Source: Peter Lee, DataSynapse
Peter Lee of DataSynapse takes the Finextra Q&A
Date and place of birth: 18.07.66, Andover, MA
Residence: NYC
Marital status: Divorced
Education: AB – Harvard University, MBA – The Wharton School, MA – U. of Pennsylvania
Career path: Strategic Consulting (Deloitte Int’l); Investment Banking (JP Morgan); Technology Entrepreneur (DataSynapse)
Current posts: CEO - DataSynapse
Q: What was your first job?
A: Running a 40-room inn on Lake Winnepesaukee, NH in college.
Q: Who is or was your mentor?
A: I’ve been fortunate to have had many great managers at JP Morgan.
Q: Which business leaders do you most admire?
A: Managers with long track records of exceptional change management and operational performance, and founders with visionary entrepreneurial guts and sustained innovation. Examples of managers would be Jack Welch of GE and Carlos Ghosn of Renault; founders I admire include Bill Gates/Steve Ballmer of Microsoft and Steve Jobs of Apple.
Q: If you weren't in your current job, which company would you most like to lead?
A: I wouldn’t.
Q: Do you read books on management theory? If so, which has influenced you the most?
A: Scott Adams – all of his Dilbert books are probably the most insightful and helpful in cutting to the truth about what is and isn’t effective in management.
Q: Which competitors do you benchmark your company's performance against?
A: We benchmark to our own internal business plan, set in consensus with our Board. We are clearly outstripping growth of all of our competitors by orders of magnitude, we are much more performance focused on our own expectations than we are on external factors.
Q: What has been your best experience in business?
A: Earning the respect of the team that I’ve been working with, irrespective of the role I’ve played on that team, or the organisation that I’ve been with.
Q: What was your biggest mistake in business?
A: We need a relational database to sort through my mistakes – there are many vying for biggest.
Q: What keeps you awake at night?
A: Execution risk.
Q: How do you relax?
A: I relax by staying awake at night.
Q: What was the last gadget you bought?
A: Slingbox, so when I’m travelling and awake at night I can watch my home TV.
Q: Favourite Web site
A: Yahoo!
Q: Desert island disc/book
A: 'The New South Beach Diet: 1,000 Innovative Meals with a Coconut'
Disc: something highly reflective to signal a passing airplane, so it would need to be a disc that I never play – perhaps, 'Milli Vanilli – the Ultimate Compilation'.