David B. Wright’s father used to tell him that everything looks different depending on where you sit.
And it took awhile, but the chairman and CEO of Verari Systems Inc. says that, over the years, he has grown to understand the corporate wisdom in that advice.
“The ideas that you get from your perspective are different from the ones that somebody else might see from theirs, and that’s OK, because they might be closer to the solution than you are,” says Wright, whose company develops energy-efficient data-center and desktop-consolidation platforms.
Wright says another lesson he learned from his father is that the people you see going up are the same people you’re going to see going down.
“I used to laugh about it, but basically, he was saying that everybody counts,” he says.
Smart Business spoke with Wright about how he combined those lessons to lead his 310 employees and grow his business.
Hire the person, not the resume. During the hiring process, everybody gets excited about where the candidate went to school. I don’t. You know what I usually look at first? I look at what they did while they went to school.
I look at people who got involved in the community — whether it’s sports or social — because I want somebody who wants to be part of society. That’s really important to me. If you can’t be part of society, you can’t be part of a team.
Second, you can tell a lot about people based on their personal life. If I know that somebody is a good father or a good mother, most times, that person is going to be a very good employee because they are unselfish.
Look at their eyes; either they have passion, or they don’t. I always tell people, ‘You can’t create passion. You have to keep it alive, but you can’t create it.’ Once it dies, it dies. You can tell — how do they look every day, how do they look at themselves, how do they want to operate as a businessperson and also as an individual?
Also, I can deal with anything but lack of integrity. I don’t think you can teach that; if you don’t have it, you don’t have it. If you’re born a dog, you don’t die a cat — as they say. People are what they are. I don’t believe people change that much in certain areas. They have integrity, or they don’t. It’s that binary to me.
