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RICHES FROM RAGS
"Cutting cost--that's what it's all about," Mow says in a white-hot whisper. In the restful and almost reverrent hush of his office the words have a mystical resonance. As we talk I come to feel that Mow's office is a temple to the god of efficiency, that the entire company is a complex, far-flung system he has programmed to generate products, growth and profits at a rate unheard of in any but the world's best companies. All that without the phone ringing. Ponder that for a moment and you come to understand why Mow is so proud of his quiet phone; it's the ultimate proof that his system works. It's hard to imagine a CEO better equipped to create and install that kind of efficiency. Twenty years ago--another lifetime, to hear Mow tell it--he founded Macrodata Corporation, a public company that gave birth to the technology for designing and testing chips before there were chips to test. In the 70s Bill Mow was the ultimate technologist, a fountainhead of metal-oxide semiconductor technology at whose feet IBM and NEC sat for inspiration. "I was the guru of the computer industry," Mow says, savoring a moment of remembered glory before pushing the discussion back to more immediate topics. Pushed, he concedes that An Wang's magnetic core memory was probably a bigger conceptual breakthrough in the history of computer technology, but maintains with some justification that Macrodata's large-scale integration equipment had a far more lasting practical effect. Mow is still proud of his technical wizardry. To most people he is Dr. Mow. That's how his business card reads. |
Bill Mow is a sportscar nut and keeps several exotic beauties in a specially designed garage below his office suite. Here he poses with his Ferrari. Mow speaks slowly and elliptically, tossing out words and phrases charged with meaning. In eight hours I rarely hear a complete sentence with a subject, verb and predicate. Sentences are inefficient, full of inessential words. Mow chooses to impart the core thoughts and leave the logical connections for the listener to make. At heart he is still a talented engineer, a man who has cultivated the ability to put his ideas directly into productive systems without having to articulate them for public consumption. And now, owning 90% of Bugle Boy, a company he has founded and built with his own guts and wits, he has absolutely no incentive to cultivate the gift of gab. Not that he is a dull conversationalist. There is enough irony, color and profanity to remind me that I am conversing with a brilliant innovator. He just doesn't need to impress anyone. Yet, he isn't imperious, crusty or smug. Partly because he seldom raises his voice, partly because he enjoys the repose of a tycoon who is lord of all he surveys, it's easy to feel relaxed with him. Mow's lack of pretension or smugness, his utter lack of the need for pretension or smugness, the directness of his expressions, is what gives him at times the demeanor of an intelligent farmboy, belying his many years of worldly experience. Mow himself says, "Who do I have to impress?" PAGE 3 |PAGE 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
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