Their engineering studies taught them problem solving. Their jobs taught them teamwork. The sum of those forces? An exceptional ability to lead.
By Karen Feldscher - Illustrations by Jon Krause
Sy Sternberg served for ten years as chief executive officer at New York Life.
Edward Galante retired three years ago as a senior vice president at ExxonMobil.
Frank Tempesta is the president of Textron, a multi-industry company that includes aircraft, defense, industrial, and finance businesses, and boasts forty-nine thousand employees in forty countries.
These Northeastern alumni have risen to the top of their organizations. They have something else in common, too: engineering degrees.
Ask Sternberg, ME’68; Galante, E’73; and Tempesta, E’62, ME’64, and they’ll tell you that their engineering studies were a key factor in their career trajectories—which, by the way, were more often than not unplanned.
Sternberg, who last June became chair of Northeastern’s Board of Trustees (see interview, page 24), believes engineers make great business leaders. He feels so strongly about the connection, in fact, that he gave a speech about it at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering in November 2007.
“Twenty-three percent of the current list of Fortune 500 CEOs have undergraduate degrees in engineering—twice the number as those who earned business administration or economics degrees,” Sternberg told his Parents Weekend audience.
“Engineering grads can work for an engineering company, and then rise up the ladder to general management,” he pointed out. “Or they can move to an entirely different industry. They might choose to go into financial services, working at Citigroup. Or consumer goods, with Procter & Gamble. Or real estate, with Starwood. You show me a successful Fortune 500 company, and I’ll show you an employer who values the talents of engineering graduates.”
Sternberg outlined for the students and their families why engineers make such skillful managers: They’re good at problem solving and processing data. They understand risk assessment. They tend to base their decisions on facts rather than emotions. They’re creative and intuitive.
He should know, of course. Sternberg himself is the model of someone who used his engineering training to excel in the corporate arena—in his case, the insurance industry.
William Howard, E’69, executive vice president and chief technical officer at Camp Dresser & McKee and a Northeastern trustee, has seen many leaders rise from a background in engineering. “A lot of people recognize that engineering graduates think logically and are really geared toward solving problems,” he says.
“Engineers process data,” says Winslow Sargeant, E’86, managing director at Venture Investors, a Madison, Wisconsin– based firm that funds health-care and technology start-ups. “We’re taught to look at a situation and build a model of the problem. We’re taught to ask what we know and what we don’t know.
“We take a systematic point of view,” Sargeant adds, paring the engineering mindset down to the basics. “And we have to make things work.”
Any wonder this clear-eyed management style is so prized in the business world?
An impressive list
Folks with a Northeastern engineering degree form an influential Who’s Who in the business world. They’ve exercised their leadership skills nationally and internationally in a wide array of areas—heavy industry, data management, energy, politics, trustee leadership.
In addition to the major players mentioned above, here are a few more:
George Kostas, E’43, H’07, founder and president of Techno Economic Services, which is involved in chemical-process research, oil and gas exploration and production, and real estate development.
George Kariotis, E’44, H’88, founder and former chairman of Alpha Industries, a manufacturer of circuits, semiconductors, and other devices for microwave and radio-frequency wireless-communications applications. Kariotis was a 1986 Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate, and the state’s secretary of economic affairs from 1979 to 1983. He’s vice chair emeritus of Northeastern’s Board of Trustees.
James Healy, E’54, founder and former president of Healy Systems, which makes vapor-recovery systems, used with gas pumps to reduce vapor emissions during refueling.
Robert Marini, E’54, H’97, former chairman, president, and CEO of Camp Dresser & McKee, vice chair emeritus of the Northeastern Board of Trustees, and the chair of a Northeastern fundraising campaign in the 1990s.
Dennis Picard, LI’59, UC’62, H’89, former chairman and chief executive officer of Raytheon Company, a leader in defense- and aerospace-systems technologies. He serves as the trustees emeriti representative to the Board of Trustees.
Richard Egan, E’61, H’95, and Roger Marino, E’61, H’96, cofounders of EMC Corporation, a Fortune 500 company that makes computer-storage systems. Egan, after stepping down as EMC chairman in 2001, served for two years as the U.S. ambassador to Ireland. Marino, who retired as EMC president in 1992, has owned minor-league ice-hockey teams and produced several movies and a Broadway show. Marino is a university trustee; Egan is a former trustee.
Leonard Perham, E’68, CEO and president of MoSys, which designs and develops high-performance semiconductor memory, and chairman of NetLogic Microsystems, which makes processors and chips used in routers to boost Internet speed and search capabilities.
