Talk: Roy Levin

My name is Roy Levin. I first met Ashok in the late 1990’s when I joined a group called BARD – Bay Area Research Directors – that he had formed some while before. The purpose of this group was to provide an informal setting for directors of IT-related research organizations and selected academics to meet and discuss common problems. Ashok was the acknowledged leader of this group and I was immediately impressed by his engaging yet professional demeanor, his clear view of the group’s value and purpose, and his light management touch.

Nearly a decade later, Ashok and I were both working for Microsoft and, though a reorganization, he and a small group of his colleagues became part of the research lab that I was running here in Silicon Valley. It was a relatively small organization, and I felt a little uncomfortable that Ashok, who had managed much bigger groups than I, would now be reporting to me. But that quickly vanished as I was reminded of his confident professionalism, his emphasis on setting a clear objective and managing to it, and his warm collegiality. We worked together well for the next half-dozen years and I learned another of Ashok’s essential qualities: his enthusiastic embrace of technology and its potential to make people’s lives better. It is rare to find a veteran manager who can find his way through the minefield of corporate politics and at the same time expresses open, almost child-like enthusiasm for the technical “meat” of his organization’s work. Ashok was such a person. I miss him greatly.