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Friday, September 27, 2002
NG: Secret of success
By Wilson Ng
Wired Desktop
BUSINESS DEGREE. I have managed a computer company for 10 years now, and have written a computer business column for seven. Most people I meet think of me as a computer science graduate. What is less known is that my first degree was in business management, and I still spend as much time keeping up on various management sciences like finance, accounting, marketing, organizational behavior as I do on technology.
I got interested in technology back in 1980. That summer, there were three schools in Cebu offering Cobol or Fortran programming. I went to see if I could enroll, hoping to have a glimpse of a real computer such as the one I had seen in Star Trek.
Imagine how I felt when I was shown into an empty room. Yes, they taught programming. The programs would be graded and sent to Manila, where somebody would type it on our behalf, and all we would get as evidence that it worked was a printout they would mail back! I decided not to enroll, and when it was time for college, I opted for business management.
ADVANTAGE. In 1984, I got an IBM PC compatible. It had an 8088 processor, and 64K of memory, which I later upgraded to 256K.
I promptly saw possibilities on how word processing could help me write better papers, and the spreadsheet could help me work out multiple financial scenarios.
Imagine my pride when I presented my marketing plan of 180 pages, almost four times thicker than those of my classmates.
With a spreadsheet, it was easy for me to copy and paste. So instead of just one projection, I had an optimistic projection, a likely projection, and a pessimistic projection. I was able to vary my projections based on several sets of possible interest rates and foreign exchange rates. Liberally sprinkled were pie charts, bar graphs and a myriad of other graphics.
All through my last two years in business school, I had an advantage over my classmates because I had a computer I knew how to use. It was this early experience that taught me how technology could help business.
Eventually, I studied computer science, worked as a programmer, and later started a computer company. We write business applications, financial software, payroll, and the like.
I guess if you are a management aficionado, nothing beats the experience of people telling you how they do their business, and you testing your wits on how you could make it better with technology. However, I never forgot that technology should serve business. In fact, our corporate motto is “translating technology to business strength.”
Maybe businesses talked to us because we talked their language. Instead of speaking of visual basic or client/server, we speak of effectiveness and return on investment.
What I am saying is it is easy to get carried away with tech-nology. I associate daily with people with creative ideas, who want to start their business. But in the end, they don’t do so well because they do not take care of marketing or their people well, or they do not know how to manage their finances. Or their applications do not improve the business processes of their customers.
It is a big error to assume that since you were so dazzled with it, all people with no technical background will be similarly impressed, that just because you have one great algorithm, people will beat a path to your door.
I have talked to people who get excited about tinkering with source code, and they think everybody wants to touch it too. They don’t seem to understand that businesses just want to buy something that gives them results, and don’t have the patience to understand why you have to go to all the trouble to fix what already works.
Now, many people ask me what makes our company successful. I just smile
and say, “I guess I learned early that technology without a business purpose is just a bad idea.”
(Wilson welcomes comments at wilson@esprint.com.)
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