6. Be Distinct or Be Extinct

—Kevin Noland (A.D.A.M., Inc.)

Talking with Kevin Noland is like drinking a double shot of espresso at an amusement park. He's just plain exciting. That's because Kevin is the kind of guy who sees the fun in things rather than the downside. It started when Kevin was a teen and wanted to be an edgy rock star and moved to Atlanta to get discovered—and just to play it safe he enrolled in engineering school. Obviously, Kevin never became a rock star, but he thrived in buckled-down corporate America in a way you wouldn't expect: He made himself stand out instead of fitting in.

"I never wanted a job. I wanted an adventure," Kevin says. Yet even though corporate jobs aren't usually considered chock-full of adventure, Kevin took his long hair and rocker image and got on the corporate career path shortly after college. It started with computer programming. Intrigued by IBM's Personal Computers, Kevin taught himself computer programming in college. So instead of using his industrial engineering degree after graduation, Kevin and one of his professors started a little shoestring computer programming business. It was 1984, when typewriters and calculators were still standard office equipment, and computer programming skills were pretty rare. After a couple years, Kevin found himself working at GE on consulting gigs week after week. Brushing shoulders with high-powered executives, Kevin started to see that GE was a pretty exciting place. When the company offered him a job as a programmer, Kevin took it.

Here is what's so important about Kevin's story: Even though he left an entrepreneurial venture to take a corporate job, Kevin never left the sense of adventure he got from having his own startup computer programming business. After all, there's no shame in not starting your own company—or starting a company and bailing out—because being on your own is hard. Owning your own company has plenty of rewards, but it's not for everyone. That's why I wrote this book: Many people want to adopt an entrepreneurial attitude while working for a steady paycheck because the tough thing about starting your own business is the money risk. "You really had to go fight for every dollar," Kevin recalls of his days trying to build his own computer consulting business. Right out of college in his early 20s, Kevin could get along on $50 a week by splitting rent with several roommates. But GE's offer of stability and a paycheck was too good to turn down.

What Kevin found during the course of his career is that he could be distinct—needed to be distinct—even in the corporate world. Instead of complaining about the structure of a 9-to-5 job in a huge corporation, Kevin embraced it as yet another adventure. And he took the famous quote of management guru Tom Peters and made it his own mantra: "Be distinct or be extinct."

Starting from Scratch

Right off, Kevin was immersed in computer programming projects using dBASE, an early programming product for the PC, which was quickly becoming standard office equipment. These were the days before Microsoft Windows, when you looked at a computer screen and all you saw was a blinking green dot. "If you didn't know how to talk to the dot, it did nothing," Kevin says. "It gave you an immense feeling of power. No one knew how to make the dot work unless he was a programmer. This was all cutting-edge stuff at the time."

At first, Kevin figured he might spend his whole career at GE; just like the man who sat in the next cubicle, a chain-smoking engineer (you could still smoke at your desk back then) who was getting ready to retire after working at GE since he was 18 years old. It was a time when Jack Welch was CEO of GE and was "gardening" the company's future leadership; Kevin saw so many opportunities. Working in upstate New York at GE's information services group, he enrolled in the management training program, quickly moved up from programmer to project manager, and eventually became manager to some of his former cubicle mates, including the chain-smoking engineer. "It was a pretty cool experience," Kevin says. "Plus, I knew even then that this opportunity would translate into a great foundation for doing things later."

Then came a life-changing moment. You know the kind—one of those quirky moments that comes along and that make you stop, think, and change direction. Kevin had one of those moments while flipping through a dBASE handbook at work one day. It started with the phrase "endless loop," which is when a computer program repeats an operation over and over. In the handbook glossary the term "endless loop" was defined simply as "see: loop, endless." Then, under the term "loop, endless" the definition was "see: endless loop." It was a clever joke that made the handbook user flip back and forth between the two definitions and experience an endless loop. Kevin was amazed that a company would put a humorous bit like that into a handbook. "I thought it was the coolest thing," he recalls. Suddenly, Kevin knew he wouldn't stay at GE all his life, and he wouldn't go back to starting his own company. What he wanted was to work for the company that made dBASE.

"You have to seek out your passion; otherwise, your career moves become dead ends," Kevin says. Even though GE gave him great opportunities to learn management skills and planning, Kevin felt his passion for the job growing cold. "It wasn't entrepreneurial enough," he says.

