ARIS MELISSARATOS: “AMERICA IS AT A CROSSROADS”
Multidisciplinary executive, engineer and industrialist Aris Melissaratos is a CEO of manufacturing and high-technology investment companies, including ArMel Scientifics LLC, a backer of dozens of high-technology enterprises. As Vice President of Research at Thermo Electron Corporation, he helmed its spin-out companies — Coleman Research, Thermo Information Solutions, LiveontheNet — in various roles, including chairman, CEO and president. One of America’s leading experts on business development strategy, he was for seven years top advisor to two consecutive presidents of Johns Hopkins University, the US’s Number One research university, where he was responsible for directing the commercialization of JHU’s multibillion-dollar research enterprise. He was the State of Maryland’s 2003-2007 Business and Economic Development Secretary, and worked for Westinghouse Electric Corporation for 32 years, his titles including Chief Technology Officer, VP Science & Technology (R&D), and Chief Operations Officer of Westinghouse’s multibillion-dollar Defense Electronics Group, responsible for $3.2 billion in sales revenue. His book INNOVATION is endorsed as a guide for American prosperity by the 1998-2004 Director of the National Science Foundation and by the American Chamber of Commerce. Aris is a philanthropist, charity fundraiser, and one of America’s senior Hellenic community leaders. He also chairs Montagu House Publishing and a private think-tank, the ArMel Scientifics Center for Technology & Public Policy.
Aris talks to ex-Reader’s Digest Senior Editor NJ Slabbert about America today, his extraordinary career, and his latest activities.
NJ: It’s hard to believe that it’s been just over 14 years since we published Innovation, the Key to Prosperity: Technology and America's Role in the 21st-Century Global Economy. Where has the time gone?
Aris: The more you witness, the faster time seems to pass. At Westinghouse we invented the future every day. It felt like every time I walked into my office some technological breakthrough with enormous implications was on my desk. The Internet era was born in those years. It was when the whole world shifted from analog to digital. We’re now living in the aftermath of that period.
NJ: Our civilization’s rate of change seems to increase exponentially. Yet, paradoxically, we also appear to be standing still. Or even going backwards. When Innovation came out, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers devoted its national magazine’s cover to our call to renew US infrastructure by putting engineers and scientific culture at the center of an economic renaissance, with America reasserting its global technological leadership and reversing anthropogenic climate change. But today the problems we identified in 2009 are worse than ever. Our infrastructure continues to decay, the prestige of science has plunged to a depressing new low, we’re dependent on microchips from Taiwan, our response to climate change is dangerously inadequate, our schools are still outperformed globally, American life expectancy is in decline, and our infant mortality rate is shocking by global standards. America used to be the economic and technological model of the world. What’s going on?
Aris: I agree that the hopes we expressed in Innovation haven’t materialized. But this is no time for hand-wringing. It’s a time of tremendous opportunity. Everything you’ve just said is an opportunity. America is at a crossroads. We can either go on blaming each other for our national woes, or we can figure out how to move ahead and get things done. The choices we make in the next year or two will shape America, perhaps the world, for a generation or more. I’m an optimist, as you know. Not a “relax-everything-will-be-just-fine” optimist but an “OK, let’s do this” optimist.
TREMENDOUS OPPORTUNITY
NJ: Your faith in American ingenuity isn’t diminished?
Aris: My faith in human ingenuity is stronger than it’s ever been. In Innovation we stressed that America’s most powerful asset has always been its ability to attract the brightest and best minds from all over the world. When those minds come to America, something strange happens to them. They become somehow magnified by our culture. This perception isn’t just naive boosterism … it’s a fact of history. As Innovation pointed out, America lost its connection with this aspect of itself in the 20th century. But my every instinct and everything in my experience tells me that this defining American energy is alive and well. It’s simply awaiting new channels through which it can burst free. That’s why despite being as frustrated as anybody by our national missteps I don’t share the bleak vision of our country that politicians on both sides of the political arena like to use as a rhetorical tool to intimidate voters. Our assets as a nation remain virtually unlimited, in my opinion.
NJ: Nevertheless, America appears polarized today as never before. It’s not only anti-science and possibly even anti-education, education being seen as elitist, but also anti-immigrant to an arguably unprecedented degree. Some would say we’ve lost the political, cultural and social center that was the foundation and dynamo of our greatness.
Aris: We’re bombarded by these arguments, but they’re based on historical myths and misconceptions. America has always been a country of tremendous conflict. This is nothing new. Right at the very birth of the United States, Benjamin Franklin warned us that we had a Republic … if we could keep it. Political conflict pervades every sector of society and it always has. Westinghouse, where many key technologies of the 20th century were created, was an immense company with many different divisions. In every division there were sub-groups with different kinds of expertise and their own projects, agendas and budgets. Often what one group wanted was substantially at odds with what some other group wanted. Anybody who ever worked for a huge organization will know what I mean. The only way to manage that kind of political diversity was to find ways to build bridges, to get past differences, to find common ground. That is essentially what I did at Westinghouse … leading by figuring out viable compromises.
