He is 63 and has been chairman and chief executive officer ofBell & Howell Co. for a solid 15 years. Most of his energies overthat time have been spent refashioning Bell & Howell to round theturn into the new century.
As he comes up on the company's mandatory retirement age hewants to get in a few more licks for the company and also see what hecan do for Chicago in the way of promoting growth and technology.
Among other things, he's co-chairman of an effort to establish aCenter for Technology at Northwestern University. Chicago, he says,is "desperately short" when it comes to research aimed at developingadvanced technology for use in manufacturing, and it is worse off inthe alternative, the service sector. Frey is interested in buildingthe center to find technology that would generate efficiency andgrowth in the service businesses.
Frey also is establishing the Frey Exchange program betweenNorthwestern and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. "Thedetails haven't been ironed out as yet," he said, but there would bean exchange of faculty members and scientists between the twoinstitutions to further research in a number of fields.
Frey has visited Weizmann a few times and he'll be the honoredguest Sept. 14 when the American Committee for the Institute holdsits annual Chicago diner at the Hilton.
Named for Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, theinstitute now has nearly 2,500 people at work on research ineverything from medicine to electronics and agriculture.
"It is a world class institution," Frey said. "One indication isthat a member of the team that went to the Soviet Union to doemergency bone marrow transplants after the nuclear accident was fromWeizmann."
Frey says he'll probably do some teaching at Northwestern,possibly at the Kellogg School of Management, when he reaches Bell &Howell's mandatory retirement age two years hence.
Innovation for growth is his thing and he has taught a fewcourses centered on that theme: how you find it and how you fosterit.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Bell & Howell was a leading innovator inmovie cameras but by the time Frey took over as chief executive in1971 it was the Japanese who were forging ahead and taking over inboth still and movie cameras.
"Pete Peterson, then head of the company, was well aware of theproblems when he left to go to Washington (where he became secretaryof commerce in the first Nixon administration), but he didn't havethe time to do much about the company's problems," Frey said.
"Most of my years at Bell & Howell have been spent trying to makesure the company could survive. We're out of the camera business nowand we have passed the survival stage. We no longer have to worryabout meeting the payroll.
"It took a strong stomach to do some of the things we did, but wehad to do them."
Born in St. Louis, Frey grew up in Detroit. He has threedegrees in engineering from the University of Michigan. He was avery young assistant professor at the University of Michigan when heleft to go to work for Ford Motor at double his university salary of$6,000 a year. At Ford he once worked for Lee Iacocca and was a vicepresident when he left in 1967 to become president of General CableCo.
Bell & Howell is now an advanced information company, Frey says,with something close to $800 million in annual sales. It is intoeducation (DeVry electronics and computer schools), textbookpublishing (Merrill), mail processing machines and computer-basedinformation storage and retrieval. Then there's the one that makes Frey chuckle. Bell & Howell is backin the home movie business. In a venture with Columbia andParamount, the company is the biggest thing there is in packingHollywood movies and educational films in videocassettes.
Price cutting has been vicious in the industry in the lastcouple of years, but Bell & Howell is now producing cassettes at arate of 30 million a year and Frey is delighted to say the company'stechnology enables it to beat the Japanese. That may be a firstin electronics.
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