'A family affair'; David Wooldridge Jr. has a great mentor at Motorola: his dad.

When assessing family traits, it's often said the fruit seldom falls far from the tree. If David Wooldridge Sr. and Jr., of Schaumburg,Ill.,are any indication, that old adage definitely holds true.

Both men express a strong commitment to marriage and family. Both display high personal and professional performance standards. And they're both employed by the same corporation--Motorola Inc.

Not many parents get the chance to mentor their children professionally as well as personally, but at Motorola--which was founded as a family business 65 years ago--corporate family legacies are rather common. An African-American father/son team at the management level, however, is quite unique.

David Sr., 62, serves as corporate vice president of Motorola University, an on-site training and development facility. His 37-year-old namesake is national sales manager of the intelligent vehicle highways systems strategic business unit. With distinctive backgrounds and venues, the duo has never had the pleasure, in their combined 30 years of service, of being on the same team. But that hasn't affected the influence each wields in his respective field.

A 20-year Motorola veteran, David Sr.'s career with the electronics systems giant has been a stellar one. Following 13 years at Hughes Aircraft Co., in 1974, the M.I.T Sloan Fellow joined Motorola's Government Electronics Group. He had been a program manager at Hughes. At Motorola, he managed the development and manufacture of two-way communications systems for deep-space satellites.

With several promotions behind him, he now heads Motorola's Corporate Marketing Institute and directs its Partnership Center, which specializes in converting technical communications information into lay terms. In this capacity, he is charged with instituting new training and development strategies, as well as defining overall direction and focus.

David Jr. came to Motorola in 1983 via a less orthodox route than his father's. "Dad and I didn't see eye to eye on a lot of things when I was younger," he admits, including his decision, at age 17, to get married. When the younger Wooldridge's degree in journalism from Murray State University in Murray, Ky., didn't translate into a career, David Sr. convinced his son to try sales. And what better place to test his mettle than at Motorola?

David Jr., who had no sales experience, took to it naturally. "The skills required for sales are the same needed for building relationships in any other phase of life," he shrugs. His appointment in 1990 to oversee the $1.2 million sales budget for Motorola's new user-friendly navigation technology, soon to be installed in cars, attests to the corporation's confidence in his abilities.

As with most fathers and sons, despite apparent differences, there are also parallels in their guiding philosophies. For instance, they both "tend to focus like laser beams on performance," says David Jr.

Assessing his son's career at Motorola, David Sr. says David Jr. has surpassed his own achievements at the same age. However, he candidly notes David Jr.'s vulnerability to "the same barriers to inclusion that minorities in corporate America, including myself, have always faced."

No barriers between father and son anymore, though. Whatever satisfaction David Sr. has derived from his own career pales next to his pride in David Jr.'s achievements. "Seeing your son perform to his full potential, on his own terms," he says, "is the most rewarding experience a parent can have."