My boss’s boss’s boss meets a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend:

scobleizer

Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, just dropped me off at the lobby of building 10. So, I’m sitting on the floor near a power outlet and am blogging my experiences.

What an enjoyable guy! We walked across the street to a Togos sandwich shop. Little-known trivia, Togos was started by a couple of San Jose State University students. I have lots of great memories of eating in Togos over the years (there was one across the street from our high school – I graduated in 1983).

Anyway, at one point we were having such an engaged conversation I had to remind myself that he runs a company with 37,000 employees and billions in revenues. We instantly were talking like long-lost friends.

There was a serious tone to our lunch, though, we talked a lot about the business difficulties facing Sun Microsystems. They are about to layoff thousands of people.

One thing I look for in leaders, though, is willingness to take the worst of times in stride with a clear eye on what comes next. Jonathan exceeded all my ideas of what a leader should do. And he has great pride in Sun, too, and says that the business is starting to turn around.

For one, Sun is going to encourage all the laid off workers to continue to blog on Sun’s dime. Now, I can imagine the kind of vitriol and crud that’ll get posted by workers who’ve just lost their jobs. That takes real corporate bravery and my hat is off to him. One good thing about this? It’ll make it possible for new employers to get in touch with laid off workers. There’s a lot of companies that are hungry for workers right now.

continues (Via)

It’s an interesting article, and not just for my benefit; sometimes being inside the company I forget how hard, how “brave” some of the stuff we do by default, appears to outsiders.

This, I suspect, is not a little to do with being part of a company which is >40% geek.