The Soft Pitch

A few weeks ago Avnet announced that Phil Gallagher, formerly president of our Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas team had been promoted to the global president position for a different business within Avnet, Avnet Technology Solutions.  As a follow up, this week we announced Ed Smith would move up to succeed Phil.  When Phil’s promotion was announced, there were a few questions along how someone who spent their entire career in components would do leading our computing business. It seemed a no brainer to us: experience counts.  Phil knows how to connect with employees, suppliers, customers. He has experience building businesses, setting priorities, allocating resources and making hard decisions.  So does Ed.  He’s run sales for the Americas team and has been “in the thick of it” so speak.  I was reminded yesterday yet again of just how much experience counts when I was listening to our CEO talk to a reporter about how the current economic meltdown is different from the tech bubble of 2001 and how he’s applying the lessons learned during that time to managing the business now.  In essence – it’s a balancing act between managing expenses to align with the short-term (trimming our expense structure to parallel declining revenue) AND continuing to invest for the long term. No one wants to cut back so far that the organization is crippled to the point of service levels deteriorating or that we won’t have the resources to capture the opportunities when business does bounce back – we all know it will – we just don’t know when.  To me, these are the kinds of decisions where you need experience, a deep bench, and someone who’s been there before.  That depth of experience allows you to put everything in perspective and – this is critical from my point of view – make wise decisions that are not driven by fear and panic. It’s also important to move quickly, being constantly vigilant.  I once worked for a company that didn’t react fast enough to a dramatic change in their business and guess what?  That company no longer exists.

During an interview Roy Vallee shared (a bit apologetically by the way) that we’re managing the business quarter-to-quarter. The reporter mentioned not to worry as other execs had told her basically the same thing.  It makes perfect sense to me in an environment where just about everyone is saying there is limited visibility into future economic trends.  Is it at the bottom?  Still going down?  No one knows right now, so we’re keeping close watch and adjusting as we go along.  A “let’s wait and see” approach could be devastating if we waited and then had to dramatically cut costs and people in a panic mode mentality, or worse cut too deep and not be able to manage the business.  That’s where experience comes in – knowing how and when to adopt a management approach that fits the situation. Call me if you’d like to talk to Avnet management more about how we’re managing through the down turn – we’re positioning now to make sure we’re on top when the macro-environment turns around.

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