ill Mow's phone doesn't ring. No one calls to push urgent
matters to his attention. His salon-sized office, the nerve-center of half-billion-dollar
Bugle Boy Industries, is as quiet and cultured as a Far Eastern museum. And
the pin-knot-pine-paneled walls are almost as well hung. A vast Japanese
screen of an enormous prowling tiger looms over the sofa at the reception
end of the office, the end adjacent to the private office of Mow's personal
secretary. On the far wall, the one behind Mow's own desk, hangs a
mountainscape by a recently deceased Chinese modern master. A more
traditional Chinese painting of a wild horse leans against the wall. Between
these walls is enough acreage to house a half-dozen lawyers or a
paddle-tennis court.
Next to the doorway stands an elegant pin-knot showcase displaying a
half dozen millenium-old Chinese bric-a-brac. Another part of the inner
sanctum is a full-sized conference room which shares a pin-knot-paneled
wall with Mow's office. Perhaps as a concession to U.S. corporate culture, the
conference room is decorated in an English motif, complete with one green
felt wall hung with riding scenes. Outside its sliding glass doors is a
quasi-Japanese garden, complete with a strand of bamboo a wooden bridge
and a koi pond like the one in Mow's Brentwood Park estate, except that the
carp at home are much older.
At our first meeting Bill Mow (pronounced like Mao) is wearing a casual
olive-drab sports coat and pea-green pants, both by Bugle Boy Men's, a
relatively new division that hasn't captured anything like the commanding
50% market share enjoyed by Bugle Boy's young men's line or the 45% held
by the boy's division. As Mow steps around to shake hands, I notice that his
cotton pants are wrinkled from a morning behind the desk, and his moccasins
are worn, creating an impression of scruffiness at odds with the splendid
office. Mow's boyishly toussled hair is without a visible trace of gray and his
face is youthful, with few of the lines you'd expect on a 54-year-old CEO.
Despite the fact that he has been in the U.S. for 42 years, he looks like an
engineering graduate student from mainland China. The impression is
exacerbated by the wire-rimmed glasses. I feel as though I walked in and
caught an employee, a junior-level one, stealing a moment in the boss's chair.
It takes a few moments for me to be fully convinced that I am not the victim
of an office prank in the real boss's absence.
Mow is tall and trim. Was a time when he could knock off 75 pushups. Now
he plays golf three days a week, or tries to. He mentions he shot 79 at a
Bugle Boy tournament the other month, modestly adding that he normally
shoots in the 90s. Later, it occurs to me that what Mow probably wanted
noted wasn't his golf score but the fact that Bugle Boy held a company
tournament.
The office we are sitting in is on the ground floor at one end of the two-story
administrative wing of Bugle Boy Industries' gleaming 300,000-square-foot
complex overlooking Highway 118 in Simi Valley, California. We have been
talking for an hour and Mow has convinced me that BBI is a finely-tuned
machine that hums as quietly as a well-programmed computer system. "You
can see my phone doesn't ring," he points out. Every one of his salesmen
everywhere in the country (and soon, in the world) carries a Toshiba laptop
that can be plugged into any phone jack for instant access to inventory and
sales data stored in an IBM AS400, a top-of-the-line minicomputer with 128
megabytes of main memory and over a gigabyte of storage. It is the
company's central nervous system.
PAGE 2
ill Mow's phone doesn't ring. No one calls to push urgent
matters to his attention. His salon-sized office, the nerve-center of half-billion-dollar
Bugle Boy Industries, is as quiet and cultured as a Far Eastern museum. And
the pin-knot-pine-paneled walls are almost as well hung. A vast Japanese
screen of an enormous prowling tiger looms over the sofa at the reception
end of the office, the end adjacent to the private office of Mow's personal
secretary. On the far wall, the one behind Mow's own desk, hangs a
mountainscape by a recently deceased Chinese modern master. A more
traditional Chinese painting of a wild horse leans against the wall. Between
these walls is enough acreage to house a half-dozen lawyers or a
paddle-tennis court.
