Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–99
own operating people and of course a relationship with the clients. It’s hard running a research
lab without knowing what the clients want.
ASPATURIAN: No kidding.
TOMBRELLO: And you don’t always get the correct information about that in quite the right form
when it comes in through the people who are working in operations.
So, it was fun. There were challenges. There were a few people in the lab who were
troublemakers, but on a percentage basis very few. I would sometimes get sort of bent out of
shape, because I had a couple of people who were real pains. Then I started thinking: I’ve got
200 people in the lab and if I have two people who are difficult, that’s not a bad percentage for a
human population. This is fantastic. These are some of the nicest people I’ve ever known. I’d
been told it was a cosmopolitan crowd, and they were. They spoke languages from everywhere.
They came from everywhere, but mostly young. They mostly wanted to have fun. They liked
doing research. They worked all the time. It was great. Since Stephanie didn’t come back East
to Connecticut with me—Kerstin was in senior year of high school, and she didn’t want to
move—I would come back every couple weeks for a long weekend. I still had ten grad students
back here, too.
ASPATURIAN: How did Schlumberger compare to the environment at Caltech? Similarities;
differences?
TOMBRELLO: Bright people, eager. The equivalent of the students or postdocs around you—that
part was similar. Politics was different, in that you were dealing with a very thin upper
management, which meant they were close to you. It was not unusual for the chairman, when he
had a bone to pick with me, to tell me to come in to the city and hear what I was doing wrong,
which was interesting.
The politics were very different. There were people who tried to take advantage of the
fact that they didn’t think I understood the culture. I saw an interesting example of that. When I
was negotiating for the job, I realized there was a market research group in my lab. But they
didn’t report to me. So I told the VP who hired me—we ruined a perfectly good dinner with
excellent wine in this negotiation—“If they report to me, I’ll pay ’em. If they don’t report to me,
http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Tombrello_T