Work with Gary for More Community, Less Olympia

Gary is an internationally known business strategist, multiple award-winning author, a technology expert, the founder of an Inc. 500 company, and an alumnus of Harvard's Graduate School of Business. He has the track record of reliable accomplishment that we need in public service.

Gary is experienced in helping large corporations, small businesses, and government entities become more successful by reducing conflict and moving decision-making from stifling bureaucracies into the front-lines where services are delivered.  Gary's books on "winning without conflict" are sold all over the world.

Unlike 70% of our state representatives who have never worked in a meaningful job in the private sector, Gary has worked continually in the private sector since he was fourteen. By the time he started college as a National Merit scholar, Gary was already a department manager for a large national chain. He left college to start his first successful business, a spice tea company, T'N'Spice.  After selling that company, he went to work for Bic Pen. By his late twenties, he headed their sales operations for Western Washington.  Moving into the high-tech market in the early 80s, Gary joined Tandy Radio Shack, the early leader in personal computers. He became their first major account marketing manager for the Pacific Northwest.

Gary left Tandy to write a series of books on computers for Bantam Books. That book series led to his starting a technology consulting company. This company began with three people in a tiny office on Midvale Avenue in Shoreline. It became FourGen Software, a multi-million dollar Inc. 500 company with offices across the country and clients around the world.  As its CEO for thirteen years, Gary won the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Blue Chip Quality Award, the Trendsetter Award, and was a NW Entrepreneur of the Year finalist.  During this period, he also published several more books on technology including a college textbook on client-server computing. He won lifetime certification in computer technology from the ICCP.

After becoming financially successful, Gary's interests turned from making money to helping others. Instead continuing his lucrative careers as a corporate CEO in high tech, he returned to school, completing a three-year graduate program at Harvard Business School in 1996. Soon after, he sold his software company and began to pursue a new career as a business educator. 

Because of his success, Gary became known for his use of "winning without conflict" from Sun Tzu's The Art of War. He wrote his first book on these ideas for his company's sales people. After selling his company, Gary began training others in these powerful methods for improving efficiency, reliability, and accountability of organizations by moving decision-making out of ineffective bureaucracies into the front-lines where products are created and services delivered. His clients include Kraft, Nokia,  the Mayo Clinic, Hyatt, Corporate Express, Fermi Labs, Corporate Express, the World Bank, the IRS, the Boy Scouts, and scores of other organizations  all over the world.

Gary wrote a whole series of books about the decision-making skills that make people and organizations more responsive and adaptable. Since 2001, ten of Gary's books have won award-recognition in seven different non-fiction categories. In 2006, he won the Ben Franklin Award for the best self-help book of the year. Gary's books are translated into a dozen languages including Korean, Thai, Polish, Russian, and Arabic. People from all over the world have enrolled in his Science of Strategy Institute's on-line courses.

Our current financial crisis convinced Gary to bring his skills to government. Costly, ineffective, and unresponsive bureaucracies can strangle the world's largest corporations, but ineffective corporations simply go out of business when they fall for the false economies of scale of growing their central bureaucracies. The bureaucracies of government can destroy entire economies. Gary's current mission is to dismantle these ineffective bureaucracies, returning control to local communities.

Gary is dedicated to serving our community rather than to a party ideology. He and his wife live in the same small house in Shoreline that they purchased almost twenty-five years ago. Because of the international popularity of his work, Gary could live anywhere in the world, but he has chosen to stay right here and work in our community.

Like most of you, he has voted for both parties.  He has spent most of his life as an political independent.  He got involved in local politics only very recently because of his concerns about our decreasing quality of government efficiencies amid sky-rocketing spending.  He is running as a Republican because he feels that our state's Democrats are currently too committed in the entrenched bureaucracy in Olympia to make common-sense reforms.