Robert Shillman, E’68, H’00, chairman and CEO of Natick, Massachusetts–based Cognex, the world leader in manufacturing machine-vision systems. He is also a university trustee.
David House, ME’69, chairman of Brocade Communications Systems, the world’s leading supplier of storage area network equipment, and a former senior vice president at Intel.
George Sakellaris, ME’75, MBA’82, founder of three energy-services companies and currently president and CEO of Ameresco.
Homayoun Talieh, E’82, cofounder, chairman, CEO, and president of SoloPower, which manufactures thin-film solar cells.
Leslie Abi-Karam, E’84, executive vice president and president of mailing-solutions management at Pitney Bowes, a global mailstream-technology company.
Valerie Perlowitz, E’86, senior vice president and director of corporate development at ATS Corporation, a leading provider of software and systems development, systems integration, information sharing, and consulting to government agencies and businesses.
Nature and nurture
How did these engineers-turned-leaders get into engineering in the first place? Most say they were drawn to problem solving from an early age.
Galante remembers tagging along with his tradesman dad in the early 1960s to watch the construction of what was then the world’s longest suspension span, the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, which connects Brooklyn and Staten Island.
House says he’s always been “enthralled” by how things work.
As a kid, Perlowitz took her brother’s stereo apart and put it back together, causing him to suggest, “Maybe you should go to engineering school.”
In college, aspiring engineers learn to be methodical about their approach to challenges. “Engineering school is mental calisthenics,” says House. “It teaches you a structured methodology of problem solving, even when you’re working on unstructured problems.
“It also gives you a greater understanding of uncertainty,” he says. “How, when you’re working on a hypothesis and looking for proof, you can’t assume anything is true until you can prove it. The study of engineering really teaches you how to use your brain.”
“The difficulty of an engineering curriculum makes you tougher,” agrees Abi-Karam. “It gives you a lot of confidence.”
After they begin their careers, the problem solvers put their training to the test, and get a taste of what it’s like to lead others.
Perlowitz’s first test came at Sikorsky Aircraft, her first real job out of college. Five Black Hawk helicopters had nose-dived into the ground in the 1980s, killing twenty-two servicemen. She led a team that was asked to figure out why.
“I was petrified,” Perlowitz admits. “But I had a great group working for me. It took us about three and a half months to figure out the problem. It turned out that, under a certain set of conditions, the helicopter’s stabilator didn’t work right. We had to reprogram it. It was the first and last time I used all the calculus I ever learned.”
In the early 1970s, William Howard was put in charge of a Camp Dresser & McKee (CDM) effort to improve the water-distribution system in Chelsea, Massachusetts. The city had been warned its water system didn’t provide adequate flow to fire hydrants.
Howard and his team completed the study, but before it could be implemented a devastating fire hit the city. The October 1973 blaze destroyed eighteen city blocks.
The tragedy thrust Howard into the spotlight. “I became known around CDM as the project engineer for the big job in Chelsea,” he says. He was tapped to handle similar problems in nearby Everett and Somerville.
House says the analytical approach he learned in his engineering classes even helped him advertise products. When he worked at Intel, he came up with the now-famous “Intel Inside” campaign. Choosing the slogan, which debuted in 1990, was done “very scientifically,” he says, using lots of data and focus-group testing.
“We took a very engineering approach to a branding and marketing problem,” says House. “For me, that was a natural way to do things.”
A love of leadership
Young engineers often discover—sometimes to their surprise—that they like being in charge.
Co-op can set the stage for this realization. “On co-op, I was challenged to take risks and learn from my mistakes,” says Perlowitz. “Once you have those kinds of experiences, you’re more inclined to take a leadership role.” A
t the start of his career, Winslow Sargeant focused solely on becoming a good engineer. Growing up in a working-class family that had emigrated from Barbados to Dorchester, Massachusetts, he’d even turned down a basketball scholarship to make sure his academic and professional development got off on the right track.
“My focus was on developing new technologies and seeing them come into the marketplace,” he says about his early days in the field. “I didn’t see it from a leadership standpoint at first.”
Then, he says, “I was given more responsibilities to make systems work. I stepped back and looked at how all the pieces came together. That led to roles as project leader, or supervisor, or director.”
After Ed Galante had worked at ExxonMobil in the construction and maintenance of storage terminals—first on co-op, then after graduation—the company asked him if he wanted to get some marketing and sales experience.
“I was not interested,” recalls Galante. “They came back a few weeks later and asked again. I said I wasn’t interested. Then they said, ‘Your paycheck is going to a sales office in New Jersey. You might want to go with it.’”
