Ron Omohundro
Cal Poly SLO '60 

DSF: Tell us about yourself.

RO:     I was born and raised in Southern California, and grew up in a little town called Lomita, which is on the coast just south of Los Angeles. My mother, father, sister, and I all graduated from the same high school there, which is somewhat unique. From there, I graduated and went off to Cal Poly where I got my degree in mathematics. My wife Marcel and I have been married 43 years and have three grown children:  a daughter who was a first grade teacher who is semi-retired and has my two grandchildren, one son who is a lawyer in downtown San Diego, and another son who is in the computer business.

DSF:  What was it that made you decide to go to Cal Poly?

RO:   Actually, I had been accepted to go to UCLA, but my advisor in high school said "you know, Ron, if you're going to go into electronics, you just have to go to Cal Poly because today it's the third best engineering school in the country behind Caltech and MIT. And, you are guaranteed a job when you graduate." It was a small little school with less than 5,000 students, and I just decided that I would take his advice. Unbeknownst to me, the vets from the Korean War were coming back on the GI Bill, and many of them went to Cal Poly. I was 17 years old and wasn't quite ready to go to college. Instead I was ready to party, which caused me to fail my first electronics course. Cal Poly has this way of making you lose a year when you do that, so I decided that I really loved mathematics and did that instead.

There's something unique about Cal Poly that many people don't know. It was the first school in California to have its own computer where they taught using professional people from the industry. Data Processing was a part of the mathematics curriculum, and I got involved in computers, which was my start.

DSF:  Why did you decide to join the Epsilon Rho Chapter of Delta Sigma Phi?

RO:     My second year, I pledged Delta Sig, and that made a big difference in my life. I was living off campus at the time, and basically, a guy introduced me to the Fraternity. I met a group of guys who really helped me get through Cal Poly. My desire to be a part of the Fraternity and the brotherhood made me excel and turn my grades around, and allowed me to graduate in just over four years. So the Fraternity was a big part of my life for the last two and a half to three years of my college life.

DSF:   Did you hold any leadership positions either within the chapter or on campus?

RO:     I was Sergeant at Arms in the chapter while I was on campus, and was responsible for the annex that I lived in while in school.

DSF:  Tell us about your early career. When you first graduated from Cal Poly where did you end up?

RO:     It's an interesting subject. I had two opportunities. One was at Douglas Aircraft Company, and the other was Aeroneutronics, which was a part of Northrop. My parents had said not to go to Douglas because they had layoffs and government programs and this and that. So, I took a job with Aeroneutronics, and there was a little project called the Skybolt Missile.  Over the Christmas holiday, the Secretary of Defense, McNamara, cancelled the project. So when I reported to work on January 2, they laid off 50% of the department, but they said to me that I was pretty cheap being fresh out of college and they kept me. That lasted six days, and they came to me and said that they didn't cut enough and they needed to cut more. They said "see the line down there of people getting their final paychecks? You have yours coming Friday."

So, I moved from there after ten days worth of work.  Douglas had thought that I was on a semester system, not a quarter system and I was a little embarrassed to go back to them.  Then I realized that I needed  a job. I went to Douglas, and they asked if I was ready to come to work. I said "I need to explain to you that I went to work for Aeroneutronics." The guy said "I thought you graduated in February." I said "No, I graduated in December, and went to work in January." He said that he didn't care, and asked if I was ready to go to work. So, I spent three years with Douglas programming their IBM 7094, and also their IBM 701 and 704. The 701 is vacuum tube memory and the 704 is disk memory.

I then had a shot to go to General Electric when they were in the mainframe computer business. I became their resident expert in their operating system after my first year. I actually wrote a manual on debugging the GECOS operating system, and then moved into management. I decided after four years, after originally thinking I'd work the rest of my career with General Electric, that I wanted to move into sales. At the time, they had frozen their computer sales, and I didn't know why. After I left, they announced the sale of their computer products division to Honeywell.

DSF:  Tell us about what you did after leaving GE.

RO:     I joined a startup company, United Computing Systems, out of Kansas City in sales, and became their regional sales manager, then regional director. I spent ten years with them. They were actually a subsidiary of a phone company called United Telephone, which became United Telecommunications, which is now Sprint.

DSF:  Talk about what got you to Fujitsu.

RO:     After ten years with the startup company that we grew into a national company, I really became interested in the microcomputer revolution that was beginning to take place – the 8 bit and 16 bit technology. I joined a company as their Vice President of Marketing to  focus on building a microcomputer. We were under-capitalized, and it just wasn't working.

While there, I had a major customer that went to Fujitsu as their Vice President of Sales, and he came to me one day and said "You know, Ron, I've got this special project over here at Fujitsu, and I'd like you to come in and take on this project." I said, "Who's Fujitsu?" He went on to tell me a little bit about the company – they were a Japanese company which was the second largest in the world. I thought about it for a while, and decided that I wanted to find out a little bit about how the Japanese function. I looked at the Datsun 240Z when it first came out. For the first year or two, it was really a loser, but they learned from their mistakes and turned it around. I was impressed.  So, I went ahead and accepted the job thinking I'd work there a couple of years. Over 23 years later, I retired. It was a wonderful career with Fujitsu and I held just about every position they had except CEO.

DSF:  Tell us about what you were in charge of when you retired as the Executive Vice President of the company.

