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Spring 2004 |
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Cover Story
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Out of the ivory tower and into the industrial world Such a record of leadership and achievement in academia alone would have made Melsa a prime candidate for dean at Iowa State or any other school in the nation. But rather than climb the career ladder further to the top of the ivory tower, Melsa instead took his formidable record of academic achievement and put it on the line in the real world of industry. He left Notre Dame in 1984 to become a vice president with Tellabs in Lisle, Illinois, where he helped build the  telecommunications equipment manufacturer’s research program from the ground up. Over the next five years, Tellabs R & D grew from 200 to 300 employees, with research expenditures nearly doubling from $12 to $23 million. Then in 1989, as vice president of strategic planning and advanced technology, he led the firm’s acquisition and merger programs and mastered the art of competitive positioning in global industries.In 1993, Melsa assumed the new position of vice president of strategic quality and process management at Tellabs and moved quickly to shape a quality program based on customer input and empowered teamwork—just the kind of forward-looking perspective Iowa State’s College of Engineering was seeking in a new leader. Indeed, Melsa stressed early on that one of his top priorities as dean would be to shift the college’s emphasis from what he viewed as a “teaching-based” model of instruction to one that was more “learning based.” Whether students in the classroom or the companies hiring those students, under Melsa’s leadership the needs and “input” of “customers” would guide the college’s curriculum and teaching. And much of this shift of focus would be grounded in a stronger emphasis on teamwork in classrooms, labs, and cooperative workplaces. Melsa knew the college was ripe for change and didn’t mince words as he combined praise for the college’s past with a clear challenge for its future. “The sense of urgency I felt in the industrial world doesn’t seem  to be here,” he said in an interview with WOI Radio shortly after arriving. “We can’t continue to say, ‘well, we do it slowly because we’re an academic institution.’ I don’t think that’s going to work.” And he drove this sense of urgency home at the opening convocation on September 7, 1995. “I warn you,” he told the assembled faculty and students, “the way will not always be easy or comfortable.”Associate Dean for Research and Outreach Ted Okiishi, for one, welcomed Melsa’s clear-eyed and commanding style. “We needed a dean who was forward thinking and visionary,” Okiishi recalls, “one who knew the value of engineering practice and scholarship, and who had the courage to insist that the college needed resources to move forward.” Cover story continues... |
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