One career done, another taking shape: longtime Hewlett-Packard executive Robert Walker is a relatively new member of FEI, but, now retired, he has thrown his energies into service for the association and several corporate boards.

No one can say that Robert R. Walker has taken the time-honored path to the chairmanship of FEI, which he assumed July 1 for a term through June 2006.

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Bob Walker doesn't have an accounting degree, never worked at a public accounting firm--though he applied for a job with one once--and never worked as a corporate controller with responsibility for accounting policy. An electrical engineer as an undergraduate, he got an MBA and started his career as a financial analyst. And he even spent time as a chief information officer, at Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), where he spent the vast bulk of his career.

Walker's FEI experience is even more striking: he joined as national Treasurer before he ever joined a chapter, having been recruited by then-Chairman David Young and bypassing the usual climb through chapter, area and national leadership board posts. After his service as Treasurer, he stepped into the leadership rotation as vice-chair last year when Michael Nemser stepped out.

At 55, Walker is four years out of the workforce, having retired as CFO of Agilent Technologies, the huge equipment maker spun off from HP in the 1990s. His arrival at FEI came in 2001, the same year he left Agilent.

Talk to Walker at any length--he talks readily and knowledgably on a lot of subjects--and you realize that he's a man with genuine energy, passion and considerable intellectual gifts. He's serving on the boards of three Nasdaq-listed technology companies, and he views his work with FEI as a way to continue a service tradition that he saw personified by the leaders of Hewlett-Packard.

"Part of my inclination is to serve on public company boards right now, which you can argue is a very dumb thing to do," he says, given the liability threats. "If we're going to restore the confidence of the American investor in companies, somebody's going to have to serve on these boards. And I get a value from having worked with [HP co-founder] Dave Packard around that kind of community service."

While he has time on his hands, Walker says he also feels energized by new challenges and intellectual curiosity. "I'm very eclectic. I've never developed a huge passion about one thing. That would help explain why my current status of not being employed is working so well. I can go off and dabble with a bunch of stuff that I never got to do before."

He's made a clear impression on others in FEI. "Bob has a style that seeks to fully understand each subject," says Mary Jo Green, FEI's chair in 2004-5, "He asks many astute questions and always is interested and involved in all the issues being discussed."

A trim man of medium height who seems to prefer sweaters and running shoes to more formal attire, Walker grew up in Chicago and went to Cornell, where he got a BSE in engineering in 1972 after just three and a half years. At that point, he applied for and was accepted into the MBA program there a semester early, and graduated the following year.

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He and his college sweetheart, Gail, decided to marry and try to move to California, where she could enroll in a Ph.D program in marine biology at the University of California at Berkeley and he would take a job with HP. She was accepted, he says with a chuckle, but he was initially turned down, and he took a job as a financial analyst with Ford Motor Co. in Detroit.

Ford had a terrific reputation in financial analysis--former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had led his "whiz kids" there in the 1950s--and Walker discovered that "Ford had real separation at the time between accountants and financial analysts. We really didn't know much about the accounting."

He says he "got far closer to accounting" when he joined Hewlett-Packard as a cost accountant in Loveland, Colo., where he stayed for two years before getting HP's permission in 1975 to move to California, first to San Diego and then the Bay Area. His wife, who started on the Ph.D track program, got a master's degree and then segued into other things, he says, including sales.

He's been in the Bay Area ever since, first in Palo Alto and the last six years or so in Hillsborough, where the family moved so his oldest son, Aron, could go to school in San Francisco. Aron, 20, is now a student at MIT in Cambridge, Mass.; his younger son, Trent, 18, is taking a year off before enrolling at Stanford.

At HP, Walker says his engineering background was an asset, and he ended up staying for 24 years, including a stint in the 1990s as CIO. Looking back, Walker thinks fondly about the company that David Packard and William Hewlett had built. "The values that Dave and Bill had were just remarkable. They just had a sense of how to build a great organization that was sustainable.

"HP had really, really strong values around what would now be termed 'ethical behavior.' It was just second nature to us. Everything we did was absolutely above board." Part of the HP approach, he says, was to pay the full corporate tax burden and not try to shirk it. Walker worked under longtime CFO and FEI member Bob Wayman most of his career at HP, and Wayman's approach, he says, "was to recognize revenues as late as possible, and expenses as soon as possible."

His first experience with board-level service was a couple of years spent in the 1990s at the Private Sector Council, which had been founded by Packard to try to get private-sector practices inculcated into the federal government.