The move turned out to be a very good one for Galante. In sales and marketing, he learned, “you’re in front of people all the time. That began my transition. Seven or eight years into my career, I had my first supervisory job. I found I enjoyed managing people. The whole thing was a learning experience—how to motivate people, how to communicate, how to help people set a direction.”
George Kariotis says figuring out he “was not going to be the next Thomas Edison” steered him toward his leadership role.
“I went off into this arcane field called sales and marketing, which horrified everybody, because I’d been a top student,” Kariotis says. “I did worry a lot. I thought I might be making a horrible mistake. But sales and marketing taught me how to get along with all kinds of people, and how to build a team, which is paramount in building a company.
“It’s a most gratifying thing,” he says, “the ability to attract various members to a team, get them all fighting in the same direction—despite the fact that they come from different backgrounds and with different talents—and pull it all together.”
Occasionally, leadership roles extend beyond the company. As the 2004–2005 chair of the American Council of Engineering Companies executive committee, Howard was able to advocate on behalf of issues and policies central to the whole engineering profession.
“Being able to effect change nationwide was great,” he says. “It gives you a really good feeling.”
Speaking the language
Knowing how to communicate clearly has been crucial to their success, prominent engineering graduates say.
You have to be able to get your point across when you work in the public sector, Howard says. “Engineers on public-works projects have to communicate to mayors and public-works directors why a project is necessary, what it’s all about, and what to expect. Engineers need to be able to communicate to non-engineers.”
House says solid communication skills helped him morph into a leader. “DNA tests will confirm that I’m an engineer,” he says. “But I can also communicate with customers, with the team, with the rest of the organization. When you do that, people start coming to you for direction, and you wind up naturally being in charge.”
House has been so adept in his leadership roles that he was offered the CEO position at Google in 2000. He turned it down (but he framed and hung the offer letter).
Galante, today a Northeastern trustee, also underscores the importance of good communication. “Engineering is a great underpinning for leadership,” he says. “But you have to be able to take all that analysis and thinking, and communicate it, and motivate your colleagues.”
To help top engineering students develop their communication and business skills, Galante and his wife, Cathie, recently donated $5 million to the university to establish the interdisciplinary Galante Engineering and MBA Program.
“As an engineering graduate in the business world, I always thought, Gee, I wish I knew this or that,” says Galante. “For me, it was often a process of self-education. With this gift, there was an opportunity to get the engineering and business colleges at Northeastern working in a more collaborative way.”
Engineers who are well versed in communication and public speaking and who understand business and economics multiply their chances for success. But there’s a second big payoff, too: Having the right tools to do a lot of good in the world.
“One of the most satisfying things for me has been the opportunity to look at complex things, reduce them to simple elements, and help people see a path to resolution,” Galante says. “Maybe it’s starting a new business in a new country. Or building a new sophisticated oil-refining process.”
“You take lots of elements and integrate them down,” he explains. “You say to people, ‘This is the way I think we should go about it.’ People start nodding their heads and saying, ‘Yes, that sounds good.’”
There will always be times, Galante admits, when an engineering or business problem seems overwhelming. “That’s where the rigor and discipline of an engineering education comes in.
“You say to yourself, ‘I’ve got to figure this out. Because if I don’t, who will?’”
Karen Feldscher is a senior writer.
Launching more women engineers
Though the ranks of women working in engineering have grown in recent decades, their relative numbers continue to lag dramatically. According to recent National Science Foundation figures, in 2003 only 11 percent of U.S. engineers were women.
So it’s significant that Northeastern’s efforts to promote women in the sciences got a big boost recently when the National Science Foundation awarded the university two new grants. One, for $3.7 million, is aimed at breaking down institutional barriers to women’s advancement in the sciences, engineering, and social sciences. Another, for nearly $500,000, will explore how cooperative education and other on-the-job experiences affect women undergraduates studying engineering. (See story, page 5.)
And it’s not surprising that Northeastern alumnae have stepped up to address the disparity, too. Valerie Perlowitz, senior vice president and director of corporate development at ATS Corporation, is the cofounder and president of a nonprofit group called Women in Technology, which promotes education and networking as a means of encouraging women to enter engineering. In 2001, she pledged $25,000 to establish the Valerie Perlowitz Women in Engineering Scholarship at Northeastern.
Leslie Abi-Karam, executive vice president at Pitney Bowes, has been a staunch supporter of the university’s Women in Engineering program, and speaks regularly about the need to attract more women into the field.
— Karen Feldscher