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Here, again, Inc. Magazine has the story of a revolutionary business leader and his incredible journey: Dave McComb, the president and co-founder of Semantic Arts.
Great leaders don’t aspire to be in positions of authority. They set out to change things. The aim always comes first, never the role. A great leader is capable of inspiring and directing a group of people with a strong desire to climb the success and growth ladder. And Dave McComb, our show’s star today, is a perfect example of inspiring leadership.
With Semantic Arts, Dave helps organizations uncover the meaning of the data from their information systems. Semantic Arts has supported businesses of all sizes in this endeavor for the past 20 years, including Proctor & Gamble, Goldman Sachs, Schneider-Electric, Lexis Nexis, Dun & Bradstreet, and Morgan Stanley. Dave is a passionate and benevolent leader with a calm mindset and an enthusiastic approach to goals. In addition to being the author of “The Data-Centric Revolution,” “Software Wasteland,” and “Semantics in Business Systems,“ Dave is the inventor of four patents in the field of model-driven development. Prior to Semantic Arts, Dave co-founded Velocity Healthcare, where he invented and patented the first entirely model-driven architecture.
In this context, Dave affirms, “I started my career with Arthur Andersen & Co. (on the consulting side that ultimately became Accenture). I was able to take part in and lead several excellent projects thanks to the outstanding coaching, direction, and encouragement I received. I realized in the late 1980s that the state of systems implementation was just making things worse.
The luminaries of the time (some of my heros) such as Grady Booch, Bertrand Meyer, and Bjarne Stroustrup, suggested that the best way to implement object-oriented design was to look at the requirements statement, extract the nouns, and turn them into objects. I had already gained enough knowledge to understand that this is precisely how a dozen separate inventory management systems would be created by a dozen different people. Instead of continuing to diverge, what was needed was something that would encourage analysts and modelers to agree on a single, shared model.
That led me to “semantics.” In the late 1980s, you could review all the articles written on applying semantics to information systems in an afternoon at the library. (That’s where information was before the internet.) We invented our own ideas for applying semantics to information systems. This eventually led us to a dot.com where we applied semantics to both the domain (ambulatory health care) as well as the architecture (we designed, built, and patented the first semantically inspired model-driven development environment, something decades later Gartner would call “low code/no code.”)
We were registering to go public in late 1999. It dragged into early 2000 when the dot.com bomb exploded, and it was game over. At that point, a few survivors founded Semantic Arts as a consulting firm to take what we had learned to a broader audience.”
Dave’s Take on the Leadership Approach
I do not believe in top-down micromanagement. I believe in allowing the enterprise to mostly find its own way. Of course, the business will veer if you are completely hands-off. In order to help the enterprise and everyone inside it find their way in a way where the total is greater than the sum of its parts, I spend the majority of my time working on principles, culture, and some subtle measurements. I completely concur with Andrew Grove’s insight that you should always develop a subjective metric alongside an objective one to keep it in check. We, therefore, have some measures that link the success of our consultants to the business, but we also have many subjective ones as well as objective ones.
Empowering a Positive Work Environment
Constraints are often the guardrails that power creativity. This occurs frequently in the arts. If all the restrictions are removed, creativity devolves into randomness. But a few good constraints can improve creativity. Semantic Arts has embraced the following limitations: We stick close to industry standards at a time when most software companies advocate proprietary lock in; we deliver in 3-6 month chunks, we choose starting with an integrated core over solving point solutions. But within these constraints there are vast opportunities for creative expression. We embrace that and learn from each other.
Insights on the Gender Pay Gap
We work hard to ensure pay and opportunity are egalitarian. Consultants do not have salaries, but are paid in accordance with their billing rate, utilization (the proportion of time spent on projects that are billable), and management of those projects (projects that experience unanticipated write-offs equally affect the entire project team). Unlike almost all consulting firms, here the goals of the company and the consultant are completely aligned. It is not a zero-sum game. When the consultant makes more so does the company. This benefits our female employees exactly as much as our male employees, but more interestingly it doesn’t subject our female employees to the discrepancy that exists in industry between how well males negotiate for salary versus females. There is no negotiation here, and as skills for any employee improve to the point that we can justify a higher billing rate, the employee automatically gets a raise.
Renowned for his “Data-centric Revolution”
At the first level, Dave would like to be remembered for his contribution to what they call the “Data-Centric Revolution”, which is the realization that it is possible and highly desirable to anchor the functionality of a business in a single simple data model that every person in the firm can understand. However, he is currently leaning more towards the next wave. Insight gained in the development of a data-centric offering has taken him back to his roots, then slingshot way past it through a focus on accounting, but importantly it’s role at the center of the enterprise information future. He is currently working on a book called “Beyond Accounting, as We Know It” which goes much further into this topic. The book, which will be published later this year, will serve as a guide for businesses that want to embrace this new view.
“I would like to be remembered as the next Luca Pacioli (the inventor of double-entry bookkeeping). I think what we are describing in this book and piloting with professional services firms is truly the biggest thing to hit accounting in over 500 years”, the visionary leader further apprised.
The Future
I think if a professional services firm (such as ours) grows too rapidly, it disintegrates. My goal is to keep us growing as fast as we can, but not faster. This appears to be about 25% a year, which ends up doubling every three years. So in 5 years the core business will be almost 4 times the size it is now.
Parting with Valuable Advice
Before signing off, Dave shared some words of wisdom with all the aspiring business leaders and entrepreneurs. He conveys the message by saying, “There exists a chance that you are both way smarter and way luckier than all your peers. You could be the next Mark Zuckerberg. But you probably won’t be. And even if you were, would you really want to be? I think a better route is to spend a decade getting good at something. There is a dirty secret in VC land: while the prototypical startup CEO is some twenty-something firebrand, on a percentage basis, more successful startups are started by older entrepreneurs. My advice: learn how the world works. Build some skills. Keep your powder dry.”
