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Scottish Roots for an International Career
The City of Brotherly Love is a long way from Robertson’s roots. He was born in Gourock, Scotland, a small town near Glasgow on the river Clyde. He was the oldest of three boys born to Scottish parents.
Robertson’s grandparents immigrated to the United States in the 1920s, but returned to Scotland when the Depression hit and took the younger of their dozen children, including Robertson’s father.
Tom Robertson lived in Scotland until 1955, when at the age of 12 his family moved to the U.S. The family settled in Detroit to be near other siblings and in-laws. He went on to get a BA in business at Wayne State University, an MA in sociology, and later a PhD in marketing from Northwestern University.
While a graduate student at Northwestern, Robertson met his wife, Diana, a native of Kansas City, MO, who was then an undergraduate in comparative literature. The couple married
shortly after both graduated from Northwestern and has had parallel career tracks since.
 Diana Robertson has a PhD in sociology from UCLA and has taught business ethics at Wharton, London Business School, and Emory, where she most recently was a professor of organization and management.
Robertson began his career as an assistant professor at UCLA, and later taught at Harvard Business School. From 1971 to 1994 at Penn, Robertson was on the Wharton marketing faculty, adding
the title of Pomerantz Professor of Marketing and serving as chair of Wharton’s marketing department.
Later, as associate dean for executive education, he led the development of Wharton’s executive education program and played a pivotal role in Wharton’s dramatic transformation during the 1980s.
Wharton Marketing Professor George S. Day has known Robertson professionally through his research for nearly three decades. Robertson was instrumental in recruiting Day to Wharton in 1991.
“I have to tell you, he’s a really persuasive guy and he knows how to orchestrate recruiting,” said Day, who also is Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor, co-director of the Mack Center for Technological Innovation and director of the Emerging Technologies Management Research Program.
Three years after Day joined Wharton, Robertson headed
to London Business School. But they crossed paths again when Day took a one-year sabbatical there.
“I said ‘Tom, you really have to stop trailing me around like this,’” Day recalled with a laugh.
“I’ve always valued the relationship and his balance,” Day said. “And we’re both interested in global issues, which is one of the great things he’ll bring to the School. We have a lot of opportunities to consider, and my hope is that he will be able to do some of the things in that domain that he did with executive
education when he was here. He really did build that and take it to a new level.”
Robertson chaired the Wharton Marketing Department when Hubert Gatignon joined the faculty as a young assistant professor. Over the next 14 years, they worked together on several research projects and published joint articles, several of which received awards.
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