Mick Slattery once had three futures in mind: forest ranger, marine biologist, electrical engineer. The third won, partly because teachers could describe the route and partly because he was good at mathematics. Yet the first two choices left a faint signature. His career has the curiosity of fieldwork about it - arrive in a complicated habitat, observe what has adapted badly, and ask the question polite organizations sometimes avoid: why?
That question has followed him from consulting rooms to cloud platforms, from transit systems to the abruptly distributed workplace, and now into the unglamorous but consequential machinery of specialty-materials distribution. At each stop, the nouns changed. The operating problem remained familiar. A large organization had a valuable relationship with a customer, an inherited process stood in the middle, and technology offered the possibility of doing something more sensible.
Slattery is now chief executive of Xenon arc, a Bellevue company that builds branded commercial channels for producers of specialty chemicals and food ingredients. This is business-to-business commerce with work boots on. A paint, adhesive or ingredient producer may have thousands of small and midsize customers, each important in aggregate but awkward to serve through a sales model designed for large accounts. Xenon arc supplies the technical sales, ecommerce, service, data and distribution infrastructure, while the producer keeps its name and customer relationship.
An engineer learns the client business
The electrical engineering degree came from the University of Notre Dame, with honors. A management master's from Northwestern University's Kellogg School followed, with distinction. Between the circuitry and the case studies, Slattery found the professional language that would define him: not technology for its own sake, but technology bent toward a business problem.
He spent roughly a decade at Andersen Consulting, now Accenture, advising clients in the United States, Europe and Asia. In 2000 he joined the founding leadership team of Avanade, the Accenture-Microsoft venture. Seventeen years is a long stay in technology, where corporate histories are measured in software releases and yesterday's certainty may already require a migration plan. Slattery's assignments kept moving: managed services, go-to-market work, global delivery, hybrid-cloud investment and, eventually, president of North America.
One operating question, five different rooms
The Avanade years also placed him near the center of enterprise technology's shift from purchased machinery to rented capability. He argued that cloud computing lowered the cost of trying, failing and trying again. The proposition was practical rather than mystical: when a company no longer had to buy a small fortress of hardware before testing an idea, innovation became cheaper and less ceremonious.
By 2016, he was writing about the ethical bill that accompanied that convenience. His framework had three workmanlike C's - clarity, communication and consistency. Decide what data is needed. Tell people what will happen to it. Apply the rule every time. At a moment when smart machines were beginning to arrive at work, his conclusion kept the humans in charge of the relationship.
The outsider takes the transit job
In 2018, Slattery moved to Conduent Transportation. He introduced himself with disarming accuracy: he was neither a career public-sector executive nor a career transportation executive. He was, as he put it, a person who liked digital technology, launching and creating things. For a business selling fare collection, road charging and mobility systems to public agencies, the outsider status could look like a defect. Slattery treated it as permission.
Transportation attracted him for three reasons: the chance to shape how people move through society, an industry ready for digital change, and Conduent's interest in improving the interactions between institutions and their customers. He liked asking why agencies had inherited a particular assumption. Clients, he observed, tended to lean forward when the question exposed a better possibility.
There is a cheerful detail from an interview near the end of that tenure. The phone line dropped while Slattery was in full flow. When he reconnected, the interviewer found him crestfallen at the interruption. Some executives ration enthusiasm as if it were stock. Slattery seems to treat it as working capital.
When the workplace left the building
Slattery became president of CompuCom in June 2019. Within a year, the routine assumptions of workplace technology had dissolved. Offices emptied, support moved outward, and the phrase “work from anywhere” stopped sounding like a perk and started reading like an operating requirement. CompuCom's mix of devices, projects and managed services put it in the middle of the scramble.
His emphasis was customer experience, an easily polished phrase with rather stubborn consequences. Supporting a distributed workforce meant getting technology into people's hands, making it function beyond the office perimeter and resolving failures without the comfort of a nearby help desk. The work demanded both systems and patience.
It also demanded leadership through ownership change. Slattery spent three and a half years at CompuCom, becoming CEO and guiding the company through internal change and a sale. When he left at the end of 2022, his public note was grateful, restrained and specific. He was proud of the team's recognition and began the next chapter with some skiing in Utah among family and friends. The mountain is a fine place to let an org chart recede into the distance.
A long tail with a long memory
Xenon arc appointed Slattery CEO in November 2023. The setting was new, but the structure of the problem must have felt familiar. Specialty producers typically know how to lavish attention on their largest accounts. The smaller customer presents an awkward equation: its orders may not justify the traditional cost of technical sales, service, inventory and order management, yet a thousand such customers form a market no sensible producer wishes to neglect.
Xenon arc's answer is a branded channel, operated on a producer's behalf. It combines humans who understand the application with digital storefronts, lead management, dashboards and the full order-to-cash cycle. The producer can widen its reach without pretending that software alone can recommend the right additive for a coating or rescue an urgent order. The model is less a technological coup than a careful rearrangement of responsibility.
The channel is a braid, not a button
The first two years of his tenure brought two acquisitions. Brandt Technologies joined in April 2024, bringing decades of technical distribution experience in coatings, adhesives, sealants and elastomers. JNS SmithChem followed in March 2025, adding relationships and reach across the eastern and southeastern United States. Each deal joined domain knowledge to Xenon arc's commercial platform. One without the other would be a warehouse with a login page, or a handsome dashboard with nobody useful at the other end.
Slattery describes the ambition as changing how specialty producers go to market. It is a sweeping sentence attached to remarkably tangible work: a customer gets real-time information, a supplier sees a market trend, a technical question reaches someone qualified, an invoice completes its journey. Transformation earns its keep in such small proofs.
The relationship is the system
A theme survives all the sector changes. Slattery's public writing on digital ethics insisted that trust could not be automated. His transportation pitch began with how people move. His CompuCom strategy met workers where they had gone. Xenon arc's model uses software and data to serve customers who might otherwise receive less attention. The technology is not the protagonist. It is the stage crew, busy making the human exchange arrive on cue.
That instinct also appears in his civic work. Slattery served as board chair of Make-A-Wish Central and Western North Carolina, helping select a new chapter chief executive in 2020. His life outside work includes family, golf and skiing. These details do not form a theory of management, but they prevent one from becoming too impressed by a dashboard.
Today he leads from Bellevue, with Xenon arc operating across North America, Europe and Latin America. His résumé can look like a collection of sharp turns: consulting to transit, transit to workplace services, workplace services to specialty chemicals. Read another way, it is one long assignment. Find the neglected customer. Question the machinery between that customer and the company. Keep what is human. Rebuild what is merely habitual.
Why must business work this way? After more than three decades, Slattery has not exhausted the question. That may be because the useful answer is rarely a speech. It is a better route through the system, built one unglamorous decision at a time.