Mathematica CEO Paul Decker on the overlooked aspect of growing a business

Mathematica Policy Research CEO and President Paul Decker has been with the organization for over 30 years, but his passion for data science remains just as strong as when he first joined the company. Ladders spoke with Decker to hear his advice for growing a business, becoming a flexible leader, and creating a culture driven by teamwork.

In your early days of CEO at Mathematica, what surprised you most about the role?

“I think the biggest surprise, maybe early on, was how what I did as a data analyst when I was doing research as a mathematic researcher was an important aspect of being president. That is, being able to pay attention to the data, read the data, analyze the data effectively, was an important part of providing leadership for the company as well.

I think to some extent that’s a statement about the importance of using data in any kind of setting, but it also speaks to relying on strengths and providing leadership that not surprisingly, since I had been a researcher for 25 years prior to being CEO, that was a key strength for me, was my ability to read the data. So that naturally became an important part of my leadership. It seems natural in hindsight, but it didn’t seem natural at the beginning.”

What’s your advice for setting the vision at a company?

“I think even though you’re right, I think it’s my responsibility to set vision for the organization, it’s not as if I do it alone. Like anything we do at Mathematica, we’re very team oriented in our approach. I rely a lot on my teammates in a collaborative setting to provide leadership for the organization, and that carries through to the vision as well.

So in a lot of settings vision can be thought of as very top down, but I think you have to build it basically from reflecting on the organization, thinking about what the employees at large are thinking in terms of the future of the market that we work in, the role they want Mathematica to play in that market. It’s important to get that discussion going to feed into the vision. And then as a leader I can kind of pull the pieces together and communicate back to the organization in a way that reflects what we heard, what we thought collectively when we think about the future of the organization. And to do it in a way that helps people see how their various efforts fit into achieving that vision.”

You led a complete turnover of senior management. What was the biggest lesson you learned from that process?

“I went from point where I had a leadership team that I inherited, and it included a lot of people who were my mentors when I was coming up through the organization, and many of them when I took over the team or within a few years of retirement. So even though it was a gradual process, it is as you pointed out, it was a full turnover of that team over the next seven or eight years.

If you had asked me before that process started about what I was looking to do, I might’ve said I was looking to find a team that could basically play the same role the former team had played. And I think what I figured out in the course of the transition was the new team wasn’t going to be like the old team. One, what was required for leading the organization was different then was what was required historically. And two, the people who are becoming the second generation of leaders and had different experiences coming up both inside Mathematica, for those who had kind of spent the bulk of their careers at Mathematica, but also outside Mathematica for those would come to Mathematica from other organizations.

And that was okay…that the new team could have a different style, different combination of skills and still be a very effective team and provide effective leadership and guidance or the organization as that former team did without necessarily imitating that former team.”

I’d love to hear about your management style. Does it change between employees of different generations at all?

“I think so. The first thing is touching on something I said before, which is it’s a very team-oriented approach. I rely a lot on a leadership team. And in a way, even though people look to me as a leader, I think the way in which I go about doing that, it feels less like a leader and more like a team member.

I can remember several years ago when I was the president of the association for public policy analysis and management I was being introduced to give my presidential lecture. The person who introduced me went through this list of accomplishments in the introduction for me and it was a little jarring as I was waiting to come up on the podium because I thought, ‘she’s got it all wrong…I didn’t do those things.’ That became the first part of my talk, because I had to point out that I appreciate the introduction, but in fact I really thought of all of that as a team effort. So, that’s the first thing is the team orientation.

I think the second thing is…you talked a little bit about changing approach to different generations of employees, but I think of it as being flexible on every dimension, not just different generations but different individuals in different settings…that what makes sense changes. Some people have a single leadership style, but I tend to, at least, I hope I’m using different styles in different settings with different individuals, to be adaptive to what I feel they need or what they say they need. I don’t think that’s inconsistent with the way of thinking around leadership as evolved over time. When I was a young researcher, everybody’s leadership idol in the business world was Jack Welch.

Now oftentimes when I’m at a leadership discussion, and I was in one just the last two days in New York City, a lot of the people making presentations were making presentations about how do you be a leader that’s more empathetic than a Jack Welch? I feel like 10 years from now, 20 years from now, we’ll go through some other cycle about what it takes to be an effective leader. So I think it’s wise for leaders to play on different styles, that play to the specifics of the situation. So I tend to take a more coaching approach, in terms of working with individuals I think as it adapts to their needs.

