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Ronald Shaw, 68, is President and Chief Executive Officer of Pilot Pen Corporation of America, headquartered in Trumbull, Connecticut. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the parent company, Pilot Corporation, which is the oldest and largest manufacturer of writing instruments in Japan. He is one of only six Americans on the Board of Directors of any publicly held Japanese company. Mr. Shaw is also the author of Pilot Your Life, a motivational business book.
He began his business career in 1961 as a retail salesman for Bic Pen in Miami. He possessed a natural sales talent which he developed while working as a nightclub comedian, opening for entertainers like Rosemary Clooney, Dean Martin, Connie Francis and Liberace. By age 30, he became National Sales Manager at Bic, the youngest person to hold that position in the writing instruments industry.
Mr. Shaw joined Pilot Pen in 1975, when sales totaled only $1 million. By the end of his first year, sales doubled to $2 million. Under his leadership, sales have increased steadily and are now approaching $200 million. To accommodate its growth, Pilot built a corporate headquarters in Trumbull, Connecticut in 1983 and a major manufacturing and distribution center in Jacksonville, Florida in 1995, which has since been expanded to 270,000 square feet.
Under Mr. Shaw’s direction, Pilot has introduced a steady stream of new writing instruments and launched two successful new divisions: Advertising Specialties and New Business Development. The latter creates new products and sells them through licensing agreements with other companies. Its biggest success is the Magna Doodle, a child’s educational drawing toy that ranks among the top ten toys in the U.S. market.
The company is the title sponsor of Pilot Pen Tennis, a prestigious combined USTA Event attracting the world’s top players, held every August in Connecticut and broadcast on network television in 140 countries.
Mr. Shaw’s duties have taken him to Japan 68 times. He has become an authority on Japanese-American relations, and he lectures often on trade, cultural and management differences between the two nations. He has appeared on ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, CNN’s Larry King Live, CNBC and has been profiled on CNN’s Pinnacle and Business Unusual shows. He has also been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, Business Week, Fortune, Forbes and on CBS Radio.
Mr. Shaw is active in many industry and civic organizations at the national and local levels. He speaks against bigotry and discrimination at fund-raising events for the Anti-Defamation League.
He and his wife, Phyllis, reside in Woodbridge, CT and Aventura, FL. They have three children and five grandchildren. | 