2/5/2012

By MICHAEL STRAND

Salina Journal

Mark Hamade has built a career in the upper tiers of technology and executive recruiting companies, generally in sunny climates such as Phoenix and San Diego.

So when Hamade, 38, decided to leave all of that for PKM Steel in Salina, "My first thought was that he's lost it," said Ken Halloway, a friend and former co-worker at RampRate, an IT company based in Santa Monica, Calif., and now financial controller at Endgame Entertainment, Beverly Hills, Calif.

"He saw something there that was challenging and that he could make a difference at," Halloway said. "People see that industry as staid and boring, but he saw he could make a difference."

'Drive and vision' an attraction

Hamade said he was attracted to PKM and founder Paul Mai because of his "drive and vision," and when he met with company owner and president Frieda Mai Weis, he knew he wanted to come to work at PKM.

"I've always been drawn to know, to be around and to work with pure visionaries," Hamade said. "That is what Paul is. His mind moves in constant pursuit of the new and the untried, and his ideas are years ahead of his time."

Hamade said that during their discussion to have him join PKM, Mai Weis told him it would take him a year to really understand the business.

"I told her if I didn't see the light bulb in 90 days, she should fire me," he recalled.

"I'm very opinionated and that did not scare her away," Hamade said of his first meetings with Mai Weis. "That intrigued me."

Moreover, he said, PKM appeared to represent several challenges: "You've got a bad economy, it's the steel industry and I'd never worked in steel -- there were all those challenges."

He sometimes goes days at a time without sleeping, he said.

"You might outsmart me, you might outthink me, but you'll never outwork me," Hamade said.

Hamade started at PKM in January 2010 as chief human resources officer, a position he held for just over a year before being named chief operating officer.

Revamping a company

At RampRate, where he was vice president of human capital, Hamade describes the company as "doing OK" before his arrival. He recruited and hired 94 percent of the company's staff, including many from Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies, in addition to revamping the human resources department and its training, retention and harassment prevention programs.

He also recovered $15,000 in accounting theft.

And, the company went from that "doing OK" to being named No. 2 in the "boutique sourcing advisory" industry in the Wall Street Journal during Hamade's time there.

Before that, he was chief people officer at DataSkill, a San Diego-based consulting firm.

Within his first few weeks there, he renegotiated the company's phone contract, software licenses and other recurring costs, saving more than $100,000 a year. He also created new employee training and evaluation programs, and helped open the company's first international office.

As for PKM, Hamade admits he had no experience in heavy manufacturing.

"I was a risky hire," he said.

Challenging employees

While Hamade said that while he's found that each industry and company "is unique and has its own challenges," he's also found the common key to business success is motivated employees.

And that motivation often doesn't mean money.

"I've worked in tech companies where almost everybody was a millionaire, with $30 million in stock options," Hamade said. "They're not there for the money, they're there for the challenge -- the fun and excitement.

"People want a challenge," he said. "Figuring out how to challenge them is one of the most fun things about this."

"If you see somebody who might not appear to be a good employee, it might just be that they're being utilized wrong," Hamade said. "If someone quits, the blame has to go both ways. What could I have done to keep them -- it's not just more money."

You can't fix lazy

At the same time, however, he believes "You can fix stupid, but you can't fix lazy. One of the worst things you can do is have a couple of world-class employees and a lazy one. It's like a cancer -- it will suck the oxygen out of the organization."

Hamade also has little patience with what he calls "brilliant jerks."

In a presentation he prepared for internal use at the company, Hamade stated that people who are difficult to work with -- no matter how brilliant -- ruin the spirit of teamwork and aren't worth it.

"Lots of companies have nice-sounding value statements displayed in the lobby!" Hamade wrote in another part of that presentation on company culture. "Enron had that and they went bankrupt and the leaders went to jail. They were not true values."

In contrast, he wrote, "The actual company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted or fired."

