[...] When people go to a football game, and the band comes out on the field at halftime, there's a drum major who's leading the band, and he or she is setting the cadence for the people that are marching behind him. But the audience should be listening to and admiring the band, not the drum major.
Q: When you were going to school in Florida, was it a drum major you wanted to be?
A: I went to school my first crack out of high school on a music scholarship, so maybe that is what's behind the analogy..
Q: What instrument?
A: I used to play clarinet. That was my primary instrument, but I played a little bit of sax and blues and all that. But even then, I knew I wanted to be a businessman..
Q: Without even knowing what kind of business you would be involved in?
A: Right. In the 1950s and 1960s when I grew up, a businessman in the African American community ran the local store or dry cleaner. There were no other business role models.
I just had a sense of what I wanted to be. Now, what that businessman was going to do, I didn't know. One day one of my undergraduate school professors said, "You ought to talk to IBM." So I landed at IBM as a salesman. The rest is history..
Q: You talk about a lack of role models when you were growing up. Did you ever experience racial discrimination during your career?
A: I can't point to any overt form of discrimination that occurred. I started out as a salesman in Tampa, Fla., and ended up running the largest geographic profit center for IBM, so it would be hard for me to say that I was discriminated against -- having had that kind of career advancement.
I can't speak to you about the more subtle forms of discrimination, because sometimes you don't see those..
Q: When you were named CEO of Symantec in 1999, a lot of the media jumped on the angle that here was the highest-ranking African American executive in Silicon Valley. If I remember correctly, you weren't very happy about that. You didn't want that to be the lead paragraph of every story. How do you feel about it now?
A: I still feel that way. I don't think it's relevant. It's not news that I'm black.
The issue here is are we able to do something important at Symantec that transcends gender, transcends race, transcends nationality, and do people view that with enough significance that they say, "I can do that too."
If that's the case, that's good. But you never set out to wear your ethnicity on your sleeve. That's not the set of stars and stripes you want. What you want to wear on your sleeve is your accomplishments.
So I wasn't interested in having the discussion that says, "Well, he's the first African American to lead a major Silicon Valley company." So what?
Q: Others wanted to have that conversation, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson's here on a regular basis ...
A: I spend lots of time with Jesse every time he comes, and Jesse and I agree on many issues, and we disagree on some issues. But you shouldn't assume that because we're both African American our agendas are identical. That would be a huge mistake.
| This is just a small part of "On the record: John Thompson," a conversation last month between the Symantec chairman and CEO and the San Francisco Chronicle's editors
posted in articles on January 4, 2004 8:17 AM | t (0)
« Previous phile: Remind us today of urban possibilities yet to be recognized and fulfilled.
» Next phile: We need to see other women who look like us.
Return to top of page