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Michael Krasny: Business
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Michael Krasny is host and senior editor of KQED-FM radio's award-winning Forum, a news and public affairs program covering politics, culture, the arts, health, business and technology. Krasny has served as the host of Forum since 1993.[1]
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"Michael will always be searching because he's never satisfied with routine," said Lowenstein, rabbi of Am Shalom, the synagogue in Glencoe to which Krasny belongs. "He has an incredibly creative mind. He searches for life's meaning in everything he sees. He's a businessman with a soul."
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In the preview issue of BizTech, Editor in Chief Lee Copeland spoke with CDW's founder, Michael Krasny, about what it took to launch an upstart computer reseller business back in 1985. No stranger to the workings of a small business, Krasny grew up watching his father grow his own automobile dealership in Buffalo Grove, Ill. Before launching CDW, Krasny cycled through a number of viable business "concepts," including a hardware store, a pre-PC, pre-Internet system for using touch-tone phones to get stock quotes and, not surprisingly, an automobile dealership. None of those ideas panned out. And when faced with getting a "real" job or making a business model work, Krasny happened to sell a used computer and actually made a couple hundred bucks profit on the transaction. "Then someone else came along and said he would have liked to buy it," Krasny recalls. "So I said 'I'll get another one.' I bought another computer and delivered it to him, and made another $200."
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Krasny grew CDW into a nimble market player by building relationships with IT department employees at small- to medium-sized businesses. In 1995, CDW remade itself into a direct-sales operation. Now a staff of more than 1,000 account representatives helps design custom setups for business customers, who make up over 96% of the company's sales. CDW representatives boast that orders made by 9 P.M. on a business day are usually shipped the next day from CDW's distribution center in Vernon Hills, Ill.
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Krasny realized early on that personal computers would be to productivity and communications what airplanes are to transportation and business. But Krasny ... understood that selling a variety of computer products would not be enough. He needed to build a unique corporate culture that would appeal to customers and coworkers alike.
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When he turned over the duties of CEO and chairman to John Edwardson in 2001, Mr. Krasny said he wanted to devote more time to his woodworking hobby. But with an estimated personal fortune of $1.6 billion that ranks 122nd on the Forbes 400, he still can make things happen in business.
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