Always reinventing

"When you're dealing with people, they're very similar across industries," Mai Weis said. "Motivating them and bringing out their strengths is the goal. The functions day to day of a tech company, and what employees do may be different, but it's still people."

Further, Mai Weis said, the fact that Hamade came from outside the steel industry has some pluses.

"His process of 'What can we do better' is what this company was founded on," she said. "He brings a fresh look at the way we do things. He doesn't have those filters, any of that 'This is the way we've always done things.' ... The tech industry is always re-inventing itself -- there are no established traditions."

Steel day

Hamade's most publicly visible accomplishment has been PKM's annual Steel Day, which in its second year drew several thousand people and more than 100 vendors.

The idea, he said, was to give people an opportunity to learn about the industry and get excited about it.

"Steel doesn't get enough recognition," he said. "It's different from tech. With Apple, you can play with their toys, think it's cool and maybe want to work there. You can't take a steel beam home."

And if the company was going to have an open house, Hamade said, "We were going to make it big. Why would you do something if you're not going to do it right?"

To Hamade, doing something right means attention to detail.

"People are taking time out of their day" to attend, he said. "You owe it to them to do it right. There are hundreds of things that could have gone wrong -- Do we have enough hot dogs? Do we have enough buses?"

Write it down every day

Hamade agrees mistakes and failures can be learning experiences, but thinks they need to be seen first as mistakes and failures.

"You can learn from them," he said. "But if you start justifying mistakes by calling them learning experiences, you're going to get more of them."

"People say I'm not afraid to fail -- but I am," he said. "That's why I plan and work so hard and watch every detail."

All those details get recorded: Hamade has over the years accumulated scores of black and red hardbound notebooks in which he writes down his ideas, to-do-lists, short-term and long-term goals, notes from meetings, and so on.

He dedicates at least five minutes of every hour to his journal, which he says "keeps me on target."

Blog, tweets and answers

That's not the limit of his writing, however.

Hamade also maintains a blog at markhamade.com, where he writes about human resources and management issues, such as the importance of praise, or how to avoid problems when key employees leave.

"I write about things I'm dealing with anyway at the time," he said. "It relates to what I'm doing and what I'm thinking. How I deal with something can benefit other people so they don't fall into the same trap."

Sometimes, he says, writing for the blog helps him work through the process of finding answers.

He's fully immersed in technology, usually carrying some combination of laptop, iPhone and iPad, allowing him to stay connected to the world -- but on his terms.

Chances are if you call him, your call will go straight to voicemail, as he deliberately leaves his phone off most of the time, to avoid distractions. He checks messages every couple of hours.

Effort to lose weight

One common thread on his Twitter account is his efforts the past couple of years to lose weight.

In that endeavor, too, he sets written goals, tracks his progress -- and is his own worst critic.

For example, after a back injury left him unable to stick to his exercise routine, he started regaining weight.

But rather than blame the back injury and accept the weight gain, Hamade said he quickly realized weight is a function of both exercise and diet: He could eat less instead.

He draws a parallel between that personal lesson and success in business -- especially in a down economy.

When innovation stops

Consider, he says, a sector of the economy worth $1 billion a year. Company A has 10 percent of that market -- or $100 million a year. If that sector shrinks by half (to $500 million), that 10 percent market share is now worth $50 million.

While some companies might be content to hold market share, Hamade sees something different in that shrinking sector -- $450 million in business Company A doesn't have -- yet.

Too many companies don't think that way, he said.

"Look at Kodak -- when did the innovation stop?" he said. "What you see is fear of being fired. At the midlevels, you see a lot of that, people just wanting to get promoted" instead of thinking about excellence. "You see it in companies that are going bankrupt -- people just stay."

No California traffic

As for how long he'll stay in Salina, consider that Hamade still has California license plates on his car, and yet he had no qualms about moving here.

"I love the beach, and there's no beach," he said, smiling. "But I also hate traffic, and there's no traffic."

-- Reporter Mike Strand can be reached at 822-1418 or by email at mstrand@salina.com.

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