THE INTERVIEW | MILTON COLEMAN
Home is where the heart is
Climbing the corporate ladder can sometimes lead to the loss of perspective about what is important in life, but with Milton Coleman, senior VP and general manager of Mitsubishi Electic Automation, nothing could be further from the truth. Behind his ascent is the heart of a family man who has always understood where his priorities lay and has let his intellect and his ability speak for themselves.
F
rom a young age, Milton Coleman had a fascination for how things work. Turning his keen mind and his curious nature to the
world around him, he has been able to rise a long way from his humble origins in North Carolina, but he has never forgotten the family values with which he was raised and have guided his values and his goals ever since.
Now, as a skilled mechanical engineer and business executive whose career has been spent almost entirely in industrial automation, and the holder of an MBA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington as well as a BS in mechanical engineering from Duke University, Coleman can look back with pride on a career that began in the early 1990s and brought together three key disciplines that are frequently separated in industrial companies: engineering, product marketing and sales leadership. In talking to him about his successes, however, the conversation rarely strays far from his family – his younger brother and sister, his own children, and the mother that raised him. Hope, faith,
family values and an aptitude for putting the right priorities at the top of the list have kept him grounded, and that as much as anything else is the secret of his success.
“I had no idea I would end up here,” he remarks. “I had no vision about it at all. My mother, a seamstress, had me when she was 18 in rural North Carolina, and raised me as a single mom. I remember she walked everywhere and I would walk her to work at the sewing factory. She was the first person there to work on an automated sewing machine. She worked long hours and always had sore feet. “From very early on she would have said that she wanted me to be a lawyer, which I am not, but I credit her with my trajectory in the business world,” he adds. “She has driven a lot of what I have done.”
Encouraged to excel Coleman’s first formal step into the engineering world came when he began his degree course in mechanical engineering at Duke,
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