George Bowman
The Poet Manufacturer
Alumnus George Bowman (BA ‘82) manages a life of writing, family, and hydraulic pumps
It shouldn’t be surprising that a young man named “one of the best undergraduate poets I’ve ever taught” by Regents Professor Patricia Hampl grows up to be president of an international company widely known for its high-quality hydraulic pumps, hydraulic bolt tightening tools, and mechanical pipeline connectors. After all, Wallace Stevens proved that no natural law prevents the souls of poets and corporate managers from mixing. Certainly George Bowman (BA 1982) seems to find no paradox in his existence as both the leader of Enerpac, an Actuant company with annual revenues past the billion mark, and the man with a daily practice of writing poetry and fiction.
When he was an undergraduate here, he imagined being a wrestling coach, then writer, Bowman remembers via e-mail. A two-time wrestling state champion for North Dakota, where he was raised in Grand Forks, Bowman wrestled for Minnesota and qualified for the Division I Nationals. But as a senior, Bowman started thinking about technical writing. “I wanted a job,” he confesses, “beyond my part-time stints working at the Minnesota Daily and writing annual reports for a local pharmaceutical firm. Technical writing seemed to be a way to leverage my skills.”
While Bowman was earning a Master’s in Technical Writing at Minnesota he began working for Cray Research. Writing technical manuals there involved working with the units that developed new product. And what had been a way of making money turned into a vocation. “I think that the excitement of working in a corporation was similar to what I experienced in athletics,” he explains. “It’s a structured environment in which an individual or team can excel.
“I enrolled in the Harvard Business School,” he goes on, “only after taking accounting, statistics and marketing in the MBA program at the Carlson School in the evenings. In this way, I had confidence in my interest and aptitude for business. This really demonstrates the great resource of the University of Minnesota.”
Bowman received his Harvard MBA in 1990, then went to work running a business for Ingersoll Rand Corporation. A year later, he joined General Electric, where he remained for eleven years as, in turn, a product manager, engineering manager, regional sales manager, and business leader for three businesses. One was located in Mexico, which allowed him to develop a “passable, not fluent” command of Spanish.
Bowman has been president of Enerpac for almost four years, during which time the former niche business expanded dramatically via two key 2005 acquisitions (British companies Hydratight Sweeney and Hedley Purvis) and various international inroads, including the Australia and New Zealand markets and projects such as the rolling retractable roof of the new Olympic stadium in Nantong, China. Bowman had a chance to observe the latter last summer: “It was very exciting to see the Chinese national track team practicing there.”
He wishes he knew Mandarin, along with his Spanish and college German. He is also traveling regularly to Indonesia, Australia, Brazil, and Europe. “The highlight and the biggest challenge is always people,” he declares. “I have had the opportunity to develop relationships with people from many countries and cultures. And I am always amazed at the strength of the distribution network and the talent of our people.”
Interpersonal communication then is one of the primary tasks of this president—and clearly having studied English helps. Further, Bowman emphasizes, “I think writing critical essays about literature allowed me to develop my analytical and problem solving skills. And studying literature naturally gives you empathy with people.”
Empathy comes in handy at home as well. Bowman and his wife Angela have four boys age five and under, including a set of twins. (So he did end up coaching wrestling!) Family keeps him grounded. “Sometimes it seems like there is almost too much going on,” he admits, “but then I realize how lucky I have been.”
The more solitary pursuits of writing, faith, and exercise help balance the scales; Bowman writes for himself rather than for publication. Nevertheless he finds a way to envision even writing as team work. A formative moment at the University of Minnesota, he writes, was “my first poetry course with Patricia Hampl. We had a great group of students; the discussion was like nothing I had ever participated in. Now I understand that we were doing action learning, or authentic learning. In other words, we were engaged in a quest to write great poetry—and Trish provided the tools and advice along the way.”
The role of the individual working within a group, the athlete within the team, the writer in the literary community, is one that continues to inspire Bowman. Recently he asked a theater academic which Shakespeare passages might relate to “the conflict that many people in corporations face regarding their personal will versus the organizational will.” Chapter and verse followed, and Shakespeare schooled him again.
“It is hard to pin down exactly what about English has made me successful,” Bowman notes finally, “because having been an English major is part of who I am.”