Magazine: Cover Story
From: October 2007 Issue | Posted By: Rebecca Smith
The Elasticity of Diversity
posted on
September 27, 2007
Mimics. It’s the first thing that comes to mind in a sci-fi world without independent thought, without diversity. So, in order to stress the importance of diversity, bizSanDiego hopes to expand everyone’s views about a word that describes much more than ethnic and gender differences in and outside of the realm of business.
“Diversity is all about relevance,” says Bennett Peji of Peji Design, a local design firm. “Businesses need to stay relevant in our increasingly global and multicultural economy.” He mentions that diversity must also be about authenticity. People who speak up about a certain cultural aspect should truly “represent.”
Peji adds, “Diversity is also linked to innovation, being open to new ideas. Diverse thinking can only happen when diverse minds and experiences are in the room.”
Zeynep Ilgaz, Vincent Mudd and Bennett Peji are in the room. Not only are they ethnic and gender diverse, but they exude diversity in other ways, as well. Their stories reveal the eclectic landscape of San Diego business in complex ways that are indeed relevant, authentic and innovative.
Rising From the Mudd
The word diversity for Vincent Mudd, CEO of San Diego Office Interiors, is simply about being flexible, creative and making smart business moves.
Mudd wanted to start another business that could be duplicated, unlike San Diego Office Interiors, which he established in 1994.
“The furniture business is completely service-oriented,” says Mudd. “We wanted the new venture to be entertainment-based, since people always want to be entertained. And we wanted to be technology-based.”
Like a true entrepreneur, he expanded his breadth and scope when he and his wife, Catherine, opened Mudd Club earlier this year. Mudd Club is a corporate training center by day and a family entertainment scene at night, at which he admits to spending hours playing videogames with his two sons. They are not alone.
“The gaming industry represents $34 billion, while sports and movie industries combined make up $33 billion,” says Mudd.
But, he adds, gaming clubs are a rarity, and he noticed that he could fill a niche in the market. Even though he knew going in that it would be an expensive venture because, as he points out, “Mudd Club has the highest-end versions of everything.” By buying the best of the best equipment available upfront, Mudd’s new business would be on the cutting edge and wouldn’t have to update equipment too often.
Mudd Club is located in a 6,500-square-foot building in the corner lot of an office park in Poway. Mudd Club features 46 custom-configured PCs supported by large flat-panel LCD monitors, fast online access and huge plasma TVs suspended from the ceiling. Recently, employees from a local company participated in an AUTOCAD training at Mudd Club for six hours, then played in the arcade for three hours. Mudd Club works with local caterers to host company parties and board meetings, yet another offering on which Mudd realized he could capitalize.
“We can also coordinate tournament games,” he says. “Imagine 30 employees playing Texas Hold ’Em for a holiday celebration.”
Mudd Club is outfitted with online computer games, arcade games and console games. One wall prominently features The Derby Owners Club (players raise their own horses, train their own jockeys, then race to the finish). A small table holds Mind Ball, (“a mental tug-of-war,” describes Mudd) where players can move a ball across a table, depending on their state of relaxation, with their brain waves projected onto a nearby screen. “The more calm you are, the faster and farther you can move the ball,” he continues. “Players realize that they can truly control their bodies.”
Mudd believes that workspaces should be “responsible and adaptable.” Showing visitors around Mudd Club, he announces, “This place is a green facility. Fully modular walls made up of metal studs and gypsum panels, concrete floors. I don’t have to destroy anything to experience change. Not only is this building environmentally sensitive, this building is productive.
“Other companies may purchase buildings, but they can’t move, take risks, make mistakes. I can always start over, if necessary, and turn this place into a restaurant, a mortgage company or a mattress store, simply by walking out with the furniture! I have options here.”
No need to turn this property around anytime soon, though. Mudd plans to open and own five additional “training and gaming” clubs, then franchise.
“We can run these gaming clubs anywhere in the country,” says Mudd. “We want the Chargers here, playing Madden NFL 2008, against the Raiders—the San Diego Mudd Club versus the Oakland Mudd Club.”
