Robert B. Shapiro, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Monsanto Company, received the 1997 Distinguished Alumnus Award.
     In an illustrious career, Shapiro rose to the top ranks of American business leaders, putting aside plans when he was at Horace Mann to become a writer. "As it turned out that would not have been a very good idea," he told a group of alumni and friends at the award ceremony last November. "It turned out that while I liked the idea of being a writer, I didn't much like writing. In addition, I had absolutely nothing to say other than that all the people whom I resented and was angry at were just terrible. To have written that probably would have limited interest to anyone else." Instead, he went on to law school and several prestigious positions in business before joining Monsanto in 1990.
     At the ceremony, Alumni Council President Suzanne Sloan '77 and Head of School Dr. Eileen Mullady extended greetings to the guests. Classmate Michael Katz introduced Shapiro. "Together we span the Class of '56, " Katz said. "Bob was graduated at the top of the class; I, close to the bottom.
     "I have only one class memory of him," Katz continued. "Bob was asked to present a paper to our class on the romantic poets. He dissected each poet carefully, left not one out, talked about a few that none of us had ever heard of, probably made up a few, quoted poems at length, recited several, and finally sat down. Most of the class had fallen asleep or were peering at some interesting cracks in the ceiling...Mr. Baruth, however, was perfectly attentive and seemed quite interested. Mr. Baruth told Bob that his work was encyclopedic, exhaustive and totally comprehensive, but, Mr. Baruth said, 'Bob, you forgot one thing...' Baruth paused a beat, and the growled, 'Brevity!'"
     Katz went on to describe Shapiro's considerable accomplishments which, at Monsanto, include the establishment of an exciting goal: "to reach a zero state of negative impact on the environment. If only all chief executives had this foresight." Shapiro was an executive at Searle and then NutraSweet, now both subsidiaries of Monsanto, from 1979 until 1990. During his career, he was also vice president and general counsel for General Instrument Corporation, a professor of law and an attorney. He served the government as a special assistant to the general counsel and to the undersecretary of the Department of Transportation. He has been a consultant to state and local governments, and is a member of the President's Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations and the Trade and Environment Policy Advisory Committee.
     Following are excerpts from Shapiro's remarks:
     "One of the pleasures of an occasion such as this is to juxtapose the self that I was and the expectations that I had so long ago with what life has in fact turned out to be like. The two have very little in common. When I hear Mike Katz describe his impression of me when I was in school with him, I suspect that the inside experience and the appearance are really quite different, and it wouldn't be fully honest or appropriate for me not to note that the years of my adolescence, as is the case with many other people, were very difficult and very painful...I must say Horace Mann during those years supported me and allowed me to experience all the issues of adolescence without too much danger, keeping me within reasonable limits and giving me the chance to grow from there.
     "One of the great sins, I think, and one which I have been uniformly guilty of, is failure to thank one's teachers. There are so many people who made a huge difference in my life. I want to mention two tonight. One was Walter Metcalf and the other was Willard Hurst. Metcalf tried to teach me Latin, and Hurst tried to teach me physics and chemistry. What they had in common was that neither of those subjects came very easily to me; I had to struggle with them. [Metcalf and Hurst] were extremely patient with me, kind, considerate and absolutely merciless in their insistence that I was going to do this. There were times when I really doubted that I could. And so what I learned from them was less of Latin and physics or chemistry than it was that in fact I could do, more or less, things that didn't come easily to me. And that, I think, was probably more valuable than the subjects they were teaching.
     "...But the real discovery of my life and one which I never would have anticipated was the discovery of business. If anyone had asked me while I was at Horace Mann what I thought of business and businessmen I would have reacted fairly contemptuously. Babbitt was, I guess, kind of the model of that. It turned out that when I finally got a job in the business world, I discovered I loved it. I absolutely loved it. It turned out to be the thing I was meant to do. I first loved it for incomplete reasons, if not the wrong reasons: because it was the best game I had seen, and called for the exercise of more muscles than I had previously been called on to use. It was only over the years that I realized that the real value of this is not in the game; business is a fundamental human activity that affects the lives of an awful lot of people. And done well, it can affect those lives in a very positive way."
     On a personal note, Shapiro spoke of his family: "I have two older kids, both of whom are rock musicians - which is what happens when you send a son to Yale to study English and a daughter to Tufts to study art history...Late in life I've begun another family. I have now a two-year-old son, and another baby on the way in April, which tends to make me very conscious of these issues of work and family. In all of this I feel incredibly lucky, and very grateful to all those people and institutions that helped me get though some of the hard times and emerge more or less intact...I want to conclude by thanking my friends, my classmates, and my teachers at Horace Mann.

This article was taken from the Summer 1998 Horace Mann Magazine, pages 16-17.

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