Glen L. Urban

INTERVIEWER: Today is July 9, 2010. I am Karen Arenson.

We are talking today with Glen L. Urban, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, and a former dean of the School. He is an expert in marketing and new product development. His recent research has focused on how to develop trust-based marketing systems on the internet, and how to morph a website to fit individual cognitive and cultural styles. He is also chairmen of the MIT Center for Digital Business.

Glen, thank you for talking with us today.

URBAN: Pleasure to be here.

INTERVIEWER: During your years as dean of the Sloan School, enrollments in the Sloan Master's degree program grew by more than half to 350 students per year, and applications more than doubled to 3,300. Where did all that growth come from, and how did you get it?

URBAN: Well, we had several strategic retreats with the key faculty members after I became dean, and really felt that our footprint was too small. We thought we had excellence, but not enough scale. So we embarked on a strategy of increasing scale, and hopefully, also increasing excellence. That led to more students, more faculty, and particularly, some really great high quality faculty, and I think some high quality students, which then gave us, I think, better recognition, a better ability to get recruiters here, sponsored research funds, and support faculty.

INTERVIEWER: Where did the perception that it was too small come from? Was it within Sloan or from top-down in the Institute?

URBAN: Sloan's always been kind of a community consensus kind of school. So I think everyone kind of felt -- you know, Harvard was really very big, Wharton, very big, particularly the undergraduate program. Northwestern recently at that time had ascended in the rankings and was larger. We felt some of our evaluations by business, such as recruiting quality, suffered from the fact people didn't know us. We felt we could do a better job and be a larger school and that would help our recognition, as well as create more good work.

INTERVIEWER: The program is still far smaller than those ones you mentioned. How did you determine that this was an appropriate size, or did you think it should be even bigger than this?

URBAN: Well, we took the biggest step we thought we could -- 50 percent was to keep the quality of the program. At the same time, we revised the program. So, a lot of things were happening. I think since then, Dick Schmalensee and Dave Schmittlein continue to increase the Sloan School footprint. Recently the Sloan School announced an executive MBA program. So that will add considerable scale, and we've added an undergraduate minor, which adds high talent people coming through.

So, I think the body count, if you count across the Sloan Fellows and the MBAs and new executive MBA and undergrads is getting up to probably the Northwestern level of total students, not counting undergraduate programs at those big schools.

INTERVIEWER: What was involved once you had your retreats and decided that it made sense to grow, and getting there, and how fast did you do it?

URBAN: Well, you had to scale-up the program, we had to hire new faculty so we could staff those. We had to work out arrangements with the provost in terms of financials and how we were going to pay for that, and where those tuition dollars were going to go, because we had also invest in some premium quality faculty. So we needed to keep some share of that additional revenue for our own development, and then a large share to MIT to support the School.

INTERVIEWER: You got there very quickly. It was within your term, I believe.

URBAN: Yeah. We always had a big backlog of qualified students. So with a little marketing and the backlog, we didn't have any trouble finding really qualified people. It was about then, also, that we rebranded the School, the MIT Sloan School of Management. Actually, that started when I was deputy dean with Lester Thurow. We designed a new logo with the dome, and put MIT in big letters, because we felt, as well as scale, the big advantage we had over the other schools was that we were integrated cross campus, and very few other business schools could claim that.

So we had the Leaders for Manufacturing program and a number of initiatives going on, and we felt that was a core strength to tap into. So it was that kind of integration, plus positioning, post marketing, plus good people that we got more enrollments, and, I think, better quality people, and, say, generated funds then to hire highly qualified faculty.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think they your expertise in marketing played any role in your selection as dean in 1993? Did the president or the provost or anyone else tell you they wanted you to market the Sloan School?

URBAN: I think the committee that selected the dean candidate, only put forth one name. I'm not sure the president had a lot of choice. I think the committee felt we needed to do a better job of marketing, and we needed someone there that would be not just marketing, but good overall, and someone who would be a kind of consensus manager. Because certainly, anything that happened during that period was due to a lot of key people working hard on the faculty and the staff to make it happen.

INTERVIEWER: And the committee was an internal Sloan committee or across the Institute?

URBAN: It was a Sloan Committee with -- yeah -- with alumni graduates and some outside faculty members, but they were charged to give the president nominations, and they exercised their prerogative. John Little was the chairman of that committee, and--

INTERVIEWER: And he didn't--

URBAN: --he's from marketing.

INTERVIEWER: --come back and say give me some more names.

URBAN: Yeah. Chuck could have come back and said give me some more names.

INTERVIEWER: So this was Chuck Vest?

URBAN: Yup.