Besides his executive board positions with the American Red Cross, Big Brothers & Big Sisters, and the Campanile Foundation at San Diego State University, Mudd views his new business as another way to contribute to the community. He has arranged for Mudd Club to be used as a disaster relief facility. A local hospital sends physical therapists and recovering coma patients to play Mind Ball. High school sports teams in the area can watch their game films at Mudd Club.
Yet Mudd Club can’t be everything to everyone.
Mudd enjoys telling the story about the woman who walked up in her white terrycloth bathrobe, “ready to get her spa on.”
Vincent Mudd
CEO, San Diego Office Interiors and Mudd Club
Age: 43
Education: San Diego State University
Best Place for a Business Lunch: Godfather’s
Most Inspirational Business Book: The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken
Favorite Music To Work By: “Gonna Make You Sweat” by C+C Music Factory
Confirmed Success
The history of Confirm Biosciences is really a love story. As newlyweds, Zeynep Ilgaz, CEO of Confirm Biosciences, and her husband, Serhat Pala, moved to California from Turkey 10 years ago. “We were best friends while growing up in Turkey,” Ilgaz recalls. “We always wanted to start our lives together in a place where we could raise children. Istanbul was a very hectic city. We were drawn to the beach lifestyle in San Diego.”
After completing the graduate business program together at San Diego State University, they decided that only one spouse would take the entrepreneurial route at first. So while Pala established a company called Test Country, Ilgaz worked at the San Diego Regional Technology Alliance at CONNECT, assisting entrepreneurs in commercializing their technologies.
“We started Test Country in 2002 as an online distributor for medical devices, mostly testing kits for pregnancy, fertility, infectious diseases and cholesterol. Our business was successful from the start, as workplace drug testing became more prevalent.”
By September 2006, Ilgaz joined her husband as an entrepreneur, launching Confirm Biosciences. The company’s main product is Hair Confirm, a home drug testing kit. Ilgaz comments, “We were convinced, by our customer feedback at Test Country, about this product. Parents kept calling to ask if we had a home drug testing kit.”
Hair Confirm provides the confidential testing of a 90-day drug-use history. After launching the product earlier this year, Hair Confirm already has more than 20 distributors. Ilgaz’s next move is getting Hair Confirm into major retail outlets. “I want to see Hair Confirm as a tool for parents,” she says. “Parents can talk about the issues of drug use with their children. They can be proactive. No matter how much you educate your children, they are influenced by other factors outside the home.”
Sad but true. So, she adds, “We want to prevent workplace drug abuse and consumer drug abuse with Hair Confirm.”
Confirm Biosciences is also developing pipeline products that test for other toxins in the body, such as wellness care for seniors and women. But her company is not the only thing keeping her busy these days. Ilgaz serves on the advisory boards of the Entrepreneur Network at San Diego State University and Venture Forth at University of California, San Diego. She was also appointed to be a technical adviser at the National Institute of Health. Plus, Ilgaz and her husband support community organizations that educate teenagers about the dangers of drug abuse.
Diversity holds different meanings for different people. The term, for Ilgaz, is less about her culture or gender, and more about the various roles that she plays at the same time—mainly juggling work and family. A framed photograph of her husband, 3-year old son and black Labrador on the beach at Coronado sits prominently on her desk.
Ilgaz recalls that the partnership with her husband was their greatest advantage in dealing with the difficulty of adjusting to a new country. She says, “Since we were together, we could support each other. Serhat and I left work and family back in Turkey and spent our first few weeks in San Diego at a Motel 8. Then we started graduate school. That time in our lives really showed us how to work together as a team. I can’t see doing business any other way.”
Although she relies on her husband for support, she also acknowledges the need for strong business relationships. “A true mentor and friend has been Tyler Orion at the San Diego Regional Technology Alliance,” says Ilgaz. “Tyler has taught me so much, both personally and professionally. And I have more support from the San Diego business community than I thought I would ever get.”
Diversity is also important to her vision of entrepreneurship. Running Confirm Biosciences, while raising her son and reaching out to the community, is the fulfillment of a childhood dream. “I am very blessed,” she adds.
