James Matthew Phillips

SPRINGDALE — SELF

PORTRAIT

Family:

wife Barbara; sons Parker, Preston and Palmer;

daughter Hunter (deceased)

Occupation:

Chairman and chief executive officer of NanoMech

A book I’ve been recommending a lot lately is

Red Alert: How China’s Growing Prosperity Threatens the American Way of Life, by Stephen Leeb.

My favorite quote is,

“You have enemies? That means you stood up for something, some time in your life.” It’s by Winston Churchill.

As a CEO, you should

take all the credit for anything that goes wrong, but share all the credit when it goes right.

My wife always says,

“Jim, you’re not blue-collar, but you’re ring around the collar.”

A board I’m particularly proud to be on is

Blue Cross Blue Shield Tennessee, which I’ve been on since 2005. My dad was senior auditor for them after he retired from theAir Force.

When I taught Sunday School, the things I tried to get across were

no matter how good you are, you’re never perfect, and to not forget that every breath is a gift.

My favorite movie of all time is

It’s a Wonderful Life.

A phrase to sum me up:

Never give up, and make every minute count!

Jim Phillips doesn’t want to sleep.

He would like to keep that moment when his weary head hits the pillow and it’s lights out, something that happens when exhaustion overtakes him. As the chairman and chief executive officer of NanoMech sees it, though, most sleep is a time when he’s just lying there and the world keeps moving faster and faster. Who needs that?

“To me, the greatest loss of life is sleep,” says Phillips, who lives in Rogers. “It’s wasted time.

What if we figure out a way - and I predict we will - that after an hour of sleep, you’d be completely refreshed? Think how much more life you’d get, how much more knowledge you’d get!”

Phillips has a resume so fantastic it would be impossible to make up. As a high-ranking executive with several companies, Phillips has been instrumental in developing numerous technologies that shape our modern lives.

If you’ve ever sent a text message or used apersonal digital assistant to keep track of appointments, you’ve felt the effects of Phillips’ work. If you’ve ever taken a virtual tour of a house online, or simply surfed the Internet faster because you have a cable modem, that’s because Phillips helped make that technology so.

This doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what Phillips has helped bring to life since the mid-1970s.

“Jim is really a Renaissance person,” says Deborah Wince-Smith of Washington, chairman of the Council on Competitiveness, of which Phillips has been a member since 2005. “I’ve never sensed his motivation is pure wealth creation; it’s what is he going to contribute to the future of this country.

He’s a special person.”

The world moves at blinding speed, faster than when Phillips came to Northwest Arkansas in2008 to become the chairman of NanoMech; faster than when he launched the revolutionary Vein-Viewer, named Time magazine’s “coolest medical invention of the year” in 2004; and before that, when he raised the money necessary to build the FedEx Institute of Technology at the University of Memphis.

It’s infinitely faster than when a surgical mistake ended Phillips’ promising career with the U.S. Air Force. And it’s seemingly impossible to compare it to 1969, when Phillips graduated from Jacksonville High School and earned golf and ROTC scholarships to the University of Memphis (then Memphis State University).

“There are two kinds of people, builders and blockers,” Wince-Smith says. “Jim’s always building something, whether he’s building ideas in his mind, or building the potential of a new product.

“The thing that’s special about Jim Phillips is that he’s a synthetic thinker. Not everyone is able to seehow the sum can be so much [greater] than the parts.”

OUT IN FRONT

Here’s the thing, though: We’re just getting started. Phillips predicts there will be more inventions in the next 10 years than there have been from the dawn of humanity to the present.

That’s why Phillips, who turned 60 earlier this year, has the same birthday wish every year: That he be 10 years younger. And it’s why he wishes he wasn’t wasting so many hours sleeping, because then he’d have time to take in more information.

