Ohio’s outrage doesn’t faze NCR CEO

Bill Nuti grew up in the Edenwald section of the Bronx, a neighborhood in the 1970s turning meaner by the day.

Drugs. Guns. Racial tension. Nuti’s parents wanted him out before he ended up dead.

Enlarge this image

Associated Press

William Nuti, CEO of NCR Corp., said moving the company’s headquarters from Dayton, Ohio, to Gwinnett County was ‘the right decision after 125 years.’

BUSINESS
Latest Headlines:
[an error occurred while processing this directive] • More business news
• Business photo galleries

Fortunately, Nuti’s 76-year-old grandmother remarried a “wealthy man who took a liking to me and wanted to polish me up,” Nuti — CEO of NCR Corp., Atlanta’s newest Fortune 500 company — said in an interview.

At age 14, Nuti left the family’s one-bedroom “tenement” in the Bronx for his grandmother’s home in Huntington, Long Island.

But the son of a truck driver never lost his inner-city toughness. He played defensive tackle in high school and college. The latter took five years because he had to work during the day.

Nuti’s tenacity propelled him up the corporate ladder. As CEO of one company, he fired the top 16 executives. As CEO of NCR, he dismissed 125 years of tradition by moving the headquarters last week from Ohio to Gwinnett County.

“Look, I grew up in a tough area so I don’t scare easily,” said Nuti, 45. “You knock me down, I’ll get back up. That motivates me. I want to be a winner.”

Nuti’s chutzpah has proven effective during his still-young corporate career. A master salesman, he soared at IBM and Cisco Systems, right-sized a floundering Symbol Technologies and, he hopes, positioned NCR for the post-recession 21st century.

He has also made a few enemies. Ohioans are furious at NCR’s apparent unwillingness to consider the state’s entreaties to remain in Dayton.

“Mr. Nuti absolutely behaved shamefully and irresponsibly,” Ohio Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher said. Atlanta “needs to be concerned about the lack of loyalty and communication that NCR executives showed Ohio because they may do the same to you in future years.”

Nuti seems unfazed. He also deflects concern that, while the company headquarters and 1,250 jobs head to Duluth, Nuti and dozens of top executives will remain in New York.

“This is one of the bigger decisions I’ll make during my career at this company,” he said. “We thought it was the right decision [leaving Dayton] after 125 years. Atlanta will have us for at least that long.”

Stellar salesman

Nuti said he was IBM’s top copier salesman during his junior year of college. He worked for IBM — an executive proving ground — for eight years.

Two-year sales stints at smallish computer companies followed. Nuti was riding the IT wave when “this little company doing $60 million a year in revenue” came after him.

Cisco Systems, today a $40 billion industry giant, hired Nuti to sell routers to financial firms on Wall Street. He was the company’s top salesman in 1993 and 1994 and named a regional manager.

“He was a New York kid who definitely had the street smarts to know how to adapt to the different cultures of the different firms,” said Ellen Carney, a senior analyst with Forrester Research.

Cisco CEO John Chambers promoted Nuti to head Asian operations. When Cisco was about to lose a billion-dollar contract to a Chinese rival, Nuti and Chambers personally lobbied President Jiang Zemin. They prevailed.

“Nuti and Chambers stole victory from the jaws of defeat,” said Tom Galvin, a Cisco spokesman at the time. “Nuti got things done. That was the bottom line.”

That earned Nuti the top Cisco spot in Europe, where sales more than doubled to $8 billion within two years as the Internet and telecom exploded, he said.

He returned to New York in 2001 to a post he hoped would be a springboard into Cisco’s top spot. Chambers, though, wasn’t ready to step aside. Nuti, 38, was restless.

“I really felt strongly, at that time in my career, in running my own company,” he said.

He was hired by Symbol Technologies, a maker of bar-code scanners on Long Island. Symbol, though, offered a be-careful-what-you-wish-for paradigm.

It was under investigation by the feds for overstating revenue. Nuti said he would have stayed at Cisco if he’d known the extent of Symbol’s troubles.

“We basically had to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch,” he said.

Nuti fired the top 16 executives and two-thirds of management. He overhauled Symbol’s sales, service and manufacturing operations. Under Nuti the company invested heavily in radio-frequency IDs (RFIDs), the tags attached to clothes and groceries that instantly alert warehouse managers of sales.

By 2003, Symbol was again profitable. At Cisco, Nuti had been hailed as a “wunderkind” by Forbes. At Symbol, he earned a reputation as a turnaround artist. Wall Street expected a better financial performance.

“They probably had very high expectations for the company,” he continued. “But where we finished is nothing short of astounding.”

Grabbed by NCR

NCR, the world leader in ATMs, check-out scanners and check-in kiosks at airports, agreed. The former National Cash Register hired Nuti in spring 2005.

Two years later, NCR spun off Teradata, a data warehousing division, which helped NCR mark its most profitable year in a decade. In April, NCR gained full control of the nation’s second largest DVD kiosk operator, cementing a push into entertainment.

Self-service wireless technology is NCR’s future. Computer chip-embedded cellphones will be able to get cash from ATMs or make hotel reservations at the airport.

NCR, which employs 22,400 people worldwide, had revenues of $5.3 billion last year, up from $5 billion the previous year. Net profit dipped to $228 million, from $274 million. Standard & Poor’s gives NCR “a satisfactory business profile” and expects new products and overseas expansion to keep revenues steady, if not spectacular.

Nuti said the move to Atlanta will one day boost profits. It’s much easier, for example, to fly to clients in Moscow or Mumbai from Atlanta than Dayton. Nuti also proclaimed the metro Atlanta talent pool superior to Ohio’s. More than $96 million in tax breaks and other incentives didn’t hurt.

NCR could ultimately have more than 3,000 employees in Georgia. But Nuti and about 150 executives will be in New York, where NCR leases the 35th floor at 7 World Trade Center.

Nuti was contractually obliged to move to Dayton when he became CEO. He never did. A year later, the board said he could keep living on Long Island.

Nuti said “family health reasons” keep him in New York. “And some of our largest customers in the world are in New York,” he added. “It’s very important for us to have a presence around them.”

Nuti plans to spend a few days each week in Atlanta and to be “very involved in the community.”

Nuti and his wife, Michele, though, enjoy New York. In 2005, they were “gold sponsors” for a Lincoln Center gala featuring Julia Roberts and Paul Newman. A year later they held a $300-$1,000 backyard fund-raiser for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, at which Bon Jovi performed.

The Nutis donated $6,900 each to Clinton’s bid. Bill Nuti also gave John McCain $2,300, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.