View from the Top Lecture Series
Kirk Hachigian (B.S.’82 ME)
Chairman, President and CEO of Cooper Industries
Friday, November 9, 2007
12:00 pm
290 Hearst Memorial Mining Building
Kirk Hachigian (B.S.’82 ME) will be on campus to talk to students about achieving success in industry. Hachigian is chairman, president and CEO of Cooper Industries, a global manufacturer of electrical products with 31,000 employees and annual revenues of $6 billion.
Mr. Hachigian leveraged his engineering background into the world of making products, where excelling meant leading a publicly traded company one day and building his own structure and vision. He earned an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and took a consulting job at Bain & Company. At 38, he became a GE vice president and joined Cooper Industries in 2001 as an executive vice president of operations. In 2005, he was appointed CEO.
Hachigian sees himself as a venture capitalist. “I like to say that I have a $10 billion market value to experiment with,” he says. “Every new product and acquisition is a bet that we can create more value for the company.”
Though he doesn’t use the technical knowledge from his engineering degree, Hachigian says his Berkeley Engineering years have been invaluable. “As CEO, I take vast amounts of data and synthesize them into clear, single points that must be understood by analysts, board members and employees. Engineering is probably the greatest background for people who want to do what I do.”
Related Links
