Blindness and Entrepreneurial Vision

An excerpt from Tough Things First by Guest Author Ray Zinn

Of all bodily senses, eyesight is the most essential. I lost mine shortly before Micrel issued its initial public offering.

I was in London on a leg of our IPO roadshow, where Micrel senior management was engaging investors in the last months before we went public. We were in a restaurant when it started. The menu appeared to have little pieces missing out of it, though everything around it looked right. At first I thought the menu had a printing quality error. I asked the guy seated next to me how his menu looked, and he said it was fine. So I took his menu, and it looked just as poorly printed as mine had.

I muddled through ordering dinner, and wrote off the experience as a transient affair. But the next morning when I faced the mirror to shave, my eyesight was foggy. As with the disjointed menu, what was in the center of my field of view was haywire, though the periphery was still working well enough. At first I wiped the mirror off, thinking that something was wrong with the glass – perhaps that an anti-fog coating was not evenly applied. When wiping away non-existent steam didn’t work, I had my first indication that my eyes were the problem.

It was retinal vein occlusion, and this was not my first encounter with it. This “stroke in the eye,” one that destroys tissues – in this case the light-sensing tissues on the retina – by robbing them of blood supply, took away a good deal of my left eye vision in 1968. Perhaps it was the limited scientific knowledge of the era, but doctors told me that it was highly unlikely that I would experience retinal vein occlusion in my right eye, much less a quarter of a century later. Even with my left eye hampered, I drove, piloted airplanes, created and grew Micrel to an IPO-worthy enterprise. My right eye compensated, testing at 20/15 in the same year it too had the eyeball’s equivalent of a hemorrhagic stroke.

I stubbornly assumed that this was a transient condition, until it wasn’t. I needed to know what was happening because it had an immediate impact on Micrel, our IPO, and thus our employees. I called home to find the right specialists, then flew back, still making business stops in Minneapolis and Denver. All the while my eyesight got worse and worse. By the time I arrived home in Silicon Valley, my eyesight had deteriorated to about 20/100, and it dropped to 20/400 within another week.

Time being a patient physician, my eyesight has returned to 20/150. I ride to work with other people, gave up flying, and have employed technology to compensate for the significant loss of the most important of bodily senses.

But none of this slowed down the Micrel IPO.

Impaired eyesight does not impair entrepreneurial vision. The entrepreneur cannot see everything all at once, but develops the discipline to see what needs to be seen in the context that keeps the brain fully informed at all times. This requires acquiring the discipline to focus intently, filter the unnecessary and maintain the correct perspective.

Practicality confronts every entrepreneur. But entrepreneurs are not entirely practical people. It has been said that nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable person; but more accurately, things happen when someone has the vision, adopts guiding principles, earns knowledge, develops wisdom and applies it to get around barriers. Practicality is merely another obstacle turned into a challenge. People told me the practical thing to do in 1994 was to resign, to pass leadership of Micrel to a fully sighted person. But I started Micrel with a vision, and what other people thought was the practical thing to do was not practical at all. It meant abandoning my company, my employees, my industry, my dream, my vision.

That all started in November of 1994. Two decades later, my eyesight remains limited, but my vision has improved.

Raymond D. “Ray” Zinn is an inventor, entrepreneur, and the longest serving CEO of a publicly traded company in Silicon Valley. He is best known for creating and selling the first Wafer Stepper (an industry standard piece of semiconductor manufacturing equipment), and for co-founding semiconductor company, Micrel (acquired by Microchip in 2015), which provides essential components for smartphones, consumer electronics and enterprise networks. He served as Chief Executive Officer, Chairman of its Board of Directors, and President since Micrel’s inception in 1978 until his retirement in August 2015. Zinn’s philosophy on people, servant leadership, humanistic management and the ethics of corporate culture are credited with Micrel’s nearly unbroken profitability.

Zinn also holds over 20 patents for semiconductor design. A proud great-grandfather, he is actively-retired and mentoring entrepreneurs. More info can be found on Zinn’s social media pages: Linked In (https://www.linkedin.com/in/rayzinn) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/Ray_Zinn_) and at ToughThingsFirst.com.

His new book, Tough Things First (McGraw Hill), will be available on November 3, 2015 and is available for pre-order at ToughThingsFirst.com, Amazon and other fine booksellers until its release.