INTERVIEWER: Did you apply your marketing expertise in any way as dean? Can you talk about whether and how you thought about somebody who had this kind of background?

URBAN: Yeah. Good marketing starts with the needs of your customer base. So we really wanted to study how those needs were changing, and we realized the ability to manage technology was critical, to be an innovator, to handle people, to be adaptive. So we really designed our curriculum around supporting those with kind of a leadership positioning, and probably moved a little bit away from the in-depth, specialization of technical skills. Not that we relaxed any of those requirements, but we said you should be good at technical, as well as be a leader, be able to handle people, understand the wide vision. So, to me that's the core of marketing is what are the needs, how do we map our strategy to them.

Once we had that, then some tactics came into play. We staffed up in PR to get the message out. We added an alumni relations to have customer satisfaction and built the alumni base, so that we have more support for graduating students, as well as contributions to the School. So I think kind of for me it was natural. It was marketing, but it was also strategy and operations. We needed people. We needed the finance structure behind it. And we got a lot of support from Chuck and the provost office.

So, it was really a very kind of cooperative effort across campus, and I think was about them, and I think we won the US News, number one award two or three years into the deanship. So, that was a lot of reinforcement. I think everybody felt good about that, that excellence hadn't been given up, that we had scale and some additional recognition.

INTERVIEWER: What kind of front-end investment did this require?

URBAN: Well, one of the nice things about having a backlog of students is you admit them and they start paying. If you want to hire faculty, it takes a while. So the cash flow was not a big problem. We were able to generate funds from the new students pretty quickly, and then we put that into reserve for star faculty and salaries that were competitive across the field. So that we were pretty much self-supporting that institute, and the Sloan School would negotiate a budget, and then incremental things are split between the School and the Institute by magic formulas that are negotiated and sometimes complex.

INTERVIEWER: And where were you putting all these new people?

URBAN: Well, this is when we opened the Tang Center. So we had to have the operations of the new classrooms there. Lester had started that as dean, and was about halfway through the fundraising, and we finished the fundraising, started the building. So, the Tang Center became a critical part to the classroom facilities, which were then much improved and could handle scale. The faculty offices were a little more a challenge, and we ended spreading faculty around, which is not good for intellectual interaction. That's why the new building at E62, now for the first time, I think since the founding of the School perhaps, all the faculty are in the same building.

INTERVIEWER: And you just moved in this week?

URBAN: This morning. Walked into my office and Dick Schmalensee walks by. I haven't seen Dick Schmalensee, because I've been in E40, which is a little cubbyhole, and before that another E60 building. So our group had been isolated for the last 10 years. So you suddenly realize that, and Dave Schmittlein walks by, Bob Pintti -- suddenly you realize this is going to be great. The space was designed for interaction. Tom Allen, who specializes in this, did a lot of the work with the committee to facilitate across-floor interaction. So, I think it's going to be a real intellectual boon for the School. It's a great facility and very nice, but I think the big gain's going to be intellectual cross-fertilization.

INTERVIEWER: Even more than has taken place--

URBAN: Yeah. I think before it was harder. This would mean easier and more of that.

INTERVIEWER: And is there room for people from other departments to come collaborate?

URBAN: There's a lot of collaborative spaces, but there aren't offices where people -- unless they come on leave. There are offices for people on leave that they could come there. But, as you probably know from space at MIT, you can only have one office and yet, we have a lot of meeting rooms and spaces, so I'm looking forward to that.

INTERVIEWER: Sloan dropped its thesis requirement for Master's candidates during your tenure as dean, even though the other Master's programs around MIT mostly had it still, I think. What was the thinking behind that, and was it a hard sell either in your department or outside of it, or in your school or outside of it?

URBAN: Well, again, this came out of discussions with large faculty groups. The thesis for some people was working, for some people it wasn't working. There was kind of a trend in MBA that some people want breathe across a lot of fields and perhaps not so much depth, and other people want depth. So what we basically did was make it optional, so that you could write a thesis if you'd like. Particularly for young MBAs coming in, many of them were looking for breadth. They had been three or four or five years in a specialty area, and come for the breadth. So, that was the thinking behind it and I think it worked pretty well, along with the views of having more time for leadership and more time for interpersonal interaction.

On the same side, we've kept the requirement for the Sloan Fellows, because they're middle managers, 35, they've had a lot of breadth. They really need at least one place where they go in depth. So it's kind of mapping the needs back into what we can deliver effectively. I think the ratings of the program generally went up when we made that option.

INTERVIEWER: And you changed it to an MBA, too.

URBAN: Well, we had that again as an option -- you could be an MS or an MBA.

INTERVIEWER: That had been--

URBAN: And the market--

INTERVIEWER: --that way for a while?

