What qualities did John Warnock and Chuck Geschek appreciate in Bruce Citizen? Bruce believed that it is important

W: Bruce Chizen is CEO of Adobe. He is offering some advice on following the founders’ footsteps.
W: You’ve said you had an unusual rise to the top at Adobe.  How so?
M: I was not an engineer. I didn’t have a technical background. I had a funny east accent. Also Ididn’t have an MBA, but I think what John Wamock and Chuck Geschke did appreciate in me was my willingness to experiment, to try new ideas in the market place in the ways that they might not have.
W: When you were named CEO, there was some anxiety about the new boss. How did you bring around Wall Street and the employees?
M: Wall Street was easier than the employees because of my relationship with the financial community. Between 1998 and 2000, I had been doing most of the presentations to analysts, though John was certainly present. I had been meeting with key investors and visiting customers and employees.
     So when John and Chuck officially retired, Wall Street knew that I was already running the company in many ways. But I knew some of the employees had some anxiety about it. The critics were concerned that I didn’t have John and Chuck’s technical background. Who would drive the company’s technical vision, considering that I wasn’t a technologist and that Adobe had built its foundation on technological differentiation?
     So at the first employee meeting I held as CEO, I made it very clear to the employees that I couldn’t fill John and Chuck’s shoes alone. I imagined a picture of myself in front of two very large shoes, and I told the employees that I would fill one shoe, but they had to fill the other one. I was counting on them.
W: How are you doing things differently from John and Chuck?
M: Adobe is going through a transformation. We are no longer a little company. We’re a $1.2 billion company with a market cap of somewhere between $ 6 billion and $ 8 billion. And I think we can become a $ 5 billion company over the next several years. That requires a whole different way of doing business.
W: Any notable missteps along the way? Any lessons from what has happened?
M: John told me, when he was handing over the title, that the CEO’s job is very lonely. While you have the board to speak to, the board is also your boss, and you really don’t have any peers within the company. I think I was too slow to reach out and engage with other CEOs to find a peer group to learn from. Over the past year and a half, I’ve joined a CEO group. We meet quarterly under non-disclosure agreement.
     The other thing I would do differently is to confront the hard organizational and people issue quickly, especially around my executive staff. Because I was promoted from within, I was sometimes too “nice” at the beginning. I didn’t want to disrupt the comfortable work environment, I allowed the present situation to persist longer than I should have. I knew that I needed to reorganize and eliminate those people who weren’t right for the positions.
W: What’s your advice to executives who are to take over as CEOs?
M: Be honest, open, and direct, and recognize that for every employee who might like what you are doing, there could be another who doesn’t and you are not going to make everyone happy most important, make sure, if your ex-CEO is still going to be on the board, to have an agreement going in so that they are going to let you do the job.