Takahashi: Synopsys leader's quiet impact
November 01, 2007
Dean Takahashi
Aart de Geus isn't a "rock star CEO," even though the longtime head of Synopsys in Mountain View plays lead guitar in an amateur band called Full Disclosure. He plays blues, not rock, where improvisational listening skills are as important as taking the lead. And de Geus and his company are rarely in the spotlight associated with other celebrity executives.
"Being called a rock star CEO is utterly not what I aspire to be," de Geus said in an interview this week. "That is what Donald Trump is. The imagery around him is even bigger than who he is."
But de Geus' humble and thoughtful leadership is being recognized by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which Friday will give him its prestigious Spirit of Silicon Valley Lifetime Achievement Award. Carl Guardino, executive director of the civic group, said de Geus has exhibited exemplary citizenship in areas of ethics, business excellence and community engagement. De Geus is the 12th to receive the award alongside past recipients such as Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and Applied Materials Chairman Jim Morgan.
While de Geus isn't a household name, Guardino said the CEO peers who voted unanimously for de Geus "measure him not on the size of his company, but the size of his impact." De Geus has played leadership roles in organizations that include the Synopsys Outreach Foundation (which supports science and math learning), the Second Harvest Food Bank, the Housing Trust of Silicon Valley, the SVLG and TechNet.
De Geus credits his success to good teams, starting with the six engineers who left General Electric 21 years ago to co-found Synopsys with him. The company created tools to help chip engineers design chips more quickly and accurately. Synopsys' synthesis tools could automatically translate a high-level engineering description of a chip into the circuit blueprints necessary to build the chips.
When Synopsys started in 1986, chip engineers struggled to design chips with thousands of transistors. Now, thanks to Moore's Law, they are designing chips with billions of transistors and Synopsys is a billion-dollar company. Like de Geus, Synopsys doesn't get a lot of credit for its contributions, but it is a critical link in the electronics food chain that gives us iPods and cancer research (a field where Esther John, de Geus' wife, works).
"It's not always about running the biggest company," said Mike Splinter, CEO of Applied Materials. "His company has had a huge impact on the industry. Every chip company uses his software to design the most advanced chips."
The complexity of the business suits de Geus, who is a complex soul and is described by Splinter as a Renaissance man. De Geus was born in Holland and raised in Switzerland. He speaks five languages (pronouncing our state as "Kalifornia" comes as easy to him as it does to the Governator), and he enjoys oil painting. He came to the United States as an immigrant in 1979. He earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from Southern Methodist University and worked for General Electric in the Research Triangle in North Carolina.
To de Geus, being competitive and aggressive is important. But he says being a CEO doesn't mean you have to live up to a "tough guy stereotype." He thrives on consensus and strives to give employees positive feedback, so they come out of meetings feeling "one inch taller." His executive assistant Joanne Linden said she worked for nine years for de Geus in part because he has an excellent sense of humor. He believes a CEO can unlock creativity just as an artist can.
De Geus is concerned about the state of education, affordable housing, immigration and other issues. But his biggest concern is whether we will tackle global warming. He is glad that countries can lift themselves up through electronics production, but he frets that such progress comes with increased energy use.
"If there is a message that comes out of this, it is that CEOs should be engaged in the community on both the local and the global level," de Geus said. "The two are no longer independent. They are interdependent."
Spoken like the artist that he is.
