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On Friday, November 9, 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. The event, part of the College’s “View from the Top” Speaker Series, takes place at noon in 290 Hearst Memorial Mining Building. Lunch will be provided.

“I’ve always liked the challenge of making things,” Hachigian explains. Fashioning his career is no exception.

It first started when Hachigian switched his major from economics to engineering, a practical decision, he says. More job opportunities awaited an engineering major in the early 1980s. A transfer student from UC Davis, he found Berkeley’s culture suited him. “It was busy and crowded,” he says. “I loved the whole independence of it. I always did better in environments that were unstructured. It was a place for me to really grow.”

Despite the demands of his engineering studies, Hachigian often got up at 5 a.m. He’d drive from Berkeley to the beach at Pacifica and hit the water just as the sun rose. “It was wild,” he says, recalling his surfing mania. “And surfing there was always cold!”

After he graduated in — take note — manufacturing engineering, he landed a job as a design engineer at Hughes Aircraft in San Diego. He worked on night-vision systems and electrical test equipment, surfing in his spare time. But while the surfing was better there than up north, Hachigian discovered his career lay elsewhere. “Though I appreciated the science of engineering, I was never going to be a great engineer, so I had to move onto something else. It’s important to know what you excel at.”

For Hachigian, that was the much broader 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.”

For more information go to http://www.cooperindustries.com