Sprecher’s remarks were edited for length and clarity.
When regulators give their final OK, as expected soon, the symbol of American capitalism will be owned by a 13-year-old Atlanta business.
Here Jeff Sprecher, CEO of IntercontinentalExchange, talks about why his company won’t be celebrating the acquisition of the New York Stock Exchange, how his business mirrors a good marriage and what he finds so relaxing about winding watches.
On how buying the New York Stock Exchange makes it easier to explain what he does: Most of us here at ICE have this experience where we tell people what we do for a living, and they all smile and nod and say, 'Oh, that's interesting,' when we tell them we run exchanges.
And then when we announced (we were) buying NYSE Euronext, people were like, ‘Wow, you’re actually buying this exchange.’
And we’re like, ‘Yeah, we run them.’
And they’re like, ‘But I didn’t really know what that meant.’
But everybody knows what the New York Stock Exchange symbolizes, and everybody’s seen it on TV. So now there’s this light bulb that’s gone off, which is, ‘Wow, they actually are in an interesting business.’
On why ICE didn't spend time celebrating this acquisition, or mourning an earlier failed attempt to acquire the NYSE: It's healthy to acknowledge that you failed, actually articulate those words, which is why you hear me say them. It's not all roses in life. But you continue forward.
It’s why I think a balanced company just needs to acknowledge failure and move on, and when you have successes, acknowledge success and move on. But I do feel like companies that are constantly rewarding their wins and never really acknowledging their failures are likely to over time make more failures.
On ICE's culture: It's a company where we don't go around telling people what they should do every day. There's an expectation here that there's a lot of work to do, and we're probably understaffed, and you should just grab a shovel and start digging holes with us. And if you're somebody that needs to be told where the shovels are, where the hole needs to be, then it doesn't fit.
When you interview a person and say, ‘This is a place where people work hard,’ most people nod and say, ‘Of course I work hard.’
But then we discuss that it may need weekends, there may be a lot of travel involved, you may not be able to go home at a normal hour. You can see people starting to think about their child care issues, their hobbies, the other things they do in life that give them balance, and start to think, ‘Could I really work hard and still do the things I love?’
For a lot of us that are here, what we really enjoy is the camaraderie, the hard work around the company. That is our hobby. A lot of people here have really good work-life balances because they’re happy in their work, even though it may take a lot of hours.
On why he will often have three-hour weekly meetings to hash out problems: Good companies, just like good marriages, have conflict, and then they have very good conflict resolution. And so we intentionally create ways of discussing conflict and then resolving it.
We have a deal with each other that everybody on the management committee will describe the biggest problem that they’re facing. And then everybody is allowed to comment, give solutions or criticism.
We have a deal that once we do that and resolve it and walk out of that meeting, it will end. The meeting goes for hours, until we resolve it.
We yell and shout at each other over things. I let it play out. I let people get mad at each other and then figure (it) out. And it’s always done over business issues, and so we figure out how to resolve it, and everybody agrees that it is the resolution.
By doing that, you don’t have any corporate politics. At the senior level that revolves around me, there’s no backstabbing because we stab each other in the front.
On what keeps him up at night: There was a time in the company when if we had a technology problem, nobody cared. But now if we had a technology problem, we're going to be on the front page of the newspaper.
We’ve all gotten so used to technology being so reliable that if for just a few minutes we’re inconvenienced, it’s actual news.
Within ICE now, we set the world’s price of oil. We’re going to become, with the NYSE, the most prominent capital market in the world. The world can’t tolerate our outages.
On what he tells business students: It's so important in business to stay close to your customers.
If you want to run a business, or start a business, you really need to figure out what somebody else’s problems are. Not what you want to do. But what does somebody else actually need you to do? And that’s what we do around here.
On why he likes to wind watches: I like the connection of winding a watch. In my house I have a lot of wind clocks that I wind every day.
There’s something that I think is interesting about people that have invented a device that can actually keep track of the way the earth moves through the universe in mechanical parts.
It’s broader than just the device that you’re wearing on your wrist. It’s really like, how did that device really interact with these unbelievable forces of nature that we take for granted? Of sun setting and rising.
And I do like the mechanical nature of it. I have watches that have a glass back; I sit and watch them. It’s calming to a certain degree. It’s somewhat Zen-like.
On his past as a race car driver: People think well yeah, he must be really hyper-competitive. What I really liked was the interplay of myself with the mechanical parts of the car and trying to push it to its limit.
I actually enjoy driving a race car on an empty track as much as I would being in a competition.
I love, I love working on cars. And it’s sad that the modern cars are so good that they don’t need any intervention by anyone other than an authorized dealer with a computer.
But I like old cars that you can really get into. If you actually look at my fingernails, you’ll see I’ve got grease and my hands are dirty.