I also tend to be pretty data oriented and analytical. I think the final thing is I try to play to people’s strengths. I remember when I first was supervising a senior team at Mathematica and I was having a meeting with one of the people that I was supervising. She was one of our strongest researchers in the company at the time, and yet the discussion centered around her telling me that she knew she was nervous on making public presentations and that she’d been working hard on trying to overcome that nervousness, even though she hated making presentations and she pledged to work to continue working hard.

My response was that maybe we should play to a different strength, to acknowledge that she was one of the best researchers in the organization, and no matter what she did with regard to presentations was going to change that. The point of making presentations was to share her findings or share her insights from her research and there’s more than one way to skin a cat…that didn’t have to come in the form of formal presentations that she found particularly intimidating. It could come in other forms of meeting and writing and other forms of communication that were easier for her. So my advice at that point was don’t work so hard on trying to overcome this weakness, play to your strengths with a mind of achieving the same objective.”

What kind of traits do you look for in employees?

“We want somebody who has a passion for what we’re trying to achieve. We’re a mission driven organization focused on enhancing public wellbeing through our work and we want to identify employees who share that passion…so that’s the first thing.

The second thing is multiple times already I’ve emphasized the importance of teamwork and we want people who have enthusiasm for being part of a team, working with teams, and for being surrounded by other really smart people. So folks that want to be in a star culture where they can attract a lot of attention to themselves as an individual, Mathematica is not always the best place for them because they’re constantly going to be working with teams and being recognized for their accomplishments as part of a team rather than as an individual.

The final thing that’s particularly important to me, is to find people who are continuous learners, folks that can observe the trends around them, how the demands are changing over time, and be ready to adapt to those to evolve their abilities and evolve their approach so as to continue to meet that mission that we’re so passionate about.”

What’s an important aspect of growing a business that most people don’t know about?

“You have to, again, relate it back to the mission and be focused on what the objective of the organization is, and therefore how does that translate into a motivation for growth? Because in order to grow effectively, you’ve got to be able to have the team engaged in that effort. So that’s critical is engaging the team and getting them to share that motivation around growth.”

Is that hard for you?

“I think there was at least a piece of it that was hard. In a sense that part of that motivation is communicating with people effectively, getting them to understand the motivations for growth, and the kinds of decisions that play in the promising growth down the road.

Again, it’s very mission oriented. We’re intent on increasing public wellbeing. It’s not just wellbeing for a few, it’s wellbeing in general. So we want to help as many people as possible. And that translates into wanting to grow as an organization so we can touch as many people as possible to have that impact.

When I was a relatively new leader addressing that issue, I think I had a tendency to say it once to the staff in the organization and think that was enough. But one of the challenges was understanding that people didn’t necessarily hear it if I just said it once. I had to repeat it, seven, eight, nine times…and I had to keep repeating it. Even once people understood it, they had to be reminded. And of course there are new people joining the organization all the time. So what might seem blindingly obvious to me and what might seem boring, in fact, that repetition is in fact critically important message across the organization and to keep people motivated on that message.”

How would you describe the company culture at Mathematica?

“A lot of it revolves around what I was talking about before with regard to being team-oriented. We’re not a star culture, we’re very much a team culture. When we think of our work, we think of it contributing to the Mathematica contribution to enhance public wellbeing. I think that we can be a fairly demanding, but at the same time supportive culture.

I always tell folks when they’re joining Mathematica, that for us to do our work well, to deliver rigor and objectivity in our work, we have to constantly seek and receive feedback on our work and be prepared for our work to be criticized so we can make it better. And that contributes positively both to the development of the organization, development of our work, but also helps make a positive contribution to individual’s career development as well.”

One of the surprising things in terms of our corporate culture is that we’re a very staff-driven culture. Oftentimes when I’m in conversations like this, people ask me, well, how does Mathematica determine what kind of projects that they compete for, that they work on? And it’s very quick answer for me, which is that  I don’t do that. I may talk about it in general, but it’s our staff who decide what kinds of projects we’ll have. And so in a large way it’s our staff that decides the future of Mathematica because the future Mathematica is simply a combination of our people combined with our projects. So if you want to see what Mathematica is going to look like in two or three years, look at the kinds of projects that we’re bidding on now because that’s the work that we’ll be doing in a few years. It’s really dictated by the staff and the staff are deciding what work they want to go after based on what they think will deliver on that mission of the organization, and the way that they engage with it, and what motivates them to get excited about the work that they do at Mathematica.