URBAN: --the market spoke. We allowed you to pick MBA or MS. So, people wrote a thesis, and who wanted to go, say, into operations research or production or part of Leaders for Manufacturing -- they really wanted the MS. Other people who went into broader management, found the MBA was a better door opener, and particularly since we had gotten feedback from a lot of the recruiters. They thought MIT people were too specialized and too narrow. This helped change that perception.

INTERVIEWER: Was it hard to win approval for these things from the rest of the Institute, or did they sort of say, oh, Sloan, they're so different, they can do whatever they want.

URBAN: Well, I never had any big push back from other departments. There's always a lot of discussion and involvement with the provost and the president, as we were going through that. And academic counsel would review these things. Sloan has a little different need space. It's a professional program, a Master's program. I think subsequently, computer science has created a Master's program, for example. So that's a little bit more similar.

Back when these were originally were done, the graduate degrees were basically PhDs, and if you got a Master's it was because you couldn't do the PhD. So we were really one of the first real professional degree schools.

INTERVIEWER: Architecture might have been another.

URBAN: Yeah, where you kind of did that. So, Bill Mitchell--

INTERVIEWER: And they, too, were probably seen as--

URBAN: Yeah, and Bill Mitchell and I were kind of kindred spirits in that respect of--

INTERVIEWER: Did you talk often about--?

URBAN: Yeah, the academic counsel was very interactive, and Phil Khoury and Bill Mitchell were very close to similar things. But Bob Birgeneau and I, and the science dean at that time had great discussions about strategy, and particularly, quality.

INTERVIEWER: So it wasn't just a question of the deans of the smaller schools getting together and comparing notes.

URBAN: I don't think so. We have long-time standings with engineering. I'm an engineer myself, mechanical engineer. So, I think maybe half the faculty and probably half the students who come are engineering trained, and then most of the undergraduates come from engineering and either major in management after they're here or double major or minor in management. Of course, Tom Magnanti became dean of engineering and he was a Sloan faculty member for most of his years. So that cemented those ties even more.

INTERVIEWER: Do most of the faculty or all of the faculty at Sloan have some interest in science and engineering, or do they pick it up while they're here or do some of them ignore it -- just they're here because it's a good business school or a good university?

URBAN: I think every faculty has a core discipline, and some of those are operations research or management science. But you have the economists, who you know well -- I don't know if you would call them economic science or engineering, but it's something between. And then the behavioral scientists are a big group. In fact, when the Sloan School started, the biggest group of people were the behavioral scientists, the organization theory people. So there's a long heritage for all three of those disciplines, and most people, they're research-oriented, using those disciplines are crossing over those disciplines. Particularly, in my field in marketing, a lot of use of behavioral science, along with statistics and economics principles.

INTERVIEWER: You talked about one of the challenges being to recruit new faculty. How many did you bring in, and where did you find them, and what fields -- what was it like?

URBAN: The faculty in each of the groups always wants to expand. So the problem for the dean's office is allocating the slots. Once the slots are allocated to an area, like we allocated slots to finance because we wanted to build the finance area, we thought it was a high productivity/research area between analytic modeling, and, of course, we had Bob Merton, and Myron Scholes here, so we had a core strength there and we wanted to maintain that.

So once you put that place and saw that those people recruit the PhDs that are out there -- if you can't find a young PhD, you try to get an untenured person. If you were in an area where there was no course, math, then you might go for a senior appointment to bring them in. So we never had trouble getting faculty enthusiasm to recruit, and once we talked to people -- a lot of people like Sloan small. It's kind of family. There's not a large compartmentalization of people with political battles. There's much more of kind of cross-fertilization. So, I think probably our empirical record of acceptance given offers has been very good.

INTERVIEWER: Did that number one ranking in US News help in recruiting faculty.

URBAN: Probably more recruiting students and alumni contributions. I think the faculty looks at an area, so they say do I want to go to MIT in finance. And they say, there's Andy Lo, great young guy -- I definitely want to be there. If they look at organization studies and they see that the heritage of Ed Schein and people, or operations research, or they're interested in manufacturing links across engineering.

So, probably the faculty look more at the academic reputation than the US News, but definitely the students, recruiters and alumni see those, and maybe other people across the Institute realize Sloan's doing good.

INTERVIEWER: So the faculty in your term grew from what to what? Do you remember?

URBAN: I'd have to look back exactly. But it's probably about 15 percent to 20 percent.

INTERVIEWER: And you brought in mostly young, untenured people?

URBAN: The objective was to bring in young untenured. Particularly, we were not very representative on women and minorities. So a very high priority on that. We got a lot of support from the Institute with funds being made available to hire those people. So I think kind of--

INTERVIEWER: And you were able to find women and minorities?

