Dick Heckman Investing in Water Again

Denise George

Richard "Dick" Heckmann grinds his teeth over the Phoenix Suns' last-minute loss in an early playoff game confronting the Lakers. "In professional sports, you tin can't 'manage.' Yous just become rid of 'em," says the squad's part owner, barely suppressing a nervous facial tic. His manner brings to listen a man accustomed to having things go his mode.
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At the same time, he defies the image of a man with his immense corporate success. Dressed in jeans and denim shirt, his wavy gray hair in need of a trim, he rambles around his huge Rancho Mirage house.

"I love basketball games," he says, and then adds, "I dearest being on my boat. I have a bunch of people waiting on me, and I can become anywhere I want."

He'southward well known for chaperoning his kids and their friends on a bound break cruise to United mexican states aboard the Orion, his 125-foot Feadship. He calls the yacht his "floating beach house, which I tin put off any beach in the world."
"I love being on the water. It's always tranquil," he says, the edge gone from his vocalization. "I intendance less well-nigh what'due south going on in the news, and I have fourth dimension to think."

Today, Heckmann seems to be navigating his own personal sea change — downshifting from driving corporate executive to mentor the next generation of businessmen and -women through the International Heckmann Center
for Entrepreneurial Direction at the Palm Desert campus of University of California, Riverside. His $six million contribution to the school put his name over the door and an MBA program in place.

You'd call up the man who virtually created the domestic water business concern by turning a sleepy $17 1000000 water company into the behemoth USFilter would project an ego to lucifer. But Heckmann disarms with self-deprecation. He's aware that the seminal upshot in his successful business life — selling USFilter to the French conglomerate Vivendi for a cool $viii billion — was due in no small role to timing. "I couldn't build USFilter today considering the circumstances aren't correct," he says. "The state of affairs makes the entrepreneur, not the other way around."

Of the halcyon days of corporate consolidation, then President and Chief Operating Officer Andy Seidel — who attended meetings in France between Heckmann and Vivendi CEO Jean-Marie Messier — says, "Dick was genetically engineered for the '90s. He likes a big platform. [He and Messier] are both incredibly charismatic, they both dearest the large vision, and they talk a proficient story. It was a mitt-in-glove fit. I knew there'd be a bargain there."

Heckmann emerged the better talker: Vivendi paid a 15 per centum premium for USFilter. Press reports say Heckmann personally pocketed $100 million.

He acknowledges that information technology's more, merely won't say how much.

Messier has no regrets about falling victim to the Heckmann amuse offensive. "Would I piece of work with him again? Yes! Tomorrow morning!" says the Frenchman. "He is a real entrepreneur, very internationally minded. He understood before anyone else the importance of h2o and water technology."

Heckmann is building another empire with K2, the publicly listed, Carlsbad-based sporting goods conglomerate he has headed for five years, and then far spending half a billion dollars on 26 acquisitions. In this corporate reincarnation, Heckmann's biggest customer is Wal-Mart, China his biggest manufacturing base, and the investment reporting Web site The Motley Fool his biggest detractor.

"Richard Heckmann's base salary increased more than 25 percentage in 2005," reads an April 2006 story on K2 that also notes the company'south stock dropped twoscore per centum the same yr.

"I don't read the negative articles," Heckmann says. And though he calls his own leadership style "collegial and fun," he doesn't suffer fools gladly. People who piece of work for him "don't get daily doses of management," he says, "You lot get 'Hither'south the job, go practice it, and if yous spiral up, …'"

Intelligent and well-spoken, Heckmann hardly comes off as "an intellectual." He went to the University of Hawaii to escape his native Iowa and its bad weather. He reads nonfiction books similar Testosterone, Inc.: Tales of CEOs Gone Wild. The final fiction he read was The Da Vinci Code and "something by Tom Clancy."

Merely he is a homo with a vision and the ability to realize it: "My hopes are to plough this 200-acre packet at Cook and Frank Sinatra into a campus teeming with thousands of students, spewing out entrepreneurial graduates who will develop fields like computer sciences and life sciences and sports … so that in 30 years, this will be more than a resort area. We could have employment opportunities for kids who come up out of college or high school who want to stay here." The campus has an executive-in-residence programme and visiting lecturers such equally former Vice President Dan Quayle.

"Dick Heckmann has the contacts and free energy to bring in world-renowned people to focus on big issues," says Don Doyle, a lawyer and CEO of Acorn Engineering science Corp. in Riverside. He has known Heckmann since the early 1980s, counting himself among the local entrepreneur'southward mentors. They start met in 1982 when Heckmann, then a stockbroker, sought Doyle's expertise on behalf of clients who had invested in Walt Disney Corp. The company's lath of directors was about to pay a virtual ransom to a predatory shareholder to keep him from
seizing the company in a hostile takeover bid.

"Dick was incensed," Doyle says. "He had no personal money tied up in this. He just thought Disney was in the incorrect … and he invested a lot of fourth dimension and energy taking this thing to court."

In the end, the case changed California police when courts ruled the "greenmail" practice illegal. "Dick was a crusader, a person with passion, fighting for the principle involved," Doyle says.

Heckmann says a good entrepreneur is "a self-starter, a run a risk-taker, a people person who has practiced judgment." His advice to those who want to exist great leaders is characteristically blunt and to the point: "If you want to be a great leader, exercise what a keen leader does. Ignore the assholes. People who manage by intimidation get that way by being managed that style."

Heckmann's original career path was quite different from where he eventually ended upwards.

"In high school, I wanted to exist a diocesan priest." He nearly was, enrolling in Formulation Seminary College of the Benedictine order in Missouri. But he left to bring together the Air Force during the Vietnam War, and his life took off in a unlike management.

Looking back on it all, Heckmann says, "I've had phenomenal experiences — flight air-rescue missons in Vietnam, working in the [Carter] White House — in that location'due south not much in the world I oasis't seen. Merely I wouldn't want to do it once again. I wouldn't want to be 20 or 30 again … peradventure 50. Now I'm into doing stuff — experiential stuff — so that when I go to my rocking chair, I tin laugh my ass off."

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Source: https://www.palmspringslife.com/a-study-in-success/

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