In 1989, in his late 20s, Kevin contacted Ashton-Tate, the company that made dBASE, and told them he would come and sweep the floors if they would just hire him. It was a funny thing to say, and it set him apart from other programmers who were asking for a job. And his experience at GE also set him apart. Luckily, he could leave his broom at home; Ashton-Tate hired Kevin on as programmer, and he was off to the West Coast for another adventure.

Underestimating Obstacles

Instead of hanging around the office writing code, Kevin saw that the real fun was going along on sales calls. He did this a few times, working as a "sales engineer" who showed the prospective customer how the product worked. "I was the guy they put in front of the crowd," Kevin says. As Kevin demonstrated dBASE, the sales guys—who stood to earn big commissions if the sale closed—sat around and watched. When Kevin realized the sales reps were making ten times more money than him, he asked to move to sales: "I've got the knowledge; I want the money," he told his boss. And into sales he went—becoming one of the few sales reps who could actually use Ashton-Tate's products.

I love how Kevin negotiated that obstacle and set himself apart: When he saw that he wasn't earning commission, he went ahead and asked for the job. Notice that he didn't just gripe and moan. Another thing he didn't do: He didn't come into the company and ask right away to be in sales. Kevin simply got his foot in the door as a programmer, demonstrated his valuable knowledge about the dBASE product, and then asked for the lucrative sales position. The Ashton-Tate people got a taste of what he could do for them, so they gladly put him in sales—and why not? He would be putting more money in their pockets if he stayed in sales anyway.

Then came another type of obstacle: consolidation. One by one, software makers were merging with or acquiring one another. Ashton-Tate was purchased by Borland International, a Silicon Valley rival, and Kevin had to deal with a different kind of corporate culture. Even though he did well at Borland, becoming one of the top sales producers, Kevin was restless for more adventure. So after putting in a few years at Borland, he went on to a small software company in Beaverton, Oregon, called Central Point Software, which was acquired within just a year by Symantec.

"Each one of those experiences I approached as if it were the next rung in the ladder," Kevin recalls. "I looked at it as adding another layer of experience." But hopping around to different employers and having them acquired by a different company every few months was taking its toll. "Two cultures clashing, it's always hard," Kevin recalls. Plus, he was living part-time on the West Coast and trying to make a home on the East Coast where he lived with his wife in Atlanta. It was all too hectic.

Probably plenty of people in the technology world were also unhappy with the climate of consolidation, but unlike Kevin they didn't feel like there was anything they could do about it. Kevin did something. He'd heard of a software company in Atlanta called A.D.A.M. Inc., which was doing some interesting things. In fact, he'd once been recruited by A.D.A.M. and turned down the job. But his frustration on the West Coast made him take a second look at A.D.A.M., and he liked what he saw: "I thought it was just the coolest company I'd ever seen," Kevin says. It had an intriguing product that reminded him of his Ashton-Tate days. Even though he wouldn't be earning sales commission, he would be learning something new: marketing.

Building Momentum—Virtually

There's something about looking at anatomy drawings that really pulls you in. That's why people love to page through the classic color illustrations of Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body. A.D.A.M.'s main product went one step better than an anatomy book: It was a three-dimensional virtual human body. Medical students could use it to virtually dissect a human cadaver, and people with a passing interest in anatomy loved it too. Kevin knew it was a great product. And at A.D.A.M. they had doctors and medical illustrators with fine art backgrounds—people who really treated the illustrations with care. Plus they had great software to navigate the illustrations. Kevin dug in.

"It was really the most exciting place I'd ever worked," Kevin recalls. The combination of working with doctors, medical illustrators, fine artists, and scientists was fascinating to him. "It was so different from what I was used to selling, like databases and other IT products," Kevin says. At this point, money was not his main motivator. At A.D.A.M., Kevin was working in marketing and not earning sales commissions like he had on the West Coast. What he had was that ever-important sense of adventure. So he immersed himself in A.D.A.M.'s main product, the virtual human body.

"I just knew with the proper kind of market opportunity this company could be something totally different," Kevin says. At the time, it was a small, privately owned company with about 40 employees. Since A.D.A.M. needed capital to grow, the founder decided to raise money with a public offering in 1995.