Walker's initial corporate board seat was at InterTrust, a company that created intellectual property around digital rights and was eventually sold to a consortium created by Sony and Philips. Later, he joined the boards of Liberate Technologies--a maker of interactive TV software where he chairs the audit committee--and Electro Scientific Industries, a long-established maker of high-technology equipment. Earlier this year, he joined the board of Brocade Communications Systems, a leading maker of network storage technology.

The FEI Connection

Walker's initial point of contact with FEI was Dottie Hayes, who was Agilent's controller and an active member in the Silicon Valley chapter. "She would drag me along to FEI events, saying, 'Bob, you really got to understand this,'" he recalls. His invitation to join the national leadership team came from Young, who was CFO at Adaptec Inc. and someone Walker says he had met through business relationships in the area.

The timing of the invitation was serendipitous. "I was looking for ways to expand things," Walker says, and was moving toward retirement. "I was open, and it was an organization that I had seen in operation, and had good respect for."

Still, he imagined people asking themselves, "'What is this guy doing? He wasn't even in a chapter! How is he going to understand our issues?' And I think that's a legitimate point, but on the other hand, I probably came into it without any baggage and with a completely different perspective."

Still, he concedes that "in the last few years, the accounting world has become so complex, and without that depth [in my background], it's become a little harder for me."

While living near the dividing line between the Silicon Valley and San Francisco chapters, Walker decided that he would join the San Francisco Chapter--having spent most of his career in the technology industry, he was looking to gain some perspectives outside of "The Valley."

One thing Walker plans to continue is Mary Jo Green's focus on increasing the diversity of member ship. "I'm a huge believer in diversity, and of having people with different backgrounds and perspectives," Walker says. "If you can create an environment that's inclusive, and people will listen to those things, it's a tremendous learning environment."

He also recognizes, particularly given his own background, that FEI isn't a monolithic group. "I think it will always be an issue for FEI that our members want different things, and they want them at different times. If you're in the middle of trying to sort out a particularly thorny set of accounting issues, what you really want is access to that sort of expertise. If you're looking to hire somebody, you want to network with somebody, usually at your local chapter meeting.

"This is perhaps the most important time for an organization like FEI to be around for our members," he adds, mentioning unprecedented complexity, huge demands and the changing regulatory environment. "Having an affinity organization where you can talk to one another ... As the senior financial person, there isn't anyone else in the organization you can talk to about doing your job."

In terms of goals and objectives, Walker sees himself as trying to help cement a continuum, to get continuity in the volunteer leadership "with, obviously, some ideas of where we're trying to go from a longer-term perspective." Some of these include:

* Really showing how FEI adds value to members. The closer integration between FEI and the research done by Financial Executives Research Foundation (FERF), as well as the advocacy efforts in Washington, bear mentioning, he says. "We want to be there as the premier association servicing [our] constituency, and they need servicing more than ever before."

* The 75th anniversary of FEI next year "is a good time to remind ourselves of the wonderful legacy of this organization, having been created in an environment that was very difficult and very challenging, and when the credibility of business was very low."

* The association's funding structure needs to be looked at closely, he says, as companies are less willing to pay for membership. The success of the national strategic partner program has covered up a stagnation in dues revenue, Walker adds, yet that program is also showing slower growth, "since partners are discovering they want access at the chapter level."

* Maintaining the excellent relationships with Canada. Walker did go to last month's Canadian conference, and calls FEI Canada "a very robust organization doing a lot of things well." He wants to help bring the organizations closer together, and to work through issues like shared costs that have created some contention.

* Looking for ways to boost membership. Canada is growing, he says, but the U.S. hasn't grown in several years, "though not for lack of effort. When you look at the potential membership base, it's many times larger than our actual membership. If there's ever a time when the value proposition ought to make sense, it's now."

Walker presents a clear change from recent FEI chairs, who were working executives coping with the burdens of running a business. With more time and his own brand of energy, Walker is positioned to do a lot.

Some of his time, though, will be spent with travel. The family has traveled extensively, including trips to Italy and Spain, and he is planning a trip with his wife this summer to Eastern Europe. Then there are the volunteer "vacations" he's spent with his each of his sons individually in Costa Rica and Mongolia, doing "non-skilled" projects like road-building and trail-clearing.

Those travels, though, won't divert him from his wider mission at FEI. "Bob has a unique grasp of both financial and technology issues. He is also a very thoughtful, collaborative leader with an ability to distill issues in a succinct way and to manage relationships," says FEI President and CEO Colleen Cunningham. "He also intends to continue the great work Mary Jo has done on the diversity front. I am really looking forward to working with him this year."