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Excerpt from Oral History Interview with Jim Goodnight, July 22, 1999. Interview I-0073. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) See Entire Interview >>

Clear division of labor helps SAS succeed

The division of labor between SAS's four founders developed naturally, Goodnight recalls, and business sense served an adequate replacement for experience.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Jim Goodnight, July 22, 1999. Interview I-0073. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

JM: Let me ask about how the four original equity holders--. None of you had an extensive business background -- I think it's probably fair to say -- other than through work experience as a younger person. How did you make your choices about how to define your tasks, split up the professional duties and apportion the equity? JG: We had a fairly well defined set of tasks that we were already doing. I was involved in some of the statistical programming and John was involved in some of the statistics. He was beginning to do some work in economic time series variant. Jane was our writer and Jim was our systems person. We already pretty much knew pretty well what we were going to do. The business about how to run the business, Jim and I had been alternating. I would be head of the project one year at State and then he would be the next year and I would be the next year. We had some experience with dealing with that. Plus, we had had to negotiate contracts with people, so we had a fair amount of business sense about us, I think, at the time. Jim and I both had been doing a lot of consulting work. We had been dealing with a lot of corporations. That's how we put ourselves through school, was doing consulting and also working for the university.