Who is arnold hiatt

Vincent J. Michael R. Linda Mason. Katherine Barrand. John J. Fran Rodgers. Joseph Aoun. Jeremy Ben-Ami. Peggy Fogelman. In The News. Detroit Free Press. The Boston Globe. CEO group poses a test for capitalism.

Trending People. Rishi Sunak. Fumio Kishida. Ron Wyden. Terence R. Liberal reporter asks McAuliffe a truly amazing question; A tired, uninspired ca Glenn A. Paths to Arnold Hiatt. Potential Connections via Relationship Science. This is the first biography of Arnold Hiatt, Stride Rite CEO during its boom years, social and political activist, and a philanthropist who used his bully pulpit to call for corporate support of early childhood education and social issues decades before others.

He sacrificed some of his own stock options in order to convince the Board of Directors to invest an unheard of 10 percent of pre-tax profits into the Stride Rite Foundation which provided millions of dollars to fund scholarship programs to encourage college student to consider careers in public service as well as nonprofit organizations, mostly those supporting children and community outreach initiatives.

In recent months, the Business Roundtable called for businesses to support high-quality early childhood education and the heads of nearly companies signed a letter urging the Senate to act to curb gun violence. Hiatt is widely recognized for turning the Stride Rite Corporation into one of the most admired and successful companies in the United States in the last half of the 20th century.

This inspirational story tells the story of a man who dropped out of Harvard to join the Merchant Marine, bought a bankrupt shoe company when he was only 24, turning it into such a success that Stride Rite made him an offer too good to refuse. Enlarging the circle of people who care is simple common sense. That knowledge is far more motivating than cafeteria benefit plans or company ball games or even a good paycheck. The company is equally outstanding from a financial perspective.

I was always tinkering with a product or trying to get the quality of representation in a territory improved or trying to get the customer-service person to be more responsive and less bored on the telephone. Our job is to focus on the opportunities for disappointment.

Where does it come from? People are captive to their experience. My perspective on management and my understanding of what it takes to run a company successfully were influenced deeply by the years I spent at Blue Star.

What took you to Blue Star? Did you always want to run your own company? I felt threatened all the time. I knew there were fifteen other candidates for five positions three rungs up. That kind of environment works for some people. Fortunately an opportunity presented itself. I had heard about a small company in Lawrence, Massachusetts that had gone into Chapter The Bank of Boston was willing to put up some money.

My father was willing to put up some money. I bought Blue Star and became totally absorbed. There is nothing like running a company that has been in Chapter They are like wreckage in the sea telling you where the shoals are.

When you come out of a situation like that you are much more sensitive to the variety of options a company has. I was the production manager. I had to get the machinery going and the workers working. But I also had to generate the payroll. I was the sales manager and also the salesman. I remember taking the night boat from Baltimore to Norfolk, Virginia and knocking on the door of Hoffmeiers, a local chain. A very nice man answered the knock and said yes, he remembered Blue Star.

I never did get to present my line to him. I had to be in Cincinnati the next day. But that was how I learned, by experience. Learning to call ahead is pretty basic. Did the lessons get more advanced? As I learned my way around, I developed Melville as an account, then JC Penney, and soon four or five other large department store chains were buying our private-label shoes for their stores. By stumbling around, the company started to grow. Instead of operating three months a year for back-to-school sales and one month a year before Easter, we were running four months before back to school and two months before Easter.

Then the year started to fill out and the company grew even larger. You began by selling private-label shoes. What was the thinking that led you to create your own Blue Star brand? To make that commitment, I had to turn down a lot of other business. That killed me because I knew how hard it was to get. But a commitment is a commitment—or so I thought.

If I had to start laying people off, well, that was my problem. That was the day I decided I would no longer depend on any one account. I would take the Blue Star name and put it on two styles of shoes: a plain Mary Jane one-strap for girls and a four-eyelet oxford for boys. Then I would put those shoes in boxes that said Blue Star, stock them year round, and sell them to stores across the country. We would control our own destiny through branding and distribution.

Sometimes there are concepts that are so rational they have nothing to do with reality. My strategy for positioning Blue Star was one of them. It was a great theory. Figuring out why was a basic course in marketing, not to mention human nature.

I went to J. Isherwood bought my pitch. So did a lot of other department store buyers. I think it helped that I was all of 26 or 27 at the time. I suspect they enjoyed being paternalistic and giving me a chance. Human nature mostly. The salespeople were all on commission and would much rather sell Stride Rite shoes than less expensive Blue Star models. Moreover, that inclination was subtly reinforced every time they walked into the stockroom.

It was a sea of green Stride Rite boxes with a few lonely shelves of blue. That was a statement in itself—but who knew that at the time? In building Blue Star you were learning how to manage as you grew the company.

What induced you to sell the company to Stride Rite? Money for one thing. And they thought my resistance was a negotiating ploy. It was an act of confidence. And Stride Rite took that expectation seriously.

The challenge for my generation was to live up to that legacy. There were no sharp breaks or radical transformations: just a steady process of experimentation and evolution that meant we were never quite the same from one year to the next.

Proving to ourselves that we could get Stride Rite quality somewhere other than Harrison Avenue. By the time I joined Stride Rite, producing shoes in Boston was clearly uneconomical.

I was convinced that we could—and at lower cost. When they chose the shoes that had been made in Lawrence, it was our first step on the journey that eventually led us overseas. Factories were closing all over New England during the s as manufacturers sought lower costs in the Far East. Is that why Stride Rite began to source its products in Korea? Many people assume that price led us overseas. Certainly, that was an inducement.

But price without quality is worthless, and it was quality more than price that moved our production overseas. During the s, we opened a number of small, cost-efficient factories in rural, more traditional parts of the country like Auburn, Maine and Fulton, Missouri. We also held on to urban manufacturing longer than most, particularly in Roxbury where we were the mainstay of the economy. But almost everywhere it got harder and harder to maintain Stride Rite standards.

We tried to address the problem with quality circles and the like. But nothing seemed to help. It was clear that we were losing our work ethic and our ability to manage manufacturing, while the Koreans were becoming better and better.

Except for one joint venture in Thailand, we have no long-term contracts with suppliers. Our responsibility is to have people on hand who can make those standards crystal clear. Responsibility for meeting them—and for everything else—rests with the producer who owns the plant and equipment and provides the payroll. At the same time, our quality standards constrain us too. By the same token, we never want to pay the lowest possible price for shoes.

Then we can offer better margins in exchange. Stride Rite takes a very responsible attitude toward its employees in the United States. Can that kind of corporate responsibility be exported? You just have to get out and look.