Once in a while, when the stars align just right, a smaller company gets the chance to swallow a larger rival. That’s what happened a few months ago when ARRIS Group, the Suwanee-based supplier of cable equipment including voice and data modems, bought a Google-owned business in a $2.35 billion deal. ARRIS purchased Motorola Mobility’s home business from Google, expanding its portfolio of products, as well as its customer base of cable and telephone companies around the globe.
Suddenly, Bob Stanzione, chief executive of ARRIS since 2000, is leading a company with a projected annual revenue of $4.8 billion, compared with $1.35 billion before the deal. Stanzione, 65, has combined acquisitions with internally generated products and innovation to grow ARRIS' revenue tenfold over the past 10 years. The purchase of Motorola Mobility's home unit has boosted ARRIS' payroll to 6,500 employees from 2,100 earlier this year, after accounting for 550 layoffs since the deal closed in April.
An engineer by training, Stanzione spent 26 years with AT&T and the Bell System in a variety of leadership roles before joining ARRIS. He discusses how job-induced moves — dating back to his childhood and continuing throughout his career — has affected his life, including how he views layoffs.
Q: Did something early in your life help shape who you are?
A: My parents were the children of Italian immigrants. I was born in the Bronx and lived there until my dad got a better job as a factory manager in southwestern Virginia when I was in elementary school.
It was a huge culture shock. We were Yankee Catholics of Italian descent moving into an area that had not seen many of those before. It was in the early 1950s. I remember one schoolyard encounter where the kids were talking about the Civil War, but I thought they were talking about the “silver war,” like the gold rush. It was still fresh in their minds because many of their ancestors had experienced it.
That, along with being Roman Catholic among the mostly Protestant population, was character building. I never felt out of place in the Bronx, but then I got a taste of what it was like to be sort of a minority. My skin was the same color, but we spoke different dialects and had different religions. As a Catholic, I couldn’t eat meat on Friday in the school cafeteria, so they would have to bring out some frozen fish sticks for me.
I think the experience helped me throughout the years. You had to learn how to get along by looking for the similarities and focusing on them, and discounting the differences.
Q: Was there any other key experience early on?
A: I began my college career with very bad study habits. I had too much fun. I went to Clemson and majored in engineering. It was a rocky time.
My father passed away during my freshman year. It was a wake-up call to get serious. I said to myself, “You’re on your own now, boy. You gotta make it. This is about life.”
I was having a rough time affording the cost of going to school. It was a few hundred dollars a year at that time, but I did not have a few hundred dollars. I worked in the summer times and I worked as a teaching assistant in school. Also, I borrowed money from a friend of my family’s to continue to pay tuition. That, combined with the jobs I had, got me through.
I learned to be pretty thrifty and to stay focused on achieving.
Q: That sharper focus helped you advance after college. You started out as an engineer but increasingly ended up with leadership roles. How did that happen?
A: A lot of doors of opportunity opened for me, but they always required some sort of a sacrifice. In my early years, the way you gained experience and climbed the ladder was to accept another job, often in another location. I worked for Western Electric, which was the manufacturing arm of the Bell System. The greatest thing about that was that you could change jobs without leaving the company.
When an opportunity was presented to me to take another job in another location, we would move. I had a supportive family. We moved about 11 times in 26 years in the Bell System.
I took jobs I had no business doing. I never turned them down. For example, I was a mechanical engineer and I was offered this job to be a research leader. I had never done research in my life. Chemistry was one of my worst subjects in college and here I was leading a team of Ph.D. chemists.
When I look back at it I wonder, “why would anyone give me that job?” I think somebody thought this group needed more leadership than it needed chemistry brainpower. It already had enough of that. I was somewhat intimidated by them, but I would never let them know.
As it turned out, I always was surrounded by people who were smarter than I was or were more expert in a particular discipline than I was. My early experiences (including dealing with being different after moving to Virginia) were a good lesson. It gave me the courage to know I could be successful because I stepped into something before and it worked out.
Q: You’ve been involved in negotiating mergers and acquisitions that have resulted in job losses. What’s more, you saw your father lose his job after acquisitions. How has this affected what you do?
A: What my dad went through a couple of times in his career — getting laid off after his company was bought — has had an effect on me. When mergers occur, people and families get hurt. There is just no way to avoid it because you put companies together to create synergies.
Eliminating jobs is very heartbreaking. It’s a difficult process for me. I have to do it, but I hate it. I just hate it. My father was a victim of it.
On the other hand, it has to be done. If you don’t do it, the consequences are worse. If you let the company carry expenses that it can’t afford to carry, you just bring the whole thing down.
The organization needs to be lean. Otherwise, you’re going to get punished. Keep it lean and you’ll be able to win the competitive battles, which allows you to grow. Then you’re actually employing more people.
Q: What’s your best advice on hiring and leading people?
A: We ought to take more risks during hiring. I think people are a little too risk-averse. We tend to hire someone who's been doing a job for five or 10 years. But from time to time, we should hire people from different industries. It's good to bring fresh ideas into the company. Why not get someone who's not experienced and train them?
When you find the right people, keep them. Let them know how important they are. I think that’s the No. 1 key to success. I’m not the kind of CEO who’s the genius.
Also, you have to know your customers so well that you can anticipate where they need to go, because it takes time to develop a solution or product for them. Surround them with love and attention. If you do that a little bit better than the competition, you’ll get your share of the business.
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