The Industry Standard
While considering who should make the list, we started by avoiding the obvious.
Robert Shaw
USWeb/CKS
Taking the Net's biggest I-Builder to the next level. Robert Shaw is the new CEO of USWeb/CKS, and he looks the part. Standing six feet-plus, with a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair, the former Oracle executive and Silicon Valley heavyweight seems every inch a CEO. It's a surprise it's taken him until this year, at 51, to finally step into the top spot.
But that's because Shaw's credentials come from the demanding world of consulting, rather than last year's Web start-up. And his blue-chip experience may be just what USWeb/CKS needs to take it to what the company's executives call "the next level." Shaw is stepping in after the surprise resignation of USWeb founder Joe Firmage , who departed shortly after he revealed plans to publish a Web site devoted to evangelizing his New Age spiritual beliefs.
Shaw brings 20-plus years of experience in the consulting business, a sector USWeb/CKS has modeled itself after. He most recently became a superstar for developing a consulting unit within Oracle. Though no one gave Oracle much of a chance to make consulting a significant part of the company's revenues, the conventional wisdom was wrong. Oracle has been giving top firms like Andersen Consulting and McKinsey a run for their money.
Shaw had previously worked at Booz, Allen & Hamilton , where he met Oracle's president and COO Ray Lane. He joined Oracle with Lane as part of a package recruiting deal. Shaw was based in Oracle's Silicon Valley office, working mainly with technology companies, but he also garnered experience with big-name consumer firms such as Kellogg 's and Xerox.
USWeb's stock rose when Shaw's appointment was announced on Nov. 5, 1998, and analysts seem to view his arrival with high hopes. Mark Kvamme , chairman and CEO of CKS Group , which just completed its merger with USWeb, says, "It's fortuitous that he was available."
Shaw brings with him the ability to ramp up - quickly. When he joined Oracle, the company had a 500-person consulting unit that only supported executives using Oracle's own software. Six years later, he'd transformed the unit into an autonomous, 15,000-strong, $2.5 billion operation that advises clients on a broad range of business and technology issues. According to the com pany's last annual report, the consulting unit brings in 30 percent of Oracle's revenues. Shaw's goal at USWeb/CKS will demand similar energy: The company hopes to increase revenues by 50 percent in 1999.
Shaw has a familar recipe for success: hiring and keeping the right people.
"Andersen Consulting is probably the only one of the Big Six that got this right a long time ago," he says. "You have to invest in building a recruiting engine that attracts really smart people. Then you build the infrastructure behind it."
USWeb/CKS' growth is very much about maximizing such human capital. The company has acquired a network of I-Builders and uses a software system called Knowledge Base to store and distribute the skills and expertise of its 1,800-member workforce.
The merger of USWeb and CKS Group was supposed to create a company called Reinvent Communications, although the company retracted the name in November, saying it was not available. It's no loss, since Shaw's vision of USWeb/CKS' future sounds more like "repurpose" than "reinvent." After all, the ability to package and reuse knowledge is the essence of lucrative consulting work.
"I think it's the key to building services profitably: building a culture that says I don't have to reinvent everything I do," he says. "If I can deliver something that's been engineered two or three times that's higher quality and I can do it quicker, customers should pay a premium for that, and I should be able to deliver that to my customers with fewer people."
Shaw says that Knowledge Base is not yet intuitive enough for employees to automatically tap the network of USWeb/CKS offices to find the skills they need and where they're located. For now, account leaders are responsible for drawing on resources for each project. This "link in the field," as he calls it, is a program he devised at Oracle to maximize the return on each member of its staff.
He was looking for a broader base of talent and technology, Shaw says, when he left Oracle in August. Oracle, he believes, "will ultimately fail" because it only offers one technology platform.
"Today, you have to be technology agnostic," Shaw says. "In the future, the most important companies will be service companies, not product companies, because they have the knowledge and resources to assemble a solution."
When Shaw left Oracle, he planned to start running his own company. He was well into a plan of his own when USWeb/CKS came calling. "It was almost the same playbook," he says of the company's model. By joining USWeb/CKS, he gets to jump in on a later phase of the plan, rather than start from scratch.
**Reprinted from The Industry Standard, January 12, 1999