The United States had a large military and industrial presence in the Far East of Russia, with more than 3,000 troops on the ground under the command of General William S. Graves.

They travelled the 9,000 km (5592.3 mi) on the Trans-Siberian Railway, crossing Siberia in the middle of winter in a place where temperatures of -35 Celsius (-31 Fahrenheit) are common.

The cattle cars of the trans-siberian were heated by coal burning stoves and the occupants slept on straw laid out on timber bunks.

In 1933 there was also a thawing of relations between the USA and the Soviet Union, which led to the re-opening of the US embassy in Moscow under Ambassador William Bullit.

[2] In 1937, Igor graduated with the highest honors at the end of the year, which guaranteed him a four-year scholarship with all expenses paid in the New York State University system.

[2] He was married the day after defending his dissertation to his wife Skip, and then traveled to Santa Monica, California, where he joined UCLA in the Senior Executive Program.

The inclusion of "soft metrics" was treated with disdain by RAND and the airforce, and Igor learned his first lesson in organizational myopia, which was to become one of his primary concerns some 20 years later.

While on vacation at Cape Cod he developed a long-term plan to take early retirement from Lockheed and find a job in a school of management.

Within a year he was approached by The Graduate School of Industrial Administration at the Carnegie Mellon University about joining the GSIA faculty.

When he entered GSIA he was allowed a year free from teaching to enable him to finish his book, Corporate Strategy, which was published in 1965 and was an immediate success.

In 1969 he accepted a position as Founding Dean of the new Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

He has consulted with hundreds of multinational corporations including, Philips, General Electric, Gulf, IBM, Sterling Airlines and Westinghouse.