Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–103
Six months later, “OK, Bob. Did you have fun?” “Oh, yeah, smart guy. We worked on this,
this, and this.” I say, “Wow, that’s great stuff. How would you compare him to this other guy
you’re working with?” “Oh, he’s not in the same league,” I’d get him to explain that. “Very
good, Bob, thank you. I’ll give you another assignment soon.” I’d bring Jorge in and say,
“Look, Jorge, no one’s going to fire you. But my projection is, you are not going to be promoted
to the next level of scientist. You’re not going to become a senior scientist.” There’d be the
usual—
ASPATURIAN: Angst.
TOMBRELLO: Yes, but nothing dramatic. In the case of Jorge, he said, “OK, I understand what
you’re saying. You’re saying I’ve got a future here, but it’s a limited future.” He said, “Let me
think about it, because I may come in with a proposal.” The proposal he came in with was, “I’m
going to take a sabbatical. I’ve found a place in South America that would like me to come for a
year. Would you pay for it?” I said, “Under what conditions?” And he says, “If it works, I’m
not coming back.” I said, “It’s a deal.” And so I adopted my own tenure-review system. I used
Mr. Bob Burridge and a couple of others as my test committee. It’s not that any of these people
were bad. It’s just that I felt that I had to keep trading up, and I had to have a way of moving
people out of the lab if they hit a plateau that I didn’t think they could get over. I could have
been wrong about it. People do restart themselves. There were some people I tried to restart,
sometimes successfully. But universities do have certain strategies that industry does not always
understand. It’s different from a university, but there are things that transfer, particularly to a
research lab. If you’re out there in the field, I guess it’s the same thing. It’s a different set of
talents, but there are people who are going to make the grade, people who are someday going to
be candidates for chairmen. Our chairman, Euan Baird, though he was a Cambridge grad, had
been out in the field, out in the Middle East, and earned his spurs. Not only was he smart about a
lot of things in science, he had actually been out there dealing with the real world.
People are people. It’s just that you’re evaluating different skills and different talents.
The last thing you want is an organization where everybody looks alike. You want a diversity of
intellectual approaches to tough problems, because you never know what you’re going to run
into.
http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Tombrello_T