About (Summary)
Mr. Diaz started a career in Graphic Communications as a graphic designer but quickly moved to Sales and Marketing. Held positions in Sales, Sales Management, Vice President Sales and Marketing in various companies in the Seattle, Washington area. After Quebecor Inc. acquired Print NW/Six Sigma in Seattle Mr. Diaz relocated to Boston to head up the new Digital Services unit of Quebecor World as Vice president with sales, marketing and operations responsibility. The Digital Services unit was a $27 million dollar a year branch of the $6.2 billion a year company.
His customer list includes, Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett Packard, Time Warner, McGraw Hill, Pearson, Simon & Schuster, Apple, Intuit, Electronic Arts and may other Fortune 500 companies. He has experience in Sales and Marketing at executive levels as well as in the trenches contract negotiation.
Mr. Diaz became a frequent speaker for the development of new markets and technologies as well as known as an agent of change in the old fashioned Printing, Communications and Publishing industries in New York and across the US. He became a regular speaker and contributor to publication for the AAUP (American Association of University Presses), BookTech (now Book Business), Print OnDemand and was a member of the Hewlett Packard’s Technology Advisory Committee on Digital Printing.
Through his career and as a senior manager at Quebecor, Mr. Diaz successfully completed training in TQM (Total Quality Management) through an ASQ (American Society for Quality) certified program. He attended and hosted a number of seminars by great motivational circuit speakers in the US, including Tom Peters. Mr. Diaz also graduated from the Lake Forest Park School of Management program for Strategic Executive Management.
In 2004 Mr. Diaz established his own consultancy and has successfully carried out projects in market development in the USA, Spain, Mexico and Asia. Mr. Diaz was born in Colombia, South America and emigrated to the Unites States in 1973, at the age of 17 to finish his education. Graduated from Bellevue Art School in Graphic Design and from Seattle Central College in Printing and Graphics.
For a more detail background please read Mr. Diaz’s “anecdotal autobiography†bellow.
Carlos Diaz - Author of the CCDiaz.com Blog
Anecdotal – Autobiography
Many years ago I read a book which talked about setting goals, the author stated that if you wanted to determine your future you only needed to know a basic formula; “the future is the sum of the past and the present”. The book went on elaborating on how you can influence the “future” by affecting the decisions you make in the present. I was only fourteen years old when I read this and at the time I was simply fascinated by the notion and maybe unconsciously I lived most of life by thinking about this formula.
I was born in Colombia south America, son of a second generation Spaniard woman and a “mestizo” father. My family was of simple means, but as an old fashioned mother would do in Colombia, I was taught very early on, that good language skills and good manners made a gentleman. In very modest surroundings I was hammered with what I later learned in school were good presentation skills and the ability to carry my self in just about any setting. I suppose this is why my mother was not surprised when at 17 years of age I announced that I was moving the USA with my new north American wife, yes I know… I was only 17. I have told my children many times that at 17 I knew it all, no one could tell me different, only that somewhere along the way I forgot many things and had to allow schools and others to teach me many things.
I moved through a series of directions in education, beginning with computer programming and finally settling with Graphic Communications. With my degree I landed in the Printing and Advertising industry in Seattle, Washington in 1978. I quickly moved through manufacturing (printing and graphic design) and decided that Sales and Marketing were much more challenging and appealing to me, besides I had set a goal for myself to own a BMW in my life and for this I needed money, serious money, since I already had children. So back to school I went, except that attending at night, while holding my job and trying to be a family man.
In 1981 I moved into Sales working for one of the premier printing companies in Seattle, catering to Advertising Agencies, Graphic Designers and Corporate clients. Within a year my clients included Hornall Anderson Design, Primo Angeli Design, The Leonhardt Group, Ste. Michelle Winery and what my boss considered a start up company called Microsoft. After two years of working on high-end corporate identity packages, annual reports and promotional materials for this clients I was offered a Sales Manager position at a competitor’s company and there I began my management career.
In 1985 I was recruited by a printing company based in Tacoma, Washington who had very aggressive plans to move into software manufacturing. The concept seemed completely out of reach for a “printing” company that had not only been around for nearly 80 years, but it was also considered on it’s way out. As it turns out the person who had sent one of the principles in the company to recruit me was none other than our mutual client the head of purchasing at Microsoft at the time; this was enough endorsement for me, but I was also impressed by the determination of the young entrepreneur who did not give up until I said yes to his offer.
I became Vice President of Sales and Marketing with in a year of joining the company and in the next decade my young boss, my self and a handful of young entrepreneurs build this company from $7 million in annual sales to $85 million in a period of ten years. We grew from one location in Tacoma (30 minutes south of Seattle) to Software production facilities in California, Massachusetts and Germany. To the dismay of all the “neigh-sayers” in the industry we became known as Software manufacturer and even more so an Authorized OEM Software reseller for Microsoft and few other software publishers. Commercial printing became less than 20% of our business and we had transformed from printers to a TQM based company that could easily pass the rigorous quality certification and audits from Microsoft, Intel and Hewlett Packard.
