Scott "Opie" Lehman founded Software Configuration Management Labs eight years ago to provide software services and products to large corporate clients. Scott’s love for computer programming began when he worked his way through school in the computer lab. IBM showed up one day and asked Scott to write a program to coordinate all the radio carbon labs in the world. After that, he knew he didn’t want to do anything else–he had found his passion. Scott believes that if people do what they love, and if they try to be the best at it, they will stick with it through the tough times and eventually find great success.

Scott began his consulting company and saw his company grow at an explosive rate. He had to hire many more people and used his steadfast rule when hiring: surround yourself with people of high integrity who are committed to excellence. Scott tries to do this, not only when hiring people for his company, but in all aspects of his life. He looks for people who are smarter than he is because he thinks that it is beneficial to him to put his ego aside and learn from others. In fact, continual learning is extremely important to Scott–his survival and that of his company’s depends on it.

"School teaches you how to learn. In the technical field, the knowledge you acquire in school is only skin deep. New information continues to be published and you have to be on top of it. School is not so much about learning specific applications or skills like Windows 98. You have to know that it runs on top of instructions that run in a chip, and you have to understand how the chip works. School helps give you a history and understanding of how things came to be, so that they are not a mystery anymore. It helps you learn how to learn, but learning is a continual process, and if you don’t continue to do it, you’ll be toast."

Even in his technical field, Scott has found communication and relationship building two of the most important pieces of success. He became very knowledgable, technically, but did not put much energy into building business relationships, at first. Now he believes that relationsips are at least half, though probably more, of the contributing factors to success. He reads the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" every year just to remind himself of the basic points: Don’t criticize or complain, but say only good things and be positive. All things tend to decay if you don’t put time and energy into them. Even business people want to be loved, so focus on relationships and success will just start happening. Scott now tries to be what he terms a "karma broker," accepting help from others and also giving it away.

Scott has three basic rules for his life:

1. Remember that life is a verb and not a noun–it is a process, not something to achieve, which require action.

2. It is better to be a stream than a pond–when a stream hits a rock, it goes around it. Find the path of least resistance and continue along. Ponds are stagnant.
3. Gravity and light explain everything. There are thousands of laws, but you can boil them down to common denominators. Silicon chips start with sand. If you can see things in different ways, you can notice similarities and skills become interchangeable. Debugging a memory leak, for example, requires going all the way to the lowest core.

Scott prepared himself to take advantage of opportunities. He saw the need for his consulting service and learned the necessary skills to make it happen. He attributes his success to several factors. 30% is luck, he says–being in the right place at the right time; 30% is because others helped him; and 40% because he was smart, worked hard and knew how to do what was necessary. Great things have happened to him because, he believes, he is eternally optimistic, builds relationships and knows how important it is to give back to the world.