Peter Neupert is famously known for his thoughtful intelligence and for a manner so intense that, as BusinessWeek reported, he once clenched his jaw and broke his fillings.
Both traits have been essential to building the bridges that make technology useful and profitable in hard-to-crack sectors. "It's always about learning the best from each culture," he says, "picking the right people with open minds and persuading them that the promised land is not about winning with their culture. It's about building something new that hasn't existed yet."
Neupert credits his father for his drive, but he chose his own path as a philosophy major at Colorado College. "Trying to understand the central questions of life—why we're here, how we think—gives you a discipline that helps you get to the root cause of business problems," he says.
During Neupert's first term at Tuck, his father died, and Neupert was thrust into his family's plumbing-supply business. But soon after graduation, he immersed himself in a couple of software startups before Steve Ballmer handed him a tough position at Microsoft in 1987: director of operating systems with responsibility for shipping OS/2. Neupert learned to bridge Microsoft's culture to IBM's, to link engineering to international sales, and, as senior director for Far East operations, to make Microsoft's culture work in Asia. Then, as vice president of news and publishing, he created MSNBC by linking engineering and journalism, as well as two wildly divergent corporate cultures. "We put Bill Gates and Jack Welch together and pulled it off," he says.
By then, Neupert had built an important bridge of his own, to Sheryl Schafer, Microsoft chief recruiter. They were married six months after their first date. Her savvy with people complements his analytical mind, and, in 1998, when venture capitalist John Doerr pursued Neupert to head up the fledgling drugstore.com, Doerr didn't succeed until he got Sheryl's nod. "I wanted to test myself and see if I could be a CEO," Neupert recalls. Best of all, the position promised him more time with his children.
The Neuperts set up shop in their garage—located half a mile from the Gates's home—and established solid customer service and distribution networks and partnerships with Amazon.com and Rite Aid. But the dotcom bust made the going tough, and that's when the fillings cracked. "There's no lifeboat if you're the leader," Neupert says. In 2001, to gain more family time, he switched to chairman, a part-time position he held until 2004.
In September 2005, he rejoined Microsoft as corporate vice president of health strategy. He has begun its push into the medical world by purchasing a doctor-designed software program named Azyxxi that integrates data from medical records, MRIs, lab results, and other sources into a single platform. Neupert explains that "we have not only a hard data problem but a hard social engineering problem: physicians like to do things in a particular way, and change comes slowly in hospitals. But if we succeed, we can help save lives and improve the health of the world through technology." If, indeed, the past is prologue, Microsoft—and the world—has found the right bridge-builder for the task.
