Rising star at satellite company: Hughes Communications chief Kevin McGrath has been zooming up the career ladder at General Motors and its Hughes operations.

Kevin McGrath appears to be one of those people whose life has fallen right into place.

Suburban middle-class upbringing, athletic achievements, class presidency, academic honors, Ivy League education, marriage, children - and today, at 41, a big job.

What's next? Some say McGrath could be the next chairman of GM Hughes Electronics Corp., succeeding C. Michael Armstrong, who currently heads the Los Angeles-based defense and electronics firm with annual revenues of $14.1 billion.

For the time being, though, McGrath is president and chief executive officer of Hughes Communications Inc., the GM Hughes division that operates the company's commercial satellites. Hughes currently has 15 satellites circling the globe, transmitting television and telephone signals, as well as other transmissions.

McGrath - who began his career in 1977 in the treasurer's office of General Motors Corp., the parent of GM Hughes - is a soft-spoken man who admits his life has been pretty good, and he attributes a lot of his success to luck.

But he also takes some credit and says the difference between him and lots of other people is that he has always taken the initiative.

"I really don't think I have any more talent than anybody else. It's just that I've always taken that first step and been willing to try things. I think I've always been the one to put my hand out first. Maybe I always didn't want to, but I've been willing to make the first move," he says.

Even though he has an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Princeton University in New Jersey, McGrath has moved up through GM on the financial side of the business. His current position puts him in charge of about 450 Hughes employees responsible for selling transmission time to satellite users, designing new commercial uses for satellites, and servicing and operating the current in-orbit fleet.

As he has throughout his life, McGrath does a lot of traveling to close deals. His recent travels have been related to the start-up this year of the South American version of DirecTV. Hughes Communications started DirecTV, a satellite cable television service, in North America last year.

DirecTV offers 150 channels - transmitted via satellite - to small, home-based receiving dishes.

McGrath says last year he traveled about 400,000 miles on company business, which involved meeting with potential customers (broadcasters that rent satellite time) and government officials of countries setting up telecommunications industries. The most difficult parts of traveling so much are being away from home and from his four children, and the obstacles it presents to his running schedule.

McGrath is a serious runner. He competed on the collegiate level and currently runs a couple of marathons a year. Around the GM Hughes complex in El Segundo, he is known for his noontime runs, when he's not traveling.

McGrath's travel schedule is a point of some contention at the company. Some Hughes employees say he travels too much. They say he's not good at delegating responsibility, takes on too much work himself and, therefore, is out of the office too much.

McGrath says he has to travel because, to close deals, customers want to meet with the top person. Specifically, McGrath meets with programmers who use the satellites to transmit broadcasts, as well as government officials in countries where such business is regulated. But he hints that his in-house critics might not be completely wrong.

"My father recently told me: 'I never thought I would be saying this to you, but you're working too hard,'" recalls McGrath.

Without implying anything about his future at Hughes, McGrath notes that he has moved around a lot. Before he graduated from high school in New Jersey, he had lived in nine different communities.

A native of Arlington, Mass., McGrath, his parents, brother and sister moved a lot because of his father's job as an engineer for General Electric Co. McGrath describes his upbringing as typical of many suburban kids whose parents earned enough for a place in the middle class.

"I think moving around so frequently helped because I had to force myself to get involved. I had to take the initiative to meet people and to feel part of things. I think actually it turned out to be a positive experience," he says.

McGrath went to Catholic schools until the eighth grade and then moved into public schools, where he was involved in just about everything - sports, drama, student government, music and honor societies.

School activities, and good grades, says McGrath, always came easy.

After scoring 1,500 out of a possible 1,600 on his Scholastic Aptitude Test, he enrolled in Princeton University. Once there, he ran track and sang in a traveling glee club and, like most college students, partied now and then.

After graduating from Princeton, McGrath went on to graduate school, picking up an MBA. Then he got married and went to work for GM. He worked for various units of GM, in the United States and Europe, until 1987 when, at age 34, McGrath was selected to be Hughes Communications' chief financial officer.

As to his future at Hughes, McGrath issues the standard response that he is too busy at his current position to think about moving higher up the corporate ladder.

He notes, however, that he sometimes thinks of getting into politics and running for public office. "I'm a Republican who can't quite forget the Irish Catholic Democrat in me," he says.

"I'm not a big fan of Newt (Gingrich, the new Republican speaker of the House of Representatives)."

McGrath says the hardest part of his life, both at work and at home, has been deciding what needs to be done.

He recalls that a former boss once told him: "Everybody has, say, 12 things going on in their life that have to get done. But you really only have to do two of those things right away. So the most important thing is to make the correct choices in what you act on."

McGrath adds that, as he gets older and presumably wiser, he realizes "that it's not so important that you do everything; rather, it's that you do the right thing."

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Kevin McGrath

Native of: Arlington, Mass. Resident of: South Bay Age: 41 Education: B.A. in mathematics, Princeton University; M.B.A., Dartmouth College Spouse: Susan