HISTORICAL MYTHS & MISCONCEPTIONS
NJ: We can relate this to political history. The Civil War created a myth of a bipolar country, and this myth defined the civil rights movement, the Cold War and the Vietnam War. The larger truth is that before, during and after each of those historical experiences there were constant, often bitter voices raised from not just two but multiple directions. There was rarely if ever bipolarization, which is what is commonly meant by polarization, but rather multi-polarization. Diverse interests — religious, cultural, racial, ethnic, economic, regionally political, nationally political — pulling in different directions. Pretty much as it is today. The idea that we’re a two-party nation is no less misleading. One of the genuinely new features of the current political landscape is the clarity with which people have realized the extent to which neither party is pure or monolithic. Each is a spectrum with a breadth of variation that can be surprising. Naturally, though, these constellations of different interests form coalitions, which can have the same practical consequences that you’d see if simple bipolarization had existed.
Aris: Well, this is the nature of democracy and it also happens to be the nature of free enterprise. Leadership in both politics and business comes down to persuasion. You get what you’re able to persuade people to do. The bridge-building I had to do at Westinghouse was exactly what I was then called on to do as Maryland’s Business and Economic Development Secretary. I found that if you persuade successfully enough, differences don’t vanish but they do become less central, less obstructive. They’re transcended by what you convince people is in their common interest. My appointment to that government post was itself a demonstration that party-political identities and labels needn’t be deciding factors. I was and still am a lifelong Democrat but I was asked and agreed to work for a Republican governor because I knew that real economic and technological solutions don’t care about party labels. During my four years in that job I consistently received bipartisan support.
THE ART OF LEADERSHIP
NJ: You were such a popular business and economics secretary that a lot of people expected you to stay in politics and run for elected office.
Aris: I’ve never thought of myself as a politician. I believe that’s why I succeeded in government. It didn’t matter to me where a good idea came from. What mattered was that it was a good idea. When I was then invited to direct Johns Hopkins University’s efforts to translate their research to commercial success, it was a natural extension of what I had done for Westinghouse and the State of Maryland. At Hopkins I advised the university’s president — actually two consecutive presidents — on how to make intellectual property a paying proposition. The bridge-building component was very similar to my work for Westinghouse and Maryland. At Westinghouse there were all these different groups gathered under one roof. In my job as business and economic development secretary, the groups were under many roofs. At JHU, it was a hybrid. The university was administratively a single entity but its departments and intellectual fiefdoms were very different from each other in expertise and culture. Each of these communities had its own reasons to resist making money for the organization of which they were part. They looked down on commercial success. I had to find common ground between these groups and the legitimate interests of companies and investors outside the university.
NJ: So when you say “bridge-building”, you’re really talking about the art of leadership.
Aris: Exactly. And by the way, you can’t create and develop successful enterprises without leadership training. Which is why the time came for me to move on from JHU, I introduced my own successor before leaving. And I agreed to serve for a time as Executive in Residence in the Business School mentoring advanced business leadership students. That in turn led naturally to my acceptance of the Deanship of the School of Business and Leadership at Stevenson University, where I mentored young business leaders for some six years and oversaw the development of business leadership courses.
NJ: You obviously enjoy sharing your knowledge, the scope of which never ceases to amaze me. In particular I marvel at how you manage to keep abreast of so many trends and developments across so many markets.
Aris: To speak of sharing my knowledge makes it sound more altruistic than it is. When I work on any business development assignment I get out of it at least as much as I put in, if not more. It invariably involves coaching younger leaders — sometimes much younger! — and that is immensely beneficial to me. It exposes me to the thought processes and vocabularies of younger people of diverse backgrounds. This is invaluable to me. This, by the way, is also a good way to keep in touch with different marketplaces, consumer audiences and economic communities. It’s impossible to mentor multigenerational work forces, as I do, without constantly absorbing information about the worlds in which your trainees live. I process and synthesize that data. It then finds its way into all my mentoring and consulting.
“Communication is an essential resource”
NJ: I know that you’re very busy. Are you able to share information about what kinds of consulting you’re doing these days?
Aris: I can’t talk about confidential consulting assignments, but a recent one that isn’t entirely confidential involved devising a PhD-level executive leadership training course for a large real estate group.
NJ: Your chairmanship, on the side, of a book publishing company, Asher Associates, which trades as Montagu House, seems remote from your core industrial activities.
Aris: With my background it would be hard to find a business activity that doesn’t attract me, at least in principle. The media industry interests me very much because communication is an essential resource for all business enterprises. A good business venture is always one which offers its customers a compelling story. Then, science communication is important to me. One of our top priorities as a nation is to make science and technology more understandable. I also strongly believe that we need to do more to encourage a deeper public understanding of history. A way to do that is to promote a fuller awareness of the richness of history as a treasure-house of inspiring stories. The past is full of adventure, extraordinary people, and insights into our own time, into who we are. Stories can also be highly profitable, in book form and in the movies and television properties which successful books incubate. The story of the Westinghouse brand, which gave me my formative business experiences, is not only about radar, the moon landing, and the rise of the Internet age. It is also part of the story of America’s media industry. Its corporate family has spanned the CBS television network, Paramount, Viacom, MTV, and numerous radio broadcasting businesses. My involvement in media is therefore logical and natural, and I’m as excited about that area as I am about any other of the several fields of business opportunity which I’m currently engaging.
NJ: Thank you for your time today.
Aris: You’re welcome — I’m always happy to talk about my many interests.
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