GENE N. LANDRUM, PH.D.

Dr. Gene Landrum is an entrepreneur, an author, a professor and a marketing consultant. But chances are, your children recognize his works better than you do.
Instrumental in several international start-ups, two of which became $100-million enterprises, Dr. Landrum created the Chuck E. Cheese concept of family entertainment. He also developed the marketing and distribution plans for the Atari 2600 Video System.

They are surprising enterprises for someone who grew up as an only child in a conservative Ohio household. “I was taught to do it by the numbers,” he recalls. “The world was numbers and I bought into that.” He earned his bachelor’s from Tulane University and his master’s in business administration from West Virginia University. He played it by the book and became a successful businessman selling computers.

In 1969, a move to what ultimately became known as Silicon Valley in California changed his philosophy. The microprocessor had just been invented; it was the height of a world in transition. “Lo and behold, when I got there, everything I learned in business school was wrong. Silicon Valley was the epicenter of the world; they definitely didn’t do things by the numbers. The world, I discovered, was not digital, it was analog,” Dr. Landrum says.

He met the young Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and father of video games, and Bill Hewlett, one of the founders of the multinational Hewlett-Packard Company. “I learned leaders break the rules; I learned leaders are inveterate planners but operate amorphously, not digitally,” he says.

In 1990, Dr. Landrum moved to Naples, Fla., where he met Walden founders Bernard and Rita Turner. They encouraged him to pursue his doctorate. His dissertation on the “The Innovator Personality” opened new doors. “I never imagined I would earn a doctorate. If I would have never written my dissertation, I wouldn't have written and published eight books,” he says. The research he did for his dissertation led to the publication of his best-selling book, “Profiles of Genius."

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