Christine Heckart
Christine Heckart: I liken it to that game that you play as a kid where there’s all thelittle blocks and you can pull different blocks out, but you don’t know whichone is gonna be the one that topples the building.
Aculture is kind of like that. It’smade up of a lot of constituent parts, and you don’t necessary know which one –and, in fact, no particular one is exactly the one that makes or breaks thestack, but if you take too many of the pieces away, eventually the stack fallsdown. So, if I look at some of thekey components of NetApp’s culture, NetApp strives to be a model company ineverything that it does. It reallytakes its core values very seriously and it spends a lot of time as a companyand the leadership team spends a lot of time as leaders talking about andreinforcing those core values. That doesn’t happen at many companies, at least not the many companiesthat I’ve been at. Usually, theyare written on a poster somewhere and they are kind of forgotten.
At NetApp, weconstantly talk about the kind of culture we want to have. We talk about valuing people. We talk about trust and integrity ineverything that we do. We stayvery focused on the needs of the customer. You don’t find at NetApp people internally focused. You find people that are veryexternally focused on, how do we do the right thing for our customers and ourpartners? If we do that,everything else sort of falls into place.
it creates an environment inwhich people not only can be, but must – to survive here – they must be verycollaborative and they must be very appreciative and respectful of the diverseopinions and skills in the company and really put those to use. I think people value that. I think what makes NetApp a great placeto work is that there are 11,000 people who come to work every day and theylove what they do and that shows, and it shows to everybody around them.
My key insight,having been here over a year and a half now and being able to compare it to alot of other places – my key insights is that those 11,000 people all feel likethey make a difference. Theyreally believe that every day they come to work, they are having an impact andthey are making a difference. Ithink it’s probably true for those 11,000 people. They get their opportunity to figure out the right thing todo for the business and to focus on doing it and doing it well. They have the space in which not onlyto achieve that goal, but they have a culture then that appreciates them forachieving that goal.