Personally, I had evolved as well, I now straddled the fence between Sales, Marketing and Manufacturing, I was member of the senior management team and had to lead not only by management style, but by example. So I had to be certified as a team leader for Total Quality Management training, had to be educated by the AQS program for Team Leadership and became part of our quality change which incidentally caused us to change our name to Six Sigma PrintNW. This process took me through four years of intensive training on how to change a company from a “quality inspection” mind set to a “build-in quality processes” based on Demming and other TQM leaders methodology.
This change (or it’s success) made us a “prime target” for acquisition and so it was that in 1995 we were acquired by Quebecor Inc, the fastest growing printing and media company in the world at the time. By this time I had responsibility for the west coast region and had P&L responsibility for offices in Seattle, Portland and San Jose, California. My client base included Hewlett Packard, Apple Computer, Intuit, Intel and had grown our product offering from software manufacturing (CD mastering, duplication, printing, packaging and distribution) to include our own software development unit in Bellevue, Washington.
After Quebecor (www.quebecor.com) restructured the company following the US acquisition of World Color a $2.4 billion dollar deal, I was transferred to Boston to become the Vice president of the emerging market business unit for the new company based in the USA – Quebecor World (www.quebecorworld.com), this new unit would be called Digital Services. By now, 1999 I had owned several BMWs and was far from my origins in the south American Andes, I had become part of the USA styled corporate world. Quebecor had selected me as one of the “young up-and-coming” executives and as such put me through extensive (and expensive) management training at the Lake Forest School of Management.
I once again went through a transformation of moving from a private company to a publicly traded company. I was indoctrinated on how 20% of my bonusable income and for that matter my ability to stay employed directly depended on how our stock performed and how investors viewed us. And so it was that I woke up one day not so much concerned about the product that we made as a company, but how Wall Street viewed us that day. We were taught to read, what did the analysts say about our company’s future on a daily basis.
Yes, by the way, at least for Public Relations my business unit was the subject of frequent presentations to the investment community, we were showcased as the company’s answer to the fast changing market and thus securing a profitable future for investors funds. The Digital Services unit had operations in Canada, the US and Mexico and I had responsibility for any inquiry on the Technology and it’s market response for every country the company had operations in, which added up to 11 countries.
My new responsibilities put me in front of a new word which we would come to regret learning – GLOBALIZATION!
We began to see our core traditional business disappear as the publishing industry in New York had discovered that Asia (not China at the time) could produce similar quality in many cases and at fraction of the cost in the USA. Every year we saw one major segment leave the USA, coffee table books, children’s books, reference books; this while our daily breakfast was made of words like stock holders equity, EBIT, dividends and our meetings topics changed to “cost cutting” and “utilization of assets”. Our largest competitor was talking about investing in China, we were investing in Latin America, meetings after meetings, Business Strategy sessions, how to compete with the new kid on the block?… China.
My Digital Business unit, the subject of many magazine and newspaper articles got a lot of press, I was courted by many associations to be a speaker, a representative of how an old industry in the USA was going to survive, I became known in this traditional stale industry as an Agent of Change. As those of you who have been in my shoes know, this was an extremely difficult and frustrating position to be in, you CEO speaks about your unit at Board meetings, yet when it came to capital allocation; well, there was none, it was all sucked up in defensive measures and putting out fires in the troubled segments.
I sat on Hewlett Packard’s Technology Advisory council for Digital printing with huge expectations on both sides. Here I was the VP of Digital Services at the world largest Printing and Media company and there they were HP trying to re-invent themselves under Carli Fiorini’s leadership. HP wanted to be the printer that prints what the world writes!…? It was during this period that my CEO pulled me aside an warned me that in the US “pioneers were mostly shot by the Indians”, he smiled and said you have my support, but there is no money for your unit, he then asked me to think how I could help put out the fires that we had in our core business. I already supported Executive sales calls to Simon & Schuster, Time Warner, Random House, Wiley, Hachette, Thomas Nelson, Scholastic, Prentice Hall, McGraw Hill in addition to my traditional segments, promising new technologies that would make Quebecor more efficient and competitive with China. I knew that his plea (order) for help was only a warning that Headquarters (in Montreal) was not pleased with results, I also knew well that we were running at capacity, so it was not a sales issue, we could not cut anymore cost we were operating with skeleton crews… we were suffering the effects of “GLOBALIZATION”
I made a choice to leave the company and start my own consulting practice, for no other reason than I thought that I rather be nimble, though alone, but in a position to take advantage of the tidal wave of globalization that was hitting the USA. Although I was born in the south American Andes, my spirit is as American as it gets, I realized that I am the American dream and that when the going gets tough the tough get going. So with this I put my sights on consulting for European, South American and Asian companies and to better understand the perspective from China I now make my home between Denver, Shenzhen and were ever else globalization planes fly.
I will expand on my experience as I touch on the different views and perspectives of doing business with and in China. I do believe that our future is the sum of our past and our present, and I am shaping my future by affecting my present; currently living the Chinese experience. For more information regarding my background please feel free to contact me.
