The Build Network - April 2012

{Slug} {Editors’ Notes}

THE BUILD NETWORK PERSONIFIED Introducing Build member profiles. Add yours.

WE ME T JOHN D. CALHOUN, CEO of Integrated Man-
agement Services, at a Build/Live event in Chicago
last fall. We met Gary Swart, CEO of oDesk, at a Build/
Live event not long after that in Northern California, where
he and Matt Cooper, oDesk’s head of marketing, took the
stage to unfold tales of management-team misalignment
that both harrowed and inspired every Build Network
member on hand. Ping Fu, CEO of Geomagic, was in
Chicago, too, though she’s been in our network since before
then, and she’ll be a keynote speaker at our Build/Live
event in Atlanta on May 23.

Each of them is an extraordinary builder. Now we’d like to introduce them to you.

You’ll find their Build Network member profile pages interspersed among this catalog’s idea pages. The profiles are driven by a questionnaire aimed at capturing a thumbnail sense of who these executives are, how they work, and what they think. We asked them what they wish they were smarter about, what their most rewarding team experience was, how they get pumped for big presentations, how they chill, what company they’d like to get inside to learn from, where they get their best advice, and what weakness they work hardest to hide. And more. In their profile pages, we present a smattering of what they told us.

Not surprisingly, these thumbnails don’t do our profilees perfect justice. But one of the reasons for that is surprising. Turns out it’s hard to portray Build Network members as individuals because it’s not so easy to separate them from the teams they lead. You can single them out (we have), but off the page they’re anything but solo actors. They’re part of something bigger: a team of colleagues who collectively are building enterprises of wide ambition and consequence.

Calhoun is just one example. You can find him solo on
page 02.08. But you can also see him pictured on this page,
in what is perhaps a more natural and accu-
rate pose for him: alongside Rod L. Hill, his
cofounder and business partner of 15 years.
(Hill is the president and COO of Integrated
Management Services.)