In the game of business, you play to win

MANAGERS ON MANAGEMENT:DICK LEHANE always liked to recruit staff for EMC straight out of school or college, "before they picked up bad habits". Failing that, he tended to favour candidates who excelled at team sports.

"A sports background was certainly seen as a premium attribute. People who played sports were regarded as generally more rounded individuals, more likely to succeed in a high-pressure environment - and EMC was certainly that," he says.

EMC is the world's largest manufacturer of data storage platforms and a Fortune 500 company. Lehane joined it in 1988 to set up its first overseas plant in Cork - and a decade later found himself senior vice-president for worldwide manufacturing at the company's headquarters in Boston.

He retired recently, and with the benefit of hindsight says one of the most striking things about EMC's corporate ethos is that "it's never lost its start-up mentality".

At least part of the reason, he believes, is the company's day-to-day emphasis on problem solving.

"Because we were at the cutting edge of a technology-driven business, there was what we called 'a bias for action' in the company, and so we tended to recruit managers we knew were action-orientated - in other words, people who were doers.

"We never had a management layer who went to their offices in the morning and might not be seen for the rest of the day. Everyone had to be visible on the floor. And when there was a problem, rank didn't matter at all. Everyone worked together to solve it.

"In fact, especially as the corporation grew, we often tended to work on the basis of the old saying, 'it's easier to get forgiveness than to get permission' - in other words, if you keep asking everyone you meet for permission to do something, you'll always eventually find someone who says no."

This "bias for action", as Lehane puts it, meant it was never enough simply to analyse or even to analyse correctly - the ability to execute was every bit as important, and even more so. And failure to execute was very public failure indeed.

"We had quarterly meetings of all EMC staff, with video links to remote locations, and all the senior managers, the CEO, the president and the exec VPs had to report on how they had met their very rigorous goals, and then set out their targets for the next quarter.

"This wasn't a situation you could talk yourself out of. EMC is like a pressure cooker. There's a revenue target, a gross margin target and a bottom-line target. Each of those targets is then applied to three separate sections, hardware, software and services, and to three different geographical entities, North America, EMEA and Asia-Pacific.

"The pressure on everyone is immense. To managers from outside it sometimes seems almost incomprehensible. Managers who've been successful elsewhere regularly join EMC and leave again because they can't take it.

"I would say there are very few businesses that have that level of public accountability, with the most senior managers reporting back to employees in a way that you'd usually only expect them to report to a board of directors."

Is it a good way to run a company? "It has made EMC very, very successful," says Lehane, who was recently given an alumnus achievement award by UCC, where he took an electrical engineering degree in 1968.

"It had revenues of $12 billion at the height of the dot.com boom, and even though that fell back to $5 billion in 2003, it was rebuilt to $15 billion by last year. I believe most other corporations would have gone out of business.

"Yes, it's very, very tough. And it works only for managers who understand the relationship between analysing and doing, and who have that ability to execute. I loved it. I regarded it as a game. It doesn't always happen - but you play to win."

• Next week: Dr Aurora Berra, general manager of GlaxoSmith-Kline Ireland, on the importance of corporate responsibility.