Greg Spierkel, CEO / Ingram Micro

Greg Spierkel, the Santa Ana, Calif.-based distributor&'s fourth CEO in the past 10 years, hung out with the legendary reggae singer back in 1979. Well, at least he may be the only one of the executives who would admit it. Clearly, Spierkel isn&'t your traditional CEO.

He laughs now when recalling his Marley moment while backpacking through Europe: “There on the boardwalk, at Cannes, we see this guy wearing a hot purple suit. I mean a hot purple suit, a spandex one-piece jumpsuit. One of our guys says, ‘Hey, that&'s Bob Marley,&' and went over and talked to him. We ended up sitting with him for about 15, 20 minutes, talking about his music. It was pretty interesting.”

These days, Ingram Micro employees might get similar treatment from Spierkel. When he&'s in town, he sits with employees in the cafeteria for lunch, sharing jokes and stories. But that&'s when he&'s in town. As CEO of a global company, he&'s just as likely to be on another continent. He joined Ingram Micro nine years ago to head Asia operations and later led the distributor&'s European arm before settling in Southern California last year. He&'s spent about 15 of the last 18 years living abroad.

Ingram Micro&'s global presence is a top priority for Spierkel because he believes that&'s where future opportunities lie.

“As much as North America has generated 70 or 80 percent of the vendor community we all work with, the future vendors are the Huaweis and Lenovos [that] will come out of Asia because there&'s so much intellectual property and design skills moving over to Asia,” Spierkel says.

Driving Ingram Micro&'s vendor relationships is as important to him as any other facet of the business, he says. For example, Spierkel met GPS navigation software vendor TomTom, a Netherlands company, four years ago when it was an $8 million company. Ingram Micro became its first distribution partner in Europe.

“Now you&'re starting to see them on TV commercials in North America. We parlayed that meeting to bring a solution to one country, then several countries, now to North America,” he says. “Over 60 percent of our business is outside of the [United States]. That sends a signal that if we don&'t understand what&'s going on outside, there&'s a problem. There are more growth opportunities outside the [United States]. There is less direct business and more fragmented markets and more small businesses. That will be the case for a long time.”

Meanwhile, back at home, Spierkel is trying to bring a cultural change to the Santa Ana headquarters, too. One of the first things he did as CEO was choose not to move into the big corner office, the same space that Foster once occupied.

“When I was in Europe, I think I had the smallest office of all our senior executives. That&'s not something I need.

It&'s not a big deal,” Spierkel says. “I stayed in the office I had. It&'s the first office you see when you come up the steps.

I try to keep the door open.”

In fact, Spierkel had the former CEO quarters divided into two offices because he thought it was a better use of space.

“He has not changed since I&'ve met him. He&'s now CEO of a publicly held company, but he&'s always been approachable. He fits into a crowd. He doesn&'t have a big ego,” says Don Kennedy, vice president of America sales and Global retail sales at Seagate Technology.

Spierkel&'s low-key presence also impresses solution providers, some of whom still talk about their introduction to the CEO at a VentureTech Network dinner last April in Atlanta. He showed up wearing a Guinness T-shirt.

“I didn&'t know who he was. He wasn&'t being escorted. He was one of us,” says Mont Phelps, CEO of Netivity Solutions, Waltham, Mass., who attended the dinner. “He gets high marks for being engaged with the people. He comes across as someone who cares about our businesses.”