URBAN: In some areas it's more difficult than others, but I think today the Sloan School has a large number of really effective women tenured and young people coming in. So, I think it takes a while for the supply to come through and to work it through, but I think it's been very positive.

INTERVIEWER: Let's back up and talk about what happened before you got to MIT. Where were you born, and where did you grow up, and what were you like as a child?

URBAN: Well, small town, Central Wisconsin. I always remember it said Marathon County, and when you come into the Marathon County when I was a kid, there would be a sign and it would give the population of cows and the population of people. There were always more cows than people in Marathon County. But it also had employers Mutual Insurance Company, a paper industry. So it was a small, pretty sophisticated little town. Good high school. I went to the local University of Wisconsin extension center for two years. So my focus was perhaps not as wide. I must say.

INTERVIEWER: Could you have stayed all four or you had to move--

URBAN: No, that's only a two-year thing. Then you go to Madison, and went there and finished engineering and the MBA. So it was kind of a widening of horizons, I think. Probably MIT was not in my consideration set for a college.

INTERVIEWER: What did your parents do?

URBAN: My dad ran a construction business, urban steel buildings, and I worked every summer there. It was great engineering experience designing buildings of steel, but also, I ended up selling and doing a lot of the marketing. So it was a good -- I think it generated a lot of my interest in management, and particularly, combining engineering and management.

INTERVIEWER: And so you thought you would come back and work in the business?

URBAN: That seemed like the natural thing to do. But, as my dad said, "I over educated you." You got into too many things that were interesting. When I got to Madison I was interested in atomic power plant design, and took a lot of courses in that. Then atomic power plants got to be not so safe, not so productive a place to be.

I got interested in marketing and technology, took the MBA and got more interested in marketing. Then was encouraged to look at PhD programs, and found a couple -- Northwestern and Michigan -- and they had full support. So it was natural and met some great faculty there -- Phil Kotler at Northwestern, and facilitated kind of moving along.

INTERVIEWER: So, when you chose your majors in college, was it with an eye towards going back into your father's business--

URBAN: Yeah, I think so, yeah--

INTERVIEWER: --or was it what you were always interested in?

URBAN: It was engineering we needed, and marketing, I learned from the summer that we needed to sell these buildings against competition, and against wood, and against other steel buildings. So it seemed natural to do those two. Then as I got into marketing and realized some nice transfers in, and the opportunity opened up at Northwestern, I thought I should take that. About then dad gave up and said, well--. Then after PhD, MIT offer is pretty hard to refuse.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have any siblings that went back into the business?

URBAN: No. I had a brother who was a computer scientist who went to Carnegie Tech, and he--

INTERVIEWER: Older brother?

URBAN: Older brother, yeah. So he went into control data at that time.

INTERVIEWER: So one of them had already flown the coop.

URBAN: Yeah. Roger, my brother, was really not a manager kind of guy-- he wasn't really interested in business. He's more technical, computer science.

INTERVIEWER: So, if power plants had continued to arise across the US, you might have gone into nuclear engineering?

URBAN: Maybe. But I think marketing, at the same, I started to do the MBA and joint work. When I was a senior in engineering, I started the MBA. So, the more I got into that, I just found engineering was really interesting, but there were a lot of big unsolved problems in marketing that kind of looked like it could use some of the statistics and modeling that we were doing, actually, in simulation of power plants. We had a computer in engineering at that point, it was a 1620 IBM, and I have more computer power on my iPhone today by some magnitude than the big 1620 that the University of Wisconsin had for all the engineering students.

INTERVIEWER: What marketing really grabbed you?

URBAN: Well, I always liked to -- in the business when I was working with my dad, I always liked the selling -- very satisfying to convince someone that this is the right thing, and I felt we had the right products. Then as I got into marketing, was the time that computers were coming into marketing. So, data analysis and--. As the computers came you could suddenly do regressions. Before that we used to have slide rules and be doing heuristic shortcuts to be able to do a regression.

So suddenly you could do forecasting and you could look at ROIs, things you did in marketing, and look at new products and say, what would I forecast and why do all these products fail? So it was really new products that kind of grabbed my attention. My Master's thesis was on product planning in the aerospace industry. Then when I got to Northwestern, Phil Kotler got me into Union Carbide, we did a lot of work on new chemical, then forecasting.

INTERVIEWER: Why the aerospace? How did you happen to fall into that?

URBAN: I think it was a flow out of atomic power plant and looking at kind of industrial high-tech, and kind of interested in new products and how people did it. An at that time, the defense industry was doing some very interesting proactive research, before the contracts, to understand needs and develop weapon systems for the military. So it kind of worked into my view of marketing, which is to understand those needs and how you can get early read on that.