I always say that my job is to make it look like a business after they’ve made those decisions…and the good thing is that it works. Our staff are very talented, very insightful about the kind of work they do as well as the market that we operate in. So my job can be pretty easy because they’ve made very wise decisions in determining what kind of work that we’ll pursue for the company.

One final thing to talk about is flexibility. What I mean by that is we’re an organization where there’s no one, two, three career paths in the organization. People are relatively free to set their own career path and it’s up to them to determine the career path that fits their preferences in combination with the way in which they think they can have an impact on Mathematica, but also an impact on our clients and the populations that are served by our clients. That’s really the guiding principle is how can they have the impact in that way, but do it in a way that’s unique to the strengths that they bring to the picture? They’re free to do an assessment of what that is and put the pieces together.

Again, the times that we have to step in and change the path of individuals are not very frequent because they tend to make really good decisions and through those decisions, in fact they’re transforming the organization. We’re just a collection of all of our people, and as they make those wise decisions on behalf of their own career, they’re also making wise decisions on behalf of the organization.”

What advice would you give to someone interviewing at Mathematica?

“What I’d give somebody advice about is focusing on that mission that I talked about, of the organization and the way in which they can connect to that mission and see themselves as a positive contributor to that mission, because I think that’s the critical thing…about whether Mathematica is a place where they want to land. If they’re passionate about that mission and they have a sense that they want to build and have that impact that I talked about on Mathematica, on our clients and the populations that we serve, then Mathematica is a great fit for them. And so as they’re assessing whether Mathematica is a place to land, I’d like them to think carefully about the ways in which they can bring their skills to bear in a way that helps build the organization and helps generate that impact that I talked about.”

What else would you like people to know about Mathematica?

“We haven’t talked much about the market that we operate in. So maybe just quickly touch on that, because we’re in a very interesting position. So we’ve gone from a position where the world of data and technology was a niche world…31 years ago when I started at Mathematica. Mathematica was a player in that niche, but most of the world didn’t pay much attention to data and research, the kind that we did because there weren’t a lot of data to work with that you had to come to a place like Mathematica collect the data in the first place in order to be able to conduct that kind of research or analysis.

What’s happened over the last 30 years is what I often, in other settings, call the ‘democratization of data.’ Data are everywhere now and the technology to leverage those data have advanced to so that, in a way, when I think about it and I talked to folks at Mathematica about it, the way I think of it is we’ve been missionaries basically for the role that data can play in improving public wellbeing for the life of the organization.

In recent years it’s like we’ve won the war. Everybody now agrees that data are important to generate better decision making. The data are everywhere now and the technology is advanced to help in that process. So in a way our market’s been disrupted, but it’s been disrupted in a way that plays to our strengths and we just need to embrace the new tools and the new environment and bring the capabilities we’ve always had inside the organization. It’s always made Mathematica a special place and differentiated us in the market. We just need to embrace those new tools to keep moving forward and keep evolving so that we can continue to be a leader in the field. So that’s really the basis for how I think about the next 10 to 15 years of Mathematica. It’s about generating success and embracing the new environment and the new tools to allow us to make greater strides than we’ve ever made in the history of the company to drive new achievements.”

Is there any one tool or industry trend that you’re really excited about right now?

“Well, the label is data science, the rise of data science, and recognizing that we’ve been data scientists for 50 years. When we talk about data science now it’s a much more technology driven approach to leveraging the data that are available and that makes sense because the data now are more plentiful and the technology is more capable.

So when we think about those tools, we need to think about how do we mix the strengths of the tools that are the modern tools that are considered to be the tools associated with data science, with the traditional research tools that we’ve been developing for the last 50 years? How do we bring the strengths together in a way that’s an intersection of the old approach or old methods with the new methods or new approach and generate the greatest power from those combination of tools to deliver effectively for our clients? Basically, to be as responsive as possible to their needs, to their questions, to their pain points in a way that’s data-driven.”