“Immobilizing the Bull Is the Hard Part”

When we sat down with NetApp founder Dave Hitz last week to talk about his new business book, How to Castrate a Bull, we wanted to know: Hitz actually had castrated bull calves his freshman year of college; could he still do it if he had to? “Once you have a bull immobilized, it’s not too hard to cut his balls off,” Hitz laughed. “Immobilizing the bull is the hard part.”

We segued into the message behind the metaphor, the idea of appropriate levels of risk. “When should you jump in without any preparation, and when should you get some training?” he asked rhetorically, conceding that times of increased economic hardship may help spur entrepreneurs and established businesses alike into taking greater risks. “It’s tough to sell change when things are going well,” Hitz explained. “Pain drives change. When times are tough, you may not have a choice but to take a risk.”

Hitz came up with the idea for his book after spending 17 years at the company he’d founded—a tenure that gave him perspective both on creating a start-up and running a company over the long haul. “Originally, I had two goals for who the book’s audience was,” he recalled. “There were business people; they were the obvious audience. But then there were employees who aren’t managers—I wanted to make management comprehensible to them.” As the project progressed, though, he realized that his focus could be even wider than that: “I had an opportunity to make a book that was accessible beyond the business world, and that forced me to consider a broader audience.” Among the test readers who helped ensure the finished version was effective for non-business readers was his mother’s book club; he gleefully reported that one of her friends said she was using his guidelines to run her condo association.

Hitz didn’t do it alone; early on, his agent had introduced him to Pat Walsh, at a time when Walsh was between his two separate editorial stints at MacAdam/Cage and working as a writer. They met for several interviews, and Hitz described how Walsh managed to boil 500,000 words of conversation down to a 50,000-word manuscript. “Pat did a really good job of capturing stories in the first draft, but he didn’t do what I wanted in terms of explaining business,” he said, explaining that he went back to the manuscript to do “serious rewrites.”

Walsh’s response? “Dave, you’re destroying this story!” He explained to Hitz that you can’t have 20-page stretches of prose without talking about any people, no matter how much theory you want to explain. Hitz took the criticisms to heart, using a software analogy to explain the lesson: “You can’t write elegant code that doesn’t do anything for the end user,” he told us.

So he “reverse-engineered” his manuscript, making notations in the margins next to each paragraph: P for people, T for tech, M for marketing, and so on, with capital and small letters to indicate the emphasis within the passage. “If I spotted too many paragraphs without a capital P,” he said, “I knew I was in trouble.”

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