GE's chief technology officer Little to retire

PHOTOGRAPHER: Photo Provided

Mark Little, left, and Vic Abate.

The man who came to General Electric 37 years ago looking for help on his doctoral dissertation and moved up the ranks to become the head of Global Research is retiring, the company announced Thursday.

Mark Little, General Electric’s chief technology officer since 2005, will retire at the end of the year. But he said his last day in the Niskayuna office will be in early October, when his replacement, Vic Abate, president and CEO of GE’s Power Generation business, takes over.

“I’ve had a great run at GE,” said Little, who lives in Niskayuna. “I started in 1978 as a working engineer, and the company is so terrific that it enabled me to do things that were beyond my wildest dreams back then.”

Little, 62, said he’s retiring because the time is right — “I’m certainly old enough to retire” — and the company is well-positioned to succeed. He plans to stay in Niskayuna with his wife, Terri, who is involved in a number of local charities.

“[We] have pretty deep roots here,” he said.

Together they will continue to run The Little Family Foundation, which benefits international and local charities. He will also stay connected to the business and high-tech communities.

He will also be spending time with his first grandchild, Sydney, who was born last Friday and lives down the road.

“Despite the fact that I’m old enough to go, I feel young and fit, and I’m ready to start my new life,” said Little, whose hobbies include golfing and playing guitar.

Little said he came to GE to take a job in the gas turbine business after earning his master’s in mechanical engineering from Northeastern University. He wanted to study fracture mechanics and he knew some of the world’s leading researchers were at GE.

“One got on my thesis committee and helped me get through my doctoral dissertation,” said Little, who earned his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy. “Then I went back.”

As chief technology officer since 2005, he has led Global Research through a decade of global expansion and the launch of signature initiatives like the Industrial Internet and Brilliant Factory.

The transition marks “another chapter in GE’s transformation to become the world’s premiere Digital Industrial company,” the company said in a news release. “Enabled by a global exchange of knowledge and technology, through its Global Research network, GE is creating capabilities that fuel innovation and applications across our industrial sectors.”

Among Little’s proudest moments at GE was convincing then-new CEO Jeff Immelt to buy Enron’s wind turbine business out of bankruptcy around 2000, “and it is now a 7 billion-dollar or so global business,” he said.

Little’s successor, Abate, took that business “to the highest level when in the earliest days it was struggling” while at Power & Water in Schenectady, Little said. More recently he has transformed the company’s thermal business.

Abate, a 25-year company employee who lives in Saratoga Springs, said he has “learned a ton from Mark” and is excited to oversee Global Research’s team of about 50,000 engineers.

“It’s just the coolest spot in GE because in one role, you’re able to see the next generation of technologies, which I’ve been close to,” said Abate, 51.

As the head of Power Generation, he was a business leader responsible for selling gas and steam turbines and generators. To succeed in that role, he said, he had to understand the technical fundamentals of GE’s products, and that will help him in his new job.

“One of the aspects I’m going to focus on is growing a strong technical base” of business leaders who also understand the technology, he said.

Abate earned a mechanical engineering degree and an MBA from RPI, and a master’s in engineering from Union College. He said GE has thousands of doctors and scientists across the globe, “and I’m looking to connect them closer to the market.”

“In this role, technology transcends industry,” he said. “And as GE is the new industrial company, as we become more and more focused on high-tech infrastructure, the ability to see the technology to do the research, but also to connect it to the market, is going to be exciting.”

Succeeding Abate as president and CEO of Power Generation will be Joe Mastrangelo, a 22-year GE employee who most recently ran the company’s Power Conversion and Turbomachinery businesses.