Invoice McDermott could be very intense. When he first joined ServiceNow as CEO in 2019—he was beforehand CEO of SAP—he met all 7,000 workers and shook fingers with each single one among them.
“In the first hundred days I was here, I travelled the whole world. The whole world. I met every single person that works for this company in person, and shook their hand.”
Handshake depth is a factor, in McDermott’s world.
The primary handshake is extremely essential, he says. It’s a part of his mindset, particularly for coping with purchasers. He advises gross sales folks, upon getting into a room with a potential consumer, to “find the decision-maker and shake his hand, but be the last one to let go.”
He spoke to Fortune lately in a penthouse suite on the 4 Seasons lodge in London, throughout a enterprise journey to fulfill purchasers.
Query 1: Does this handshake factor actually work?
“Yes, it does.”
“It’s not a perfunctory exercise to greet somebody. It’s not a perfunctory exercise to shake somebody’s hand. They have to know you’re in the room and you have to let them know that you care,” he says.
“So just to shake hands as if it’s just some standard thing to do is not enough.”
(So, was my handshake any good? “You were fine. I wasn’t judging you.”)
McDermott’s stewardship of ServiceNow is definitely working. 5 years later, ServiceNow has 26,000 workers, revenues of $2.8 billion per quarter and a market cap of greater than $195 billion.
The AI-driven enterprise software program firm counts purchasers similar to IBM, KPMG, and Deloitte, for whom it supplies an enormous vary of back-end software program that handles customer support, IT operations, safety, and new worker on-boarding, amongst dozens of different providers.
The handshake factor is an effective instance of McDermott’s intense, pushed model. This can be a man who solely sleeps for 5 hours an evening. He wakes up at 5 a.m., reads three newspapers, drinks an espresso, does a lightweight exercise and walks his canine, Amber. He’s within the workplace by 8 a.m. He often continues working till 11 p.m. at night time.
Query 2: Can you actually get by on simply 5 hours’ sleep?
“Five hours a night, you know, which is fine,” he says. “During the week, you know, like it’s ‘go time.’”
He sleeps a bit extra on weekends.
Query 3: Does ServiceNow have provide points with Nvidia?
Most merchandise supplied by ServiceNow are pushed by AI.
So is he getting what he wants from Nvidia, the AI chipmaker that has been accused of not having the ability to meet demand for all its prospects?
“Perhaps we’re fortunate because we have such a strategic relationship but Nvidia has fulfilled all of our requirements and done a great job,” he says.
“We started building models with Jensen [Huang, the CEO] several years ago, and we were the first mover in enterprise software building with Nvidia’s GPU stack.”
Query 4: Will you cave to Robby Starbuck?
McDermott isn’t afraid of the standard culture-war controversies which have come to bedevil leaders at massive firms. ServiceNow, for example, has a well-developed, public going through DEI program, of the sort that has recently turn out to be retro.
Robby Starbuck—the conservative activist who organizes boycotts of firms that he believes are too “woke”—lately compelled Ford, John Deere and Harley-Davidson, amongst others, to again away from their DEI initiatives.
So what is going to McDermott do if Starbuck comes calling?
“Well the good news about ServiceNow is we haven’t played ‘acronym bingo,’” McDermott says.
“If you’re not growing and you’re managing and all you talk about is corporate acronyms, that could be a problem for that phone call. But when you’re growing like we are, we have to source talent from every corner of the earth to keep up with the pace of our growth. So if we didn’t believe in diversity, if we didn’t have an equitable and an inclusive culture, there’s no way we could be the defining enterprise software company of the 21st century. So I think that call would be pretty simple.”
Query 5: Is working remotely OK?
McDermott is just not a fan of 100% distant working. He requested the corporate to return to the workplace about two years in the past. ServiceNow presently has a versatile coverage wherein some workers are available in two days every week except they’re designated distant staff.
“I believe strongly that people do their best work in person.”
“We need everybody in the company to cross-pollinate and innovate and work as teams. So, basically, when I asked the company to do it, I didn’t have to mandate it. I just had to say, we need it now, we have to hit the accelerator, people came back.”
However when the CEO says “we need it now,” absolutely that’s a mandate?
“If they trust you, it’s not a mandate. It’s a desire. It is ‘I need you. I trust you. I want you with me.’ I’m not telling you I have to have you tied to a chair, and I’m not telling you I’m going to fire you if you don’t do it. I’m telling you, I need you to do it and I don’t ask for things that I don’t need. And they responded next day, the parking lots are all full. There’s a difference between leading and managing and I don’t think it’s healthy to actually have people that feel forced into things,” he says. “One volunteer is worth 10 pressed people.”
Query 6: Are you a micromanager or do you favor to delegate?
This query is essential as a result of McDermott has, previously, insisted on using alongside on gross sales calls along with his workers.
“I hire people that are the best in the world at what they do and I trust them with my life. I think trust is the ultimate human currency and I think the best leaders hire people that are substantially better than them. In every area of domain expertise. So, if you have a CFO, they have to be better at you than finance. If you have a CHRO, they have to know more about the people equation than you do. If you hire a head of engineering, they have to be an extraordinary exemplar of an engineering manager and they should know a lot more than you do. In other words, when I look around the table of my leadership team, I’m humbled, that’s how good they are.”
“I also believe strongly that we have to go into the details and we have to be with our customers and we have to be shoulder to shoulder with the customer so you understand the pain that they deal with,” he says. “I become obsessed with their problems. And I want 26,000 people to be obsessed with their problems, so we come up with new solutions to make them better.”
Query 7: What’s the most troublesome factor you’ve tackled as CEO?
Rising the corporate from 7,000 folks to 26,000 should have concerned some difficulties. However McDermott received’t admit it.
“I love scale. I came here from a company that had a hundred thousand people. So my whole life has been spent scaling companies, so the things that people might find difficult, we find great joy in, we bring new people into the culture, we get new people to buy into the purpose.”
That appears like PR spin. Certainly there should have been ache factors whereas rising ServiceNow?
“I’ve encountered thousands of challenges, but is that a difficulty? Or is that a challenge? Is that A setback? Or is that an opportunity,” he says.
After which, simply in case you wanted a reminder of the extent of depth he’s working at, he provides:
“At the end of the day, what is pain? Your pain might be my pleasure.”
