Bob's Personal Journey

In 1957, Bob was born Ulrich Trogele-Peters to a German mother and an American father in what was then West Germany — in Augsburg, Bavaria, an area his maternal forebears had farmed for 500 years. Bob’s German grandfather, whom he calls his greatest teacher of basic human wisdom and practical common sense, was a horticulturalist as well as an officer in West Germany’s border guard who’d once been captured by the Russians and sent to Siberia. Bob’s mother and grandmother, in the shattered and poverty-stricken aftermath of World War II,  worked on farms to maintain a subsistence living.

In 1965, when Bob was in the third grade, his mother — by this time separated from Bob’s father — fulfilled her dream of escaping family hardship in Germany and moved with Bob to New York City. There, Bob soon found his new home in the U.S. to be quite different than what he had become accustomed to in Bavaria. Instead of surrounding farmlands and wide-open fields he saw miles and miles of urban streets and buildings. Rather than play soccer, Bob’s favored sport in Germany, kids in New York swarmed the city’s playgrounds and their innumerable basketball hoops and courts.

So with encouragement from his stepfather, a NYC policeman who placed in Bob’s hands a basketball just as Bob one day would do with his daughter Julia (an eventual Division I collegiate player herself), Bob turned to the game of hoops, that most American of sports. It was in basketball where he learned a lifelong lesson: to be successful one had to study with masters. Among his coaches as a teenager were Tom Konchalski, a famed high-school basketball scout whose insider newsletter the New York Times called “required reading for college coaches craving insights about potential recruits.”

Showing incipient talent, Bob attended the elite Five Star Basketball Camp, considered the mecca of summer basketball with alumni that now includes Michael Jordan and LeBron James. Expert guidance and Bob’s hard work paid off. In his senior year he helped lead his high-school basketball team to an 18-0 record and a #1 ranking in New York State, drawing the scouting attention of famed coaches Bobby Knight and Al McGuire and a basketball scholarship to Wichita State University. “Bob was not your typical basketball player struggling to get through college,” recounted David E. McFarland, who mentored Bob at Wichita State and later became a university chancellor and president. “He was extremely talented in sports, but extremely smart. He’s a guy’s guy to be sure, tough, having come out of New York City, and as competitive as they come. Yet at the same time he is very caring and compassionate.”

Bob was a four-year starter at the point guard position with Wichita State’s Division I basketball program and faced opponents including Indiana State with future Hall of Famer Larry Bird. Bob helped lead the Shockers to a first-place conference finish and an appearance in the 1975-1976 NCAA Tournament, where they came up short by only one point to ninth-ranked and eventual national runner-up Michigan. “Bob was a big-time college basketball player who excelled in big games in part because his focus was making the people on the team greater,” remembered Rick Shore, then an assistant coach at Wichita State.

Not surprisingly, Bob still ranks among Wichita State’s all-time leaders in career and single-game assists. But just as importantly to Bob, in 1979 he earned a Bachelor’s of Business Administration degree from WSU, which set the stage for an extended academic career.

Next for Bob was to return to his native Germany. Though he would discover only after he’d left the U.S. that he’d been drafted by the Cleveland Cavaliers of the NBA, he nevertheless committed to a career in business, where he figured he could have a much longer and more impactful career as a corporate executive than he could as a full-time player in the NBA. He enrolled at the University of Göttingen, where he spent more than a decade pursuing an MBA and a PhD in business.

To help support himself and his wife Uta Trogele during his studies, Bob returned to basketball for a time by signing a three-year contract to play with the club team ASC 1846 Göttingen, which he led to several German championships. This tenure in turn led Bob to a spot on the Federal Republic of Germany national basketball team, which competed in the European Championships and at the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles. There, the West German team — featuring Bob (playing as Ulrich Peters) along with future NBA star Detlef Schrempf —  finished eighth, falling in the quarterfinals to the eventual gold medal team from the U.S. starring a young Michael Jordan.

It was while studying for his MBA at the University of Göttingen that Bob made his first official entrée to the world of business by landing a job with the Schering Corporation as one of two select upper management trainees. While working full time, including an initial stint as Schering’s area manager with P&L responsibilities for all direct business in France, he spent nine years researching and writing his doctoral dissertation as an external candidate.

Since completing his doctorate in 1994, Bob has kept a hand in academia through the years. Beginning in 1997 he has educated MBA students at the Berlin School of Economics & Law to be future leaders in global business and society, with main lecture topics including international business, management and leadership, mergers and acquisitions, organizational design of multinational corporations, global strategy, and business ethics. He also now is a noted agribusiness thought leader — a much-sought-after source and contributor to agricultural media as well as an active presenter at industry conferences and webinars and on industry advisory boards.

Schering was just the beginning of a long, stellar business career for Bob. Through the years he has led successful turnarounds at Schering, Bayer, Aventis, FMC, and AMVAC, and in nearly every case he has doubled revenue and grown net profit by 2X to 4X.

Drawing on his athletic background, he believes growing a business involves transformation management and a focus on shifting an organization from “playing just to be in the game” to “playing to win.” This approach forces people to make different choices about investment, strategy, operations, technology, sustainability, and talent management. Bob also believes in falling in love with the customer rather than with the product, after which good things almost always happen for customer and supplier alike.

From sports to academia to the practical applications of business, Bob has forged a path like few others, and has reinvented himself several times over. Yet each stop on his journey has informed and improved the next top, with a lifetime of positive results —  personal as well as professional — serving as vivid testimony to a life hard-worked and well-lived.