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Introduction
I won't bore you with my childhood stories. Here are the headlines:
- Born on August 11th in 1942 in the small town of Elgin, Illinois
- Graduated from Rochelle (Illinois) Township High School in 1960
- Graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 1964
- Left law school in April of 1965 to serve as a crew member on a square-rigged sailing ship captained by Alan Villiers (YouTube video of this voyage)
- Worked as a stunt man on the movie Hawaii, staring Julie Andrews, Max von Sydow, Richard Harris, and Gene Hackman (YouTube video of filming)
- Received an appointment as a U.S. Naval officer in 1966
- Served on the USS Hopewell (DD-681) off the coast of Viet Nam
- Served as Executive Officer and Navagator of the USS Apache (ATF-67) during the Scorpion Phase II Operation (see YouTube video), during which we spent a year away from home while investigating the loss of the submarine USS Scorpion. The Apache towed the floating drydock USS Whitesands, which in turn served as the mother ship for the bathyscaphe USS Trieste. We towed the Whitesands/ Trieste from San Diego, California, through the Panama Canal, (see YouTube video) to the Azores islands (see YouTube video) and back, the longest single towing operation in U.S. Navy history (see YouTube video).
- Worked
as an electrical engineer for ITE Circuit Breaker Co. and for Thermon
Manufacturing Co. while attending law school at night in Houston, Texas
- Graduated cum laude from the University of Houston Law School in August 1972
- Passed the Texas State Bar Examination and was sworn into the Texas State Bar in September 1972
- Practiced law in Houston, Texas as a partner in the firm of McAninch & Hagerty
My Decision to Leave the Active Practice of Law
I am often asked why I left the active practice of law. (I still maintain my license before the Texas State Bar.)
The answer is quite simple. I had come to the practice of law with
ideas of changing the world, but I became disillusioned when I realized
that everyone cannot afford the sometimes high price of justice.
Although my practice dealt primarily with business and real estate
matters, the time I spent working with clients who came from socially
and economically disadvantaged situations convinced me that before
people could change their lives, they first must change their attitudes
about life. Thus began my search for ways to help people discover their
own potential for personal and financial growth.
Success, Inc.
After
leaving the practice of law, I became involved with several network
marketing companies. I was the president of one of these companies,
Success, Inc. This company was the vehicle my business partners and I
used to market sales training and marketing courses to companies who
used the network marketing sales model.
Under the Success, Inc. label, I wrote, recorded, and sold thousands of
cassette tapes covering topics such as:
- Goal Setting
- How To Master Direct Sales
- Freedom Now!
- Introduction to Personal Computers
- Self Confidence
- The Art of Becoming an Entrepreneur
During my time with Success, Inc., I appeared before tens of
thousands of people giving keynote speeches and workshops.
The National Speakers Association's most coveted award, "the Cavett,"
is named after its founder, Cavett Robert. Until his death in 1997,
most people called him the dean of public speakers. Here is what he had
to say about me when we worked together in the 1980s:
Larry Hagerty is one of the most outstanding speakers I
have ever been privileged to hear. Not only is he qualified by
experience for his great message, but he presents his ideas in a most
enjoyable and attractive style.
Dynasty Computer Corporation
In late 1979, I founded Dynasty Computer Corporation. Dynasty was the
first network marketing company to exclusively carry the then new home
computers. This was a couple of years before IBM brought out their
first PC.
Begun in my home with an investment of only a few thousand dollars, our
gross sales in our first full calendar year exceeded one million
dollars. Paltry by today's standards, this was big money in 1980 when
few people had any reason to want a computer in their home. The big
names in the world of micro computing back then were VisiCalc, IMSAI,
WordStar, Compuserve and the like. The hot chip was the Z-80A, as Intel
had only introduced the 8080 a few years earlier. If, as some say, the
birth of the personal computer industry came about in 1980 with the
introduction of the Intel chip, then it was an auspicious year indeed
in which to begin a computer company. Unfortunately, Dynasty was on the
Z-80/CPM bandwagon. None of us early pioneers in the industry could
foresee what was about to happen the following year, when IBM
introduced its first PC. Even though our company wasn't one of the
survivors of the personal computer revolution, I would not trade that
experience for anything. To have been there at the beginning of what
has led us to today's Internet-connected world was worth more than any
possible financial rewards that failed to materialize.
