When John Brown was invited to the campus last year for a football
afternoon, the Kalamazoo resident saw his hometown team of Western
Michigan University outflanked by Auburn in a 34-13 game that followed an
emotional loss to Florida the week before.
"I don't know if (Engineering Dean) Bill Walker invited me to that
game because I was from Kalamazoo or not," the CEO and board chairman of
the Stryker Corporation said. "But I was pulling for Auburn all the way."
Auburn's been good to him, Brown says, and admits that football means
less to him than the academic preparation he received as a transfer student from
a small Christian college in rural western Tennessee where he grew up on a farm.
"I remember Auburn it was API then as a good school for
serious students, and a good education for the money," he
recalls. "It was relatively inexpensive for
out-of-state students, which attracted me to the campus."
To a large extent, that situation still exists, and Auburn engineering
continues to be a good draw for out-of-state students. However, political debate
has sometimes been heated over the merits of teaching non-Alabama students.
Brown would probably be uncomfortable around such posturing.
"When I think back to my own days at Auburn, the vet school was making
a national name for itself, and doing so on its ability to draw highly intelligent
and motivated students from around the region," he notes. "They blew a lot of
in-state students away with the grades they made."
Wilford Bailey, then head of pathology and parasitology in the School
of Veterinary Medicine, and later president of the university itself, has remained
a lifelong friend whom Brown greatly admires.
(Bailey on Brown: 'a very capable individual in terms of his
professional activities, and a considerate person
who works well with other people. His wife Rosemary is very much the same.')
Brown's own curriculum choice was chemical engineering, which in the
fifties was a part of the chemistry department. (It would not come into its own
as a department until 1969.)
A 1957 graduate, Brown points out that Auburn's greatest gift to him
was learning how to solve analytical problems in a logical way.
"A scientific and technical background," he adds, "is a good
preparation for life."
His own career began in a joint venture between Olan Chemical and
Revere Brass and Copper in the Ohio Valley, and progressed through the
technology-driven manufacturing giants Thiokol and Squibb. He also worked
for Edward Weck, a corporation specializing in hospital-related equipment,
from hemostats to microscopes.
"Most of my career has been heavily involved in new products, product
marketing, and product management," he explains.
For the past 20 years he has been associated
with Stryker, which makes medical equipment
ranging from arthroscopic and endoscopic probes and cameras to implants that
stabilize patients who have knee, hip and spinal surgery.
He now heads the company and has manufacturing sites in California,
Michigan, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, France and Switzerland. Nearly half of its
sales are overseas, and spread throughout 80 countries. Stryker is considered as
one of the preeminent suppliers to the field.
With annualized growth of some 20 percent over the past decade, Brown
has definite ideas about team-building among Stryker's six divisions.
"I look to three things in employees as indicators for success: you have to
be smart, work hard, and be able to communicate," Brown states.
"This, frankly, is one of the challenges I view in higher education,
because I see whole cadres of students now who are bright kids, but not
well educated relative to industry's needs.
"I say this of education in general, because I see so many college
graduates who don't know how to analyze problems in a logical way," he adds. "But
I still see in a scientific and technical background the challenge and
opportunity to succeed not only in engineering, but in a number of areas."
To this end he believes Auburn should continue to stress its
reputation as an excellent undergraduate training ground with a strong technical
dimension.
"That's what it was for me," he
notes. "At the same time, we need greatly strengthened programs in selected
graduate areas, where we have established depth. I say this because at Stryker
we hire right through to the doctoral level."
Students should consider their time at Auburn as preparation for the
future, and not as a mere rite of passage.
"Grades are important," he
stresses. "There is a lot of hard competition
in the business world, not only in the sector in which I operate, but
everywhere. A college education is now a commodity that's as necessary as a high
school degree was a generation ago."
One thing hasn't changed, he suggests.
"Auburn. Before I came back last fall, it had been a few years. There
were more buildings, but beyond the brick and mortar, I saw the same attitudes
that make the town and the campus so friendly. People walk up and talk to
you. The students impressed me. It was fun to be back."
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