Hi! My name is John Mariotti and I have written a lot of books that you can find on amazon, but I'd like to share with you how these books came into being.
After getting my education at Bradley University (B. S. M. E.) and then the University of Wisconsin (M. S. M. E.) I got married and started by my career which now spans more than 45 years. It's easiest to describe it in three stages.
The first part--about 15 years--was as an engineer in telecommunications, then a supervisor, a manager and a VP climbing the corporate ladder. I started writing as a young engineer, to pay the bills for our furniture (as newlyweds). I learned a lot in this 15 year period. I stopped writing as we had children, to coach just about every sport they played, and enjoy family time plus my career. My wonderful wife (Maureen, now of 48 years) took great care of me and the family so I could do all these things.
I moved to the second stage--another 15 years--running entire companies, when I became a President (at age 38), of a brand new plant start-up for Huffy making bikes in the USA (OK). The recession of 1982-83 shuttered the plant, but not my career. I landed on my feet, running Huffy Bicycles--the combination of three bike divisions—for 10 years—during which we became the biggest bike maker in the world. Starting at 11,000 bikes per day in 1982 we grew to making over 21,000 bikes/day when I left in 1992--all Made in the USA (OH). I left Huffy to join Rubbermaid, America's Most Admired Company as Group President of a multi-national Office Products Group. But Rubbermaid was "falling apart" and I left there to "do my own thing."
I decided to share what I learned over the past 30 years, founding The Enterprise Group, and I also resumed writing, started doing keynote speeches and consulting work. Since founding The Enterprise Group in1994, I have advised or addressed many leading American companies such as Emerson, Scotts, Titleist, DirtDevil, CharBroil, Hills Pet Nutrition, Deere, and many others.
The past 18 years have been exciting, diverse and fun. I've written ten books (all available on amazon.com), thousands of articles and blog posts, some for big names like Industry Week, Fortune (fsb.com) and Forbes.com. Two of my books were award winners too: The Shape Shifters (1997) and The Complexity Crisis (2008). I also wrote five books for a publisher in the UK, which spread my works around the world. Like so many writers, I had to write a novel, thus "The Chinese Conspiracy" was born. It's an exciting fictional thriller built on the factual reality of America's risk from Cyber-Attacks. Read the reviews on amazon.com--they are quite good! Since 2001 I have also published THE ENTERPRISE, a weekly email newletter and later as a blog and founded the Reunion Conference series, which I hosted for 16 years--so far.
In this latter stage of my career, I also continued trying to help companies by serving on boards. Earlier I had served on not-for-profit boards, and held industry leadership positions. First I was Chairman of the Board of the Productivity Communications Center, then Board Chairman of Goodwill Industries of Dayton (OH), and also President of the Bicycle Institute of America, representing the U.S. Bike industry in Washington with the International Trade Commission, the U. S. Trade Representative, the U. S. Customs Office, and members of Congress, dealing with Legislative, Trade and Product Safety issues. Then I was asked to serve on corporate boards too finally serving on six of them over a ten year period--until most of the companies were sold or merged out of existence. I remain on just one...World Kitchen, Inc.
You can find me at www.mariotti.net or contact me at mariotti@usit.net.
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