The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 229

J5 Unorthodox, yes, but Little leads Mathworks to success: THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE APRIL 20, 1997 su. 1 Wf Firm first day at work, Little handed her a shoebox full of undeposited checks from customers. Asked what he has learned, Little stares out his office window at the parking lot below. "It's by listening that you find out what motivates" people, he says. "If you can find out what excites people and what they're good at they'll excel at that." Whatever Little's secret, it has worked.

In 1992, he was named Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year in New England by the national accounting firm Ernst Young, joining such chief executives as Daniel Smith of Cascade Communications Corp. and James Vincent of Biogen. Today, Mathworks dominates the $150 million market for software that analyzes research data, according to Ken Kornbluh, vice president of Scitech International a Chicago software distributor. Little, Moler, and Bangert still hold most of the equity in Math-works. Although accurate sales figures.

a on private companies in this market -are difficult to obtain, Kornbluh says, "If Mathworks isn't the largest they're real close to number one" in market share. One strong competf-M tor is Visual Numerics of Boulder, with an estimated $35 million in sales, he says. Mathworks said only the pany's sales are more than $50 million and that it is profitable. If Little decides to take Math- vj works public, he says it would be tp) reward loyal employees. But era-o ployees would lose such perks as the $200,000 trip planned for their fam-' ilies this summer at a Mount ington resort.

ti "Every cent we've spent on the people who work here has paid for itself many times over," Little says! Shareholders, he says, just wouldn't understand. iJ LITTLE Continued from Page Jl of stuffed-shirts, Little is an iconoclast who shuns the stereotypical accoutrements of corporate life suits, ties, and tassled shoes, as well as a preoccupation with mortey, power, and the stock market Little may also be one of the njost popular bosses in Boston. No wpnder. His philosophy, conveyed wjth humor to the new recruits during orientation in early April: Have fun at work. And get this: The customer, he tells his recruits, does not come first.

"If we're happy and motivated and doing our jobs, the customer's g6ing to be happy," he says. Perhaps most significant, he has resisted selling the company' stock publicly out of fear shareholders' demands will drain Mathworks' creative spark. Mathworks is what happens when a child of the '70s starts a business. "At times I wonder if we're living irj communism with Jack," says Sieve Bangert, who helped Little sart Mathworks. "He doesn't want t4 go public.

He doesn't want to lose control. He doesn't want to deal with ajbunch of stockholders. Frequently, we have to foist money on him. It's difficult to get him to take what a smiilarly compensated CEO would be making." i For individuals used to working elsewhere, Mathworks' live-and-let-lire atmosphere can seem unfocused -jand exhausting. There are company outings and book clubs and skits and a company band.

A dicing number of teams work on myriad projects. Little's organization "chart" resembles the path of a bum- GLOBE STAFF PHOTO BILL BRETT out what motivates" people. Executive M.B.A. A workable model for experienced more important and that engineers and scientists would need software to do computations on them. Enlisting help from Bangert, another consultant, they rewrote Moler's fortran code for PCs on a tiny Compaq computer.

Eventually MatLab took over their lives, and their employer "kicked us out," Little says. MatLab was cutting-edge. Math-works' first customer was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which paid $500 for 10 copies. It slowly caught on. Gary Mosier first stumbled onto MatLab as a student in the mid-1980s: "A lightbulb went off, and I said, Where has this been all my life? I don't have to sit down and program Mosier, an aerospace engineer at NASA, and his colleagues still use MatLab in their work constructing space simulations with data obtained from the Hubble space telescope.

When orders for MatLab started coming in, Little decided to leave California and return to Massachusetts. He and Nancy Wittenberg, whom he had met on a blind date windsurfing, packed their belongings and Mathworks' files in a U-Haul truck and drove east. Little's management style today seems to be a product of birth order he is the responsible oldest child -and his youth in the 1970s he used to ride a motorcycle to prep school at Phillips Academy in Andover. Little grew up in Lincoln and has deep roots in Massachusetts his ancestor, John Alden, was on the Mayflower. Little's father, an MIT professor at the Sloan School of Management, and his mother, Elizabeth Little, an archaeologist with a PhD in physics from MIT, still marvel that their son didn't become a ski bum after he stopped in Vail, for a season of skiing before starting his first job after college.

