Rick Hamada

Rick Hamada always thought he might take up Bonsai gardening when he retired. He is, in fact, one-quarter Japanese. So during the downturn, his wife, Michele, bought him a Bonsai tree, thinking it might help relieve his stress. When the tree died, he took it as a sign that retirement wasn’t yet meant to be.

The 46-year-old president of Avnet Technology Solutions, Tempe, Ariz., a division of electronics distributor Avnet Inc., has found other ways to maintain balance and harmony in his life while managing Avnet’s growing midrange computer products distribution and channel business. Hamada relies on what he likes to call the four pillars of success: personal responsibility, balance, life-long learning and attitude. “I believe a positive attitude is the single biggest determinant of the probability of success,” Hamada says.

That positive attitude has come in handy during his 21-year career at Avnet, where the San Diego State University business graduate started out in technical support and rose to become Avnet’s chief salesperson to the channel. That is a role he has grown into. “I was at first apprehensive of being called a salesperson. But early in my career I learned that what I was really doing was helping people,” he says. “Then I became more comfortable in the sales role.”

If Hamada has stepped into the role of consummate salesman, he has also exhibited a knack for building his division into a leading distributor of enterprise systems, software and storage products. Over the past year, Avnet Partner Solutions, the distribution arm of his division, recruited more than 25 new ISVs for IBM and launched open-system migration and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance initiatives. The division overall grew to $4.35 billion in sales for the year ended July 3, up from $4.06 billion the prior year.

“Rick is a take-action guy, and he always seems to do the right thing,” says Rich Baldwin, president and CEO of Nth Generation Computing, San Diego, an Avnet customer. “I’ve never worked with a nicer gentleman.”