“He’s what I would call an innovation adrenaline junkie,” says Chris Galvin of Chicago, the former CEO of Motorola. “He is uniquely creative, especially curious, and he just loves new ideas. And so he’s always on the hunt for new ideas. The minute he sees them, he jumps right on them, and tries to find some way to push them forward.”

If Phillips’ prediction about the forthcoming decade is correct - and his track record suggests that betting against him is a risky proposition - then he’ll play a major part in this development through his work with NanoMech.

Founded in 2002 by University of Arkansas professor Ajay Malshe, NanoMech works with materials the size of a nanometer - onebillionth of a meter. Phillips joined NanoMech as its chairman in 2008 because he admired Malshe’s genius and was enticed by the possibilities those nanometers possessed.

NanoMech has made millions selling Tufftek, a sprayon coating whose hardness is second only to diamonds. Tufftek is capable of increasing the lifespan of manufacturing cutting tools by 300-1,000 percent, at just a minimal cost.

In 2011, the same year Phillips added chief executive officer to his title, NanoMech launched NGlide, an additive that dramatically improves the performance of lubricants. General Electric is a client, and discussions are ongoing with several major oil companies. NanoMech has also secured government contracts for two of its products: nGuard (which kills mold, bugs, disease and odor) and OmniArmor (which hardens the ceramic plates of body armor).

Phillips is the man out front, the one who uses his connections and his limitless enthusiasm to raise investment capital and sell new companies on the benefits of nanotechnology. Phillips has always had a creative mind, having named countless products and companies over the course of his career, and winning a prestigious Clio award for one of his many advertisements.

“Jim has a way to bring pretty complex things into layman’s terms, and explain what these science and technological revolutions mean,” says John Hendricks of Silver Spring, Md., the founder and chairman of Discovery Communications. “It’s beena real skill of his to be able to do that, because no business can survive without people understanding the consumers are the product.”

Having someone with Phillips’ experience and near-fanatical drive has been absolutely critical to developing the company, Malshe says. Time is not on the side of technological companies like NanoMech; the world is filled with competitors that are trying to beat you to the next step.

Malshe compares Nano-Mech to a ship that’s sailing through a storm, and Phillips as the captain guiding it through those rocky waters.

“For Jim, losing is not a choice - like George Washington burning the boats,” Malshe says. “Our slogan is ‘Think small’ [which Phillips came up with], but for Jim nothing is small.”

GROUNDED, BRIEFLY

If not for a serious medical mix-up, Phillips might have gone to outer space by now.

Phillips joined the Air Force in 1973, after graduating from what is now the University of Memphis with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. He had planned to follow in the footsteps of his father, John Travis, a World War II tail gunner whose highest rank was lieutenant colonel.

Jim wanted to become an astronaut, and he was wellon his way. He was the cadet commander of the largest ROTC unit in the country at Memphis, and received the Distinguished Military Graduate Award from the Air Force before he wrenched his left knee playing baseball.

Phillips needed minor knee surgery, but the doctors operating on him read the wrong file, and wound up taking off about two-thirds of his kneecap. The accident became apparent when something felt wrong in his leg during takeoffs.

Doctors said his damaged knee would develop severe arthritis if he spent long hours in pressurized cockpits. Just like that, Phillips’ military career was over.

“The Lord works in strange ways,” Phillips says. “At the time, it was devastating, but I’m glad it worked out the way it did.”

After leaving the Air Force, Phillips went back to school in Memphis, where he dated and then married his wife, Barbara, and established himself as a hot commodity, even before he finished his master’s of business administration degree. While in school, the dean asked him to write his thesis on an up-and-coming Memphis company, Telecommunications Systems of America.

This led to a job with the company, which was then sold to Northern Telecom, at the time the second-largest phonecompany in the world. By the time he was 27, Phillips was a vice president and running a third of its U.S. operations.

