ORANGE COUNTY STYLE : THE NEW BOSSES : Low-key executives keep morale and profits high by balancing work and leisure

Executive work style in Orange County: Fast, flexible and entrepreneurial. Without a lot of time-honored tradition to slow the pace. A personal stamp is welcome, risk-taking accepted, diversity valued. And there’s room at the top for more than Type-A bosses. Successful CEOs in the county are proving what management psychologists have been theorizing for years: The road to long-term profit is not necessarily paved with open-ended stress. Here, men and women who have earned national and international recognition for their on-the-job achievements find time to strike a wholesome balance.

For many executives--such as Tom Lingo, who, with wife Pat, runs a multimillion-dollar swimwear house--good management doesn’t mean merely comparing this year’s balance sheet with last year’s. It means keeping enthusiasm--and thus production and profits--high. “We work hard so we can play hard,” Lingo explains.

Balance takes another form for executives such as banker-philanthropist Tim Strader. He hires the right people, then spends his time looking at the big picture.

“Work is a way to enjoy life, not a way of life,” says Augie Nieto, an under-30 entrepreneur turned millionaire.

Like Nieto, other members of the new breed of Orange County executive toil intensively, yet agree that knowing when to stop is as critical as knowing when to plunge in. Though they don’t try to pass off work as all fun and games, they focus on its rewards, rather than its sacrifices.

Some businesses use help-wanted ads when they have jobs to fill. Others retain employment agencies. But Tom and Pat Lingo, the owners of Raisins, call on their friends, or friends of friends, whenever their San Juan Capistrano women’s swimwear company has an opening.

And since it’s friends who are on the payroll, the Lingos say, they like to treat their 37 employees like family.

For example, every winter the couple takes the entire Raisins staff to Park City, Utah, for a week of skiing. Later in the year, they sponsor Raisins’ annual day-long bike ride from San Juan Capistrano to Oceanside and top off the festivities with a banquet.

Executives of the firm, several of whom have been the Lingos’ confidants for more than a decade, frequently vacation with their bosses on the Lingo yacht, anchored at La Paz, Baja California. They are also treated to a weeklong stay at the prestigious Cooper Clinic in Dallas for fitness and stress evaluations.

The Lingos rely on their younger women employees, whom they consider “profile Raisins’ customers,” to help them make design selections for their annual collections. “This is valuable to us and valuable to their self-esteem,” says Pat Lingo, 40, Raisins’ president and chief designer. “Essentially we have very low turnover on the workforce.

“At Raisins we’re surrounded by friends. Socially, we don’t do anything outside our family or the company. In fact, we’re not well known outside the company.”

No matter, the Raisins label is .

Raisins’ pastel colors and uninhibited graphics spell beach in any language and are copied the world over. In the 14 years since Pat Lingo started sewing bikinis from used Hawaiian shirts in her Laguna Beach apartment, the company has mushroomed into a $10-million-a-year business, with a women’s swimwear and sportswear line aimed exclusively at the boutique market.

To maintain its image as an innovator and to avoid being controlled by department stores, Raisins has turned down requests from giant retailers to carry its line, selling instead to about 1,600 U.S. speciality shops.

Although the firm makes its home amid the sun, surf and sand of Orange County, the Lingos say they treat the beachwear business as serious work.

“Outsiders have an image that Orange County people don’t work--that they just lie around on the beach. It couldn’t be further from the truth,” Pat Lingo says. “And you can imagine what they think when we say we’re an Orange County swimsuit firm.”

To stay on top in the “fun-fun-fun” beachwear business, the Lingos routinely work 60 hours a week. In May and June, when they’re putting the finishing touches on the following summer’s line, the couple put in 12-hour days, seven days a week.

Still, the Lingos, who have live-in help with household chores and child care, say they are not workaholics.

“We work hard so we can play hard,” says Tom Lingo, 44, who sold a chain of six Orange County real estate offices to join Raisins in 1982. “We’re outdoors people.”

Playtime consists of sports and recreation-oriented vacations with their children, Meagan, 9, and Matt, 7--on the yacht, in Utah or camping in the mountains. Vacations are so important to the family that last year the couple transferred the children from a private school to take advantage of the three-week vacations every nine weeks at the local public school, which is on a year-round schedule.

