Education and Early Work
University of Michigan Undergraduate Studies:
I have historically been a slow learner, but once I understood a concept, I could often apply it well. Likewise, I was a slow reader, but very good with math.
Thus when I entered the University of Michigan, it was quite difficult competing in a curved grading system against mostly smart people. But I remembered physics well and I learned how to write well enough to get good grades in economics.
As a junior, I was accepted into the U of M business school which is now known as the Ross School of Business. It was hard to get accepted to that program and 2/3s of the applicants most of whom were enrolled at Michigan, were rejected. My 3.0 grade point average was the bare minimum, I probably got extra consideration being a varsity athlete, taking Calculous II with an A-, and getting my best grades during the second semester of my sophomore year.
I loved the business school. The professor in Marketing 301 wrote the book. There were 20 three credit hour classes over the next two years covering computer programming in Cobol, finance, accounting, labor negotiations, macro economics, statistics, and many others.
By my senior year, I began interviewing for a job. After about 20 rejections, I got two job offers and the one I wanted was with IBM Corporation. As the interviewer said, IBM was the greatest corporation the world had ever seen. Of course the success of IBM didn't last forever and they are no longer in the caliber of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon or Facebook.
Almost Six Years at IBM Corporation:
IBM had a fifteen month training program to teach us about the highly technical products we sold and how to conduct ourselves with customers. They trained us in assembler language and taught us about the operations and capacities of the components in a main frame computer system. The training program was harder than college and I struggled at first and was almost placed on an improvement program because of my poor grades.
But gradually I started to get it and got promoted to Associate Systems Engineer. This was the technical sales position that interfaced with large business customers. At this time they brought a demo midsize computer system to our branch and I spent hours and hours hands on. Eventually we sold several of these and I became the branch expert. I had learned how to trouble shoot software and hardware problems plus I put together a two day training program for a major account where I was the lead trainer, but four other company people participated.
Over almost six years, I won to Regional Manager awards, two Branch Manager awards and two SE symposiums. I wasn’t exactly fast-tracked, but I was doing pretty well in this career start.
The two things I remember best include how IBM could charge more money for its products by providing better support to help the customers integrate all components of the data processing system. That allowed them to focus on the savings they got from improved productivity in their business which were much greater than the costs of the computer equipment.
The second lesson came from the one time I got in trouble. General Motors had set up several remote computers at their plant and there was a daily data transmission to the mainframe to back everything up. Except about every other night the transmission would fail in the middle. I got involved in helping them fix it, but it was extremely complex and the problem continued for several weeks. I had several meetings with my manager and the lead marketing rep and asked for help, but there wasn’t much.
At one point we thought we had a handle on the fix and the key customer went to the Columbus Ohio plant for a week to get it implement. I was now in my night MBA program and if I traveled that week to Columbus, I was going to flunk my classes, so I didn’t go. When the transmission failed again, the customer called our branch manager and complained. I got reprimanded for it because some one had to be blamed. It took six more weeks, we finally found an engineering update had not been applied to a communications controller and the problem was finally fixed. The lesson I learned was that IBM was paying for all of my tuition for the MBA, but no one at the branch level cared.
A year later, I left IBM to join Saylor-Beall, my MBA was almost complete. The team held a going away party for me and I remember one guy asking me, “Why would you leave a secure job like this and go into something so risky?” Five years later, the wheels came off at IBM and they turned over 75 percent of their employees, so it was the other way around.
MBA at Michigan While Working Full Time:
The Michigan night MBA program was 60 credit hours, or 20 three credit hour courses. I single course involved two night per week from 7-10 pm. I would take two courses per semester so that meant I was in class from Monday night to Thursday night. This was while spending a regular work day from 8am to 5 pm.
Because of my BBA, I was able to pass out of all the core courses and take all electives. Between the BBA and MBA, I took nine marketing courses, seven accounting courses, three statistics courses and many others in economics, international business and one in real-estate development. It certainly honed my skills in using math, accounting and marketing in the work place once I joined the air compressor industry.