After more than a decade with Northern Telecom, he became senior vice president of Mobilecomm. When it was sold to Bell South, he became the co-founder and president of SkyTel - where he pioneered the first nationwide paging service - then president and vice chairman of Telular Corp., which he took public on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

Next came Motorola, where Phillips’ team invented the cable modem. Phillips has won scores of awards during his career, but he says few meant more than the Motorola Patent Disclosure Award that resulted from his work on a tablet computer in 1995.

“What the genius of Jim is, he’s a very creative marketer,” Galvin says. “He’s a promulgator, a very creative evangelist of new ideas.”

From Motorola, Phillips co-founded iPIX, serving as its chairman and CEO while it invented technologies like virtual tours and the “click and drag” method that made selling on eBay a breeze for even its least technology-savvy users. Next came the FedEx Institute, a research park he started at his alma mater, and then CEO in residence with Morgan Keegan and CEO of the Luminetx Corp.

Luminetx is the companythat commercially developed and rolled out the VeinViewer; Phillips came up with its name, as well as the name of its parent company. The VeinViewer uses infrared technology to highlight blood coursing through the body, making it vastly easier to get intravenous needles into the right location.

“He’s a quick study,” says Barbara, Phillips’ wife of 35 years. “He’s always reading, doing research on his iPad. He’s interested in any kind of technology and he soaks it up.”

NO END IN SIGHT

It’s 11 p.m., and Phillips isn’t done yet.

He has been working all day, and has finally come home, but he and Malshe are firing instant messages back and forth. It’s hard for Phillips to give his brain a break, which is why he routinely falls asleep on his couch, wearing a suit and holding a remote control and an iPad.

Because of his father’s Air Force commitment, Phillips lived all over the globe growing up before the family moved to Little Rock Air Force Base. Thus, Phillips is comfortable with people from a wide range of cultures.

That’s particularly useful at NanoMech. The company has recruited scientists from all over the world to work at its 8,300-square-foot facility in Springdale, which openedin 2009. (NanoMech’s 7,500 square-foot administrative office is in Fayetteville, at the Arkansas Research and Technology Park.)

“The thing I appreciate about Jim is that he connects the dots,” Malshe says. “He loves new things, taking risks in the given time and bringing that to market.

“The common bond between him and I is we love the new. We love technology and we love applying that to the good of society.”

Phillips’ military background instilled in him a devout patriotism, which is why he is constantly flying back and forth to Washington. Few things are more important to him than America retaining its technological edge, which is why he recently testified in front of a U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee on behalf of the Council on Competitiveness.

He’s a Republican, but one who is eager to work with the current Democratic administration. He has been at the White House several times this year, meeting with undersecretaries and presidential advisers on science and energy issues, such as the Material Genome Project, of which NanoMech is a part.

When asked to explain where his work ethic comes from, Phillips credits his faith. An ordained Baptist deacon and longtime Sunday School teacher, he believes he needs to make the most of his time on earth - and that his abilities need to be connected with good things that improve society.

One of Phillips’ favorite sayings comes from a minister, the late Adrian Rogers: “Man has never invented anything; he’s only discovered God’s inventions.”

“[His faith] has always been strong,” Barbara says. “That’s his code of ethics, his bottom line, and everything is built on that.”

Phillips can be hard to pin down for an in-person interview, because his desire to build NanoMech, Northwest Arkansas and the United States often takes him on the road. He’s quite easy to get hold of, though, because he’s as connected as connected gets.

There are just two times when Phillips can’t be interrupted. One is at church, and the other is during the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference. Every year, Phillips attends the TED conference, in which global leaders make presentations on a wide array of topics related to science and culture.

At TED, Phillips soaks up information and learns about what will be the next big things. Four times, he’s spoken at the conference.

“He’s a TEDster,” Hendricks says. “It’s perfect for him, because it’s the leading ideas in technology and design, and Jim is always onto the next big thing.

“When a lot of people weren’t paying attention to future benefits of nanotechnology, he was. [Its] applications are game-changers, and an enormous area for future development.”