Jason Bates

San Francisco Bay Area · LinkedIn

About

Strategic leader with over twenty-five years at Google, Specialized, Driscoll's, and Dell, the common thread has been transforming businesses, teams, and value added work into operating models that hold up after I've moved on.

At Google I currently work on planning for partner-developed compute capacity — data centers that other companies build and Google fills with its own hardware. Before that I co-wrote a rewrite of the company's long-range demand plan: the first single process that lines up compute networking, power, space, and chip supply against the same growth targets. I ran the first two planning cycles, then handed the process to a director hired to run it.

Earlier I was Chief Supply Chain Officer at Specialized Bicycles, ran sales and operations planning for fresh berries at Driscoll's, built a marketing shared-services team for General Mills in India, and spent six years at Dell, including two in Shanghai starting up the Asia supply planning team.

Beyond the day job

The rest of this site is the other half of the story. I've been an athlete for as long as I can remember — these days mostly a runner, on roads, trails, and the occasional marathon or ultra — and the Journal page is where that life gets written down. I think of the writing here as a creative practice rather than a hobby: the same instinct for pattern, patience, and long horizons that shows up in planning work, pointed instead at miles, places, and the people met along the way.