Rob Rodin, 43, can't sit still. The president and CEO of Marshall Industries, a billion-dollar electronics distributor headquartered outside Los Angeles, is wearing a telephone headset and pacing nervously, swinging a baseball bat to ease the tension in his office. He stops for a moment to check one of his three computers. Then the phone rings. It's a major supplier. The market for one of its products has exploded, and now it wants to "reallocate" to its direct customers shipments that it promised to Marshall.

"You have a moral obligation," Rodin pleads. "We've been with you through thick and thin. Can't you peel off 1% from IBM? That would cover us." Rodin agrees to send a revised order and the supplier agrees to send what he needs.

"I go through that a hundred times a day," Rodin says. "We're a professional organization that knows how to go to market. We also get the loose ball at any cost. We have to. Suppliers and customers measure product life cycles in months. They have problems with inventory, manufacturing, quality. They expect us to solve them."

The market seems to like Marshall's solutions. In 1991, the year before Rodin became CEO, the company had sales of $582 million and a stock price as low as $9 per share. Last year it had sales of nearly $1.2 billion and a stock price as high as $37 per share. It achieved these record results with 1,400 people -- 250 fewer than five years ago. Sales per person have more than doubled since 1991, from $360,000 to $740,000. Profit per person has tripled.

But Rob Rodin isn't just running a company. He's reinventing an industry. He's designed a far-reaching, still-evolving program to anticipate and build the middleman of the future. Rodin is changing the rules and tools of a notoriously conservative business, betting the company on what he calls "virtual distribution." It's an experiment with obvious implications for any organization that sits uncomfortably between demanding customers and fast-moving suppliers -- in other words, practically any organization.

"The middleman is becoming obsolete," Rodin declares, "and our company is by definition in the middle. We are a junction box between suppliers and customers. The forces around us are so intense. Our suppliers compete with each other, but they all want the same thing - 100% share of mind. No two customers have the same needs, but they all want the same thing -- free, perfect, now."

Free. Perfect. Now. Rodin's job is to make sure everyone at Marshall chases those impossible goals. Fueled by his own blend of anxiety and exhilaration, the CEO repeats his rallying cries until they become company touchstones. "It's all about time," he declares. "The future is now. Not the next five years but the next five minutes. Think like the customer. Let their voices design what you do."

Much of what Marshall does is familiar, even prosaic. Put simply, the company moves boxes -- from 150 powerful suppliers such as Hitachi and Texas Instruments to more than 30,000 demanding customers such as Bay Networks and WebTV. It sells parts -- 170,000 different items from semiconductors and capacitors to liquid crystal displays and programmable logic devices. It operates huge sales and distribution facilities -- a 200,000-square-foot warehouse bursting with computers and fast-moving robots, a cavernous "bullpen" staffed by fast-talking salespeople arranged in row after row of metal desks.