Zeynep Ilgaz
CEO, Confirm Biosciences
Age: 34
Education: Master’s in Business Administration from San Diego State University and Bosphorus University, Turkey
Best Place for a Business Lunch: Harry’s Bar & Grill on La Jolla Village Drive
Most Inspirational Business Book: Jack: Straight from the Gut by Jack Welch.
“No matter what type of business you own or are interested in, there is something in this book for everyone.”
Favorite Music To Work By: “Norah Jones is my ultimate favorite artist. Her music inspires me.”
Diversity in Design
When you run into Bennett Peji at lunch, most likely in Little Italy, chances are that he introduces you to the founder of a new theater production company. Or he invites you to a fund-raising event for a children’s dance organization. Or he may ask your opinions about recruiting new members for the city’s boards and commissions.
However, he’s not a politician. So what does Peji actually do for a living? In his own words, “district branding and architectural graphics.”
At his downtown design firm, he shows maps, sketches, pictures and graphs from his gig as master plan consultant of the Filipino Village in National City, the recent project that launched his passion for redesigning neighborhoods. The Filipino Village truly reflects the look and feel of this culture. With a purpose, Peji hired facilitators to ask the community about their vision for the area. Hundreds of people, from National City residents to business owners to schoolchildren, were gathered for input. The project is now positioned as an international destination, especially within the Filipino community.
Peji has since designed other district branding projects, such as the NTC Prom¬enade, the civic, arts and cultural center at Liberty Station in Point Loma, and the Asian Pacific Historic District downtown, south of Horton Plaza. He speaks with the intensity and focus of an evangelist when relating the discovery of unique aspects of history in this city. “Filipino, Chinese and Japanese people lived and worked together in this section of downtown in the 1920s. They were involved in occupations like laundry and fishing and commerce. Even though they have no history of living together in other cities, can you imagine Filipino, Chinese and Japanese families in the same neighborhood back then? They just had nowhere else to go in San Diego.”
Peji is committed to “making history” with his own work. He mentions that he wants his designs to be timeless, not trendy. For example, out of the 500 or so brand identities that he’s designed in the past 20 years, only one has changed. Although he started out as a graphic designer (his clients include The Scripps Research Institute, Hewlett Packard, the Kellogg School for Science & Technology and the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts), he feels that this new approach allows him to make greater contributions in the community.
After all, what’s the shelf life of a marketing brochure? Peji is turned on by “the built environment,” a phrase he uses to define structures like buildings, parks, bridges and courtyards. He believes that these structures can be designed into neighborhoods to instill a sense of community, by involving the stakeholders in the process.
Peji is now invited to speak in cities like São Paulo and Santa Fe about redesigning neighborhoods—he’s made 42 presentations in the past two years. He uses the catch phrase “form follows culture” to describe the approach of designing communities that connect heritage to people’s futures. He is passionate about involving different community voices in the neighborhood planning conversations.
.gif&contenttype=gif "Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C.")
Community activity is especially near and dear to Peji. Born in Manila, Philippines, he was raised in San Diego, similar to many other immigrants—without a sense of belonging and identity in the local neighborhood. He doesn’t want others to feel the same disconnect. Peji even goes so far as to link international communities through his design work, and maintains that there’s strength in numbers when people from ethnic backgrounds can come together as one. “Over the years,” he says, “members of my staff have been originally from Vietnam, Germany, Italy, Indonesia, China, Zimbabwe and Texas. My wife, Lilia, is from Mexico.”
Most importantly, his passion for history allows him to pass on the culture that he missed as a child. Says Peji, “Through my work, I’m preserving stories for our two daughters.”
Bennett Peji To Add Comments, suggest a Topic or join in the conversation you must register to be a part of it.
Owner, Peji Design
Age: 44
Education: The playgrounds of Barrio Logan, the canyons of Clairemont, University of California San Diego, San Diego State University, a summer at Harvard, and many amazing cultures around the world
Best Place for a Business Lunch: Quarter Kitchen, when they serve lunch on the rooftop deck of the Ivy Hotel
Most Inspirational Business Quote: “The function of art is to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see.” –Anais Nin
Favorite Music To Work By: “Most of us go to our grave with our music still inside of us.” –Unknown author
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