King of Immedient

Industrial Management, Sept, 2000 by Erin O'Briant

In Stamford, Conn., old men gather on sidewalk benches to swap stories; toddlers, shrieking with delight, storm the public library for story hour. And if you drive haltingly through the charming New England town's business district at 15 miles an hour with one eye on the road and the other on a map, no one beeps at you.

In this idyllic place an hour's drive north of New York City is an office that houses just two people: Roy King, president and CEO of Immedient Corp., and Sara Glidden, his executive office manager. The office will soon be the headquarters of Immedient, an e-business solutions company currently based in Denver. But for now, no one but the two occupants is allowed inside -- the new office is a mess, says Glidden, because it's being reconfigured to meet Immedient's needs. Instead, King greets clients, new hires, and members of the press at Stamford's private Landmark Club, a comfortable suite of meeting rooms with a gorgeous view of the Connecticut foliage and a smiling waiter who asks visitors, "Would you care for a triple martini or an ice water?"

Beyond his wildest dreams

King didn't grow up with a private club membership or a view of Connecticut. His father was a cop. His mother was a typist. And he didn't know any industrial engineers until he went to college. His career, King says, "has grown beyond my wildest dreams." The kid from Peoria, Ill., couldn't have said, 20 or 25 years ago, that his goal was to lead a global business -- he had no role model for such a dream.

King always had a natural inclination toward engineering, though. "I liked dealing with concepts and math and tearing things apart and putting them back together," he remembers. That's what drew him to mechanical engineering in college; but once he began his studies, he realized that IE sparked his interest more. A college co-op job at John Deere gave King his first close-up view of industrial engineering. "I really liked the idea of being an industrial engineer because to me it was more diversified," he says. "I could study ask-and-apply aspects of anything from organizational theory to labor relations to optimization techniques all in the same career. And it didn't necessarily mean being a time-study engineer carrying a watch all the time." At the advice of his John Deere mentors, King transferred from Bradley University in Peoria to Iowa State University so he could continue to study industrial engineering.

"After John Deere, I went to work for the Trane Company as an industrial engineering supervisor and then went to AT&T in their management development program," he explains. "So I began to apply the industrial engineering discipline to different environments in a short period of time. And it was a result of working with some of the executives at AT&T that I was really encouraged to get a master's in business."

King returned to school -- this time, to earn an M.B.A. at Harvard University. Why? Business education, King says, was the one thing missing from the industrial engineering curriculum: "I wanted to better understand how business really worked. Understand successes, understand failures, and why [they happen]. You know, the engineers, we're always looking for the right answer, and in business it doesn't necessarily work that way. And I wanted to understand, really, how we could make a difference in the business world."

King doesn't downplay the importance of what he learned in business school but says he uses his IE training daily. "IE took you through a very logical and disciplined fact-based approach," he notes. "That hasn't changed in anything that I do. And there is also a people side of our business. Human factors was something that we studied then, and making sure that the workplace was designed with the human factors in mind. And so when we're serving clients in the business world and as my management team and I build this enterprise, I will draw upon that IE expertise, both the discipline approach as well as the people side of the business."

To King, there's a clear connection between the excitement of IE and the enthusiasm that made him a business leader. "One of the things that really excited me when I was that co-op student at John Deere was really getting my hands dirty in some operations stuff and really trying to figure out how to make it different and better. And that's what an industrial engineer does. It's being able to sift through a lot of different facts and stories and being able to really determine the right set of things and the right times and the right priorities in getting it done. So that's in me, that's what excites me. It came from, I think, the whole operation manufacturing experience."

He continues: "That became the foundation then in consulting, where you're able to really address the clients' needs and understand their problems and issues and how to apply engineering managerial technology and organizational management systems to address the pretty large issues that they have. And that has shaped, then, who I am; I was able to take that and apply it to the market."