About David Montgomery

We had going at MIT was, we really did a lot about starting marketing science. I had the idea, after I had been there about six months, to start an organisation within the Institute of the Management Sciences called the Marketing College which was for quantitative marketing people and managed to persuade a bunch of my colleagues to go on. And so we started that. That is the organisation now which is the predecessor of the one that owns the Marketing Science Conference, it owns the Marketing Science journal which is one of the four biggies within the marketing field. 

In any case that was a very exciting time and in reflecting on it with some of the faculty who worry a lot about the fact that we at SMU don't have many senior faculty, when I went to MIT, there had never ever been a full professor of marketing in the history of MIT.

So, we really got started with doing marketing science. Then I moved to Stanford which was my home base, and three years after I'd arrived I became a full professor. And my objective had been always that within seven years of getting my PhD, I wanted to have, be a full professor at one of the top five business schools, and a miracle happened, (laughter) it actually happened. It's nice to have been born in the 30s when there weren't as many of us to crowd up the space. I wrote a bunch of books and articles and stuff and got my first chair in 78 at Stanford and then later got the most senior chair, which was the Kresge chair. 

My first trip to Asia was in 1969. I was one of the last two MIT faculty members to be seconded for a bit to help found the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta. And so on the way out my wife and I and our three kids and another MIT faculty member and his wife and child; so we had four adults, four kids and sixteen pieces of luggage and we went through Japan and Hong Kong and Cambodia, Bangkok and India up to Kashmir. We spent a month in Kashmir and then the rest of the summer in Calcutta.

So that was the start. Actually, when I was an undergraduate, 1958, I went as a student and that's where I met my wife. Stanford exported sixty-three of us to a campus in South Germany and I became hooked on globalisation at a very tender age. And then in 68 while I was still at MIT with John Little, my boss at MIT and I did a program, at Orly airport in Paris, and the next year was my first trip to Asia. So I am not really a Johnny-come-lately; this has been a long-term passion.