Interview with Michael Moon

Michael Moon: For the last 12 years I have served as the President of a firm that I founded, called Gistics. In 1987 we started with a hopelessly, hopelessly idealistic mission of helping customers, helping our clients better find and serve their customers.

And in the course of that we developed a research methodology called Solutions Research. We go to the most successful, satisfied, productive users of a technology and try to find out what they did right and how they would do it better with 20/20 hindsight. And out of that we jumped, we create a model. What we call the best practice model for how to replicate more of the same.

That then kicks into one of our principle jobs which is market education with an emphasis on executive education.

What do senior executives at end user customer enterprises, what do they need to know about this new technology? What competitive advantage does it bring? What cost savings does it bring? What productivity improvement does it bring? What quality improvement does it bring?

So, in many sense when people ask me, in informal situations, what do I do? I say I tell stories. And I tell stories to senior executives about how to improve their business.

Interviewer: So can you give me a little bit of background about how you ended up doing Gistix?

Michael Moon: In college I went to U.C. Santa Cruz and at that point in time U.C. Santa Cruz stood as a bold experiment in higher education. And they encouraged you to design your own major so long as you remained kind of a self-directed, self-learner or what Mortimer Adler would later call us, the principle product of an education, which is an autodidact. A self-learner.

And so what caught me, what grabbed me was the first hand experiences of mystics, saints, poets, heretics, shamans, brujos, witch doctors. And fundamentally how they translated those experiences, those transcendental experiences into social action.

And so, in essence what I ended up doing was studying the language, philosophy and sociology of the mystical experience. Needless to say, when I came out of school in 1975 in the San Jose area, which at that point was in the depths of one of its deep recessions, I did not find a lot jobs listed in the classified for a reader of tea leaves, seer of visions, interpreter of dreams.

So, like many people I did whatever it is that I could to get by and in the course of, I'd say, five, six years, I had about eight or so jobs, six or seven of which I got fired from. These jobs included door-to-door sales of cable TV subscriptions from east side San Jose all the way through Saratoga. I have put my nose in about 6,000 living rooms. And I can tell you that this has served me lifelong reference experience for the utterly bizarre, unimaginable diversity that constitutes "we the people." I was also in retail.. I worked for Color Tile. I sold floor...vinyl flooring and bathroom tiles and fixtures and so on.

Michael Moon: I sure did. But I guess what I am trying to emphasize here is that I had retail experience there, I worked at Macys, I worked in a car wash as an Assistant Manger. I sold video surveillance equipment door-to-door to the retail trade. I mean, basically I have a very broad experience as far as how stuff gets sold at the front line.

I also got involved in marketing, initially in the computer industry. I got involved in the computer industry in 1978 at a company called [Im-Cy]. Which was one of the very first microcomputer companies.

And so most of my friends or associates in there have gone on to become millionaires. One guy went off and helped create Computer Land. Two of the other people that I worked with went off and created WordStar. Another group went off and created the Waite Group which does all these technical books and sells them to Prentice Hall. Another guy went off and started a couple of software companies and ended up becoming the publisher of PC magazine, back in the early '80s.

So, it is kind of a been there, done that, in the computer industry. And at that point I shifted away from sales into marketing. I ended up at Regis McKenna, in its hey day. I worked on the Apple account. I worked on the Intel account. Given that I am not a consultant, I am more of an insultant, the only reason that they tolerated me was that I was the only guy in the shop that actually knew a bit from a byte.

And then worked at another advertising agency called [Loutaft Beatty]. We did the branding programs and advertising programs and advertising programs for Shugart Associates and Seagate Technology. I worked at Altos Computers and did some really great work there.

Then I created my own advertising and marketing agency and I did the branding program for Syquest. We also worked with Hewlett-Packard, and a number of different software companies, Ampex and so on.

At that point I said well, geez, marketing is really kind of interesting but it doesn't really have a lot of substance to it. And so I shifted over into the market research area and I went to work for a market research firm called Electronic Trend Publications and they had a very interesting business where they basically would study emerging OEM technologies like applications to specific integrated circuits. Surface mount technology. Gallium arsenite integrated circuits, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, write a report. Sell the market study part of it back to the vendor and then sell the "here's what it means and here is who is deploying it," to the deploying enterprise. And so at that point I discovered that senior executives were more than willing to pay for a thousand dollar report, sight unseen for helping them make strategic business decisions.

And it was out of that realization plus another couple that I launched Gistix. Another way of talking about my experience in Gistix is that I have studied very up close, up close and personal detail, the systematic wreckage and carnage of Silicon Valley's attempt to market and other wise find and disserve its customers.

Interviewer: [Laughter.] Over 12 years that is about right. You've seen the I don't know how many cycles there...

Interviewer: The rise and fall of Apple would be something you've kept your eye on.

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