Reversal of fortune

Reversal
of fortune
Quality education is behind alum’s success story
…………………………………………………………………

BY DAVID D.
MEDINA
Special to the Rice News

Growing up poor
in the Mexican border town of Piedras Negras, Hector de
Jesus Ruiz ’72 never imagined that someday he would
be president and chief operating officer of Advanced Micro
Devices.

“Are you
kidding?” he said in a telephone call from his office
in Austin. “I wanted to do a bunch of oddball things,”
he explained. When he wasn’t playing with a rock-and-roll
band called The Teenagers, he dreamed of being an auto mechanic.

Not that he
lacked drive, but his humble surroundings offered humble
aspirations. His family was so poor that Ruiz was born at
home because his parents couldn’t afford a hospital
stay. His father worked at a ranch and his mother was a
secretary.

His fortune
changed, however, when Ruiz was 15. He met a missionary,
Olive Givin, who taught him English in exchange for housework.
She also encouraged Ruiz to attend high school, which he
did by walking 45 minutes each way across the border to
Eagle Pass. Ruiz thrived in school, and by the time he graduated,
he was named valedictorian of his senior class.

As if she hadn’t
done enough, Givin paid for Ruiz’s first year at the
University of Texas, where he received bachelor’s and
master’s degrees in electrical engineering. Ruiz then
pursued a doctorate in electrical engineering at Rice. Forever
grateful to the missionary, he dedicated his dissertation
to her.

Ruiz said he
attended Rice because he wanted to do something modern in
the field of electrical engineering. “Also, I heard
there was a professor, Thomas Rabson, who liked working
on cars, and since I liked doing that too, I thought that
Rice couldn’t be that bad.”

Rabson, professor
emeritus of electrical and computer engineering, remembers
Ruiz as being an excellent student. “He was probably
one of the best, if not the best, graduate student I have
ever had,” Rabson asserted. “I use his notebook
as an example of how to keep a research notebook.”

His experience
at Rice is one Ruiz will never forget. “It was the
best time of my life. We felt like a family. The teachers
treated me with respect and there was camaraderie among
the students. It was a place where self-worth was allowed
to reach a high level,” he said.

Even the maintenance
workers made him feel at home, Ruiz said. In a talk he gave
at Rice in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, Ruiz said he
thought that the Mexican workers didn’t like him because
he was a student and unlike them. Ruiz took pains to avoid
the workers, but one day as he sat outside, a groundskeeper
came up to him and patted him on the back.

“He told
me, ‘We are so proud of you, and we want you to know
that. We also want you to know that we feel that by keeping
this campus beautiful, we are helping you enjoy this university
so that you can graduate.’”

On that day,
Ruiz said he learned a valuable lesson: Those who have self-worth
respect themselves and others, no matter what their social
background is. He also learned that self-worth is a key
ingredient for success, an idea that he would later impart
to young Hispanic students.

After he graduated
from Rice in 1972, Ruiz went to Texas Instruments in Dallas,
where he worked for six years in the research laboratories
and manufacturing operations.
In ’77, Ruiz joined Motorola as an operations manager
in a semiconductor facility in East Kilbride, Scotland.
He returned to the United States in 1980 to assume positions
of increasing responsibility and eventually was made president
of Motorola’s worldwide Semiconductor Products Sector
(SPS).

As president,
Ruiz faced one of the most difficult assignments of his
career: to reorganize and save the struggling division.
He had to make some very unpopular decisions, such as to
lay off several hundred employees, cut layers of management,
reduce manufacturing expenses and move the headquarters
from Phoenix to Austin. The
drastic measures, painful though they were, did produce
results. Business analysts credit Ruiz for turning the group
around and leading SPS in 1998 to sales of $7.3 billion.

Another difficult
decision for Ruiz was to leave Motorola. He had worked there
for 22 years and had learned a great deal as he moved up
the corporate ladder, he said. But when the founder of Advanced
Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), W.J. Sanders III, handpicked him
to be president and chief operating officer of his company,
Ruiz accepted. The opportunity to head one of the world’s
leading producers of microchips was a new challenge Ruiz
could not decline.

Ruiz took the
helm of AMD in February. “I love it. I am having a
good time,” he said. “This new responsibility
has reinvigorated me. I feel like I was born again.”
Ruiz will need all that newfound energy to go against his
main competitor, the giant Intel.

Industry observers
predict that Ruiz will give Intel a run for its money. In
its Oct. 2, 2000, issue, Business Week declared in a headline:
“Why the Chipmaker’s Overachieving President,
Hector Ruiz, Should Worry Intel.” According to the
article, Merrill Lynch & Co. expected AMD’s revenues
to hit $4.95 billion for the year 2000, up 73 percent from
1999’s $2.86 billion. Ruiz is expected to continue
that boom by making faster and cheaper chips than Intel’s.

His accomplishments
have been recognized by several organizations. Ruiz was
named the 1999 Hispanic Engineer of the Year at the Hispanic
Engineer National Achievement Awards Conference. The following
year, the same group inducted him into the Hispanic Hall
of Fame.

For all his
glories, Ruiz is determined to remain compassionate, especially
after his first wife died at age 29 of leukemia, leaving
him with a four-year-old son, Hector Jr. “I treat people
with utmost dignity,” he told Business Week. He later
married a widow with two children.

Ruiz cherishes
being a Hispanic role model. He often goes to schools throughout
Texas to encourage Hispanic students to get a college education.
At the talk he gave at Rice, Ruiz told a packed crowd of
about 200 that success consists of three building blocks:
self-worth, a good education and access to quality technology.

“But the
power of self-worth is the single most important building
block,” Ruiz explained. He said that self-worth stems
from having strong family values. He grew up poor, but from
a very early age his loving parents instilled into him a
sense of self-worth.

His mother,
he said, worked at night so that he could attend a private
school, and she made sure that he always wore a clean shirt
to school. That very simple act, he said, drew the admiration
of his peers.

His father inculcated
him with the idea that in order for society to progress,
each generation had to be better than the previous one.
“Self-worth gives you the right be respected. Without
that right, it’s very difficult to make one generation
better than the other,” Ruiz explained.

Education, the
second most important building block for success, is seriously
lacking in Texas, Ruiz said. By the year 2025, Hispanics
will be in the majority, but if the educational status of
Hispanics doesn’t improve, Ruiz explained, Texas will
be a second-class state.

In 1999, Ruiz
was appointed by the governor to the Texas Higher Education
Coordinating Board, which has a 25-year plan to rectify
the educational problem. “Frankly, when I look at five-year-olds
in the first grade, I don’t have the courage to tell
them that they are doomed, because our programs won’t
be able to help them until 2025,” he said.

“We need
to say ‘no mas’ to this long-term solution. We
have the resources and means to do it now,” he said.

Access to quality
technology is one way to accelerate the process of providing
education to the poor, Ruiz said. “Technology can close
the gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots.’
It can help people move up the economic ladder.”

When his talk
was over, Ruiz was whisked away by AMD’s corporate
jet to California for yet another meeting. His 45-minute
walks to school are long behind him, the dust cleared from
his shoes. He has walked a long path to reach the American
dream, and now he is soaring to greater heights.

— David
Medina is a senior editor for the Sallyport and the minority
community affairs director.