Rackspace CEO opens up about success
Lanham Napier: Rackspace is blessing, right now is magic moment in innovation
Rackspace CEO opens up about success
Rackspace isn’t your normal high tech company and, according to their CEO, that’s by design.
They have areas named after game shows and breakfast cereals. The work areas are as wide open as the Texas Hill Country.
“We are a company of geeks and nerds, and people that are really into it,” said Lanham Napier, RackSpace CEO.
Rackspace has few walls and even fewer corporate perks.
Napier doesn’t wear a power suit, and doesn’t have a mahogany covered office.
He has a cubicle just like the rest of the “rackers,” the name given to Rackspace employees.
"The 4,000 folks who work here truly are special. I mean, they're the people who volunteer their best to make it happen on a daily basis for our company, for our customers, for our stockholders. So the rackers here, truly, are our secret sauce,” Napier said.
Comfort and creativity go hand-in-hand at Rackspace. It’s a culture of openness.
Game rooms, coffee bars, even a huge slide -- places for rackers to unwind without walls.
A leader in cloud computing, Rackspace does serious work, they just try to not take themselves too seriously.
"A lot of the best technical ideas start at the front line and have to flow around. Walls inhibit communication, so we don't want walls. You never know in this company when the next big ideas going to come from. We don't care where it comes from, we want to make sure we listen, we capture it, and we act on it," Napier said.
Napier says working at Rackspace is a blessing for him, and he believes right now is a magic moment in innovation.
He uses the iPhone as an example.
Right now, there’s more computing power on that phone than was on board the space shuttle Columbia.
He said he can't wait to see what's next for technology -- and for his company.
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