The ZANDAN Brand

Serial entrepreneur Peter Zandan exemplifies how creativity, collaboration and community involvement are keys to successful leadership in the 21st century.

Written by Diana Dawson and photographed by Matthew Mahon

1 | 2

When Peter Zandan finally looked up from the proverbial grindstone to take a break from business, he clearly saw how corporate leaders’ role in society needed to evolve.
 
The serial entrepreneur realized he and his peers weren’t reaping their millions in a vacuum. Organizations that built hiking trails, created niches for the arts, tried to find cures for cancer and educated the workforce were vital to corporate success. Without a strong symbiotic relationship, neither business enterprises nor nonprofit ventures would thrive.
 
The us-them relationship between bottom-liners and do-gooders had to end and a more collegial era commence.
 
“It comes down to listening and representing what you hear, finding clarity and beginning to connect the dots to come up with common ground,” says 54-year-old Zandan, Ph.D. ’82, MBA ’83 and senior adviser for Public Strategies, Inc. “I’ve always enjoyed collaboration. If I see authority for the sake of authority, I challenge it.”
 
Leaders emerging in the 21st century must be able to work cooperatively with all parts of society, says Zandan, who will address that topic as the keynote speaker March 28 at the McCombs School of Business MBA Alumni Conference.
 
“It used to be that business was the bad guy,” says Deborah Byrd, founder of “Earth & Sky,” a science radio program and Web site that Zandan now advises. “In working with Peter, I get that corporations might be part of the hope for the future.”
 
If the corporate world is going to follow the Zandan path to the future, though, it may have to learn to think in fresh, new ways.
 
“Peter exemplifies a new breed of leadership that’s not the hardass CEO,” says Mark McKinnon, vice chairman of Public Strategies. “He’s collaborative, friendly and collegial rather than intimidating.
 
“I think the corporate world is still in the middle of evolving,” McKinnon adds, “but you’ll see more and more successful businesses will be heading to the Zandan model.”

A MAN IN MOTION

Zandan was born with an inherent drive to chase the bottom line. His father owned a dry-cleaning shop in Springfield, Mass., and his Uncle Saul was an accountant who dabbled in restaurants and clothing manufacturing and ran scores of businesses that made everything from computer chips to potato chips.
 
Before the training wheels were off his bike, Zandan launched his first business. In kindergarten he made brightly colored potholders on a child’s metal loom and sold them door to door. By fifth grade, he raked in a dime or more for every Indonesian Tiki doll he carved from wood for his classmates, and, by age 12, he started his own landscaping business. At 19, Zandan paid for his travels through Mexico in a Volkswagen bus by selling imports on visits back to the states. Later, when graduate school tuition payments were due and babies needed to be fed, he renovated and sold houses.
 
“I’ve always liked the concept of exchange: creating something and seeing the reaction of the market,” says Zandan. “When work is aligned with my passions I don’t find it [to be] work at all.”
 
Not one to dawdle, Zandan started Intelliquest in 1984, the year after he earned his MBA from the McCombs School (and two years after he earned his Ph.D.). Taking his first real business from a living room startup to the fastest-growing market-research company worldwide in the 1990s required single-minded focus.
 
After he sold Intelliquest in 1999 (the company went public in 1996), Zandan took a year off to spend time with his family, travel and decompress. In the quiet, he noticed the balance he’d sacrificed while working 18-hour days, seven days a week, constantly jetting from one coast to the other. He also became interested in putting his talents to use in new ways.
 
“As the business succeeded, I became a lot more appreciative of the system that allowed that to happen,” Zandan recalls. He recognized in Austin the educated pool from which to draw employees, the entrepreneurial environment and the quality of community life—all of which contributed to his company’s ability to grow and go public. “There’s a responsibility to give back to the system in which you operate.”
 
During that year off, Zandan began picking up pieces of his life that he’d set aside to build a business. He volunteered at St. Stephens Episcopal School and started 360 Summit to encourage leaders of the technology community to get more involved with Austin. He soon started another business, Zilliant, an Austin-based provider of price-management software that allows companies better insight into setting prices. He advocated for an evening MBA program at the university and began teaching a marketing technology class at McCombs.
 
“He has always pushed the university to reach out to the community and not hole up on the 40 Acres,” says Jim Nolen, distinguished senior lecturer in the Department of Finance. Nolen says Austin would not have recovered from the dot-com crash in the same way if it hadn’t been for Zandan’s work in developing the 360 Summit.
 
“They shaped the critical mass of talent here and helped pull things together after the crash,” Nolen says. “Sometimes it’s easy for people to pick up and leave. He organized people to keep the talent here so it didn’t become a ghost town.”
 
When Zandan was asked two years ago to show an example of a business plan to a science radio program that had never made a profit, he became intrigued by the show’s potential to grow as a voice for science in an increasingly politicized world. His relationship with the program quickly deepened to chairman of Earth & Sky Communications.
 
“He took a chance on us,” says Byrd, the program’s founder. “We weren’t out there making buckets of  money. I think it’s because he just cares deeply about the world.”
 
The more involved he became in the community, the more accolades Zandan earned. He’d already been selected by Interactive Week as one of the “Unsung Heroes of the Internet” and was awarded Ernst & Young’s “Entrepreneur of the Year” for Austin. Soon came recognition as “Hero of Democracy” by the Austin American-Statesman, “Best Local Visionary” by the Austin Chronicle and “Soul of the City” by a leading environmental group.
 
“In business, you push forward in a race against the clock. But when working in the community, you have to build consensus among lots of interests, and that takes time,” Zandan explains. “You don’t have to be as worried in business about making a mistake. If you recover quickly, you are OK and you move on. In the community, there’s less forgiveness. If you lose the perspective of all of the groups involved, you have a difficult time regaining respect.”

1 | 2