Alumni Spotlight: Richard Sykes

Empathy, compassion, the desire to listen: these things make us better citizens of the universe, but can they make us better employees, managers, or engineers? Richard Sykes (BSGE 1981) thinks these virtues may have a role to play in success as well as citizenship.

Sykes is also sure his ISE degree, with its foundation in problem-solving, had a role to play in his success as well.

In fact, some of Sykes’ best memories of his undergraduate curriculum are of the foundational General Engineering 103 class. At the time, this class was taught by Professor Michael Pleck. Pleck would prove instrumental in bringing computer-aided drawing to ISE, and was working on the problem as early as 1968. However, during Sykes’s time on campus in the late 1970s, to create a computer graphic you needed to walk stacks of punch cards across campus, and, according to then-Department Head Jerry Dobrovolny, another drawback was “the need to sometimes wait several days to get the graphic output generated from line drawing instructions.”

Pleck taught a disciplined approach to problem solving that, by its description, was as tight as an algebraic proof. The problem-solving methodology taught by Pleck helped Sykes with his career going forward, as an engineer with Eli Lilly, and, especially, as a business consultant with AT Kearney and McKinsey and Company, Inc.

Of Pleck, Sykes recalls, “He taught us how to problem solve, and how to think logically…. taught us the discipline of writing a problem statement, writing down the information you already had, writing down what you think you needed—the analyses you needed to do or information needed to gather. And then a section to show your work, and a place to draw your conclusion. And that discipline of how you break a problem down, how you structure a problem, how you attack a problem—I remember to this day. It was certainly helpful for engineering things, but enormously helpful in the field that I eventually went into, management consulting, where that's what you do: you solve problems.”

Pleck also taught Sykes and his undergraduate colleagues to draw. Sykes remembers the General Engineering students could always be identified walking across campus: “You could always tell the engineering students who would walk from the ‘six pack’ [Peabody Drive Residence Halls]… because we all had our T-squares hanging off the backs of our backpacks like the nerds that we were.”

Beyond simple drafting, Pleck was teaching communications. He taught “how to represent things, how to actually take care with how you communicate things in written form, so it's legible, neat, concise… that was all part of it as well. It was it was a phenomenal foundational class, might have been my most influential class as an engineer.”

Today, GE101 is Systems Engineering (SE) 101, taught by Molly Goldstein. Although mastering CAD software takes center stage, hand-drawing is still taught, in keeping with research that suggests hand-sketching “has cognitive benefits that cannot easily be replaced by computational tools”. (Gabriela Goldschmidt) Sykes has no complaints at missing out on the CAD revolution, as he did not take to the user-unfriendly computers of the time.

Sykes also fondly remembers Professor Thomas Conry, who would serve as Dobrovolny’s successor as Department Head. While Conry was Department Head, Sykes was recruiting graduates for Eli Lilly. Sykes remembers calling Conry and asking Conry to identify the best students to recruit. In return, Conry gave Sykes a kind explanation as to why he would not grant this request.

Sykes recalls, “He very patiently educated me on how things work. And he said, ‘I'm not going to tell you who the five or six best students are. Because first of all, I don't know what you want them to do. So I don't know if it's a good fit. And second of all, you know, I'm kind of behind all these guys. And third of all, if you want to figure out where the talent is, you guys show up more, spend more time with the kids, do the interviews, all that stuff.’ He was very patient about it, nothing nasty, but he took the opportunity to educate me a couple of years after I left the university, about how [recruitment] should work in a little more proper and professional way. And again, he didn't have to do that… he chose to take a moment to educate me even though I was no longer a student. And I appreciate that.”

While he was still an undergraduate at ISE, Sykes met another person who would change his life: his future wife Peg. They met at the six-pack, when she was a freshman and he was a sophomore. They ran around with the same group of friends and started dating towards the end of that school year. Peg was studying Special Education, which she would go on to teach. Rich and Peg’s oldest son Patrick graduated from Illinois in 2008, and their youngest son Michael in 2014.

At ISE, Sykes had chosen business as a secondary field option, and it would ultimately be in business consulting that he applied his problem-solving ISE skills. After seven years in various engineering and management roles at Eli Lilly’s Clinton Laboratories operations in Clinton, IN—at the time the largest bulk pharmaceutical plant in the entire world—Sykes felt he had gone as far as he could without a chemistry background.

And so began career part 2. Sykes went back to school. He got his MBA from the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, now the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

After Booth, Sykes started with AT Kearney, a management consultancy based in Chicago. Kearney was sold in 1995, after which he joined McKinsey and Company, Inc. Sykes helped build McKinsey’s operations practice, and became Managing Partner of the McKinsey’s Midwest Region, where he led over 100 partners. 

He retired from McKinsey in 2017 and is now a member of the Board of Directors of Dycom Industries, where he serves as the lead director. Sykes has also sat on the board of World Business Chicago, among many other civic activities.

Rich is a good storyteller, and his list of ten things that matter is worth hearing him talk about in its entirety. The emphasis of Rich’s life lessons falls repeatedly on the importance of empathy instead of self-importance, listening instead of talking. These ideas are illustrated through numerous stories, and here’s one such tale from his days at Eli Lilly, fresh out of college.

One of the projects was to repipe something from there to here, and it was a quarter mile away, and, you know, lots of flows and bends and 90s and pumps and all that stuff. And so I went to work like holy heck on that thing… designed it all out… And there was a project coordinator, Don, who was the guy who was going to actually install all this stuff… I said “Don, I got the work done. And we need a four-and-a-quarter-horsepower motor, this size pump, 2-3/4-inch pipe…” And he looked at me. And he said, “Sykes, I got a five-horse motor and I got a ten-horse motor. I don't have a four-and-a-quarter, and I'm not gonna go buy one for you. And on pipe, I got two-inch or three-inch. So you tell me which one you want.” And it was a great lesson. I was trying to use the skills that I had, thinking that that's why I had been hired—to get this down to the exact answer. And I had never talked to the Project Coordinator until my work was done. I should have talked to him before I started my work, and said, “I gotta go from here to there, you're gonna be the guy to build it. We're working together, you know, here's my thoughts, what’re your thoughts?” I didn’t do it until the end, and got a very nice lesson in how to work effectively with others.

To our graduates, Rich Sykes says, your career is a rocket—when you leave here, you’ll be sitting on a rocket. You’ve earned a tough degree, you’re ready for the challenges that await. Your Illinois education will give you velocity, so it’s essential to steer accurately. So have the confidence to listen as you decide where to take your rocket.

 

 

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