Walter L. Robb
Penn State University
For Walter Robb, a management consultant and president of Vantage Management, Inc., challenges were always his motivating factor. After choosing to attend Penn State, “I heard the toughest course was chemical engineering, so I wanted the challenge of taking the toughest course,” he recalls.
Robb admits, however, that his childhood dreams weren’t of a laboratory, but of a playing field. “When I was in eighth grade, my goal was to be a sportscaster. I wasn’t much of an athlete, so I was going to be the sportscaster instead of the player.” Robb didn’t know it at the time, but his love of sports would lead him to chemical engineering.
“When I entered high school at New Bloomfield, PA, with 25 in the senior class, I had a science teacher who also coached football, basketball, and baseball. He knew I wasn’t a great athlete, but Coach Weigle made me his assistant in his laboratory. I set up experiments and each year he let me acquire one thing out of the scientific catalog, and that got me interested in science. By the end of high school, I decided I was going to take either chemistry or engineering.”
College wasn’t too difficult for Robb as he consistently earned good grades and was on the dean’s list in each semester of his academic career. The aspiring chemical engineer was also able to finish school in three years.
After working for Sun Oil Company for one summer and due to some prodding by a refinery engineer, Robb decided to go for an advanced degree. After being accepted at some of the top engineering schools in the country, he chose to attend the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. He had a teaching assistantship his first year, and then received a General Electric Research Scholarship. As business manager of his graduate fraternity, he graduated with cash in his pocket.
Robb brought to graduate school the same drive that helped him finish his undergraduate degree in three years. His graduate research focused on the diffusion of gas molecules, an offshoot of his advisor’s efforts to understand transport properties in dense gases.
“I got three published papers while I was in graduate school, and my professor told me if I worked 72 hours a week, I’d have a chance to get through in three years,” he recalls. “I worked 72 hours a week and sure enough, in three years, at 23 years of age, I had a Ph.D. and set a record in chemical engineering.
Looking back on it, Robb says the secret to his successful career was the effort he put in with every endeavor. “I don’t want to imply that you can’t succeed working only 40 hours a week, but the most successful people I saw put in a little extra time each day and took a briefcase home at night,” he states.
Soon after receiving his Ph.D., Robb joined General Electric at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in Schenectady, NY, and began work designing an isotope separation plant for nuclear weapons.
“They didn’t have enough of this particular pair of isotopes to even build a pilot plant, so we simulated the pilot plant on a computer and they built the plant and it worked,” he says. “That gave me a lot of confidence that I could do anything they asked me to do.”
That confidence allowed Robb to work in different parts of G.E., as he changed research fields every two or three years during his first decade with the company. “I always had the feeling that my chemical engineering degree didn’t give me a huge amount of knowledge in any one field, but taught me how to learn about any field I was assigned.”
In 1960, having moved to G.E.’s research laboratory, Robb was tasked with developing a membrane to separate oxygen from carbon dioxide.
“The result was a new type of membrane that had never been built before and is still being expanded in things that it will do,” he says. “Technically, that project provided the most important breakthrough I ever made.”
Robb’s membranes have been utilized in breathing systems as well as artificial lungs. During his career as a G.E. researcher, he’s received a dozen patents dealing with permeable membranes and separation processes.
Brimming with ideas, Robb became head of the chemical engineering group at G.E.’s research laboratory. His 15-member team worked on polymers, jet engine components, materials, and membranes. “I enjoyed the work as a research manager,” he says, but after three years in the research job, he wanted some experience in a G.E. business.
He became leader of an even bigger group when he became research director for the G.E. silicone products business. There he was responsible for 180 chemists, chemical engineers, and technicians involved in a $35 million business.
“It was quite a step up,” Robb states. “But I found being on a business team was really thrilling because you had some objective goals like budgets, sales, and new product introductions.”
He then began training for his second career as a general manager and went to the company’s Crotonville education center. “I essentially took a mini-MBA under company sponsorship, interacting with other students from sales, marketing, and manufacturing. Everyone wanted to be a general manager. I said, ‘Shoot, someone from research can be just as good a general manager as someone from sales.’ It was a challenge to me to show that an engineer can be a general manager too,” Robb explains.
His first opportunity as a newly-minted general manager was to parlay the membrane technology he created into a new business for G.E. Under Robb’s leadership, G.E. began selling membranes for blood analyzers, which were sold to hospitals. The company also developed a membrane lung that was able to keep a person alive for eight days. In three years, Robb took a new operation from nothing to $7.5 million in revenues.
