By GREGORY SPIERKEL
Published: May 2, 2009


MY late father was from Belgium and my mother is from Luxembourg. They emigrated to Canada from Europe on a freighter a year before I was born. We lived in a small iron-ore shipping town 370 miles north of Quebec City with other immigrants. Our street was like a little United Nations, and everyone was chasing work.

My mother was an interpreter for an iron ore company and my father was a jack of all trades. He started a newspaper and a TV station that both failed, and he worked for the government and in finance. My parents separated when I was 5, and when I was 10 my father returned to Belgium to run an airport. I visited him in the summers until he returned to Canada six years later.


I went to an English high school in a French community. Several teachers pulled me along, persuading me to accomplish things I otherwise wouldn’t have done. I became assistant captain of the ice hockey team and captain of the curling team, and was class president my senior year. These were small leadership opportunities that were linchpins for me to become more comfortable with myself and take on responsibility, but I didn’t see it that way at the time.

While attending Carleton University in Ottawa, I started doing some statistical analysis for Bell Canada. After I graduated, I went to work for it to develop one of the first e-mail systems for Canada. This was in the early 1980s, however, and the system was ahead of its time. One of my first bosses there said that as long as I made the right decisions 51 percent of the time, he could live with the wrong ones. I was in my late 20’s. He was telling me not to be risk-averse, and he gave me a lot of runway.

I’ve learned that you have to be willing to take an assignment that is less glamorous than you would like, and to make something out of it. You need to surprise your boss or the people around you. Either turn a project around faster or leave it in better shape than it was. People will trust you and give you more responsibility and more interesting work.

Many people feel disenfranchised when they get a small project. But if you shine on a small one, you’ll look even better than on a bigger project where there are more people.

I’ve lived and worked in seven countries. In 1989, while working for the telecommunications vendor Mitel, I was in Hong Kong setting up a factory in mainland China at the time of the uprising in Tiananmen Square. I was 32. We had five Chinese nationals working in China, and I was determined to get them out. Headquarters back in Canada thought I was crazy. I chased down paperwork for the men, found a driver, paid him to cross the border into China and negotiated with the government for two days. I didn’t rest until we were back in Hong Kong.

When I was 40, I thought I was moving along well at Mitel when a more seasoned executive was given the C.E.O. spot. I did some soul-searching about what I wanted to do and decided I wanted to work overseas again.

I moved to Ingram Micro in 1997 and started our operations in Asia. After working there and in Europe, I was promoted to president in 2004 and to C.E.O. in 2005. We’re a distributor that sells technology products to small and medium-sized businesses through a network of system integrators. We’re like a Wal-Mart where these businesses shop for all the elements of an information technology system.

Working abroad was enriching beyond my imagination. I had one guiding light after obtaining my undergraduate degree: to see the world through work. In my early 20’s, I was focused on what I could do to work for a company that would send me abroad. After getting my first such assignment, I was on my way (and I never looked back).

As told to Patricia R. Olsen.

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