Out of the Rat Race

Cruising along a rainy, northern New Jersey stretch of U.S. 1 in 1987, Gene Landrum listened to the words coming from his brand-new Cadillac's cassette deck and made a snap decision. The high-tech startup specialist had just signed a five-year contract as a top-level executive, but he suddenly knew he would quit the new job and start living the life he wanted.

"It was a PBS tape of Wayne Dyer, and he asked what you'd do if you had six months to live," says Landrum, whose career highlights include the launch of Atari and the creation of the Chuck E. Cheese chain of pizza parlors. "And then he said, 'Nobody guarantees you six months, six weeks or six days.' So the next week I walked into the office and resigned."

Landrum's decision placed him on a new path as educator, business consultant, guest lecturer and motivational author. Soon after moving to Naples in 1988, Landrum began work on a Ph.D. from Walden University. Dissertation research into the lives of highly successful figures like Henry Ford, Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) and Walt Disney led to Landrum's first published book.

Currently a business professor at International College in Naples, Landrum has written 10 books on entrepreneurship and the creative personality over the past 12 years. He has also made countless appearances on television and radio talk shows.

"Gene's experience gives him unique insight into how people behave, and all of his research validates that," says Don Forrer, director of the Master of Business Administration program at International College. "He brings that experience to the classroom and to his books, and he can really make it all come alive. He can deliver because he's so dynamic, and he practices what he preaches."

"I've never thought of myself as inspirational, but I talk and write about inspirational people," says Landrum. "I've written 10 books on one subject, looking at lots of data, trying to find out what makes intriguing people tick. What I've found is that geniuses are different, that they see the big picture, and that the textbooks are wrong." (See Landrum's Kinesthetic Karma is Contagious, p. 54.)

If not inspirational, the silver-haired 69-year-old has-to say the least-an infectious energy that motivates. An avid skier and serious golfer who won the over-65 Naples city tennis championship last spring, Landrum's gregarious optimism emerges when he speaks about his work. Fond of motivational aphorisms, he often punctuates the catchy sayings with a resounding 'Baby!' ("If you want to change, you've got to stop being who you are, baby!")

The only child of a single mother, Landrum has been transforming his own life from the beginning. His mother was "something of a wild child herself," says Landrum, and he spent most of his youth in an Ohio military academy before attending Tulane University. That upbringing made him independent and responsible at a young age, he says, but he was also an introvert who often escaped into fantasy and books.

Landrum's evolution as a creative innovator began during the early 1970s. He left graduate school at West Virginia University and found work in Silicon Valley. There he observed the mindset and methods of people like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of Apple Computer. In that environment, Landrum could see that his own creative side had more potential than any formal degree.

"Silicon Valley changed my life," says Landrum. "It was the epicenter of the universe, where the

integrated circuit started, video games, the Internet. The people I met told me that what I learned in grad school-do it by the numbers, follow the models-is the wrong stuff. Those guys weren't doing it by the numbers; they were changing the world."

One of those guys was Nolan Bushnell. The inventor of Pong, Bushnell has been called the father of the video-game industry. When he first met Landrum, Bushnell sensed qualities that could help his fledgling enterprise, Atari, take flight.

"I initially hired Gene to help with business development at Atari," says Bushnell, currently chief executive officer of uWink Entertainment Systems, a software company in Los Angeles. "He was a very creative, smart and competent guy. He also became part of the founding team at Chuck E. Cheese and deserves a lot of credit for that concept."

Once the wild success of video games was well-established, Bushnell wanted to combine games and animatronics with food to create a high-tech but family-friendly entertainment center. To flesh out the details, he turned to Landrum.

"Basically, I came up with the idea of the games and combining it with animals, but he decided on the selection of pizza and started all the business operations," explains Bushnell. "Gene was the guy who really put Chuck E. Cheese together on the corporate level, and he was president of the company for the first three or four years."

Through a series of creative decisions, Landrum honed Bushnell's initial concept into a groundbreaking marketing phenomenon. He decided on pizza so customers could move around the restaurant while eating. He also decided to use a rat as the chain's mascot and gave that rat a name-Chuck E. Cheese.

"Once we opened six or seven restaurants, we decided to do a joint venture with Holiday Inn," says Landrum. "I met with one of their people and he said, 'Hold on a minute, we can't have a giant rat walking around a restaurant.' I said, 'We do have a rat, and in fact he's doing pretty well for himself.'"

In June, Chuck E. Cheese Enter­tainment opened its 500th franchise. Approaching its 30th year, the chain is still a leading player in the family-entertainment sector of the restaurant industry with more than $700 million in 2004 revenues.

"The idea of entertainment being central to eating was really proven by the concept of Chuck E. Cheese," says Rick Hendrie, a food service marketing analyst and chief executive officer of LINK Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. "People like to be part of the experience, to have the sense that they're not just passive players. Combining pizza-the No. 1 or No. 2 food in America-with games and animatronics made it a fun place to go in 1977, and it's still a fun place to go today."

Hendrie once served as a consultant for a competing chain, Showtime Pizza, which merged with Chuck E. Cheese in 1980. Though pizza and video games seem like an obvious pairing today, he attributes the longevity of Chuck E. Cheese to a more subtle dynamic.

"Chuck E. Cheese has been around a long time, I think, because it also appeals to adults," says Hendrie. "There is something subversive about the place. The rat is a very interesting kind of icon, part of a mindset that's out of the mainstream."

A subversively inspired attitude is what makes the world's most successful people great, says Landrum, who investigates that mindset in all of his books. His latest book, The Superman Syndrome, includes profiles of Joseph Campbell, Coco Chanel, Ayn Rand and Isadora Duncan. A book that will be released in 2006 examines sports figures including Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods and Muhammad Ali.

"Those people are not normal," says Landrum. "Normal success comes from normal people. Abnormal success comes from abnormal people, people with vision, risk taking. Sometimes it takes a person who's not adapting or conforming, and I've been trying to let people know it's OK to be unique."