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GOLDSEA | BUSINESS

MICROSOFT'S ASIAN PIONEER
PAGE 10 of 10

GS: What would you point to as the thing that made you so successful?

Oki: Having built up some scar tissue starting my own software company. That was a real eye-opener for me. You can take all the classes you can possibly take, you can graduate with honors, you can get an MBA, but I tell you, real life is quite different. For me, a lot of things just converged to make the pot of soup come out tasting pretty well. It was everything from being involved with a company that happened to have the right kind of products at the right time, me being opportunistic and identifying the international as a huge opportunity, having the total flexibility to do whatever I wanted to do in the international arena. No one was looking over my shoulders. I delivered the results. As the results came in, more and more resources got freed up. So success breeds success. I guess timing is everything. I guess I benefitted from a lot of good timing.

GS: Some quality of Scott Oki must have contributed.

Oki: Oh, I'm pretty maniacal in terms of work ethic. Maybe that was because I was picking strawberries 12 hours a day, I don't know. Certainly that level of discipline and not being afraid to work hard and being very focused probably had something to do with it. I'm not the smartest person in the world but I'm not the dumbest either. I tend to know what I don't know. I don't know something, I gotta figure out how to learn about it. Take international. Had I ever done anything international before from a business standpoint? No. Talk about wet behind the ears, that was me. I knew nothing about international. But I applied myself and learned about how to set up companies internationally.

[CONTINUED BELOW]

I've always been a fairly good reader of people. First impression, I can usually figure out, Is this person smart? Is he committed? Motivated for the right reasons? Is the chemistry going to work? People--that really is everything. And I was very lucky in terms of hiring some world-class people. Many of them are still at Microsoft. Many of them are in positions of huge responsibility now. I take a lot of pride in having hired a lot of those individuals. Not only hired but also indoctrinated them to the Microsoft way and trained them and made sure they had the right cultural values.

GS: Now that you're no longer at Microsoft, are there times when you'd like to step in?

Oki: No, no, no.

GS: You have no remorse about leaving?

Oki: No, not at all, not for a second. When I closed that chapter of my life, it was closed.

GS: Any advice you want to give Gates?

Oki: Last time I saw Bill was a couple of weeks ago. I told him I thought the last ad campaign was pretty braindead, a waste of money.

GS: What did he say to that?

Oki: He said, Well, yeah, okay, what would you do? So we talked about that. But I'm not involved in the company at all. I still have a lot of friends there. I cheer them on from the sidelines. A great deal of my net worth is still tied to the company. [End]

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