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Arthur Nadata has the standard-issue power office.
There's the over-sized desk, gleaming like a Tiffany diamond, the wall art, the swivel chairs, the golf bag. The desk is nearly bare: not a single paper clip out of place, not a Post-it Note in sight.
If the office has a museum quality, it may be because Nadata, chairman and chief executive of Nu Horizons Electronics Corp., rarely sets foot in it.
Instead, he spends almost every moment of his office time in the bullpen, a cluster of standard cubicles where he can take the pulse of business with his corporate troops and keep up with the roughly 250 e-mails he gets daily.
In his Dilbertesque cubicle - with walls no higher than 42 inches as per company policy - are the family pictures affixed with thumb tacks and the piles of papers. Until his retirement in June, sitting in the next cubicle was Irving Lubman, who was the company's chairman and chief operating officer.
We never sit in our offices, he said of himself, Lubman and Richard Schuster, the trio who launched Nu Horizons. We sit in the bullpen. We always sit with the people. That's where the action is. Hands-on is the key.
Nadata acknowledged that it sounds like a lot of hype, but the...