At The Center Of Reshaping The New Microsoft -- Vice President Deborah Willingham Stresses Service To Corporate Customers

Not long ago, Deborah Willingham found herself in the typical working-mother's quandary of having to be in two places at the same time.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates had summoned Willingham, who heads the company's increasingly strategic enterprise business, to his Hood Canal compound for a high-level get-together between company executives and visiting luminaries. The same evening, Willingham's then 11-year-old son was to give a speech at his school.

Willingham could not afford to skip the meeting. But she already had promised her son after missing an earlier presentation that she would be on hand this time.

Researching the logistics, Willingham found she could take a helicopter from Hood Canal to her son's speech, then fly back. That way, she would miss only the dinner part of the Microsoft event.

Not only did she pull it off, she got a reaffirming response from Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's No. 2 in command and the father of two.

Eager to know how her son had done, Ballmer asked, " `How'd it go? How'd it go?' " Willingham recalled. "And when I told him, he was smiling all over and there was a twinkle in his eye."

In the past, putting family responsibilities on a par with corporate duties might have been frowned on at Microsoft. In 1985, according to a recently published book, "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates," co-authored by former Microsoft programmer Marlin Eller, Ballmer called a meeting of Microsoft's Windows team for 9 a.m. Easter Sunday. Although strictly symbolic - Ballmer quickly dismissed those who showed up - the incident reflected the "hard core" Gates-Ballmer workplace psychology.

Today, however, Gates and Ballmer have families, as do most other senior executives and managers at the company.

And Willingham, 42, who joined Microsoft in 1993, is being cited as a symbol of a new Microsoft: an older, wiser company where relationships, whether with family or customers, are a key to the company's ongoing success.

What's more, not only does she represent a company that has matured, but she's also at the vortex of one of its most important enterprises for its future.

As Microsoft's most visible female executive, Willingham oversees a part of the company that's emerging in strategic importance: multimillion-dollar government and corporate accounts the world over. In this position - vice president of Microsoft's enterprise customer unit - the former 15-year IBM executive is helping to shape Microsoft as "the new IBM."

Microsoft's message, centered on its increasingly important, high-end Windows NT operating system, is this: Networked PCs are capable of doing things that large enterprises formerly relied upon IBM-like mainframe systems to do.

Willingham's strategy involves three steps: Listen to complaints and suggestions. Make sure they are addressed. Form partnerships with other big companies to provide the kind of worldwide support the old IBM built its empire around.

What makes the enterprise customer unit - or the ECU, as Willingham's division is usually referred to - so vital to Microsoft is its growth potential. With more than 5,000 Microsoft employees targeting 13,500 organizations that have 1,000 or more PCs, the ECU already accounts for 35 percent of Microsoft's expected $14 billion in fiscal 1998 revenues, and is growing at a rate of more than 40 percent annually.

Just as Gates is Microsoft's software visionary and Ballmer its sales beacon, Willingham is emerging as an icon for big-enterprise support and service. Yet her down-home earthiness and relaxed style are a marked departure from the no-holds-barred combativeness generally associated with Microsoft management.

Meeting her for the first time after several telephone contacts, Digital Equipment executive John Rando expected someone with a commanding physical presence, not a Holly Hunter look-alike. "And here she was all sweet and smiling, going about 98 pounds," Rando recalled, adding with a chuckle, "but pure steel underneath."

Willingham insists on bringing a distinctly personal touch to her job. Despite her crowded schedule, she is one of Microsoft's most approachable executives, colleagues say. She is able to switch gears deftly between business and personal issues, and keeps close to the pulse of fellow workers' lives.

After sending Willingham a courtesy invitation to a holiday get-together last year, Linda Plonsky, head of executive relations, was astonished when Willingham not only showed up but also stayed through the event to get caught up socially.

"That she took time to do that was very motivating to me and my team," Plonsky said.

During a particularly stressful budget review last year, Willingham called her staff together for an off-site meeting in Kirkland.

"People were just groaning, `How can she do this?' " Willingham recalled. When they showed up, however, she dispensed envelopes of cash and told them to go to a movie of their choice at a nearby cineplex. Most wound up at "Jerry Maguire."

"It was a matinee and we had our chocolate balls and everything," she recounted. "I just wanted to kind of remind them it is important to have fun." Willingham had not known what the movie was about, but the story line - a down-and-out sports agent who revitalizes the career of a disillusioned football star - turned out to be serendipitous: "The thing about `Show me the money!' was really appropriate for a sales group!" she said.

Running ECU is physically demanding work and, even if the atmosphere at work is more accommodating to outside concerns, Willingham still works 60- to 80-hour weeks. She professed not to have the secret to balancing work with family. Recently divorced - a parting that had more to do with diverging interests than her job demands, she said - she sometimes feels cheated on both ends of the spectrum.

"I've missed out on a lot with the kids," she said of her sons, now 9 and 12. Willingham has admitted that she has come to terms with never being the room mother or the reading mom.

"At work, too, I have to say no to things," Willingham said. Car pooling her kids to school means she often arrives late for customer briefings. "I can feel them thinking, `Aren't we important enough for her to be on time?' " she said.

In any case, she denied her dilemma stems from being in a traditionally male position. Microsoft, she said, is far more gender-blind than IBM was in her years there.

At IBM, "it was always, nice suit, or great pair of jeans or whatever," she said. When she got pregnant, she was told to transfer off her supervisory job because "people would know I was a lame duck!"

At Microsoft, "I don't think people notice" gender, she said. "They're too focused on the work. They go to meetings and dive right in."

