Late in 1995, just after
becoming Otis Elevator Company’s first director of systems engineering, I was
told that our parent company’s corporate director of education wanted me to
meet someone from the MIT Sloan School of Management to talk about educating
product development engineers. That was the start of my personal journey with
the System Design and Management (SDM) program.
Professor Thomas L. Magnanti
explained that he and Professor Edward F. Crawley of the MIT School of
Engineering were gathering stakeholder needs for a new career-compatible
graduate program called “System Design and Management”—the first
graduate-level, degree-granting program at MIT to include a distance education
option. The program would partner with industry to educate future leaders in
product development, with a curriculum that combined system-level engineering
content with management courses adapted from the MIT Sloan MBA program.
As an MIT alumnus myself, I
knew that an MIT graduate program would be a terrific option for my
high-potential product development engineers at Otis, a division of United
Technologies Corporation (UTC). I also had some thoughts about what the new
degree should include. Magnanti and I spoke for about an hour, and I was soon
able to confirm that Otis would send students to SDM’s inaugural class.
Since that time, UTC has sent
45 students to the degree program and 164 students to the certificate program.
Seventy-five percent of Otis’s degree students and one of its certificate
students rose to executive positions within a few years, as did many of the
students from other UTC divisions.
After seven years at Otis, I
left to start my own consultancy, and was hired through my company to run the
SDM Graduate Certificate in Systems and Product Development program with Helen
Trimble, who is now SDM’s director of career development. In 2004, I joined MIT
as the director of the master’s degree program, and I have since discovered
that I love teaching and mentoring the students and working with the staff.
It feels as if I am home now,
after being associated with SDM since before the beginning.
Happy 15th birthday, SDM!
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