INTERVIEWER: As you were going through school as an undergrad or through your Master's, did you think, oh, I've got a set of tools, I could go out and work and these would be really useful?

URBAN: Yeah. In fact, I did interview when I got my engineering degree at Trane, which was an air conditioning company, in Wisconsin. The same time, I was finishing the MBA, and I also applied to PhD programs. I remember I applied to GE and this GE guy said to me, he said, "You gotta decide what you want to be when you grow up." He said, "You can't work in GE and be a PhD, you gotta be one or the other -- you know do--."

INTERVIEWER: You told him that you were applying to the PhD programs.

URBAN: Yeah, and so he thought that was terrible that I was walking away from business. I kind of said, I really thought there's a synergy.

INTERVIEWER: He didn't say we'll send you to get your doctorate as long as you come back.

URBAN: No. I wasn't applying to R&D either. I'm sure in R&D they probably would do that. But this is more kind of product planning and new things at GE.

INTERVIEWER: So did a light bulb go off -- speaking of GE -- go off in your head where you said, gee, I really like this academic stuff?

URBAN: Yeah. I think I really liked the academics. Also, full transparency of what was happening at that time, that was the Vietnam War, and there was a definite choice. You either stayed in graduate school or did you chose a career in Vietnam. I thought I could use my skills more productively academically. So either you had to have a deferred job or be in graduate school, and even by the time I came here, the MIT system worked to be a deferred appointment.

INTERVIEWER: How did you choose Northwestern for your doctoral work? Did you apply to other places as well?

URBAN: Yeah, just two -- Michigan and Northwestern, both of which in the Big 10 are very good marketing schools. My wife was a music major, plays the organ, and both those are good schools for organ. So we kind of -- we were engaged at the time, so we put our thoughts together and looked at our options and scholarships and the people. I really liked Northwestern, so we chose that.

INTERVIEWER: Did you know Phil Kotler or know of his work?

URBAN: I knew of his work. He was actually an economics graduate from MIT, and had pioneered in the use of quantitative methods in marketing. So I seriously felt that was very much along where I wanted to go. In fact, I just edited a volume on Phil Kotler as a legend in marketing. It's interesting to trace back and talk to him about 45 years ago or 46 years ago.

INTERVIEWER: Have you stayed in touch with him all those years?

URBAN: Oh yeah, sure.

INTERVIEWER: Has he ever come over back to MIT?

URBAN: Yeah, he has, and he had a 75th birthday recently which I was out for. So we reminisce. I think he very much was bringing kind of economics and statistics.

INTERVIEWER: So he had a doctorate in economics from MIT?

URBAN: Yup.

INTERVIEWER: Then went--

URBAN: Not that far before you.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think you would have studied these same disciplines had your father not owned that business? Do you ever think about if you had just come into college--

URBAN: What would I have gone into?

INTERVIEWER: --in a more neutral way? Yeah.

URBAN: I think I was always interested in engineering. I was with a group of 8 or 10 guys in high school who all were kind of science/engineering oriented. In fact, we all went to this local extension center which had just opened. It turned out to be a great undergraduate education, because there would be 10 of us in physics and 10 of us in chemistry, and a professor from Madison kind of retired back to this extension. It was new facilities, and great calculus, great linear algebra. So, it was kind fortuitous. So probably I would have.

INTERVIEWER: This was mechanical engineering that you--

URBAN: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Did you tinker with stuff growing up? Did you play with--

URBAN: Yeah, to some extent. Because my dad was in the steel building business, I worked on the crew, and you were welding and building steel frames. It was a little more civil and mechanical --

INTERVIEWER: So you never thought about architecture as a--

URBAN: It's interesting, I didn't. I probably, subsequently--

INTERVIEWER: Because you sculpt now--

URBAN: Yeah, I think about kind of the artistic side. I think those days it was more functional.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think your engineering background proved useful to you in any way being an MIT professor?

URBAN: Oh, absolutely. I mean this is an engineering school, so engineers kind of really want to make things work and do things. So I always, in marketing, the things I did, I always wanted to build tools that marketers could use to really solve problems. Probably in my academic group, I'm viewed as kind of the engineering side of the field rather than the science side of the field. There's a little bit of rivalry in the field between the scientists -- some economists who are theory-driven, saying, well, you're just an engineer. Of course, the engineer sides as well. At least what we do is relevant. Helps the--

INTERVIEWER: So you think your engineering inclination made you approach the topic differently from some other people in it and maybe influenced some of the research topics?

