Bill McDermott is very intense. When he first joined ServiceNow as CEO in 2019—he was previously CEO of SAP—he met all 7,000 employees and shook hands with every single one of them.
“In the first hundred days I was here, I travelled the whole world. The whole world. I met every single person that works for this company in person, and shook their hand.”
Handshake intensity is a thing, in McDermott’s world.
The first handshake is incredibly important, he says. It’s part of his mindset, especially for dealing with clients. He advises sales people, upon entering a room with a prospective client, to “find the decision-maker and shake his hand, but be the last one to let go.”
He spoke to Fortune recently in a penthouse suite at the Four Seasons hotel in London, during a business trip to meet clients.
Question 1: Does this handshake thing really work?
“Yes, it does.”
“It’s not a perfunctory exercise to greet somebody. It’s not a perfunctory exercise to shake somebody’s hand. They have to know you’re in the room and you have to let them know that you care,” he says.
“So just to shake hands as if it’s just some standard thing to do is not enough.”
(So, was my handshake any good? “You were fine. I wasn’t judging you.”)
McDermott’s stewardship of ServiceNow is certainly working. Five years later, ServiceNow has 26,000 employees, revenues of $2.8 billion per quarter and a market cap of more than $195 billion.
The AI-driven enterprise software company counts clients such as IBM, KPMG, and Deloitte, for whom it provides a vast range of back-end software that handles customer service, IT operations, security, and new employee on-boarding, among dozens of other services.
The handshake thing is a good example of McDermott’s intense, driven style. This is a man who only sleeps for five hours a night. He wakes up at 5 a.m., reads three newspapers, drinks an espresso, does a light workout and walks his dog, Amber. He’s in the office by 8 a.m. He usually continues working until 11 p.m. at night.
Question 2: Can you really get by on just five hours’ sleep?
“Five hours a night, you know, which is fine,” he says. “During the week, you know, like it’s ‘go time.’”
He sleeps a bit more on weekends.
Question 3: Does ServiceNow have supply issues with Nvidia?
Most products offered by ServiceNow are driven by AI.
So is he getting what he needs from Nvidia, the AI chipmaker that has been accused of not being able to meet demand for all its customers?
“Perhaps we’re fortunate because we have such a strategic relationship but Nvidia has fulfilled all of our requirements and done a great job,” he says.
“We started building models with Jensen [Huang, the CEO] several years ago, and we were the first mover in enterprise software building with Nvidia’s GPU stack.”
Question 4: Will you cave to Robby Starbuck?
McDermott isn’t afraid of the usual culture-war controversies that have come to bedevil leaders at large corporations. ServiceNow, for instance, has a well-developed, public facing DEI program, of the type that has lately become unfashionable.
Robby Starbuck—the conservative activist who organizes boycotts of companies that he believes are too “woke”—recently forced Ford, John Deere and Harley-Davidson, among others, to back away from their DEI initiatives.
So what will McDermott do if Starbuck comes calling?
“Well the good news about ServiceNow is we haven’t played ‘acronym bingo,’” McDermott says.
“If you’re not growing and you’re managing and all you talk about is corporate acronyms, that could be a problem for that phone call. But when you’re growing like we are, we have to source talent from every corner of the earth to keep up with the pace of our growth. So if we didn’t believe in diversity, if we didn’t have an equitable and an inclusive culture, there’s no way we could be the defining enterprise software company of the 21st century. So I think that call would be pretty simple.”
Question 5: Is working remotely OK?
McDermott is not a fan of 100% remote working. He asked the company to return to the office about two years ago. ServiceNow currently has a flexible policy in which some employees come in two days a week unless they are designated remote workers.
“I believe strongly that people do their best work in person.”
“We need everybody in the company to cross-pollinate and innovate and work as teams. So, basically, when I asked the company to do it, I didn’t have to mandate it. I just had to say, we need it now, we have to hit the accelerator, people came back.”
But when the CEO says “we need it now,” surely that’s a mandate?
“If they trust you, it’s not a mandate. It’s a desire. It is ‘I need you. I trust you. I want you with me.’ I’m not telling you I have to have you tied to a chair, and I’m not telling you I’m going to fire you if you don’t do it. I’m telling you, I need you to do it and I don’t ask for things that I don’t need. And they responded next day, the parking lots are all full. There’s a difference between leading and managing and I don’t think it’s healthy to actually have people that feel forced into things,” he says. “One volunteer is worth 10 pressed people.”
Question 6: Are you a micromanager or do you prefer to delegate?
This question is important because McDermott has, in the past, insisted on riding along on sales calls with his staff.
“I hire people that are the best in the world at what they do and I trust them with my life. I think trust is the ultimate human currency and I think the best leaders hire people that are substantially better than them. In every area of domain expertise. So, if you have a CFO, they have to be better at you than finance. If you have a CHRO, they have to know more about the people equation than you do. If you hire a head of engineering, they have to be an extraordinary exemplar of an engineering manager and they should know a lot more than you do. In other words, when I look around the table of my leadership team, I’m humbled, that’s how good they are.”
“I also believe strongly that we have to go into the details and we have to be with our customers and we have to be shoulder to shoulder with the customer so you understand the pain that they deal with,” he says. “I become obsessed with their problems. And I want 26,000 people to be obsessed with their problems, so we come up with new solutions to make them better.”
Question 7: What is the most difficult thing you have tackled as CEO?
Growing the company from 7,000 people to 26,000 must have involved some difficulties. But McDermott won’t admit it.
“I love scale. I came here from a company that had a hundred thousand people. So my whole life has been spent scaling companies, so the things that people might find difficult, we find great joy in, we bring new people into the culture, we get new people to buy into the purpose.”
That sounds like PR spin. Surely there must have been pain points while growing ServiceNow?
“I’ve encountered thousands of challenges, but is that a difficulty? Or is that a challenge? Is that A setback? Or is that an opportunity,” he says.
And then, just in case you needed a reminder of the level of intensity he is working at, he adds:
“At the end of the day, what is pain? Your pain might be my pleasure.”
