Head Monster

By Amanda Bower

Noel Lee's career is as colorful as his many sports cars: he quit a job in nuclear research to play folk rock before deciding in 1979 to make quality speaker wire. The CEO of Monster Cable spoke with TIME's AMANDA BOWER about how he built a company on a product that stores used to give away, as well as the wireless revolution and the NFL.

TIME Your business card says "The Head Monster." Do other CEOs take you seriously?

LEE They love it. They wish they had that kind of creativity in their own company.

TIME No one needs the things you sell. How do you overcome that obstacle?

LEE We're totally focused on making our retailers successful, letting them make money on us, letting salespeople make money on us. We focus a lot on sales training. Nobody wants to buy cables. Cables are kind of unromantic. You have to teach consumers why they should have them. Otherwise they can't get the best sound, they can't get the best picture.

TIME What's your response to the wireless revolution?

LEE In the future, the consumer is going to be able to move high-definition audio and high-definition video around the house, to many different sets, very easily. And that's one of the things that we're going to be providing wireless products for. But you'll always need cables for the foreseeable future for close connections.

TIME What's the next thing to get the Monster name on it?

LEE If you want to hear music come to life, you want to hear it in full surround sound-- Monster Music. We're doing a very special project [with the band 3 Doors Down]. We're doing a live album. When you play this DVD, you get your choice: you can be in the audience, or you can be onstage. The nice thing for the industry is that you can't download a surround-sound experience.

TIME You have a neurodegenerative disease but are still in charge of product development, marketing and sales. Tell us about your work ethic.

LEE I've got my Segway. I don't let it bother me. People have got to help me walk here and there, but they don't think of it as a limitation because I don't. You could also say the same thing about my ethnic background--being Asian, Chinese, in what is mainly a Caucasian world of business. I pretend it isn't there. The work-ethic part, you've got to be passionate about what you do and instill that passion. I don't expect people to do things I don't do myself. If I'm traveling coach, working 24/7, working on the weekends, and I'm asking them to do a weekend, they don't say, "Noel's on vacation most of the time. He's an absentee boss." I'm there in the trenches with all of them, working to put it together piece by piece.

TIME Have you moved some production offshore?

LEE We have to make component parts offshore. There's no getting around it. But the assembly, the quality control, the fact that we want to be more responsible to the marketplace--we do a lot of that in-house, which we're pretty proud of.

TIME You haven't missed a 49ers home game since winning the naming rights to Monster Park, but I hear you're not exactly a huge football fan.

LEE I wasn't ever a sports fan. I watched the Super Bowl once a year, and that's it. But I'm a big fan, just being there, getting to know the sport, to know the players.

TIME So, you didn't love the sport; you don't have any advertising at the park. Why pony up $6 million for naming rights?

LEE It was a statement for Asian-American business, and half of it went to help the city.