URBAN: Absolutely. I'm probably more problem-driven. So I get out and talk to managers and see problems and big needs and say, all right, let's see if we can do that. I remember once with Gillette, they were talking about how new products fail at Gillette, and they were losing millions of dollars every time a test market failed. This is market research [INAUDIBLE] said, well, why don't you build a system that can predict new product sales before we launch? I said well, that's impossible.

I've been working on test markets, they're very complex, there's diffusion renovation -- everything's going-- he said, well, how about if we give you an exploratory grant at MIT to look at this and we'll cooperate with you. So I said, great, let's do that. So, Al Silk, another colleague and I, started working on it and we developed a laboratory procedure where you could show people products and ads and measure behavioral characteristics and repeat purchase and use of diffusion modeling to predict. It turned out to work very well.

INTERVIEWER: You started with products like razors or what?

URBAN: Yeah. Shampoos, shave creams, they were consumer packaged goods.

INTERVIEWER: This wasn't being done before?

URBAN: No. People would do a test market and they would spend 18 months and millions of dollars, and then more than half would fail. So, this was a three month procedure that cost much less and was much more reliable. It's actually become kind of a standard in the field. That one was called Assessor, but there are a number of copies now in the field, the Bases, and others that use that same technology we developed here.

But it was, to your point, driven by the problem, and because of that -- I think you were in economics about the same time when Dan McFadden was developing logit analysis. We were using logit analysis as the first application in marketing before Dan had developed maximal likelihood. We were using heuristics. And that once we had the maximal likelihood, we used that to estimate the preference models. So, the problem spawned a lot of cross-fertilization and innovation that then became a major contribution to the academic side.

INTERVIEWER: Was it exciting?

URBAN: Oh, absolutely. Great fun.

INTERVIEWER: Did you ever try to make a business out of it, or did you just go on to the next problem?

URBAN: Well, I always had a view that we should impact practice. It was clear that this journal of marketing publication was not taking off with the market research firms. So actually, with John Little, and Len Lodish, one of our students, we formed a little company called Management Decision Systems, and some of the graduates who had left before came and worked. Eventually that company sold I think maybe 2,000 of these packaged goods studies over a 10 year period.

So it really had an impact, and then it was copied by people who left our company and went to another company. My role was kind of bringing ideas in, and on the board, and then these students took it and made it into a real company.

INTERVIEWER: You've called the recent decades an exciting time for marketing science. In what ways? I mean this is one thing that was you--

URBAN: I guess it's always been exciting. The start out with computers enabling a lot of things. Then Assessor was kind of bringing across some behavioral concepts and logit analysis and diffusion of innovation. The next things we did were related to durables, and '80s and '90s on electric cars and trying to predict would it be a success or not. So, we developed something called Information Acceleration, which used the latest computer technologies.

At that time MacroMind Director was a big 14-inch disk that stored data, and we created a simulator of the shopping experience and the dealership experience. GM built prototypes that we could have people drive, and we measured all these things and accelerated kind of the future to, in that case, 1992, to forecast the sales in California of the EV1.

So that was exciting, because then all the computer psychology, behavioral economics. It turns out that was one of the instrumental studies with GM EV2 that said this is probably not the right vehicle -- that you should be building hybrids. GM subsequently tried to leap frog that with hydrogen, and that got delayed, which led them to lose a share of the Prius, which was a hybrid. It turned out Prius took our publication on information acceleration and did it themselves and forecast the sales of Prius with that methodology.

So that was kind of the ultimate compliment that you can publish something, somebody else can take it and replicate it and use it in a positive way. So that was exciting. Then the whole internet came about around the '90s and 2000. So we have all these new issues on the internet. So, I would just say the last 10 years, it's kind of been pretty exciting ever since I started in the field.

INTERVIEWER: Your Gillette example you talked about, helping them move from an 18 month process to a three month process, it sounds like some of what you were doing is looking more systematically at the information that was available. Were there other keys to speeding it up, or simply saying you just don't need to wait so long or gather so much data or something?

URBAN: I think the measurement was very different. They would put it in a test market and watch sales grow, trial, grow. What we were doing as a laboratory. So you take the product and you force people's awareness, and you say here's the ads for this product and competition. Now here's a simulated store. You can buy any of these products you want with the money we've given you to be part of this interview. If you don't buy it we're going to give it to you anyway and measure your use afterwards. So it was forced exposures and then you used a model to build awareness by past historic relationships, and trial repeat models for diffusion, and logit models for share given the trial.

So it was a whole different measurement and modeling system than kind put it out there and simulated in the real market.