RO:     I ended up as the Executive Vice President and General Manager, and at the time, I had responsibility for all sales, marketing, product operations including design and development, and customer service and repair. As I started to move toward retirement, I convinced our CEO to start moving some of my responsibilities to other key executives. For the last two years of my career, I really just had the sales, marketing, and product side of the business.

DSF:   For those who don't know much about Fujitsu, can you tell us a little more about the company?

RO:     Fujitsu was formed in 1935 as a Japanese telecommunications company. From telecommunications, they began to grow into the semiconductor business, and then eventually moved full-fledged into the computer business. In 1981, they had $5 billion in sales and were the second largest computer manufacturer in the world, just behind IBM. The company was divided into three main units with two thirds of their business tied to computer mainframes and the other third was split evenly between the telecommunications and semiconductor businesses.

The semiconductor business was very important to Fujitsu because they could develop computers from the ground up and didn't have to go to the open market for components. They built their own memory, disks, peripherals', and everything else through their semiconductor divisions, resulting in highly reliable products. They were $5 billion in sales when I started and just before I retired they hit $90 billion in revenue. Hewlett Packard bought Compaq a number of years ago and Fujitsu has moved into the number three position.

DSF:   So what specific products did you oversee during your time there?

RO:     I ran the business, in the United States. that built ATMs for financial institutions, point of sale equipment for retail stores like Nordstrom and Macy's, and we also built handheld computers that automated Frito Lay, PepsiCo, Sara Lee, and several other large companies that distributed products directly to stores but had no way of billing their customers at the time of delivery. Those became big products for us.

We also designed and built the first ATB ticket printer for Airline industry. The ATB ticket is one that has the magnetic strip down the back, which is pretty standard now. Before, there was no magnetic strip, so there was no way to keep the appropriate information about the passenger with the ticket. Now, it's all automatic just like a credit card. We built that for United Airlines.

DSF:   Where do you see the information technology business going?

RO:     I think that we will continue to see smaller devices with much more power and capability. It will just continue to miniaturize. The old saying is that if the car industry had grown at the same rate of obtaining good gas mileage as the computer industry, we wouldn't be having a gas war today. We'd be getting 10,000 miles to the gallon. The internet has just exploded with the amount of information available. If anything has ever gone in print, it's on the internet and you can find it. We're seeing more and more small handheld devices now that access the internet anytime, anywhere, anyplace and I just think we'll continue to see more and more technology focused on the consumer. Some people ask whether we will ever reach a paperless society. No, I don't think we ever will. I think that's the same question of whether we'll ever reach a debit card society. Also, the security issues existing around the technology continue to grow by leaps and bounds. I don't see the end of the desktop revolution, but I think that what you'll have on your desktop will continue to expand and will be extremely flexible and powerful.

DSF:   Talk about your travel during your career.

RO:     I had about 75 trips to Japan throughout my career. When I retired, I had put 4.6 million miles on American Airlines alone. Around the world three times. I am a lifetime platinum member of American's Frequent Flyer program. When I retired, I also had 750,000 Marriott points and 680,000 Hilton points. That's being away from your family a lot, and it was too much for me. I r made a decision at an early point in my career that if I was going to put in the 12 hour days and the travel, the weekend had to be with my family. I really focused on that. I needed to be with my kids when they had soccer games or basketball games, or whatever they were involved in. That was really important to me.

DSF:   What is your philosophy on leadership?

RO:     I think it's pretty simple-- be willing to understand what your immediate directors, reporting to you do, need and require. At the same time, know what the people, down at the bottom, are doing, needing and requiring. You must have   open communications with your people and understand what they're feeling. It's not about me. It's not about the leadership. It's about the team, and the team is made up of everyone, from the people on the manufacturing line to the people in the executive office. Too many CEOs get too caught up in their own work.

I had one guy who was a Vice President of the company say to me, "you took that call from the customer." And I said, "Yeah, so? Don't you?" He said, "Are you kidding? It could be an irate customer. I have my secretary take those calls, and then she'll tell me what the problem is." My thinking is: how do you satisfy or even understand what the customer's issue is if you're not willing to take his call right up front? He doesn't expect the answer. If you tell him you'll look into it and get back with him in a reasonable, and you do that, he feels good. It's just that I have always been a people person, and that's why the Fraternity was important to me. It was a team of guys that together we had a bond that we had each others' back. I look back at the key thing getting me through college was my life in the Fraternity, and I'll never forget it. Fraternity life played a key role in my personal development that later enabled me to reach pinnacles that I may not have been able to reach.

DSF:  What do you like to do in your spare time?

RO:   Probably golf is my main thing. I was playing a lot of golf until my recent hip replacement. Then again, the reason why golf is fun is because of the camaraderie of playing with the same people two or three times a week. It's not the score. I have also redone the house that my wife and I live in, with all new kitchen and landscaping. Even though I don't have a contractor's license, I do a lot of the work myself. I also have two grandkids who keep me busy. One is seven and one is ten, and they both are pretty good athletes.

DSF:   What is some advice you'd give to other Delta Sigs about being successful?

RO:     One of the biggest things I'd say is be open to change, because change is positive and change is good. Too many times, we get so focused that we don't want to see change. People get so fixed in their job, and sometimes you need to pull back a little bit to be successful. And number two, communicate. Communicate with the people you work for, and with the people you work with. Have an open dialogue, and if something is bothering you, sit down face to face and have a conversation to get it out. Have that open dialogue. Too much pent up anger is kept by employees who end up leaving a job that is a good job where they could have done quite well. They become unhappy, and don't communicate with the people that that can make a change.