The Soft Pitch

While Al was tending his wounds from the Cubs loss (so sorry Al), I was visiting a small town in Oregon – Ashland. Home to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland has about 20,000 people … and the largest Shakespeare Festival in the country (it runs 10 months and draws thousands).  My daughter was on fall break and since she is a Shakespeare fan, off we went for four days.  We saw four plays and only one, Othello, was presented in the “traditional” Shakespeare style preserving language, costumes and setting.  All the others, including a hilarious production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that involved a hippie VW bus from the 60’s, were true in spirit but adapted for a fresh approach.  In fact, the production of A Comedy of Errors was so far from the original (think western town + musical), that it was barely recognizable as Shakespeare.

Speaking of barely recognizable (okay, so I know this is a big leap, but transitioning from watching Puck cavort across the stage to sitting in my windowless office is also a big leap), before I left, BusinessWeek published a cover story on how counterfeit components were finding their way into US military applications. When I saw the cover, I thought, “Wow – if they only knew what we were doing.”

What the BusinessWeek story left out was how we and others are working against counterfeiting. As a global distributor, we have the processes in place to prevent that very thing from happening.

We announced in July that we were one of the first distributors to be certified under China’s new “Reliable Electronic Component Suppliers” or (RECS) system. Then, this week our team in Asia announced “Avnet combats counterfeiting concerns for small-to-medium sized manufacturers in China.”  For those of you who follow supply-chain news and study how players in an industry collaborate to drive efficiency or in this case authenticity, you might be interested in how Avnet and others worked together on the Shenzhen International Components Center (ICC) “Transaction Hall” that was announced this week.  As part of this, Avnet launched a sales & service counter in the ICC that allows us to conduct transactions on the spot of small quantities guaranteed to be genuine components.

With all of the bad press about counterfeit parts, bad milk and tainted toys, isn’t it nice to know someone’s got the integrity to do the right thing and guarantee what we’re selling really is what we say we’re selling?

Oh and as far as that “barely recognizable Shakespeare thing”? The really interesting part is that the ideas Shakespeare wrote about 400 years ago still came through in the modern productions. Set in an urban, gang-torn city, Coriolanus still invited scrutiny of one man’s struggle to rationalize his personal beliefs with the political will of others. Personal integrity – it’s still at the heart of things.

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