Shortly after, Robb became general manager of G.E.’s silicone business. “I had a chance to come back to the department where I had been head of R&D,” he says. “The first year we had a sales budget of $48 million. We did $67 million, which blew the socks off the budget. Everyone, including my boss, Jack Welch, was amazed.”
After another promotion, G.E. placed Robb in charge of its medical systems business. “I’m reporting to Jack Welch, and he said, ‘The medical business is the smallest old division in G.E. It’s never made much money and it’s never been well integrated in the company. I want you to go out there to Milwaukee and tell me in a year if G.E. ought to sell it,’” Robb recalls.
Faced with whether to retain or jettison this division, he began analyzing the field and looking at where G.E. stood among its competitors.
“I got there just as the CT [computer tomography] scanner revolution was starting to happen and all the companies in medical imaging began to design products that were copies of the CT scanner that the company EMI developed,” Robb states. “I decided that there had to be something better than copying someone else’s breakthrough.
So we went back to the central research lab in Schenectady and said, ‘How can we make a quantum leap in the design of CT scanners?’ They came up with an approach which we loved. They developed it in the laboratory and we put it in production in record time. The doctors loved it. In three years, we were getting 50 percent of the orders in the United States!”
When magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was introduced, Robb returned to the same formula that vaulted G.E. into a leader in CT scanners–creating something innovative that no other company had. “Once again, the same science team gave us a breakthrough and we became number one in MRI.”
In the span of 13 years, he cultivated a $200 million business on the verge of being sold to a highly profitable $1.6 billion enterprise in medical imaging with more than 10,000 employees worldwide. Today it has revenue of more than $15 billion and is one of G.E.’s biggest businesses. After 13 years in Milwaukee, Welch asked Robb to take over G.E.’s Research & Development Center in Schenectady. This was the first time an engineer was entrusted with the company’s research lab. “I had a ball for six years being G.E.’s chief technology officer.”
After 42 years with the firm, Robb retired as senior vice president for G.E.’s corporate research and development in 1993. But what to do now that he was retired?
“I had worked hard enough that I didn’t have any hobbies. I didn’t have a workshop in the basement. I hadn’t become a fisherman or hunter. I played a little golf, but not very much. What I really enjoyed the most was technology and business,” he says. “I traded in my G.E. stock and became an angel investor in ten startup companies.”
He continues, “Sixty-five years of age used to be required retirement in certain positions. I think it is so crazy to feel that your usefulness ends at 65.”
Today at 78, Robb remains active. A management consultant and president of Vantage Management in Niskayuna, N.Y., he still holds memberships on more than ten company boards, mentors and invests in another half dozen high tech start-ups, and is co-chair and founder of an incubator in Schenectady.
His lifelong love of sports not forgotten, Robb is also owner of the Albany River Rats, a AAA farm team of the National Hockey League’s Carolina Hurricanes. “When I open up the sports section–they don’t cover Penn State very well in Albany–there wasn’t anything in the sports section that got my blood flowing,” he says about his decision to buy into the River Rats. “Now I have something I can really get excited about – finding out what they’re saying about the River Rats.”
To keep himself in shape, he skis, plays tennis, and periodically challenges his body with treks. Robb ventured with his three sons up Mt. Kilimanjaro at 70 and made a recent visit to a base camp at Mt. Everest.
Robb’s storied career has brought him numerous honors. In 1987 he was given Penn State’s Distinguished Alumni Award. In 1993 President Clinton honored him with the National Medal of Technology Award for his leadership in the computer tomography and magnetic resonance imaging industry. Robb has also served on the council of the National Academy of Engineering.
At Penn State, he is most proud of being a founding and active member of the Leonhard Center Advisory Board. Robb also served on the University’s Alumni Council during construction of Hintz Family Alumni Center. The Robb Family fund has endowed two scholarships and the chemical engineering department head’s chair at Penn State.
In Schenectady, Robb is on the board of Proctor’s Theatre, a 2,300-seat area and show venue, and the Double H Ranch for critically ill children. He and his wife, Anne, have three sons and five granddaughters, all of whom live in the Boston area.
Sixty years later, Robb says he’s still convinced he made the right decision, taking chemical engineering at Penn State.