From 2016 Self Authoring

5.1 Being interviewed by six managers

The sales floor at Hamilton Avnet’s Culver City branch was a huge space. There were six large offices with large windows looking onto the floor, all in a line along one wall. When I went in to interview for a Product Manager position, I was taken to the far office and sat down to be interviewed. I thought the interview went well. When we were done he walked me over to the next office and I had my second interview. This continued until I had been interviewed by all 6 managers, and was offered the job.

5.2 Creating the inventory spreadsheet for Jim Jeffries

I was hired to do three months each of Customer Service, Inside Sales, and Outside Sales before becoming a Product Manager. After the three .months of Customer Service I was asked by Don Sweet, the corporate Senior VP in charge of product management, if I wanted to join his small team that did the purchasing for the whole company, in the same building as the Culver City branch where I was working. My new title was Assistant Corporate Product Manager, Hamilton/Avnet Electronics. I didn’t get any more money, but it was obviously a major step up. While there, from September to December 1981, we picked up distribution for the Xerox Star, which came with VisiCalc. I had been working with Jim Jeffries, in charge of inventory for H/A, which was the world’s largest distributor ef electronic components. I immediately saw that what he had me doing could be automated using the new tool. They brought me one, Greg Kawasaki showed me how to use it, and voila, H/A entered the world of the personal computer. I was identified as a rising star.

5.3 Independent Scholar’s Journal – Management literature and spiritual practice

Working at Avnet and living and practicing at the Zen Center every day, after having been a hippie, was quite a mix of value systems. One day I found a book in the ZCLA “boutique” (free store) called The Independent Scholar’s Handbook. It inspired me to start what I called my Independent Scholar’s Journal. The first entry is dated January 1984. Then it starts in earnest in March 1985. The most entries are in 1985, 6, and 7. There are fewer in 1988 to 1991. I spent a lot of time at the USC library, got a card, and checked out a lot of books about business and values. Bob Silvers entered the Stanford doctoral program in Organizational Behavior and I seriously considered it. I haven’t gone back over the journal since then. I hope I can sometime.

5.4 Creating the Computer Marketing division

Bill Page was the visionary. The concept was very simple and compelling. The “world’s largest distributor of electronic components” had been selling an increasing amount of computer components as the PC industry started growing. Our warehouse in Torrance was where that product was purchased, stocked, and shipped from. The sales force was totally oriented toward electronic components and considered the computer products a distraction. Bill’s vision, quickly shared by our team of 5 or 6 young product managers, was to build a computer products division with its own sales force, to eventually become the dominant force in the company. We knew we were the wave of the future and we had the fire in our bellies. We were going to do it as countercultural upstarts, undercutting the bloated corporate thinking and style of the old guard. We had a great deal of fun putting it together, and after about 2 years of work, we succeeded in creating Avnet Computer. A very heady experience.

A small group of us (intrepeneurs) had split off a computer business within the electronic components distribution company, using data from a system I developed by siphoning off data from the corporate mainframes onto the DEC minicomputers we sold. The division we started is now called Avnet Technology Solutions, which had grown to $10.6 billion sales in FY 2015.

5.5 Meeting and working with Riley

I was selected to be the Avnet Computer representative on the end-user team that met all day every day for months to design the specifications for Avnet’s new IBM mainframe inventory management, purchasing, and logistics system. I learned a LOT about large corporate IT systems development during that time. From the first day, I was fascinated by a new person in the room. Riley Sinder had been hired by ISD (Avnet’s Information Services Division) to monitor the process. I started asking him during breaks what he was doing there. What I found out was he was a brilliant and witty person who among other things, was working on a manuscript with his friend Ronnie Heifetz, who ran the Leadership Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Riley started giving me printouts of chapters as they developed the drafts. I devoured each chapter and discussed it with Riley. The manuscript later became the basis for Ronnie’s best selling book “Leadership Without Easy Answers”, in which he acknowledged Riley for the “intuitions and underpinnings of this book”. Riley and I became great friends, which lasted for years. Riley, his wife Judy, and Ronnie came to my Shuso Hossen at ZCLA (graduation ceremony as head trainee).