitors are taking rice out of our children’s mouths,” he repeated, adding another phrase
to the lexicon of inflammatory statements regularly attributed to him.
That Ellison’s $70-million mansion in Woodside, Calif., is modelled after a medieval shogun compound, and his
office is plastered with Japanese art, certainly compounds his image as a wannabe Mongol warlord. But the main
reason it is so tempting to use snippets like these to explain his strategy is that they fit so well. In the early days of
Oracle, Ellison is said to have been “obsessed with the 100% [growth] figure,” rewarding those who exceeded their
sales targets with gold coins. If he’s seen as prizing victory above all else, it’s because, well, he does.
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