INTERVIEWER: Where did your ideas come from? How did you think, hm, let's invent this. Can you describe--

URBAN: Well, I think you get out there and kind of say what can we do, and you look at what Dan was doing at that time, you look at other kinds of marketing research that was being done. There was a lot of advertising testing where you forced exposures. So we started to put the pieces together, and then there's sort of some creative spark that happens and you kind of say, ah, this is a way to go, let's move that way more. Probably very similar to engineering design where you're solving a complex problem. You've got theory and you've got tools, but you follow things down and you occasionally get a blithe of insight.

INTERVIEWER: Was it hard to sell it to Gillette? Were there people who were skeptical?

URBAN: Well, because they had brought the problem, that market research director had no problem. They did eight test cases with products that were going national. They did, in parallel with the test market, the Assessors, and so we had eight validation studies. And we could have got like 0.09 correlation between actual share and predicted share. So they were very cooperative.

INTERVIEWER: Did you hold your breath or lose any sleep while you were waiting for the first result?

URBAN: You always hope they work. It turns out marketing is more difficult, because you think of an engineering problem, you count your inventory or you measure your pieces of steel, but in consumers, they change and you don't have very good measurements and precision. So they're wider variances on everything, so you're living with the correlations.

We did a second paper where we've applied Bayesian Decision Theory to those reliabilities to say if they weren't perfect, they were what we observed, 0.09 correlation. How much is it worth to have this tool, and how many times will you get the wrong answer -- false positives and false negatives? Where should you set the cut-off value to optimize that? It turned out, if you optimize the cut-off value and set it, you would have a very high value, more products, lower cost coming through the system.

INTERVIEWER: You talk about a "we." It sounds like there's a lot of collaboration. Is that a common thing in consulting or fairly unusual?

URBAN: I don't know about in consulting, but in research definitely it was. Most all my papers, I really worked with our team -- Al Silk on this Assessor project, John Hauser, who is a senior professor in marketing. He's probably my most common co-author. John Little, who's the author of Little's Law, and OR, was probably my mentor and we worked very closely with him, but not so much on doing publications. But he is OR background, and advice were always critical, and then a lot of other Sloan professors. Eric Von Hippel who worked on lead user innovation -- built that in. We worked with Dan on his material. So, yeah, it's always been -- for me, I found it quite good to interact.

INTERVIEWER: Have you done much with professors or students from other schools at MIT, or has it been mostly people within Sloan?

URBAN: I think mostly within Sloan. Certainly have had a lot of discussions with people. As we go through these processes, it's a lot of interaction with the media lab, but not so much on joint projects. But rather implementing media lab technologies in my kinds of problems. A lot of this trust and morphing work comes out of things that the media lab had helped developed these technologies. I kind of see myself taking technologies, melding them with problems and creating solutions.

INTERVIEWER: You talked about getting into the whole business area and marketing during the Vietnam turmoil, which was also a period when lots of young people were running away from business. I think business schools saw enrollments or applications fall somewhat. Were you aware of that kind of disenchantment? And do you have any sense of why you somehow escaped it, and yet others felt like [INAUDIBLE]?

URBAN: Yeah, well, you couldn't not see it. At that point, the Herman Building on the fourth floor had the center for political science. I can't remember the -- do you remember the exact name? Center for International Studies.

INTERVIEWER: CIS, yeah, Studies.

URBAN: During that student unrest, some students planted a bomb in the men's room, only they planted it on the wrong floor, on the third floor. My office happens to be on the third floor. So, yeah, when a bomb goes off near your office, you really know what's going on. I think peoples' views about how to cope with that vary. I felt kind of a lot more social conscience about wider issues, not just the war. So at that time, we were doing a lot of work on family planning. In fact, I worked on a model to forecast new family planning programs, and I had been visiting in India, in Calcutta.

So, I think my social conscience got channeled more towards public health and family planning. And a lot of the Sloan graduates at that time -- I was the head of the public management part of the Sloan program in those early '70s. We had about 20 percent to 25 percent of the people majoring in public sector management.

In fact, a couple of those doctors -- Ron O'Connor. MBA Joel Lamstein and I formed a company called Management Science for Health -- a non-profit company to bring management to the public health area in developing countries. Those guys have gone on to be very successful companies, and they probably have 3,000 people worldwide working on AIDS and family planning.

INTERVIEWER: How did you get hired at MIT? You had been at Northwestern working on your doctorate with Phil Kotler.

URBAN: Yeah, that's kind of an interesting story. I went there in my second year, the fall, Phil said, well, I've got some people at Union Carbide who -- it might be an interesting area for testing your new product forecasting models. I said, great, and I went out and talked to them and we got some data together. By about January I said, well, I'm going to write this up as a first draft of the thesis. I think it was by April, we had this done.