Skiing, swimming, snorkeling, camping, biking and other sports are but part of the Lingos’ quest for a healthy life style. At home, they’ve cut fats from their diet, reduced alcohol consumption and maintained a regular exercise regimen.

Pat Lingo, who still wears Raisins’ tiny Lycra bikinis, says that keeping her trim figure is an important motivation. “I wouldn’t be happy with myself if I couldn’t wear the life style I produce,” she says. “I can’t imagine doing a job I couldn’t relate to.”

Tom Lingo sums up the couple’s approach to work as “having fun and making money. That’s our commitment to ourselves and our employees.”

Fresh out of college, already $30,000 in debt on a business deal, 23-year-old Augustine Nieto took the gamble of his life. He had borrowed the money to buy into an obscure company that made an unproven computerized exercise bicycle. When customers failed to see what he saw as the bike’s potential, Nieto decided to up the ante with $100,000 sales promotion.

In a 1981 move that he now describes as a desperation gimmick, Nieto traveled around the country and personally delivered a free Lifecycle to the presidents of the nation’s 25 largest health clubs. The gambit paid off, and by the end of that year, Lifecycle sales had jumped from fewer than 500 to more than 1,000 a year.

“Once people accept a $3,000 bike from you, you know they will accept your phone call,” says Nieto, now president of Life Fitness, a subsidiary of Bally Corp., the giant gaming and leisure company. “They felt obligated to the product.”

That Nieto’s business became part of the multibillion-dollar Bally conglomerate is testimony to his marketing savvy.

Just three years after putting Lifecycles on solid footing, Nieto persuaded Bally to buy his company and allow him to stay on to operate it. Although the purchase price was never officially divulged, Nieto reportedly pocketed $5 million on the deal.

“Augie lives to sell,” says Bryan Andrus, a former college classmate of Nieto who now works for Life Fitness in Chicago. “And he has an incredible, intuitive feel for how to do it.”

That trait has served Nieto well. Still four months shy of his 30th birthday, he lives in a $1.1-million house on the tip of Newport Isle with his wife, Karin, a 28-year-old doctoral candidate in microsoil biology, and their 21-month-old son, Austin.

“This is his dream come true,” says Karin, who met Augie when they were both freshmen at the Claremont Colleges in Claremont. “He has his house, his Porsche and his son.”

Although Nieto doesn’t like to dwell on his material success, he readily admits that his goal from the time he was a youngster in Anaheim was to become a millionaire before he was 30. Now that he’s achieved it, Nieto says, money is no longer his primary motivator.

“I’m successful enough that I don’t have to work,” he says. “And what maintains my sanity is knowing that at any time I can walk. So now it’s fun.”

Part of the enjoyment for Nieto has been to build a company to operate on his credo that work “is a way to enjoy life, not a way of life.”

He can no longer personally manage each department of his rapidly growing company--since 1981 the firm has sold about 100,000 bikes and the has grown from 45 to nearly 200--so Nieto says his style is to “hire the right people, pay them very well, offer performance bonuses and then under-manage them.” In many cases, he says, his department managers have years of specialized experience that he can’t begin to rival.

“I’m just their touchstone,” he says. “They are mainly on their own.”

Hours at the Irvine plant are flexible, and white-collar employees are free to come and go as their duties dictate. Even assembly-line workers are not required to punch a time card. “We use the peer-pressure system,” he explains. “It encourages loyalty, self-discipline and, ultimately, greater productivity.”

Another part of the fun for Nieto is that his job allows him to indulge his passion for exercise. At six feet and 175 pounds and with movie-star looks, Nieto is a living advertisement for his products. He intends to keep it that way.

Nieto spends between two and three hours exercising every day: an hour’s run around Newport Beach and weight-lifting in the morning; an hour’s ride on the Lifecycle (at level 12, the most challenging) at noon, and another 30 minutes or more at night, lifting weights or rowing.

“Workaholics don’t make it in this life,” Nieto says. “You have to have a happy home life.”

Nieto comes home by 7. He has given up weekend work to devote the two days to family, which includes his father and four brothers and sisters in Orange County.

