Guerrino De Luca

By Jennifer L. Schenker/Paris

It's not surprising that Guerrino De Luca celebrated his 50th birthday in Las Vegas this September. He loves betting. When he lost one particular contest two years ago, he was compelled to dye his hair fuchsia. Then he addressed a convention of Zurich bankers.

De Luca insists on having fun, but don't mistake the CEO of consumer-electronics company Logitech International for a reckless gambler. In business, he takes calculated risks and consistently beats the odds. An engineer who developed a reputation as a marketing whiz at Olivetti and Apple Computer, De Luca took Logitech's helm in early 1998, when the company was known mostly for selling mice to PC makers. Today Logitech, incorporated in Switzerland and with headquarters in Fremont, Calif., sells a wide range of retail PC peripherals known for catchy designs and reasonable prices: webcams, wireless keyboards, game controllers and speakers.

During a period that hasn't been kind to his industry, De Luca has kept Logitech growing. Its profits are expected to swell 25%, to $94 million, in the fiscal year ending in March. The company's stock price has more than quadrupled under De Luca.

A native of Lanciano, east of Rome, De Luca bursts with an Italian passion for style, which insinuates itself into Logitech's curvaceous product designs. When executives bring him a prototype, "his face glows," says David Henry, a senior vice president. A smoker since he was 15, De Luca likes sneaking outside to light up with employees. "It creates a kind of complicity that allows me to find out what people really think," he says.

Logitech has 50 products on the drawing board for next year. Beyond the usual PC gizmos, De Luca is betting on a new line of peripherals for game consoles, mobile phones, PDAs and TV set-top boxes. A cloth PDA case that unfolds into a keyboard made its debut earlier this year, and the latest offering is a pen that captures handwritten notes in digital form. The global market for such devices--what De Luca calls "the last inch between human fingers and the digital world"--is about $8 billion, enough to let Logitech grow rapidly over the next five years.

Now, what about that pink do? To motivate the troops, De Luca had bet that a Logitech spin-off wouldn't sign up 100,000 users and promised to dye his hair if it met the target. It did--and he kept his word. --By Jennifer L. Schenker/Paris