Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–98
say she is, she’s going to find a way to tell you.” And so in this mountain of stuff that came to
me, there are a couple of pages that she put together, “in case you’re curious about me.” It’s a
little CV and a short bio, and, oh yeah, she found a way to tell me. Before I got there, I’d
actually done a bit of work, and I made sure she was going to be my assistant.
I knew I had to fire the head of one of the departments. I couldn’t do it until I got there,
but I was already beginning to audition people. You would approach somebody you thought
might be a candidate for the job and say, “Write me a visionary statement of what this
department should do under the present circumstances.” There was a bit of that going on, too. I
had a bit of luck that the chief financial officer was a woman I knew, Ellen Burns. She was
going to be leaving the company to go into business for herself. She was an accountant, married
to one of the senior scientists, whom I think she met at the lab. She was extremely helpful,
because she told me where certain bodies were buried that were useful to know about. There
were lots of things about the lab that did not appear on pieces of paper. There were mysteries,
but she was quite willing to be candid about answering why these mysteries had occurred. So I
had gotten a few months’ head start, even though officially nobody knew I was going to be
running the lab—but since I was a consultant, I could get a lot of information from people. I
could talk to them. I think only one person figured it out, and he figured it out about a day
before the announcement.
The job paid well, shall we say. It paid nicely. And it was a great education. It was an
education in, first, being responsible for a lab. You paid the taxes. You paid the electrical bills.
You had some dealings with the New York office, but you wrote the checks. If they got over a
million dollars, you had to get some big vice president to countersign it, but, you know, a million
dollars is a lot of money. They were very careful about how many people you could have on
staff. They did want to keep some of the number of full-time equivalent employees. But that
was not a terrible task to do. They didn’t micromanage at that point—which you can take as a
hint that maybe they started micromanaging later.
Our lab had to build some sort of relationship with the rest of the company, because
Schlumberger may do research, but they’re a service company. They have an operating arm out
in the oil patch. They do things for money. They make measurements in oil wells. They do
seismic profiling. They’re a service business, and research is a tiny little piece pasted on top of
all that. That’s the reason the case studies were important. They created a relationship with your
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