Case: Self Competency

Larry Ellison at Oracle Computer

Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of Oracle Computer whose net worth is in the billions, has been the driving force at Oracle since he started the company more than two decades ago. He is now the fourth richest man in America with an annual salary of more than $72 million, a pay package that is 12 times bigger than the average pay of CEOs in the technology industry. Addressing his stockholders at Oracle's Redwood Shores, California, headquarters in 2008, he delivered a 30-minute profanity-laced speech in which he attacked his partners, competitors, the government, and most individuals in the room. PeopleSoft CEO Craig Conway called him the modern-day "Genghis Khan" because of his atrociously bad corporate behavior. In 2008 when Ellison proposed to buy PeopleSoft, Conway noted that the takeover was nothing more than a sham intended to disrupt PeopleSoft's sales. PeopleSoft employees openly criticized Ellison. Pleasanton City officials, home of PeopleSoft, questioned the integrity of a man who would insensitively target thousands of jobs just to claim a corporate victory. He is known for his corporate ruthlessness, which is outlined in a book by Mike Wilson titled The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison. Go to Oracle's blog (www.oracle.com) and read the blogs from irate customers and employees.

Ellison's brash disdain for failure and obsession with reaching the top started as a child when his adoptive father tried to lower his self-esteem, telling him that he would never amount to anything. His father fled Russia in the early 1900s, but was able put together enough money to make down payments on some apartment buildings in Chicago. He then leveraged those properties to buy more. When the tenants didn't pay rent during the Great Depression of the 1930s, he evicted them. His father was very hard on him also, but that made Ellison tough and competitive. He dropped out of the University of Illinois in 1964 because college was holding him back. He nearly died in a high-profile yachting race off the coast of Australia in 1998. His boat, named the Sayonara, ran into a hurricane and nearly sank, but Ellison was able to win the Sydney-to-Hobart race by his sheer persistence and determination to win at all costs. One of Ellison's favorite quotes is from a Zen proverb: "Your garden is never complete until there is nothing left to take out of it." To his competitors, the message is clear: Ellison will not be satisfied until there is no more business to take away from competitors.

Ellison runs Oracle without much input from others. He is famous for firing individuals because he doesn't like them. He lost Oracle's President Raymond Lane and senior executive Gary Bloom and refused to name successors, calling such a move dumb. He runs a tight ship that rewards employees who produce and squeezes out those who don't measure up to his standards. Individuals stay at Oracle because they are paid very well and fear recrimination. According to Thomas Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems, which Oracle bought a few years ago, "Larry is a control freak. He has the knack for taking the best and the brightest and trying to destroy them." Ellison defectors often end up competing against him. "Larry Ellison is a silver-backed alpha male gorilla," says his former friend and Oracle employee David Roux. "He will respond only to a direct challenge." Ellison likes to compete rather than collaborate. For example, he gave out gold coins as sales bonuses when Oracle drove Ingres Sybase out of business. In his bid for PeopleSoft, he said that if he and PeopleSoft CEO Craig Conway and Conway's dog were standing next to each other and Ellison had only one bullet, it wouldn't be for the dog.

Ellison might be a nightmare to work for, but his methods have created unimaginable wealth for the company's shareholders, managers, and employees. Since its initial stock offering in 1986, Oracle's share price has risen by more than 1,000 percent. It began with a staff of 3; today it employees more than 50,000 worldwide. Oracle's share of the database market is 49 percent.

Questions

1. Using the Big Five personality factors, describe Ellison's personality characteristics. How do these affect others?

2. What's Ellison EQ? Why do individuals work for him?