Message from Gordon Mowat:

After Mario’s wife Carla died a few years ago, Mario bought a house along the street from his son Andrea in Redlands CA, and split his time between there and Torino/Susa area in Italy. Roberto showed me a picture of the whole Rosso clan, as well as the Montis, at a lovely outdoor garden party in Redlands just a few months before. Mario looked pretty good, but perhaps a little tired. I had last seen Mario quite a few years ago when he graciously hosted Susan & I in his vineyard, Mankas Hills in the Suisun Valley, close to Napa and Sonoma Valleys.

My career in Schlumberger interlaced with Mario’s over decades in many places, in Iran, in Jakarta, in Caracas, in Houston, in SDR Ridgefield, where he was either my direct boss or regularly visiting.

Mario had a special highly focussed drive. He was scornful of those whose lives and careers were too easily diverted by frivolities. He had a deep understanding of technical issues that drove him all the time. He sometimes showed a roguish talent for “sailing very close to the wind” in regulatory and compliance issues that almost but not quite got him into trouble. He was the eminent sales person – when in front of a client, he could simply not prevent himself from “selling up”.

I recall on once occasion when visiting my client Pemex with my boss Mario accompanying me, I had travelled from Caracas, he from Houston. My primary goal that day was to ensure we would close the sale of what we had already been selling for months, many hundreds of thousands of dollars-worth of workstations and software. Mario sniffed an opportunity to “sell up”, a little prematurely, as selling to Pemex was always a long, slow arduous process. He started to sell  the next generation, before we had a signature on the present generation. I had to physically kick him on the shin under the conference table to get him to shut up. He didn’t miss a beat. He “got it” immediately, ended the upsell, and exited gracefully with “but that’s for another day”. And we got the signature. Afterwards, we laughed about it, he told me that’s the first time ever a direct report had kicked him to shut him up.

In the mid-1980s (1986 as I recall) downturn, I was in Jakarta, running the ID group. Mario was the Indonesia/Australasia Region Manager, or maybe it was still the SE Asia Region. There were many layoffs. Mario was a very able manager in downturns as well as in boom times, but if course in downturns a manager’s job is very hard. While he did not show it externally, I know that laying off so many fine people hurt him deeply. For some reason, he chose to move me to the position of GM of the interpretation JV we had with Elnusa (the technical services branch of Pertamina). I was very grateful to Mario. I will miss Mario Bartolomeo Rosso.