Robert Pritzker

Beginning in the 1950s, the entrepreneur and engineer Robert A. Pritzker built the Marmon Group into a multi-billion dollar empire of manufacturing and service companies. The son of a prominent Chicago family of lawyers and entrepreneurs, Robert Pritzker is also a major figure in the family investment group that created the Hyatt Hotel Corporation. Robert and his brother, attorney Jay Pritzker (1922 - 1999), acquired the Colson Corporation in 1953, merging it with Marmon-Herrington in 1964 to create the Marmon Group, a holding company with interests in electrical equipment, industrial components and transportation equipment, as well as construction and retail services. While Jay acquired troubled companies at a discount, Robert made a specialty of restoring them to profitability. A period of explosive growth included the acquisition of Cerro Corporation in 1976 and credit bureau TransUnion in 1981. At the time of this podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 1983 program in Coronado, California, Robert Pritzker had built the Marmon Group's sales from $200 million to over $3 billion in only ten years. In this address to the Academy's student delegates, he shares his business philosophy: motivating managers and employees to do their best work and leaving them alone to do it. Robert Pritzker retired from his position as President of the Marmon Group in 2002. Five years later, the Pritzker family sold a controlling interest in Marmon to Warren Buffett's Berkshire-Hathaway investment group. Robert Pritzker is now President of Colson Associates, Inc., whose holdings include manufacturers of hardware and plastics, as well as medical companies, including Acumed, OsteoMed, and Precision Edge Surgical Products Company.