Difference Makers

Earlier in his career, when Jeff Swenson was appointed to serve on the Konica Minolta Dealer Service Advisory Council, there was a little bit of trepidation. Certainly he was flattered by the honor. However, at that juncture in his career, Swenson wondered what he could bring to Read More

Confidence can be a funny thing, coming and going as it pleases, just like a teenager. When it checks out, confidence leaves more than its fair share of baggage—doubt, insecurity, hesitation and fear, to name a few. It strips one of the mojo, the swagger that can project a Read More

It’s amazing the depth of information you can absorb simply by listening. Elliot Williams knows this to be true. The director of product marketing for Business Imaging at Epson could easily throw around the weight of his long career, but a know-it-all attitude is the first step Read More

The title on Marc Grégoire’s business card may read “chief information officer,” but in his day-to-day interactions at Seattle-based Copiers Northwest, his underlying thrust is to be a catalyst for meaningful change. With the knowledge that the solutions he and his team implement Read More

It was about 13 years ago that Michael Horvath discovered the product he was most adept at selling was actually himself. The recurring revenue took the form of professional fulfillment. Horvath never had any designs on working for an office technology dealership; he felt his job Read More

Sometimes a vision can seem clearer on paper than it does in practice. When Dean Swenson decided to transform his business in 2003—leaving the comforts of being a Xerox Agency member to begin anew as an independent Konica Minolta dealer—the reset button was hit on his annual Read More

Our starting point is less important than our ultimate destination. And sometimes a phone call is all it takes to get moving in the right direction. Just ask Vince Jannelli, the associate vice president, software product management for Sharp Imaging and Information Company of Read More

When it comes to attaining career aspirations, it often helps to borrow the roadmap for the journey you’re about to embark upon from someone who has successfully traveled that path. It’s not enough to only visualize being in a role; the path to actualization can be brought into Read More

It’s no secret that the office technology dealer circuit is blessed to have a large number of manufacturers whose offerings—while different in their own ways—meet a high standard of excellence. A quality hierarchy exists in the B2C world, where there are products aimed more at Read More

Skills sets that are portable and adaptable to any number of business segments can make for a valuable commodity from a human resources standpoint. In the case of Evelyn Pichardo, who currently serves as director, partner experience for Brother International, what crystallized in Read More

Given his love for the game of softball (his Austin, Texas team even won its league recently), it’s not surprising that one of the axioms Rick Havacko abides by daily is that the name on the back of the uniform is not nearly as important as the name on the front of it. Absent the Read More

Although Brian Kimball isn’t really much of a sports enthusiast, outside of enjoying a game of golf, he certainly can appreciate the glamor, tradition and the significance of the Stanley Cup. The oldest trophy in North American sports, annually bestowed upon the champion of the Read More

Dave Moorman freely admits to being confident. He’s a two-sport star, in a sense, as president and CISO for Novatech—a big-picture executive meshed with a granular technology foundation. He’s even written a book on the subject. But long ago, Moorman realized that empowering his Read More

Virgil Brown has always known God, but until a certain point the man known by friends as “Downtown” had never truly given his heart to the Lord. It took a 13-year addiction-fueled journey, 15 arrests, six-plus years of incarceration and being shot by police to set him upon a more Read More

J. Mark DeNicola remembers the day he truly arrived as a business executive. It was 1989 and he was the CFO of Round Mountain Gold Corporation, a coal mining organization. Three companies held ownership stakes, which meant the firm was being guided by numerous execs from the Read More