   Robert Whisler, president of Kyocera America Inc., which employs about 650 people in San Diego.
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Robert Whisler recalls the day that Dave Grooms, a fellow salesman for the Silverman’s chain of men’s clothing stores, told him that he should not only be able to sell a three-piece corduroy suit to a customer, “but also the tie that goes with it, the shirt, the socks and everything else.”
Whisler followed Grooms in 1981 to a Kyocera sales office in Cupertino, career moves that led 19 years later to Whisler succeeding his mentor as president of Kyocera America Inc.
Although his background was in sales, Whisler, 51, says Kyocera’s “amoeba management system” helped him develop the financial savvy to run a company that employs about 650 people in San Diego and contracts with sister company Kyocera Mexicana for additional production line workers.
“The amoeba system means every operating unit has its own profit and loss, its own little business,” he explains. “Even a three-person sales office has an income in terms of shipments; has expenses, and has a bottom-line profit.”
Kyocera America has four major divisions. The metallized division manufactures “ceramic components for the RF (radio frequency) world like amplifiers for base stations for cell phones,” Whisler says. The “layered” division produces more complex ceramics “that go into anything from a microprocessor in a computer to radar in an F-22.” The company’s assembly division “takes the customer’s silicon chips and mounts them into a package.” A nickel- and gold-plating division enables electricity to be conducted through ceramic that otherwise insulates.
Whisler, a car enthusiast raised in Michigan, is excited about the possibilities of developing the U.S. automotive industry as an important KAI market. “We recently got our first order for a transmission control unit,” he says.
Like that three-piece corduroy suit, the transmission component is only the beginning of Whisler’s sales process. “The electronic content of cars is growing so fast,” he notes.
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