From Simi Valley to Silicon Valley: A Story of Hard Work, Serendipity, and Questing, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of From Simi Valley to Silicon Valley: A Story of Hard Work, Serendipity, and Questing, by Stephen Gillett, available from Amazon here. See more reviews here.

To succeed in business and in life, you must be focused and committed. But it also takes serendipity and a certain amount of alchemy.

Stephen Gillett went from part-time technology specialist at an Office Depot to one of the youngest CIOs of a Fortune 500 company by keeping himself fully present and open to all possibilities. In From Simi Valley to Silicon Valley, he shares his remarkable journey and the valuable lessons he learned while working with Bill Gates, Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, and a host of other influential innovators.

Serendipity is more than being in the right place at the right time. It’s about being flexible enough to allow unexpected things to enter and transform your life. Stephen’s inspiring personal story of extraordinary achievement will light the path for others who are willing to keep their minds open, stay true to their values, and embrace their own contradictions.

Review of From Simi Valley to Silicon Valley

When you come to write your memoirs it is always a challenge to ensure that you are not merely joining everything up, backwards, from the rosy perspective of hindsight. Gillett’s book does aim to be honest and self critical in looking at the path he took, and the choices he made. The experiences of his parent’s shop were formative and interesting, in an unexpectedly negative way. His parents took over the lease for a failing shop, and turned it around to become a success.

At which point the shop owners contrived to have them kicked out and take it back for themselves. This unfortunate turn of events naturally informed Gillett’s own experiences, and while he did gain some positive aspects from working in the shop from an early age, he also learned about the value of securing your own position too. No bad thing to learn of course.

His experiences working with Starbucks, and it’s then CEO Howard D. Schultz were also interesting and informative too. Gillett came in at a relevant time for the company, and did a lot to help them turn around what could have been a permanent position of decline. Their customer experience was too dated, customers were not being valued or embraced with the latest technology. Gillett brought the benefits of a fresh, tech-savvy perspective and all parties flourished.

Ultimately though Gillett’s lack of complete passion for coffee drove him to seek fresh pastures. Gillett came to learn that, as with other ex-employees, Howard Schultz took things personally, and that you were not leaving Starbucks but you were leaving Howard. In this context it is interesting to note that Schultz has never spoken to Gillett again since leaving. It does show of course that work is only work, and if it is not helping you to pursue your dreams then you need to leave. Often these people that you spend a lot of time with while you are work colleagues, often prove to be only that once you move to fresh pastures.

Gillett’s book discusses family a lot, initially the one he grew up in, then the wider one he discovers in the Lebanon, and then, as the book progresses, the impressive number of children he ends up having too, eight! These elements do help to ground the book, and keep it real and readable. This is a book that is an interesting read and attempts to be honest with itself and for the readers benefit too. In many ways he is still mid career, now that he has moved into the VC world, and it will be interesting to see what happens next.

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