The best CEO in Silicon Valley: John Thompson has transformed Symantec into a multibillion-dollar security software juggernaut

Black Enterprise, Sept, 2004 by Alan Hughes

On the occasional summer day when John W. Thompson manages to get away from it all, he can be spotted along the riverbanks of Alaska's waterways. Fishing rod in hand and fly securely tied to hook, he'll carefully scout the wooded shoreline for the ideal location to cast in hopes of landing the perfect rainbow trout or arctic grayling. Though this is Thompson's ideal way of relaxing, it uses methods similar to his approach to business.

As chairman and CEO of Symantec Corp., the 55-year-old trolls the waters of Silicon Valley to determine the hottest growth areas within the network security software industry and to identify potential acquisition targets with products that complement his company's software portfolio. And he's good at it.

One of Symantec's recent deals, the $370 million acquisition of Brightmail completed in June, gave it access to a suite of antispam technologies. Before that, there was the $100 million buyout of ON Technology Corp., a provider of software used to rapidly deploy applications and operating systems. Deals such as these are all in a day's work for Thompson, who's spearheaded dozens of acquisitions since taking the helm of the company in 1999. "Those were, in essence, about expanding us and moving us into adjacent markets--adjacent to the security space--and expanding file opportunity pool for the company to compete in," Thompson said from the company's Cupertino, California, headquarters. "So our business opportunity or addressable market went from about $16 billion to almost $32 billion."

Thompson successfully transformed Symantec from a $632 million consumer software company into a multinational market leader in enterprise security software with 5,600 employees and projected revenues of $2.41 billion for fiscal 2005. Under his leadership, the company's stock has risen more than 500% (compared with a loss for the tech-laden NASDAQ over the same period of time). In fact, during the five years since Thompson took over, Symantec stock has not only outperformed the stock of its chief competitors--McAfee, Computer Associates International, and RSA Security--but that of nearly every other major technology company as well, including such bellwethers as Microsoft, eBay, Dell, Cisco Systems, and Intel. These results make a powerful case for Thompson to be recognized as "the Best CEO in Silicon Valley." For Symantec's explosive growth in the fast-paced and ever-changing world of network security, BLACK ENTERPRISE has selected Thompson as Corporate Executive of the Year for 2004.

MASTER OF THE TURNAROUND

Thompson's road to the executive suite of a company best known to consumers for its Norton AntiVirus product was a lengthy one. Growing up in South Florida, Thompson's parents instilled in him a set of blue-collar values that he still applies today. He worked odd jobs such as cutting grass, and even at an early age, he wanted to become a businessman. "I always had this aspiration of someday being a businessman," Thompson recalls. "Now, I didn't know what that meant, because back in those days--in the early to mid-60s--a business leader in the black community ... ran the local grocery store [or] might very well have had a dry cleaning service. A business in the black community back then was fairly localized, not something that had national or global scale."

Thompson would attend Lincoln University in Missouri on a scholarship, until he learned that a condition of the scholarship was that he major in music. "I thought if I fulfilled my commitments to play in the marching band and play in the woodwind ensemble and play in the concert orchestra, that I had in fact rid. filled the obligations under my scholarship--not that I had to major in music," recalls Thompson. So the following year, he transferred to Florida A&M University. where he majored in business administration, and with the ink from his degree still damp, joined IBM in 1971 as a sales representative.

Thompson had initially planned to work for IBM for two years and then go to law school, but those plans never materialized. "I got hooked, like many young IBMers," he explains, "on the excitement and success that you can have from a last-paced career at what, at the time, was a very, very rapidly moving and growing company." Thompson would hold several positions in his first decade at Big Blue, including regional sales rep, sales manager, regional practices adviser, and regional sales manager.

One of Thompson's challenges at IBM was to turn around the company's flailing Midwest region. The division had a high cost of sales and declining revenues, and the solution of Thompson's predecessors was to cut a percentage of the sales force each year and hope that the cuts were deep enough to offset the declining revenue balance. So Thompson created a system in which there was a set of people, who would remain constant, responsible for customer relationships. Behind this group was a team of product specialists, who would service accounts based on existing demand. The new model lowered costs, improved customer satisfaction, and allowed the business to stabilize its revenue performance, while reducing headcount from roughly 9,000 to 4,400.