Jeff Raikes

Jeff Raikes' field of dreams is bigger than any Iowa cornfield. Today, the one-time Nebraska farm boy plays in an arena that's as vast as the great plains he hails from. That field: Microsoft, where Raikes oversees a $9.7 billion business that includes Microsoft Office.

Raikes' mantra might as well be "If you build it, they will come." In his 22 years with Microsoft, his imagination has produced substantial results: Office has become the market-dominating desktop suite, and Microsoft's sales to business customers have skyrocketed to stellar heights.

Now Raikes, group vice president of Microsoft's productivity and business services unit, faces another challenge: convincing business customers that the latest generation of the venerable application suite is an absolute must-have.

"Two years ago, the sense here was our work with Office was done. Jeff said, 'Holy cow, look at all the work we have left,' " said Michael Risse, Raikes' business manager. "He inspired us to look at new ways to help information workers be more productive. Jeff has an amazing ability to act as the catalyst for people to come together as a team, even while each person on that team gets charged up to deliver on new opportunities."

Key in on the word "catalyst." By every account, it defines Raikes' modus operandi. Known for building teams out of strong-willed personalities, Raikes, 45, has a knack for getting those around him to see the world through a multifaceted lens of unconventional perceptions. And understanding that talent speaks volumes about how Microsoft aims to transform its Office cash cow into a revenue-leaping thoroughbred.

"The way [Raikes] manages is by always asking the questions that help people see different connections and different viewpoints to a problem," said Marc Chardon, CFO of Microsoft's Information Worker Business Group.

Raikes displayed his off-center perspective even while growing up on his family's 2,500-acre corn and soybean farm near Ashland, Neb. Back in 1973, ninth-grader Raikes had the lead role in a play titled "The Bald Soprano," by Eugene Ionesco. This was theater of the absurd, and the 15-year-old Raikes,wearing a gold-trimmed, purple satin smoking jacket,added a more bizarre touch. He opened the play by standing on his head in the chair. "The point of the play was to turn people's perception of the world. Jeff did that," recalled Lissa Eades, Raikes' high-school English and drama teacher.

But Raikes wanted to do more than turn others' perceptions of the world. He also sought new perspectives for himself. In his sophomore year at Stanford University, the blond, freckle-faced, bespectacled kid from a Nebraska community of 2,100 decided to room at Ujamaa House, Stanford's African-American dormitory.

Raikes said he moved to the African-American dorm for the same reason he chose to join the diverse student body at Stanford: to see the world in a new light. In an unexpected twist, his roommate, Kenneth Nunn, was an African-American from the inner city of Omaha, Neb.,one of only five Nebraskans in a freshman class of 1,700 students. "So while we were from the same state, I learned we had grown up in two completely different worlds," Raikes said.

"I spent three of my four years at Stanford living in Ujamaa, and a key part of that was my interest in seeking new experiences and exposure to new ways of seeing the world," Raikes said.

Still, Raikes had always expected that he would return to the farm, and on his way back, a funny thing happened. In his senior year, Apple Computer offered him the job of VisiCalc engineering manager. That's when he discovered what he calls the magic of software. "I learned that software could make a big difference in people's lives," Raikes said, explaining how people's eyes would light up whenever he showed them how the Apple spreadsheet would fix a problem they thought was insurmountable. "It's a hugely creative satisfaction. And it was that insight that caused me to want to leave Apple and go to a software company."

Raikes joined Microsoft, where he had more than the average share of new experiences. First as a product manager in 1981 and then as director of applications marketing in 1984, Raikes drove the design and strategy of Microsoft Office to unseat WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 as the leading desktop applications of their day. In 1992, he switched from overseeing desktop technology to supervising Microsoft's sales efforts. During that time, the company created channel-friendly efforts such as the Solution Provider Program and its Business Productivity Advisers team to help solution providers sell to companies of all sizes. In his eight years as a sales guy, Raikes saw Microsoft become a software juggernaut for businesses and consumers.

"How many executives have the personality, IQ, skills and capacity to transition between technology and sales and succeed?" Risse said. "Could you imagine Bill [Gates] and Steve [Ballmer] switching jobs for 10 years? But that's essentially what Jeff did."

Just how well did a technologist handle the channel side of Microsoft? Randy Shilling, president and CEO of Quilogy, a St. Louis-based Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, gave Raikes high marks. "Jeff truly cares about the partner community, and he understands my issues as if he were running my business," said Shilling, who first met Raikes 10 years ago. "He added Business Productivity Advisers, who got us to rethink our market and changed how we do business. Now we no longer go after IT. Instead, we work with those advisers as we talk to people with spending authority in finance, operations, sales and HR," Shilling said. "It has allowed us to move away from areas being commoditized by offshore services and helped us raise our rates. And that concept all came from Jeff."

Raikes returned to Microsoft's technology side in August 2000 as group vice president of its wide-ranging Productivity and Business Services division. Office is the undisputed moneymaker of the unit, and the product accounts for one-third of all the company's revenue. For Microsoft's 2003 fiscal year ended June 30, Office sales were $9.2 billion, about $1 billion more than the previous year's total. But as impressive as those number are, Office sales growth remains in the low single digits. According to Microsoft's fourth-quarter earnings report, Office-related revenue grew 5 percent year over year in "new and recurring multiyear licenses." But excluding recurring revenue, the suite saw 2 percent to 3 percent growth in new sales.

To rejuvenate Office sales, Raikes charged his team with transforming the product into something that would sway business customers to upgrade. "Something I learned from listening to [former General Electric Chairman and CEO] Jack Welch is, when you are in a position of leadership in a business, you need to step back and ask how to redefine the opportunity to be bigger and broader," Raikes said. "Your current position is a smaller share of that opportunity and thus has more room for growth."

For Raikes and his team, that broader opportunity involves positioning Office as the front end to collaboration and productivity capabilities built on Microsoft server applications. Introduced in October, Office 2003 is a software suite revamped for the business environment that enables virtual workgroups, ties XML data to documents and provides improved instant messaging. Raikes credits Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of Office, and Anoop Gupta, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Real-time Collaboration Business Unit, for their work in crafting the new capabilities. "Steven is one of the deepest thinkers there is about information work," Raikes said. "Anoop is responsible for the cornerstone of realtime collaboration. Don't give me the credit for this. The team did it."

And now that the new Office has been built, Microsoft has initiated a $120 million to $150 million advertising campaign to ensure that they will come.

 Published for the Week Of December 15, 2003