Tech journalists will be mourning the departure today of Bill Watkins as chief executive of Seagate Technology, the world’s biggest maker of hard-disk drives.
He was the most candid and colourful CEO in Silicon Valley, never afraid to tell it the way he saw it and provide a great quote.
He was equally blunt with employees, telling them they were going to die soon and asking if working for Seagate was what they really wanted to do.
“I’m a great believer that people who are doing what they want and are excited about it make the best workers,” he told me.
He tested their mettle by taking them on annual team-building exercises into the wilderness of places like New Zealand, to do white-water rafting and abseil down cliffs.
It seems ironic then that analysts feel a lack of team spirit at the top, in terms of rifts between executives, have led to his demise. He had told me in an interview last year that they worked together well, like old married couples.
Mr Watkins was a throwback to the company’s founder Al Shugart. His unconventionial style and ultra-casual dress sense recalled how Mr Shugart favoured Hawaiian shirts, chain smoked, worked without a secretary and made coffee for his co-workers.
However, Mr Watkins had managed to defuse a culture of yelling and screaming in the 90s. One example he gave of the bad old days was when a senior executive once gave him advice on how to improve falling yields for Seagate’s hardware.
“He said: ‘Here’s how you get yields up. You go on the floor, you bring everybody to the middle and you say: ‘If you don’t get your fucking yields up, I’m going to fire you all.’ And you come back the next day and you’re going to have good yields.’”
In an interview with us last month about what gadgets he would never leave home without, he cheerfully admitted:
“I really don’t like gadgets, I don’t even know how to use the GPS in my Bentley. I swear when I quit working, I’m going to throw away my BlackBerry and I’m going off the net, I do not want to be connected to the world.”
So don’t email and don’t call once the Seagate transition is over. Bill Watkins is expected to have left the building for good, for parts unknown.