Though he just won a 2 1/2-year extension on his contract with Bally, Nieto says he has no interest in climbing the corporate ladder. In fact, he says, his contract specifies that he may not be transferred from California.

As for the future, Nieto remains undecided.

The lure of real estate, which he studied while earning his college degree in economics, remains strong. In his spare time, Nieto has invested in several new residential projects in inland Southern California.

“Real estate was my hedge against this (exercise) industry not working,” says Nieto, who has had a real estate broker’s license since 1978. “Now it’s a hobby. But who knows about later?

“I thrive on diversity and I’m a risk taker. Now the goal is to create some more money for the risk side of my budget--so I can take even bigger risks.”

In another generation, Timothy Strader might have been a politician--a power broker who solves problems, builds institutions, erects monuments. Instead, the 49-year-old lawyer is into land development, banking and community fund raising.

“I like to be involved in creating projects,” says Strader, founder of the Legacy Cos., an Irvine real estate development, financing and management company, and chairman of Commerce-Bank in Newport Beach.

“I really believe in leaving future generations a better world. And, as corny as it sounds, that’s why I named my company Legacy.”

Since moving to Orange County in the late 1960s to accept an entry-level attorney’s job in the county counsel’s office, Strader has steadily climbed the social, political and financial ladder. He has become a community leader, entering the realm of such prominent millionaire mega-developers and philanthropists as William Lyon, Donald Koll, Henry Segerstrom and Donald Bren.

His first major move into the Orange County power structure came in 1972, when he became executive vice president, a member of the board of directors and a partner in Koll Co., one of the county’s major office-building developers. Strader left in 1983 to try on his own what he had been doing for Koll: building and leasing office complexes.

Through connections made at Koll, Strader became part of the elite group of business leaders who oversaw construction of the Orange County Performing Arts Center, where he was on the board of trustees for eight years, including two years as president and chief executive office.

In addition, he has devoted substantial time and money to UC Irvine, the Republican Party, the Irvine Community Foundation, the Irvine Industrial League, and most recently, Santa Margarita Catholic High School, which opened in September.

“He has made a great difference to us,” says John R. Miltner, UCI’s vice chancellor for university advancement. “He has promoted the university within the community and brought it tremendous exposure.”

Strader says he is able to juggle his banking, development and philanthropic activities by focusing on the problems he has the expertise to solve.

“I believe that you hire the best people, delegate to them the responsibility and authority to handle a situation and then be available as problems arise. I’m a big-picture guy who gets involved in details only if there is a problem. Otherwise I stay away.”

Strader says, for example, that of the 50-odd hours he spends each week on professional and volunteer activities, only five are devoted to his duties as chairman of Commerce Bank. “It’s a mature operation,” he says of the 10-year-old institution. “It doesn’t need me as much as it did before.”

In general, Strader says, he doesn’t have to work as hard as he used to. The difference, he explains, is experience and maturity. “After 15 years in the business, I have probably seen every kind of process or problem you can imagine in land development. So what would take a rookie two or three weeks might take me 15 minutes.”

Perhaps that is why, despite his varied interests and fragmented responsibilities, Strader’s schedule is remarkably calm.

He rises at 6:30 a.m. to ride his exercise bike and watch the morning news. By 8:30, he is at his office in a new 250,000-square-foot complex Legacy built last year near John Wayne Airport.

Most days, Strader schedules a lunch oriented to philanthropy or business at one of two exclusive clubs to which he belongs: Big Canyon Country Club in Newport Beach and the Center Club, the members-only dining room near the Performing Arts Center, where he is on the food committee and heads the wine committee.

“They are more formal situations, and I enjoy formality,” Strader says. “Besides, there’s no worry about reservations; I can always get in.”

Most of the day, he says, is spent on the phone, gathering information, answering questions, solving problems. He usually leaves the office at 5 p.m.--earlier if he wants to catch his youngest son’s Little League game. Prolonged out-of-town travel is largely an activity of the past, now that he does not represent a company with distant developments.

Observers say Strader’s upbeat attitude helps him get the job done. “He has a very focused style,” says UCI’s Miltner. “He doesn’t get bogged down in detail. That also means that he doesn’t suffer fools well or people who simply meander around.