During its five years of life, Dynasty received a great deal of
notoriety in the press. In addition to receiving a page one mention in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine had this to say about us in their May 23, 1983 edition:
[Hagerty] also ran a sales training company but wanted to
get into the computer business, so he combined his interests and
founded Dynasty, a company that emphasizes the "personal" in personal
computers. Hagerty, 40, already has 3,000 salespeople selling his
machines . . .
Dynasty is not to be taken lightly. Hagerty, who flies hot air balloons
in his spare time "to get away from high technology," started the
company in 1980. During his [sic] first year Dynasty did over $1
million in business, and he is expanding rapidly enough to require a
sales force of 5,000 people in 17 states by year's end.
A few months later, Popular Computing had this to say about Dynasty Computer Corporation:
The company's tone is set by President Lawrence Hagerty, a
mega-achiever who flies hot-air balloons for recreation and who, along
with authors John Naisbitt (Megatrends) and Marilyn Ferguson (The
Aquarian Conspiracy), airs his views about '80s culture and business
trends in the prestigious Tarrytown Group. Hagerty's main achievement
at Dynasty has been his aggressive assault on some of the Lone Star
State's most powerful corporations: Texas Instruments, Radio Shack, and
even Southwestern Bell.
I must admit, those were exciting times, but the year of that Forbes
article, 1983, was to be Dynasty's final year. Like Osborn Computers,
which at one time held the record as the fastest growing company in
America, Dynasty succumbed to the tsunami of IBM's marketing machine.
My Years With GTE . . . . . working undercover 
During
the late 1980s and most of the 1990s I worked for what was then the
nation's third largest local telephone company, GTE. The division in
which I worked was the Data Services division in Tampa, Florida. At GTE
Data Services I served in various positions including technical writer, multimedia software developer, Internet & Java "evangelist,"
and product manager for an Internet security product line. At the time
I left GTE I held the position of Group Marketing Manager for a suite
of data center and Internet product lines.
In 1996 I became a founding member of GTE's original Internet/Java
Development Group. As this organization started up just months after
Sun Microsystems' introduction of Java Technology (tm), one of our
primary functions was to promote this new technology both within and
outside of GTE. Over the next several years I spoke on GTE's behalf
promoting the now commercial Internet and the Java programming
language. These presentations were made at annual conferences in
London, Amsterdam, Lisbon, and throughout the United States at
conferences such as JavaOne and the Zona Research Zonathons.
In 1997, GTE acquired BBN, the company that
built the first segment of the Internet, ARPANet, and I was privileged
to work with some of the wizards who design and run the Internet's
backbone segments. At this time I was promoted to group marketing
manager and assumed responsibility for the marketing efforts of the
following GTE commercial product lines:
- Data Center Outsourcing ServicesProcessing
nearly 10 million transactions a day with systems availability
consistently exceeding 99.98 percent, the GTE data centers work around
the clock to collect, process, distribute, and archive customer data.
