Michael Anthony, Management Engineering Technology ’84, new Chairman of the Board of Trustees, credits the V-8 engine of the 1976 Chevrolet Monza for his pursuit of a Wentworth education. After a customer brought one into the garage where he was working as a mechanic after high school, Anthony couldn’t figure out how to replace the number-six spark plug, and he called the dealer for help.
“You had to unbolt the engine mounts and transmission mounts, disconnect the drive shaft, and jack up the engine three inches just to change the spark plug,” says Anthony. “It was a three-hour job.”
It was a breaking point.
“I said ‘I’m done. I’m not going to do this for the rest of my life. I can design this stuff better than these guys.’”
After Wentworth, he set his sights on Boston’s burgeoning high-tech sector and has now spent more than three decades as an entrepreneur and executive in the region’s tech community, including more than 20 years at the management consulting firm PRTM. Recently named vice president of sales at Cambridge Semantics, Anthony talked to us about his career, his advice to students, and his vision for the future of Wentworth.
How have you stayed involved at Wentworth?
I’ve really been involved since I graduated. I was asked twelve years ago to be a corporator, and I’ve been a trustee for ten years now. I’ll typically go back once or twice a year and do a question-and-answer session with the students and help with Mock Interview Day. Whenever they need someone from industry to come in and talk to students, I try to help out.
What kinds of questions do students ask you?
A lot of them want to know about my career path—there are a number of questions about what kind of company they should work for when they graduate. I tell them that it depends on your personality: If you are a person who is comfortable with ambiguity and wants to count on yourself to build something, succeed or fail—and you’ll fail a lot, as I did—then you might want to take the risk of going with a small company or a start-up with hopes of making it really successful. But if you are a risk-averse person and you are looking for something more 9-to-5, then you might want to go work for a big company. You’ll be well taken care of—just don’t expect a big payout at the end. That’s not wrong, it is just different.
You have written extensively about what it takes to make a product successful. What does a graduate have to do to succeed?
I tell young workers that it is really simple: You just have to work five percent harder than everyone else. It’s that little extra initiative. One of the things I’ve told young people is, if you’re going to do just what I would do, we don’t need you. The last thing we need is another Michael Anthony. I expect them to challenge me, give me ideas, to argue with me, to try new things. I might not agree with you, but at least I see that you are offering some input into how we are running the business.
In your book on product development, you note that “strategy requires vision.” What is your vision for Wentworth?
I think it is changing. I’m very happy that we’ve started the biomedical engineering program. The push into the health field is great for us. I am enamored of the electromechanical engineering degree, because that’s the way the real world works—multiple disciplines getting together to solve a problem. So we need to continue to think about what the market needs and how we are providing a student that can meet market needs. At the same time, I am very guarded about not changing the culture and what works. It is fine to grow and add new things, but they need to be built around the roll-up-your-sleeves, get-your-hands-dirty approach.
—Dan Morrell
