I recently had the privilege to spend some quality time with Kevin Kline as PASS Summit Unite 2009 was wrapping up. I served with Kevin on the inaugural PASS Board of Directors 10 years ago, and I’ve considered Kevin a good friend for the past decade. I knew that many of you would enjoy hearing Kevin candidly discuss his journey with PASS, so I asked Kevin if I could interview him, and he was gracious enough to say yes. The interview was a bit hectic because we did it at the PASS booth during PASS. We tried to hide away in the corner, but Kevin’s fans couldn’t help but say hi from time to time.
Brian Moran: How has being on the PASS board for 10 years changed you?
Kevin Kline: It's been very humbling for me, actually. There are certainly things to be proud of when you're at the helm of a big organization, but for me I still see so many things that need to be done, so I feel like in a sense, "Gosh, it would be really good if I had gotten those other things done." And also I really recognize the fact that for me, having been on the board at PASS is an aspect of what I call servant leadership, in which the leader is not there to be served or treated especially well, but is there to serve others and act in such a way that their needs are to be met. So, for me, it was the kind of thing that I thought about every day I was working on PASS stuff, which was most days at least for a little bit. I was definitely thinking about how was it that I could bring value to the membership and provide something that is not being provided elsewhere, or build a relationship that is being broken down somewhere else, or reconcile with someone who was irreconcilable before. Where can we make these things better, rather than leave them as they are or let them get worse.
Moran: How much time, on average, do you think you spend working on the board?
Kline: Well, it's varied, depending on the particular time and job. In the early years, it was probably between 5-10 hours per week. For a few years, when we were doing all that work to move to CNC, it was 20-30 hours a week on top of the 40-50 hour day job. That was backbreaking at that time, but I was very dedicated and loyal—I really wanted to see it happen. I knew it had to be done, so I had to see that through.
The last couple of years have been less demanding but still probably on the order of 5-10 hours a week. I would say that over the lifespan of being on the board for 10 years, it's probably averaged 15 hours per week.
Moran: Was that primarily personal time per se? Did Quest Software ever say, "Hey Kevin, it's great that you're on the board, and you only have to work half-time for us and we'll still pay you full salary"?
Kline: No, I pretty much always had to work on it on personal time. Now Quest was always supportive of what I was doing, and if there was a way I could multi-purpose it, that was great, but that didn't always work out. Sometimes you have to take off your employee hat and you have to put on your PASS hat and just wear that one. So a lot of the time, I did need to do that. When I was working on Quest stuff, I tried to give 110 percent, when I was working on PASS stuff, they needed a full measure too.
Moran: Were there ever awkward situations with being the president of PASS and being a senior person at a major SQL Server software vendor as well?
Kline: This was something that could've been horrible, and I think one of the key things we need to do as smart professionals is recognize the risk and take steps to mitigate it. For example, when I started on the board I did not work for Quest; at the time I was working for Deloitte & Touche as a standard team lead for the DBAs there, so it wasn't an issue. But later on when I took the job with Quest, it was sort of an issue. And at that time we adopted much stricter rules around conflict of interest, just to make it clear to everyone—not just to the board in general, but the membership and also to myself—that we're going to manage it, we're not going to let it manage us. We also did some changes in the governance. At that time (around 2002), the board had less strictures around the way it was structured and the president was a more powerful position. We implemented a new structure called the Executive Committee inside the wider board, so there would be checks and balances against a very powerful president who might try to use that inappropriately to try and sponsor his employer or company. So the two VPs and the president—along with the immediate past president—made up the executive committee. So it was possible for them to override the president if the president stepped out of line to do anything.