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The diverse activities at Cotton Incorporated World Headquarters include disciplines ranging from research and development in every aspect of textile manufacturing, to agriculture and marketing. And if that weren't enough, the Cary, NC, facility regularly hosts tours for textile decision makers, cotton producers and industry groups who are taken through the working labs and machinery rooms. This must all come together to achieve the ultimate mission of Cotton Incorporated: To increase the consumption and profitability of cotton.
Overseeing this divergent operation in meeting its specific goal would seem to require the analytical skills of a research engineer, the management savvy of a seasoned executive, the temperament of a diplomat as well as an understanding of agriculture. Given these qualifications, Dr. Preston Sasser, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Research for Cotton Incorporated, seems unusually well suited for his role.
From his childhood on his family's tobacco farm near the eastern North Carolina town of Kinston, Dr. Sasser remembers how easily he took to higher mathematics, like calculus and trigonometry. "Mom and Dad made it very clear to their children that they never got out of high school and how important it was for us to get an education," Dr. Sasser emphatically recalls. So, like his two sisters and brother, he was encouraged to go to college. The aspiring engineer enrolled at North Carolina State College in 1955. "I decided to major in Agricultural Engineering. With my tradition of coming off the farm and my interest in engineering, it seemed like a good compromise," Dr. Sasser explains.
The nine years Dr. Sasser spent studying for his Ph.D. could not have been easy, making it through with grants and financial aid, but he relates mostly fond memories of his university days. He lists the odd jobs he took to support himself, which included everything from cleaning tables in the cafeteria to "the perfect student job" as a projectionist in the local cinema. "I would take my books with me and study. After seeing the same movie about nine times, it wasn't much of a distraction," Dr. Sasser laughs.
While in graduate school, the National Cotton Council was offering grant money to work on cotton research projects, which he accepted, sparking his interest in cotton. This experience not only introduced Dr. Sasser to the interesting potential of cotton research, but to the people at the National Cotton Council, who hired him upon completion of his doctorate in 1964 as a ginning engineer. He was working with ginners as well as cotton growers. "To this day, I can identify with farmers and growers more than any other people I meet," Dr. Sasser confides. "It's easy for me to work with them, because I'm familiar with everything they deal with, from planting the seed in the ground to harvesting."
At the time, there were no automated systems for grading cotton. "It was all done by eye and feel," Dr. Sasser recalls. "Human subjectivity played a major role, from looking at the color and pulling at the fibers to determine their length." In the late `60s, Dr. Sasser went to work for a company in Texas which had a contract from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop a high-speed strength tester. "There were instruments developed to test the strength of cotton fibers, but they were manually operated and depended on the skill of the operator. Except for research purposes, not much strength testing was done," Dr. Sasser notes. But the advent of open-end rotor yarn spinning was to change all that. "Different from ring spinning, the strength of the rotor spun yarns was very much dependent on the strength of the cotton fibers," he explains.
Not only did the desired new instrument need to be objectively accurate; it had to be cost effective and fast. Dr. Sasser went on to successfully co-invent a strength tester that could evaluated 300 samples per hour, faster than the 10 seconds per sample the USDA wanted. The technology was to become the standard for almost 20 years, and was also adapted to measure other cotton properties, including fiber length and color. By 1991, every bale of cotton harvested in the U.S. would be tested for these properties.
In 1973, soon after completing this groundbreaking work, Dr. Sasser was recruited to join a brand new venture, Cotton Incorporated. This helped him gauge his sights beyond just research. "Even as an undergraduate, I can recall that I didn't want to be an engineer that only had one vision. There were other things in world," he insists. At Cotton, Dr. Sasser would serve in several administrative research positions, working his way up the ranks until his promotion to his current post in 1995. The management style he developed was clearly a product of his unassuming, soft-spoken manner. "My philosophy is to get good people that know what they're doing and staying out of their way," Dr. Sasser explains.
This "cotton ambassador" has other interests. A student of American history, Dr. Sasser has been known to entertain out-of-town visitors to World Headquarters with interesting after dinner tales from North Carolina's historical past, especially the Civil War period. A father of two grown boys, Dr. Sasser has been an avid angler since childhood, fishing "wherever there's water."
His well-rounded approach to his personal and professional lives helps Dr. Sasser maintain a style that is at once serious and accessible. A good combination for leading the dynamic Cotton Incorporated World Headquarters.
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