Willingham joined IBM after getting an engineering degree from Georgia Tech in 1978. One of four children born in the Atlanta suburb of East Point to parents raised in the Depression, Willingham recalled her father telling her, "You never want to be financially dependent on anyone. You want to be able to take care of yourself."

Former colleague recruited her

In charge of IBM's huge AS-400 manufacturing business, which in 1990 won the prestigious Baldridge Award for customer service, Willingham at first had little interest in Microsoft, a company whose desktop software business did not cross paths with her responsibilities. She did not even have a PC on her desk, Willingham said.

Beth Baumgardner, a Microsoft human-resources executive who had been an IBM colleague, persuaded Willingham to come out one weekend for a day of meetings with Patty Stonesifer, then Microsoft's highest-ranking woman executive, and others.

Coming from a huge organization populated by "lifers" who didn't seem to be that fired up over their jobs anymore, Willingham recalled being impressed with the energy and enthusiasm of Microsoft.

Entrenched in a career path herself, Willingham nevertheless turned the job down - to Baumgardner's shock. "I let her know I was really angry!" Baumgardner said. "It caused a rift in our relationship."

Willingham eventually thought things over and within three months called to see if the position was still available.

Once on board, Willingham set about streamlining Microsoft's product-support division, considered a necessary drain on revenue and resources. Willingham's breakthrough was to suggest that support be looked at as part of the product-quality equation. The better the software, she pointed out, the less support should cost.

The approach gave product teams a goal to work toward and established a way for Microsoft to quantify a program's success with users.

"Almost every time you reduce (the need for) product support, you're increasing customer satisfaction," Willingham pointed out.

Willingham's creative approach caught the attention of Ballmer and Jeff Raikes, another senior sales executive, who in March 1996 asked her to take over support of Microsoft's enterprise accounts.

"NT was in the process of accelerating, and I wanted Deborah's leadership to organize our efforts to handle the growth," said Raikes. Willingham, who had little sales experience, began building a service model based on "24x7x365" - around-the-clock, all-year-long responsiveness.

Again, a former IBMer played a key role: Kevin Johnson, hired in 1992 by Microsoft after working in IBM's Dallas network-consulting operation. Johnson oversees a tactical- response team modeled along the lines of a fire department. Microsoft technicians are prepared to jump on a plane and travel to the site of a network emergency to implement a "hot fix" and get the network back up and running - even if the source is not a Microsoft bug or otherwise the company's fault.

Johnson cited the example of a company that had developed interactive computer technology for specially equipped seats at a recent Super Bowl. Seat-side terminals were set up to display instant replays, game and player statistics and Web site data. The Thursday afternoon before the big game, problems developed.

Microsoft dispatched a technician, Michael Corning, who caught a 9 p.m. flight to San Diego. Corning worked with an on-site team through the night, took a break from 4 to 7 a.m. and by late Friday resolved the problem, which turned out to be a glitch in a third-party's software.

The partnership approach

Quiet but intense, accommodating but firm, Willingham is popular with Microsoft clients. Ballmer credits Willingham with some of the company's biggest corporate deals over the past two years. Clients use terms like "empathetic," "ethical" and "dependable" to describe Willingham.

Microsoft's relationship with Digital Equipment is typical of the kind of big-customer partnering Microsoft must do to grow, analysts say. Digital is certifying 3,000 engineers to help companies install and use Windows NT technology. Microsoft is also building bridges with support organizations such as Digital, Vanstar, Hewlett-Packard, Wang and Unisys, rejecting the traditional approach of assembling its own worldwide support force.

It also has struck partnerships with consulting groups such as Arthur Andersen, KPMG and Ernst & Young, which in turn will sell Microsoft's approach to clients looking for specialized software solutions to business needs.

"People say, `Don't you want to capture all that service revenue and profit yourself?' " said Willingham, who would contend that service is a low-profit business compared with software.

Microsoft's partnering focus has the added benefits of assuring support companies that the software monolith will not be a competitor for their business, and it may help insulate Windows NT from antitrust concerns. Because Microsoft's relationships are nonexclusive and involve many of the industry's main players, any government action could have a serious impact on Microsoft's partners and the rest of the industry.

A struggle to get the word out

For all its impact on the company's bottom line and future growth, however, Willingham noted that the enterprise support side of Microsoft has been a tougher story to tell than that of the rough-and-tumble PC software business dramatized by browser wars, antitrust investigations and competitor accusations of foul play.

Faced with getting the word out, she's not afraid to take a creative risk or two. At a global sales meeting last year in Orlando, Willingham's group needed to keep an audience of 1,500 alert after the previous day's 12-hour drubbing of one slide show after another.

Willingham suggested dramatizing the ECU's quest for the enterprise with a takeoff on "The Wizard of Oz," whose soundtrack was her only record as a youngster, one she played over and over. Wearing pigtails and a blue-checkered dress, Willingham as Dorothy led her top three executives in search of the Wizard, whose message was that partnering was ECU's yellow-brick road to success.

The high point of the skit came when the burly Ballmer, wearing a dress and gold crown, appeared as the Good Witch of the North and told Dorothy all she had to do was click her heels together to find wealth and happiness in the enterprise.

"Having Ballmer onstage in drag was a big laugh, and he was a good sport about it," Willingham recalled.

"Instead of saying `There's no place like home,' " Willingham recalled, "it was `There's no place like Microsoft.' "

Paul Andrews' phone message number is 206-464-2360. His e-mail address is: pand-new@seatimes.com