Strader could have plenty of time for his Rolls-Royce, his yacht or golfing, but his interests are elsewhere: “My hobby is being involved in philanthropic activities. That’s what makes me happy.”

What might seem to be a purely social dinner party with wife, Susan, and a few other couples can lead to a contribution to one of Strader’s favorite philanthropies. Observes Miltner: “The social, cultural, business and philanthropy activities all have a purpose. It’s not simply serendipity.”

Dick Pick, a computer whiz from Irvine, hung upside down in inversion boots to oblige photographers from a high-tech magazine. For Business Week, he posed with a poster-size baby photo of himself, retouched with a mustache.

But that was the old Dick Pick, the man who would stroll into work at his company, Pick Systems, wearing jeans and sandals. The one who seemed not to care how many businesses bought his revolutionary computer operating system, with data encoding and tracking features. The Dick Pick who would rather be known as a mad scientist with a physics degree from UC Berkeley than a savvy businessman.

That Dick Pick has been replaced by a man who sports a dark suit, tie and monogrammed shirt and who delights in talking about his latest sales strategy or marketing triumph.

What happened?

Five years ago, Dick Pick married Barbara Young.

Telling why he started wearing a suit and tie to work, Pick remembers how his new wife had been hounding him to look more like a businessman and less like some free-spirited computer techie. Finally, he says, Young found a picture of a scruffy and bearded Steve Wozniak, the Apple Computer co-founder and behind-the-scenes engineering genius whose image spelled “computer nerd,” not “high-tech businessman.”

Then, Pick recalls, “she asked if I would buy a computer from someone who looked like that. That’s all it took.”

Pick’s bride did not confine her advice to comments about his wardrobe. She began applying the hard-driving business skills she had honed as the owner of a Newport Beach escrow company to her husband’s firm.

Young, whose training taught her how to read and enforce contracts, says her primary contribution to Pick Systems is organizational, imposing structure on an otherwise free-form operation. But Pick, 49, credits her with possibly saving his business by actively enforcing his licensing agreements with users and aggressively suing imitators and unauthorized users.

“People were ripping me off right and left,” he says. “I could have lost it all if it hadn’t been for Barbara.”

Insiders say that Young’s involvement in the company triggered a minor revolt among licensees and employees a few years ago, prompting her to give up her office at Pick headquarters and considerably reduce her visibility there. These days, she says, her role is an “overview” one.

“I’m his personal data-management system,” she says. “It’s a fun way of doing things.”

The results of Pick’s metamorphosis from laid-back computer guru to straight-arrow executive have already shown up on the bottom line. The company is generating sales of nearly $20 million annually, about double the level of several years ago.

Still, among operating systems--the internal programs that determine how a computer organizes the information it holds--the Pick system has a long way to go to be considered anything but a minor player in an industry dominated by AT&T;, IBM and Microsoft.

But Pick, who has earned accolades for the power his system gives computers, keeps trying.

For him, the fun--and the challenge--comes in system design. For most of the last eight years, he has been working on a comprehensive revision of the computer operating system that bears his name. The task is enormous and at times has assumed Sisyphean proportions.

The revised Pick Operating System will retain all the database management features of the original system--such as cross-referenced inventory and billing systems--that have made the Pick system a “must-have” for nearly 1 million users. It will add to these features new, generic-application software, such as word-processing and accounting programs. The new Pick system is designed to have broader appeal to businesses.

“I can see how the program should work but only in a broad philosophical sense,” Pick says of the remaining unresolved questions. “But at least I know that I can solve those problems because I’m running my own company on the new program now, and it’s working. ... I know it’s taken longer than I ever thought, but if it were easy someone else would have beaten me to it.”

On most days Pick, an admitted night owl, arrives at the office at 9:30 a.m. after a leisurely breakfast at his Newport Beach home. Awaiting him at his cluttered desk is the system-revision project.

While Pick searches for the answers to the lingering program problems, his staff of 35 executes his orders for the company’s daily operations. But when it comes to strategy and problem-solving, Pick turns to Young.

“Together we’re better as a team than if we did the job individually,” he says.