The Happiest Place on Earth? Kingston Technology Corp.
It must be the Grinch in me that prompted the question.
“Have we beaten this Kingston thing to death?” I asked my boss.
No way, he said.
People can’t get enough good news at Christmas, and the news doesn’t get much better than that coming out of Kingston Technology Corp., the Fountain Valley computer company that old-time Hollywood director Frank Capra would have loved.
Forget “It’s a Wonderful Life,” starring Jimmy Stewart.
How about, “It’s a Helluva Company,” starring John Tu and David Sun.
They founded Kingston nine years ago and announced at the office Christmas party last weekend that they’d be dispensing $100 million in current and future bonuses to their 523 employees. I’ve been at office Christmas parties where they frown if you have a third eggnog.
But Sun and Tu, both made immensely wealthy when they sold 80% of their company stock in September, apparently have this notion that corporate loyalty is a two-way street. You talk about putting your money where your mouth is.
Funny how these stories grow. Times reporter Greg Miller broke the story in the Sunday paper and by Monday morning, Kingston was a national story.
On Tuesday, I talked to my sister, who works for the phone company in St. Louis, and she said everyone in her office was talking about it. “It made such an impression on me that I can even tell you the name of the company. Kingston, right?” she said.
Maybe the company will become a household name. My sister said the buzz around her office revolved around the fact that Sun and Tu are Chinese-born. In a period in American business where many people express groundless fears about the influence of foreign-born corporate executives and Americans losing their jobs, “Here’s a wonderful comeback to that,” she said. But the more compelling conversation point, she said, “is that there are still people who do this kind of thing. I don’t care if they’re purple with green heads. This is something that swept the whole country because someone did an incredibly good deed.”
Not to play the rube, but isn’t it interesting that this act of largess was so newsworthy? Sure, the size of the bonus package--$40 million now and $60 million in the years ahead--was huge, but the philosophy behind it seems so elementary.
That is, the Kingston workers helped make it a company that yielded Sun and Tu $1.5 billion from the stock sale. So, after the founders became rich beyond all comprehension, why not give part of the windfall back to the employees?
Obviously, not all companies are situated like Kingston, which came along at a time when the computer memory industry was taking off. But the employees are already considered well paid and, by all the newspaper accounts, were satisfied workers. In other words, Sun and Tu didn’t need to hand out the bonuses to maintain a happy work force.
“It’s no surprise, because they are always so generous,” one employee told The Times’ Miller. “We don’t take it for granted, but that’s their philosophy.”
Just wondering. Has anyone checked with Disney employees since the Kingston announcement? In the same week that Sun and Tu rewarded all their employees for what they’d done, Disney rewarded Michael Ovitz for what he hadn’t done.
Ovitz, who joined Disney a year ago but left last week after everyone agreed he hadn’t done very much, got a severance package that reportedly was in the $90-million range. That’s the kind of corporate philosophy that the average American worker has come to know in the last 10 to 15 years--he knows there’s money out there to be had; he just knows he’s not getting it.
Sun and Tu announced, in effect: There’s money out there to be had, and you’re going to get it.
Kingston employees say they’ll spend their bonuses--reportedly from one to three times the amount of their annual salaries--on things like paying off mortgages, buying new homes or putting children through college.
It makes you wonder what Disney employees, just to pick a company out of thin air, could have done with $90 million.
Maybe I’m just full of the holiday spirit, but I’m not even jealous of the Kingston employees. More power to ‘em and God bless them one and all.
I just hope they realize that with their little windfall, they’ve forfeited for all time one of the most precious rights in the American workplace: the right to complain about our jobs.
Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.