GTE's commercial data centers offer numerous state-of-the-art features,
including:
- Triple redundancy and satellite backup
- 4,000+ MIPS of mainframe processing
- 700 T1 and T3 circuits linking dozens of sites
- 120+ mid-range computers (IBM, Digital, HP, Tandem, Sun, SGI, Compaq, Teradata)
- Mainframe, mini, PC/LAN, and client/server platforms
- 28 terabytes of data stored on 706 DASD
- 57 StorageTek tape silos
- Fault-tolerant facilities with full UPS and diesel generator backup
- QCare - Healthcare AdministrationThis is a
total healthcare management system comprised of 20 subsystems, each of
which facilitates a healthcare processing need. The six processing
categories are:
- Claims Processing
- Customer Service
- Group and Member Services
- Provider Relations
- User Assistance/Technical Support
- Utilization Management
Help Desk ServicesProfessional consultants
support customers' IT environments with a first-touch resolution rate
that approaches 75%. Three problems out of four are resolved without
escalation. Help desk services include:
- Single point of contact with end-to-end problem ownership
- Call logging, tracking, follow-up and call pattern analysis and reporting
- Optional toll-free service
- Customized call answering
- Rapid diagnosis and triage with immediate dispatch of critical calls
- First-touch resolution capability
- Expert systems and case-based reasoning tools
- Hardware break/fix dispatch
- Full-service LAN administration
Network Management ServicesA totally
integrated solution to provide the network, operation, administration,
and monitoring of a data network. Network management consists of three
services, which were provided through the coordination of offerings
from GTE Data Services Incorporated (GTEDS), GTE Data Systems Services
(DSS), and GTE Internetworking Powered by BBN. The solution set
included the following:
- Network Analysis & Design provided by GTE Internetworking
- Network Implementation & Support provided by GTE Data Systems Services
- Data Network Management provided by GTE Data Services
Network Commerce PlatformThe
Network Commerce Platform harnesses GTE's unrivaled Internet resources,
world-class data centers, and 24x7 support operations to enable
businesses, their technology providers, application developers, and
systems integrators to rapidly develop and deploy electronic commerce
and other network-based business applications. This was, in fact, one
of the first instances of what is today called an Application Services
Provider, or ASP.At the most basic level, the NCP is a value-added
TCP/IP network bundled with common services to provide access to an
array of Internet commerce solutions without the need for massive
installations of hardware or the licensing and updating of software.
The NCP's sophisticated infrastructure is transparent to the user and
supports virtually any business application running on any popular
operating system or application server.In the spring of 1998, I joined
Dev Horn, David Gonzalez, and David Belson to form the core team that
took our initial ideas and transformed them from concept to reality in
less than a year. With the merger of GTE and Bell Atlantic into
Verizon, this project was transferred to their Internet spin-off,
Genuity, Inc., where it is known today as Black Rocket.
August 1999 - August 2002 . . . . no longer undercover
After Bell Atlantic announced its intent to acquire GTE (the merged
companies are now know as Verizon), I took a leave of absence to finish
writing The Spirit of the Internet.
While I was writing that book and spending all my days and nights
thinking "out of the box," I came to see what a precarious position
many of today's companies are in. Not only has the Internet changed
many of the rules for doing business, it has also begun to change the
way people think about their connectivity with others and about how
their individual actions are affecting the Earth.
It became apparent to me that individuals were expanding their
awareness of the consequences of their actions much more rapidly than
were the companies who are trying to sell them goods and services. As a
result of my research, I decided to not return to GTE and instead spend
my time consulting with companies that are intent on becoming agents
for change in a world that is changing at an incredible pace. Practices
that were considered business as usual just five years ago no longer
work. The end users of products and services have begun making demands
about quality, levels of service, and environmental and safety issues
as well as other issues reflective of better informed consumers.
Theday has arrived for companies, large and small, to add a companion
piece to their mission statements. In today's rapidly changing and
highly competitive environment, it is the companies that make a clear
statement of their "corporate consciousness" that will be the ones who
make it in this new century.
August 31, 2002
Burning Man: On the night of the burn, Larry (Lawrence) went up with the man, and Lorenzo arrived.
January 2003 onward
The beginning of 2003 brought with it the birth of the Digital Space Commons.
Along with several other founding members of the Commons, I am now
devoting a significant amount of my time to the creation of a private
voice communications network using TalkSpace, the voice of the people.
August 2003
Organizer of the Palenque Norte theme camp at Burning Man (see YouTube video of the 2006 Palenque Norte Lectures)
June 2005
Started PodCasting the Psychedelic Salon
Burning Man 2007
Changed the Palenque Norte lectures to Playalogue format (see YouTube video)
June 10, 2009
Published the audio book edition of my novel, The Genesis Generation.
JUNE 10, 2011
Published the eBook edition of my novel, The Genesis Generation.
Lorenzo is the father of three children, Chris, Kelly, and Dan.
And he has five grandchildren, Megan, Molly, Evan, Haylee, and Avery.
[Java Technology (tm) is is a trademark or registered trademark of
Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.]</ | | |