"It wasn't clear to me he was ever going to leave Vail," his mother said. Little still skis. Every winter, he and Mathworks' chief scientist Joe Hicklin, ski the treacherous slopes of the Canadian Rockies, reaching them by helicopter. "This place has no phones, no faxes, no televisions," Hicklin says. Little's "responsibility for keeping The Mathworks together and his family together is nonexistent." Most of the time, however, Little is a devoted father to his two preschool daughters, says Wittenberg, who also helped run Mathworks in its early years.

Little formed Mathworks because he wanted to write software. Learning to manage has been a bigger challenge. He credits Jeanne O'Keefe, an experienced computer executive he hired after meeting her at a block party in Sherborn, where he lives, for transforming Math-works into a real company. On her Oldest residential Executive M.B.A. program in New England Nationally accredited by the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business Instruction by full-time faculty of the Whittemore School General management curriculum for those with executive potential One week international residence Friday and Saturday classes -twice a month 22 months Limited class size next start up Sept.

University of New Hampshire OVER 2000 PC's NOTEBOOKS! iebee in a garden. But, Ned Gulley, a former aero nautical engineer for NASA recruit ed by Mathworks, quickly learned that nothing pleases Little more than a good idea. I Sitting in a meeting over a year ago, Gulley was struck with the idea of designing a browser for the company's bug-tracking system to niore easily find where the software bjigs hid and who was fixing each jie. If Gulley's idea worked, it would mean scrapping a new system the company had just purchased. Gulley launched a "stealth project" to investigate whether they could make the browser work.

Two Weeks later, a nervous Gulley invited Little to his office for a demonstration. "I had 10 major points to make, Choose an NPC Ready-to-Go Computer NPC Jade 97 NPC Diamond 97 -InW Triton II chlpMl 512K CacM Triton II cMps S12KCacne, -32MbEQRAM lOObOmillliHD 06HD. -2Mb MPEG Gfapriic card Diamond Stealth 3D 64tit 4MB G.C. -IS- SVGA Monitor. 15- SVGA Monitor 33.6 ZSQU faxrVnooam 33 ZOOM, taxmodem 12X CO ROM, 3D Sound card, 16X CD ROM, S8 32 Sound Card Speaksm.

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Lipsey had been at Mathworks one year when he persuaded Little in 1992 to open an office in Cambridge, England, to respond instantly to European customers' questions. Lipsey soon realized customers' detailed inquiries required a call to a software expert back home anyway the new office only added a middleman. Little described the experiment as an "unmitigated disaster" costing $600,000. "Looking back on it I feel stupid," Lipsey says. But at Mathworks "thereXno such thing as blame." Today, Lipsey is one of two senior vice presidents, working closely with Little to grapple with managing the fast-growing company.

When it comes to ideas, Little says there two kinds of people: Those who have ideas, and those who can recognize them. That in a nutshell, describes how Mathworks became a company. The company's basic software, MatLab, was created in the 1970s for use by academics by Moler, then chairman of the computer science department at the University of New Mexico. But Little recognized the commercial potential of MatLab, which he first ran across as a graduate student in electrical engineering at Stanford University. Little completed school in 1980 and went to work for an engineering consulting firm in Palo Alto.

But he kept thinking about Moler's program. It was the early 1980s, and personal computers were new. Little believed that PCs would become probe won't The laws, named after Stark, bar doctors from referring Medicare and Medicaid patients to services in which they have an ownership interest. There are several exceptions. One, for example, allows doctors to refer such patients to hospitals in which the physicians have an ownership stake, as long as the investment is in the hospital itself and not in a specific service provided there.