My wife and I strapped our skis on the car -- we had a little Triumph at the time. We're heading out to Aspen, Colorado, and I said, OK, we'll drop this off. So went out to the thesis committee and dropped off this mimeographed -- I don't know if you remember the days when you had mimeographs with purple ink on the back. If you wanted to correct it you took a razor blade and scraped off the back of the paper. And we turned out all this paper.

Went out skiing, came back, and I remember one of my marketing professors, Dick Cluett said, well, you're not going to turn in a thesis like this. I kind of said well, it probably needs a lot of work. And he said that these table formats are all wrong. You've got to clean this up before we can accept it. Phil Kotler thought it was good. So I said, OK, why don't you graduate? Then, of course, well, who would I get a job with at this time of year? So Phil called around and we talked to Stanford, and MIT was looking. So I came out to MIT--

INTERVIEWER: And they were looking for a marketing person.

URBAN: Marketing professor, John Little and Arnie Amstutz were looking. They hadn't found anybody and I came out and had an interview and they said, well, why don't you come? So there I was.

INTERVIEWER: Did you think hard at all about do I want to be in Boston or do I want to be at MIT, or was it just--

URBAN: Oh, MIT was a very exciting place. Sloan School was exciting at that point, too. John Little was young, Little's Law, OR and marketing, and John had just really moved from kind of OR per se to marketing, and kind of an inspiration of saying, look, these problems are really important, we need to work on them. Other young people there, we were starting -- MIT had Project Mac, and Online was there, and it was a perfect match to the kind of things I was looking for.

INTERVIEWER: Were you aware of most of that when you were approached?

URBAN: Yeah. I mean you know the people in the field because you've been reading it, and of course, Phil was from MIT.

INTERVIEWER: He knew people here.

URBAN: He knew people here and could call John, and talk to them.

INTERVIEWER: You came I think in 1966, which would have been just about the time that the Sloan School dean had become president of MIT.

URBAN: Yup. Well, I remember interviewing -- Bill Pounds was in operations research at that time on that same floor in the Hermann Building. I talked to him, and then I met Howard Johnson and Howard was the dean. I think it was probably a couple months later, Howard was packing up to leave and he -- Federated Department Store-- and got the call from the MIT Corporation Committee, and he became president and Bill became dean. So, it was kind of fun to be in at that point in the School.

INTERVIEWER: I wonder how unusual it was for a university to be run by a business school person, whether there were very many other presidents at that point who came out of-- and Howard was somewhat unusual in that he didn't have a doctorate. Do you think MIT--

URBAN: You know, you have a unique choice. You've probably talked to Howard and have the background on how they selected Howard, but I think Howard did a good job at Sloan, and was a good manager. Apparently, the committee felt needed a little more management--

INTERVIEWER: Did you have much in the way of conversation with him over the years he was president?

URBAN: You know, Howard was always kind of an inspiration. I was a young faculty member, and then trying to get publications out. But when I became dean, Howard was particularly valuable in bringing a lot of wisdom to bear.

INTERVIEWER: He was on the Corporation at that point.

URBAN: He was chairman of the Corporation. I remember we had a dinner at my house with all the living deans -- that was when I first started, it was one of the first things I did. So that helped me be able to access their skills. I consider Howard a good friend.

INTERVIEWER: What were your first impressions of MIT? You thought this looks good, I'll go there, and then you got here and what?

URBAN: Well, it's an overwhelming place. Here you're sitting in marketing in a business school, which is not the highest prestige level of the intellectual power of MIT. So I think I felt very humbled and kind of insecure. But it was a colleagueship of, I think there were 10 young professors hired when I came in.

INTERVIEWER: For Sloan.

URBAN: For Sloan. So we had a very good peer group across operations and finance and organization studies. I had good mentoring. Bill had just come on, he was only 36 I think or something at the time he became dean. John Little was a great colleague. So, I felt, get to work, see what happens. John always said it's a good place to be from.

INTERVIEWER: Engineers and scientists had to go out and get grants to help pay for their labs and their assistance and their salaries. Did you in the Sloan School have to do that as a young professor?

URBAN: Probably not to the degree that it happens in engineering. I did do things like these Gillette projects, and Nabisco we had sponsored research projects. But it would have been conceivable at Sloan at that time to pay all your salary by teaching. And if you do more research then you get time off from teaching, and so you have more time to do research. So there was kind of a leverage to getting those grants. I think my problem-solving approach probably lent itself to that.

So I probably always had considerable funding and be able to support a pretty significant research team. Probably not the scale of engineering, but I probably, like in the last five years, averaged maybe 8 to 10 RAs working on four to five projects over those periods.

INTERVIEWER: But when you started out, what did you teach?

URBAN: Well, I was teaching basic marketing.