James Goodnight
| James Goodnight | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
January 6, 1943 (age 74) Salisbury, NC |
| Nationality | American |
| Other names | James H. Goodnight, Jim Goodnight |
| Alma mater | North Carolina State University |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur, CEO, Statistician, Software engineer, Inventor |
| Net worth |
 US$8.8 billion (October 2016) |
James Howard Goodnight (born January 6, 1943) is an American businessman and software programmer. He and several other faculty members of North Carolina State University left the university in 1976 to co-found SAS Institute. Since the first day of incorporation (July 1, 1976) he has served as the company's CEO. His leadership style and the work environment he created at SAS, now a multibillion-dollar company, have been studied by other businesses and by academics.
Goodnight was born to Albert Goodnight and Dorothy Patterson in Salisbury, NC, on January 6, 1943. He lived in Greensboro, NC, until he was 12, when his family moved to Wilmington. In his youth, he often worked at his father's hardware store. Mathematics and chemistry were Goodnight's strongest subjects in school, thanks in part, he says, to a "wonderful chemistry teacher" at New Hanover High School.
Goodnight's career with computers began when he took a computer course his sophomore year at North Carolina State University. At the time, he said, “a light went on, and I fell in love with making machines do things for other people.” The following summer he got a job writing software programs for the agricultural economics department. With contributions from other alumni, Goodnight was responsible for the construction of a new fraternity house in 2002.
Goodnight received a Master's in statistics in 1968. While working on his Master's, his curiosity was piqued over the prospect of a man being sent to the moon. His programming skills helped him land a position at a company building electronic equipment for the ground stations that communicated with the Apollo space capsules. While working on the Apollo program, Goodnight experienced a work environment that had an annual turnover rate of approximately 50 percent. This shaped his views on corporate culture and his future role as an employer. Goodnight returned to North Carolina State University after working on the Apollo project. He earned a PhD in statistics with thesis titled Quadratic unbiased estimation of variance components in linear models with an emphasis on the one-way classification under the supervision of Robert James Monroe and became a faculty member from 1972 to 1976.
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