PROFESSIONAL
42
INTERVIEW
Professor Ibrahim Kavrakoglu might well be the IEM graduate with the most diverse career of all. We met him in Istanbul and talked about his extraordinary career path, his drive and his perspective on the field of Industrial Engineering and Management.
PINAR ALTINKESER
Could you introduce yourself briefly? I started my career as a mechanical engineer and did my PhD in aerodynamics, and then started teaching at Robert College which is now Boğaziçi University. Later on I went as a visiting professor to Stanford University where I taught Mechanical Engineering and set up the Aero-acoustics Laboratory. A turning point came in 1983 when oil prices increased by 400%. This caused me to look at the world from a different perspective. I started studying economics and tried to understand how economics and the energy markets influenced the economy.
of higher growth rate and stability. This resulted in the Mass Housing Project, which was soon turned into a law. The Mass Housing Project eventually became the largest project in the history of the Turkish Republic.
After that I concentrated on the industrial sector of Turkey. I was asked to restructure the Turkish Glass Corporation. I worked on a part-time basis at Boğaziçi University and was devoted to restructuring the Turkish Glass Corporation. This took almost seven years. We had a big increase in exports, essentially through technology and quality improvements. I continued my research when I came back to Turkey It was in 1984 that I started the “Turkish Quality and started developing plans for the Turkish economy. Movement”, founding later the “Turkish Society for I was the director of the Energy PlanQuality”. At the time, globalisation was taking place ning Project of Turkey which made and Turkey was highly involved in the globalisation me an expert in energy planning. process. Quality, as well as productivity and technoIn 1981 I accepted a post at the logy, became one of the major factors. After that I University of California Berkeley devoted a lot of time to restructuring corporations in as a visiting professor, this time Turkey. Since then, together with my colleagues at for economics, and continued my Kavrakoğlu Management Institute, we have consulted work on the Turkish Economy. more than 250 companies in Turkey to make them When I came back, I was asked to more competitive, improve their productivity and develop a project to jump start the quality and globalise their businesses. Turkish economy to a level Your academic and professional life sets a really interesting example for IEM students; it’s not that common to be active in so many different fields. Why did you choose to move between all these positions? What was your drive? My main objective in all these endeavors was to have a big impact on the Turkish economy. Of course, as an engineer, I had only a limited influence on the economy but as a major project director in energy, economy itself and later on in the various industry sectors, I believe I achieved my objective.