The Soft Pitch

After seeing China do the Olympics opening and closing events…seeing the DNC this week was like seeing Cub Scouts put on a Jamboree. If Obama and Hillary were not diversity candidates there would have been no hype or drama at all…the staging was just average. The intro videos were ok, the intro of the Obama was sooo weak he just walked on stage and then I kept saying where are the ending fireworks to everyone jazzed? Finally they had some at the ball park before the last commercial…someone must have been looking for the match to set them off? .

Oh well let’s see what McCain and Co do…

So what the heck does it have to do with Avnet? If you are a meeting planning journalist we have some event pros around the globe you should meet…an award winning customer apprecation event at Electronica in Munich an employee thank you programs are suppliers rave about in all 3 regions, especailly in Hawaii. The first global customer educational program.  Partner conferences that attrract 1000 people.  Our video producer has won international awards for years…she knows how to motivate a crowd. These folks truly enhance our brand and sales…you should meet them.

Does not matter what country you are from but Michael Phelps 8 gold medals in swimming has to be one of those memories that we will all remember…but what I will remember most is his excitement and body language when the last leg of a team event the US swimmer beat the Aussie at the last second to win the event. That is the most excited I saw him all week and I like that he was more excited by a team win than individual…teamwork is one of our 5 core values…because we have two groups Technology Solutions and Electronics Marketing they do not have too much in common…other than simliar business cards. But as time goes on they are, one example:  selling similar embedded solutions…it will be interesting to see how this plays out…in fact our EMEA EM team just started a seperate divison to sell embedded producats. This is just one one example of our scope and scale and how it will pay off for all customers.  If interested Pat Cathy in the US and Georg Steinberger in Germany would be the first people to inquire with.

We celebrated two little-ballyhooed anniversaries in July. First, it’s been 10 years since Avnet moved its headquarters to Phoenix, Ariz.  Previously, Avnet had two headquarters – one in California and one in New York.  It was before my time, but seems the two headquarters came about as Avnet built itself through a series of acquisitions and found itself with critical mass on both coasts. Avnet’s newly-named CEO Roy Vallee made the strategic decision to consolidate and move to Phoenix.  Why Phoenix? According to Roy, attracting and retaining top talent was critical to the company’s success, but it was getting more and more expensive and difficult to achieve that in LA and NY, two of the most expensive places to live.  Phoenix offered a better quality of life for employees plus an attractive business climate.  So here we are today in the Valley of the Sun — we have 2,400 employees in the state of Arizona and we’re the second-largest publicly traded company in Arizona with headquarters in the state. We have an economic impact here in the millions, as well as participating in the local community with “Avnet Cares” volunteers, community boards, etc.

The second anniversary has to do with Roy himself.  He just celebrated ten years as Avnet Chairman and CEO. Much has changed in those 10 years for Avnet and the industry. We’ve grown from $6 billion to $18 billion in FY ’08.  We went from being a US-focused company to a truly global company.  In 1998, 75% of sales came from the US; now less than 50% of revenue comes from the Americas – in fact we just tipped the scale last quarter with 53% of revenue now being generated from outside the US.  This was accomplished largely through acquisitions – 33 to be exact since Roy took over the reins. We transformed the business from a purely revenue focus to a on return on capital focus – nearly doubling our market cap in the process.  The company culture has evolved, too, to focus more on people and helping them to develop their talents and skills.

I’ve had the privilege this week to sit in on a few interviews and listen to Roy talk about the past ten years.  Talk about humble.  It’s always “the team this” and “the team that,” never much about himself though clearly he has been the catalyst for many of the changes. I guess his real talent is in getting the team to do “this” and “that” – oh that’s right, that’s what true leadership is all about. Well, IMHO, he’s a great leader … and still going strong.

The Olympics is upon us…good luck China in baseball…huh? China does not have a team do they? Yep..as you may know every host country can have a team in most events without qualifying…China has been playing here in Scottsdale under MLB manager, Jim Lefebvre for two years. Film producer Tom Jennings had the foresight to do a documentary on their humble beginnings and preparation for the Olympics…if you like baseball you will love the show. If you like heart warming and charming stories of underdogs you love it as well…

PBS approached us because they heard I liked baseball, well they were right. This is our first major support of public broadcasting, which is a good thing to consider and support in our community efforts anyway…but when it has some impact on our fastest growing region why not take a chance. Corporate Communications is funding our sponsorship of the program with both our operating groups in Asia…both presidents Stephen Wong and KP Tang loved the idea…so hopefully our customers and suppliers will go see the team play…I assume the odds are against them, but ya never know. In either case watch the program on PBS…it will be shown on most of their network on the evening of 8/14…my bet is you will think it’s a homerun.

For more information, please visit the Out of Left Field  web site http://www.azpbs.org/leftfield/ .

In a few days, my daughter will be heading back to school along with thousands of other kids here in Arizona. (Yes, I know, seems way too early to me, too. It’s the end of July and already I’m shopping for pencils, a new backpack, and of course the “perfect outfit” for the first day of her sophomore year in high school.) Most of her teachers along the way have done a great job of helping her learn and develop her ability to think. It’s an under appreciated but critical role in our society.

I think it’s the same way with distributors in the technology supply chain. Every year we train and certify thousands of our customers on the latest technology from leading suppliers. Without this knowledge, resellers and technology engineers would be hard- pressed to use the latest technology in the systems and applications they design every day. Last year, Avnet Electronics Marketing broke new ground with X-Fest, a series of design workshops held around the world helping design engineers pull together all the components needed for a solution.  Instead of a component-by-component or even supplier-by-supplier approach, the training focused on true “Across the Board” solutions.  Thousands attended. In some places it was standing room only because it was the only training engineers could get that didn’t focus on just one piece of technology but focused on multiple components and how they worked together.  Bringing together all the different suppliers and technologies into one workshop is something only a distributor can do.

Avnet’s other operating group, Avnet Technology Solutions, just announced the latest step in an innovative training program they introduced two years ago. It’s an “internship” for resellers at a hospital. It’s part of Avnet HealthPath University, a program designed to teach resellers how to think like a healthcare provider when it comes to technology.  It teaches them how hospitals work and the language and concerns unique to the healthcare industry (like the legal requirements of HIPPA that drive humongous needs for data storage). Now, with the internship program, resellers actually get to walk in the shoes of a healthcare provider, spending a week at a hospital shadowing the IT department, meeting hospital administrators and executives to learn first-hand about their challenges and technology needs.

Almost every day, I’m getting an e-mail from one of our businesses announcing a training or certification for this product or that new technology.  We deliver thousands and thousands of hours every year. So maybe I’m too close to it, but seems to me the there’s a great story here about the continuous learning that must occur in the technology industry to get new products to market and adopted by end-users.  What do you think?  Anyone interested in digging deeper, just give me a call: 480-6430-7653.