In the mid-1990s, computers were just coming out with CD-ROM drives, and people were hungry to buy disks to put in those drives. "Retail software was a very hot category," Kevin remembers. So with plenty of money in the bank, A.D.A.M. threw its business into producing retail CD-ROM versions of the A.D.A.M. virtual body for home users. A.D.A.M. had fantastic production capability and a unique market niche. But by the Christmas season of 1995, the market was already saturated: Instead of selling for $50 apiece, A.D.A.M.'s discs were ending up in the sale bargain bin.

So Kevin, who was just a cubicle dweller in the marketing department, walked over to the company founder and chairman, Bob Cramer, and told him, "A.D.A.M. should get out of the retail market and this is why…." A lot of people might not go out on a limb like that, but Kevin wasn't trying to be like everyone else. He was just calling it like he saw it. Impressed by his honesty, Cramer agreed.

"All of a sudden we had to revamp the company," recalls Kevin. By now, Kevin was used to underestimating obstacles, and he'd made a name for himself as a straight-talker. He took everything he'd learned so far in his career and searched for a way to make A.D.A.M. different from all the other ailing software retailers.

Taking the Next Leap

In the mid-1990s, buzz about the Internet was growing. Consumers were learning to do things such as order pizza off the Pizza Hut website and use online banks. In the middle of all this buzz, A.D.A.M. took its encyclopedia of symptoms and diseases and hooked it up to the Internet—just to see what would happen. Even at a time when most people didn't have an Internet connection, the site became a traffic magnet, taking hundreds of hits a day. The host that ran the site was an old Macintosh at A.D.A.M.'s headquarters that was set up in one of the cubicles. "Every day we would walk by that cube and say, 'There's got to be a business there,'" Kevin recalls.

It turns out that health information—right up there with pornography and financial information—is one of the top three topics researched on the Internet. Who knew? No one, and that's the point. In the brave new world of the Internet, new business models were being created every day. It was incredibly exciting. Kevin and his team transformed the company into ADAM.com and made it a destination site for healthcare information.

Kevin, who had never really worked in marketing, put together a hilarious marketing stunt. He hired beautiful models—male and female—to fly around the country on airplanes wearing only skin-tight bodysuits painted to look like they were wearing nothing but a few fig leaves. At an IT industry event, the models walked around the convention center with apples a la the biblical story of Adam and Eve. A.D.A.M. got noticed, even though the models were thrown out of the convention center for being too provocative. And it wasn't just the ADAM.com site that was making money; the company was also supplying health content to most of its competitors, such as Web MD and Dr.Koop.com.

Just as A.D.A.M.'s stock price climbed, the dot-com market blew up.

Unlike a lot of other dot-coms, however, A.D.A.M. had plenty of money in the bank from its initial public offering and time to come up with a plan to stay afloat. In 2000, Kevin remembers the company founder came to him and asked him to retool the company.

"We had to quickly do something," says Kevin, who still has flashback anxiety to those days. "'Man,' I thought, 'here we go again.'" The solution? Go after the healthcare market.

Usually when a company revamps, it brings in a Harvard MBA or McKinsey consultants. But Kevin had a reputation as an independent thinker with a zest for solving problems—no MBA needed. "It's not that hard," Kevin says about retooling the company. "The simple rule is you don't spend more than you make. You do more with less, and you invest in the things that give you the greatest return."

Since 2001, A.D.A.M. has been selling annual contracts to hospitals, HMOs, and drug makers that use A.D.A.M.'s healthcare content to connect people to their websites. As Kevin climbed the executive ranks, he wasn't afraid to ask for what he wanted. One day 4 years ago, Kevin was helping the head of human resources with a job description handbook and read the description of Chief Operating Officer, a position that A.D.A.M. didn't have. He was incredulous because the title described everything that he did, and he was only a vice president. "I definitely had to ask for that COO title," Kevin recalls. "I went into Bob's office and said, 'That's what I need to be.' He was for it."

A few years later, in 2006, Kevin's title had to catch up with him again. He was named CEO because he was doing all the jobs that went into it.

All along the way, Kevin made himself distinct by not being afraid to speak his mind—and by being willing to think creatively instead of falling back on a tired business model. "Most people walk through life asleep," Kevin says. There are plenty of opportunities for people who keep their eyes open.

Kevin's story shows us how to distinguish ourselves by picking up experience along the way—not by having the right business school pedigree—and how to set ourselves apart from the crowd. Which just goes to show that it's easier to be a CEO than it is to become a rocker! And maybe just as fun.