Vandewater characterized hospitals as an extension of a doctor's office, and said most doctors don't consider their investment interests when deciding to which hospitals to send their patients. "These guys are not going to risk their license and personal finances" by referring a patient for treatment at a hospital where he or she won't get the best possible care, he said. Vandewater said there are plenty of expansion possibilities. "There will 'Frequently, we have to foist money on STEVE BANGERT, of Mathworks NPC T-Rubv jNPCT-Jade INPC T-Diamond Intel CPU 8 Mb RAM. 13Gb removable Intel CPU, 16 MO RAM, 1 3Gb removable Intel CPU, 16 Mb RAM, 2Gb removable HD.

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"He said, You already sold me. This is great' Little's fanaticism about recognizing his employees runs so deep that he tries to persuade this reporter to focus the article on them. And he actually seems sincere. He views "empathy" as key to managing a talented staff, and he personally delivers paychecks to new employees in order to learn their names. All this is key to fostering an environment in which employees are encouraged to innovate, a requirement for survival in a hotly competitive industry.

"One of the things I feel like I stand for is making sure everybody takes the credit and making sure everybody's involved," Little says in a recent interview. "There's a Japanese saying, "The more power you give up the more power you Other CEOs who feel lonely are hoarding something they shouldn't They might be a lot more effective if they didn't." But success could spoil the Little style at Mathworks. As employment has exploded, to 380 today, he can't spend as much time with individual employees as he used to. Cloning Little "will be a tricky thing," says Helen Paret, a software program manager at Mathworks, "because he's pretty unique." Says Elizabeth share of $2.93 in 1998, but said the company's plans to buy back $1 billion of its shares could add another 5 cents a share to its 1998 earnings. Nashville, ColumbiaHCA is a target of a federal probe of its hospitals in El Paso, Texas.

Last month, federal investigators raided ColumbiaHCA's hospitals in El Paso and also more than 20 doctor offices, seizing boxes of documents. They have not disclosed what they are looking for. Representative Fortney "Pete" Stark (D-Calif.) has been pressuring the Clinton administration to investigate whether ColumbiaHCA has violated laws that restrict doctor referrals to services in which they have financial stake. The Wall Street Journal, quoting unidentified sources, says the probe focuses on doctor referrals to ColumbiaHCA-owned home-health agencies. Vandewater defended the company's relationships with its doctors: "We believe what we're doing is within the boundaries of the law." 9000 r.Roy aJComputer.com, Novofl ft Whdows NT naajwonong UodndnaParta SYSTEM RAM Carry kit On SMe Service CaS For AjaiolnBitaiit Pentium 3D MMX System riSMI RAM, l.

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Victor Campbell, a ColumbiaHCA senior vice president, said much of the firm's growth comes from hospitals it already owns. "Do you have to make acquisitions to maintain the earnings growth of the company? No." He said, however, his remark shouldn't be interpreted to mean the company is going to stop making acquisitions. "MBA Pig F0R Jg No plans to slowdown acquisitions By Paul Heldman and Kathleen Sullivan BLOOMBERG NEWS WASHINGTON Colum- txaHCA Healthcare Corp. president David Vandewater said he doesn't expect the federal investigation hanging over the nation's largest hospital company to slow its earnings growth. will be able to sustain our it growth," he said Friday in an interview with Bloomberg News.

Industry analysts have been projecting earnings growth for ColumbiaHCA of 15 percent this year. A J. Rice, health industry analyst at Bear Stearns, said he is estimating ColumbiaHCA earnings will rise to $2.55 per share this year from $2.22 per-share in 1996. He is predicting earnings per 617 551 HOURS: M-f -8 Thura 9-8 tat 10- Sales A Service, 'email 166MHz 16MB a GET I MBA. 1 RoyaieBoYalComputer.com Parts 256K Cach 1.6GB HD 15" Monitor, 1MB MPEQ Video 8X CD-ROM Sound card rfe Suffolk's many full-time and part-time options allow even the busiest person to complete an MBA.

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