Craig McCaw Interview (page: 5 / 6) Pioneer of Telecommunications	Print Interview

Are there times when you feel your integrity is truly challenged?

Craig McCaw: Your integrity is always challenged in business. I have long believed you have to assess your options in a very military way. You have to decide what the possibilities are, and then you have to decide whether you're going to use them. The people around you will bring you options which are amoral, or questionable, or aggressive. For the benefit of the people around you, you have to know what the alternatives are, what the other person might do to you, and how to respond to it.

You have to know what evil to put on the other person, as it were, to prevent them from doing it. You have to have your guard up. You have to think almost as a chess player. If they do that, what will I do? What could they do to me, and how do I defend against it?

So you're constantly coming to grips with the morality of it, because you are looking at all the evil you could do and then deciding what you will do. Mostly, when you make it clear that you've got something bad you can do to other people; they behave, because they recognize that you are not namby-pamby. You're not akin to Jimmy Carter trying to deal with Iran, where our American sensibilities were incompatible with their sensibilities, and they view you as weak if you haven't thought out the consequences. You have to demonstrate strength in order to be good.

What advice would you give a kid who had the motivation to pursue telecommunications, but not a clue as to how to go about it?

Craig McCaw: I'm not sure I would advise someone to actually take a career, in particular. I think they need to be driven from within and they'll know when they see it that it's the right thing to do.

I believe people are driven by some adversity to want to do greater things. If life is too easy, you take the easy part of it. You have to be driven by competitiveness, which is usually driven by adversity. You've been put down as a child; there was something you had to overcome. In almost every person you see who's really interesting; they have had the gift of adversity. Something bad happened to them which caused them to want to do more.

Once they got good at overcoming it, it's kind of like getting a ball rolling down hill. Pretty soon it's real easy and you just keep on doing it.

The power of ideas is the most important element to me today. Ideas, carefully nurtured, whatever they are, are what's of value today. We see that the world does not value mechanical things as much as the product of ideas. And that's creative thought, whatever it is. Software, meaning singing, dancing, playing baseball, basketball, doing something which is the human contribution.

Machines do mechanical things better than we can ever hope to and nobody cares. It's really the things that improve life and make something better that are important. Once someone finds something like that, that happens to attract them, the rewards will come.

I'm very dyslexic, so that forced me to be quite conceptual, because I'm not very good at details. And because I'm not good at details, I tend to be rather spatial in my thinking, oriented to things in general terms, rather than the specific. That allows you to step back and say, "What's the easy way? How do I get through this easily?" It also makes you very intuitive. You tend to look at things, and you don't want to read so much; reading is harder for a dyslexic. So you become very quick, very intuitive in understanding what the point is. And that's good with ideas. And so, I feel blessed about that.
[ Video ] Low High    [ Audio ] Quicktime	[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

I think that people should be guided by their hearts, not by their minds. I If you're guided too much by your mind, you're not in touch with what you're really good at. Sometimes, in the world, we find an idiot savant, who is great at some one thing. I just have to focus on what I'm good at and not worry if other people don't like it that I'm not good at something they treasure, like details.

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