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For a CEO in the modern age, Brett Dawson’s 12-year stint in charge of technology group Dimension Data (DiData) is a bit of an outlier.
Where companies nowadays tend to swap out CEOs as quickly as we change our wardrobes – Telkom, for example, has had six since 2005 – Dawson has managed to stay the course despite a rapidly changing technological environment. The unusually long stay is not lost on him. “In our industry the average is about three years, so 12 is a long innings.”
Though he has had a lengthy stay in the top job, it still came as somewhat of a shock when he announced he was leaving with immediate effect a few weeks ago and that chief operating officer (COO) Jason Goodall would be taking over. Goodall has been with the group for 18 years.
For Dawson, the timing was right to leave. He had been CEO for over a decade and had led the company through four major transitions: turning the group around after the dot-com crash, expanding DiData globally; moving into IT as a service; and the buyout by Japan’s NTT in 2010.
He is also well aware of the dangers of having someone too long in the top job. “I think there is a certain point in time where it is healthy for a company, for its own longevity and its own sustainability, to have some change.”
Operating in a rapidly changing environment
The tech world he leaves behind is very different from when he took charge in 2004. Back then Telkom still held a monopoly on fixed-line communications in South Africa, Facebook had just about grown out of being a dorm-room experiment and Apple had just begun working on a handheld device it would later dub the iPhone.
A decade of rapid change was ahead. But where some companies would lose their way, DiData has grown from strength to strength. It has quadrupled in size, from a $2bn competitor to one earning revenues of $8bn a year, expanded from 38 to 50 countries and provided IT services to over 60% of the Fortune 500 companies.
Even Dawson is a little awed by the group’s success. “If I look back 12 years ago and someone gave me this score card, I would have taken it.”
Looking at how it has become a global technological powerhouse, it is almost easy to forget that DiData was against the wall following the dot-com bubble bursting in 2000.
The tech euphoria of the late 1990s had seen DiData become the toast of the market as it saw its market cap reach R77.3bn and move its primary listing to the London Stock Exchange. (NTT paid R24.4bn to buy the company in 2010, representing a R5bn premium to its market valuation at the time.) But like the rest of the sector it soon took a hiding and incurred a $81m loss for the year to end September 2000.
By the time Dawson took charge in 2004, the group was in the investment wilderness as the market had become suspicious of tech firms. To win back investor confidence it had to figure out what went wrong and sort it out.
Dawson was well equipped to lead these changes. At that point he had already been with the group for six years, filled a number of senior positions and, like Goodall, had a sort of apprenticeship as COO before taking on the top job.
The period immediately after the dot-com crisis was a hard slog but by the time DiData released results for 2007, it had turned the corner and the investment community had started to take notice.
“We have spent a lot of time as a management team rebuilding credibility and we are winning confidence that we can be taken seriously. Three years ago we battled to get any time with the analysts. Today we are battling to satisfy industry demand,” Dawson said at the time.
The need for hands-on leadership
The group’s turnaround wasn’t easy and Dawson did not lead it by just sending out instructions from the head office in Bryanston.
To him, being CEO means getting your hands dirty and really getting involved in the running of the organisation. “You’ve got to be grafting and leading from the front by showing you are willing to put in more hours than anybody else. For me, company leadership is not the razzmatazz and the picking up of awards, it is being in the field every day, meeting with clients and grinding away.”
Part of this grind was fixating on maintaining the culture of the organisation, as it ensured its people were motivated and believed in achieving its goals. “I spent a lot of time with our leadership all over the world, making sure they understood the strategy, making sure where it is we are going, what it is we are doing, what course corrections we need to make.”
Maintaining this focus on getting the best out of its staff is one bit of advice he has passed onto Goodall. “The big difference in moving from COO to CEO is to win hearts as well as minds, to keep the high performance culture alive and thriving.”
Dawson says this focus on its staff is a big reason why it has been so successful. “We only compete successfully through our people, and our people need to be more motivated, more passionate, more energetic than anybody else in the industry.”
The importance of being able to predict the future
Getting the culture right was key but just as the next wave of technological change was starting to happen around 2009, DiData knew it had to change otherwise it would get left behind.
It foresaw a future where its clients would want to buy their IT as a service, which meant it would need a lot more cash. The best way of getting access to more money was to get a parent company that had “deep pockets and could invest into the business”.
This eventually saw the acquisition by Japan’s NTT. With NTT’s backing it has invested heavily in data centres, people and platforms all over the world.
The group might have prepared itself for technological change but if anyone thinks that this shake-up brought by technology is over, they are very wrong, says Dawson.
With the number of connected devices on the rise, the disruption that has already affected so many industries will only accelerate. “Technology will soon be core to every business strategy,” Dawson says.
Though technology might be becoming ever-present he has rules about it becoming all-consuming. For one, he does not tolerate people checking their phones, tablets and PCs in a meeting as it is too distracting. “If you are in the meeting, you need to be in that meeting.”
Dawson has played his part in driving digital transformation, but for now he wants to take a break to re-energise. He has no immediate plans, and only says he is weighing up options and that he is not retiring.
This article originally appeared in the 14 July edition of finweek. Buy and download the magazine here.
