Alfred E. Mann is equally comfortable in a scientist’s lab coat and the executive’s requisite jacket and tie.
He is a researcher, an inventor, an investor, a philanthropist, a savvy and successful entrepreneur, and a consummate business leader. Equipped with a master’s degree in physics from University of California Los Angeles, Mann started his first business, Spectrolab, in 1956, which became an international supplier of photovoltaic solar cells, panels, searchlights, and solar simulators.
Since then, he has founded and led more than a dozen profitable companies, taken two of them public, and sold seven, and he shows no signs of slowing down. In a career that spans 50 years, he has patented numerous innovative products, from semi-conductors and electro-optical components for the aerospace industry to neurostimulation systems and drug delivery technologies.
But what he really wants to come up with is the 48-hour day.
“There just isn’t enough time to do everything I want to do,” says the energetic 80-year-old. “I consider myself fortunate in that many of my endeavors have extended life and improved its quality for people. This inspires and drives me to go on seeking ways to create benefit for others.
“Besides, what else would I do with myself? Play golf? I don’t have the patience for that.”
Even an abridged version of his current activities makes it clear why he needs to get two days out of every one. He is CEO and chairman of the board of MannKind Corp., a diversified biopharmaceutical company and chairman and co-CEO of Advanced Bionics Corp., a firm he founded in 1993 that is now a Boston Scientific company.
He serves as nonexecutive chairman for five other medical technology companies he launched between 1998 and 2004, as well as for a sixth he acquired during the same period. He is chairman of the board of trustees of the Alfred Mann Foundation and of the Alfred Mann Institute at the University of Southern California, and chairman of the Southern California Biomedical Council, a nonprofit group that fosters the growth of the biomedical industry in metropolitan Los Angeles.
