All in the family: Richard's wife, Melinda, and their two sons, Kyle and Brent, are Harbert College graduates as well. Kyle earned a degree in marketing, while Brent earned a degree in supply chain management.
HCOB: You received your B.S. in Business Administra- tion and your M.S. in Economics from the College of Business, but you originally came to Auburn as an en- gineering student. Can you tell us a little about why you made that switch? Hale : I chose Auburn because I knew I wanted to have a technical career and began my studies in Engineering. I soon realized that business was my passion and I trans- ferred to the College of Business. Because I was technical by nature, I focused on statistics and econometrics and was a member of the College of Business’ fourth graduating class. I left for military duty and upon return I went back to Auburn to get advice from professors on what I should take as next steps. They offered me a graduate teaching assistant position at the College of Business, and I enrolled in the Master of Science program. My mentor and major professor in that program was Dr. Wayne Lacy. I was inspired by Dr. Lacy to learn analytics and predictive modeling, which at that time primarily involved in working with government data. In what was, essentially, an early pre- diction of the current rise of Big Data, Dr. Lacy told me all areas of business would one day rely heavily on data analyt- ics. He required my thesis — which was based on predictive models — to be not simply a survey of scholarly literature, but one that would contribute to the current stock of knowl- edge. That drove me to think “out of the box.” It also built my confidence to try something new — an important lesson for all entrepreneurs today.
HCOB: Can you tell us a little about your early career at the Federal Reserve and then AT&T? Hale : The skills I learned while at Auburn enabled me to begin a career in information technology at the Federal Reserve. Like most businesses, the Fed was more interested in my programming skills than my analytical skills. I wrote programs to solve requirements of operational departments — “the business.” During my time at the Fed I rose to lead IT planning for the 6th District and began their initiatives to implement data management systems and decentralize computer processing. My passion for business led me to AT&T Computer Systems where I became Director of Sales in the southeast for their largest computer system platforms. While at IBM, Richard Hale was awarded a patent for a predictive modeling technology that has been deployed by some of the world's largest mass merchandisers.
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