President, Texas Instruments Education Technology

Inducted in 2005

Melendy Lovett is fortunate for the many opportunities, and the wonderful support she has had that has helped her achieve her goals and dreams so far.

The most important lesson from her consulting experience was the idea that she needed to earn every paycheck every day. Melendy could make the personal profit and loss statement because she could see client billings and knew what the firm was paying her.

This lesson put her into the mindset of being in a position of consistently and continually earning her pay every day. Melendy went out on her own as an independent consultant for a year and then had the opportunity to join Texas Instruments (TI).

In 2003, Melendy became the first woman to hold the position of a business president at TI. In her position as president of TI’s Education Technology business, she was given the opportunity to directly impact science and technology by bringing innovative products to market. These products make a significant difference in the educational experience of today’s school children and young adults. More than just bringing innovative TI calculators to market, she was able to focus the organization on using research to continue driving products and programs that truly help students perform better in the important subjects of math and science.

At TI, Melendy was brought into a group that was leading the enterprise systems business and worked as deputy program manager for the Motorola program. In this role, she helped get the program back to its target margin.

After two years, with the project successfully on track, she then moved into the human resources arena. By this time, she had close to 15 years of business experience.

In the human resources position, she was responsible for a PeopleSoft project that was already underway, but behind on schedule and over budget. They wanted someone to implement the software application in 26 countries in 20 months.

She didn’t have much global experience and wanted to gain experience. She was then offered a full-time position in human resources to head up the systems and administration part of the organization and spent nearly three years in that role. There, she was given the opportunity to lead efforts in her current area, along with the full compensation and benefits strategies and programs.

Melendy was promoted to vice president and worked in human resources for a total of eight years. In her role as vice president, she had the outstanding opportunity to be the primary liaison with the compensation committee of TI’s board of directors.

This experience was extremely valuable for her because it broadened her business perspective by allowing to get to know and work with the board members. They are all highly accomplished people, and working with them helped her to appreciate their perspective on the world.

Melendy has a great appreciation for those people who have sponsored and mentored and helped develop throughout her careers. Her parents had the greatest influence on her from a values perspective.

Her husband is an accomplished businessman. As a result, she has been able to learn quite a lot from his ventures. He has been willing to share the responsibilities of a family and marriage.

When the two first met and married shortly afterward, she was working at a meager job at TI in human resources and was traveling some. He was an executive with Halliburton, and traveled almost 100% of the time, mostly out of the country. In the early part of their marriage, his career came as a priority, and she was put in charge of their daughter, gladly taking care of all that the role entailed.

As her husband had gotten to be more advanced in his career, his opportunities grew more entrepreneurial flexible. In recent years, he agreed Melendy’s career is primary.

Each time she has had an opportunity to take on a new role, it has been a joint, family decision. These decisions made for a very rich relationship because the two of them relate to each other so well. Sometimes she plays certain roles, and other times he plays certain roles.

Stereotypes have nothing to do with these roles, and their responsibilities are simply dictated by whatever needs to be done.

Serving the community is important. She was a member of the AVID Center board of directors (audit committee chair) and the Rose-Hulman Technology Institute board of trustees and is also a founder of the Women of TI Fund while continuing to play an active role in supporting the Fund.

The Women of TI Fund is a donor-advised fund in partnership with the Dallas Women’s Foundation, focused on closing the gender gap in STEM professions.

She enjoys mentoring women and speaking to groups about careers and aspirations. In her presentation, career reflections, she discussed how to use self-analysis to know one’s strengths, weaknesses, and self-competition to compete against one’s own best efforts, rather than comparing efforts to the efforts of other people.

Education was valued in her home. Melendy earned most of her college tuition from a singing scholarship and worked in the dining room at her college. She saw education as an important way of advancing and supporting herself, a trait that Melendy carries with her to this day.

Melendy grew up during the late 70s and early 80s when the television show "Dallas" was very popular. She was able to achieve a small bit of fame for a while because her maiden name is Ewing and her father’s initials are J.R.

Her father even worked in the same building that J.R. Ewing did on the show.

Melendy’s father was an important figure to her. He would bring them to his office and talk about the work he was doing. These trips were during a time when computers were being introduced into the business world. Her father’s work involved mainframe computers. He worked on converting the bank’s data into new computer systems.

Melendy always enjoyed leadership roles. When she was in junior high and high school, her girlfriends and herself created a community service club, and Melendy was the leader. She also did many projects through her church and enjoyed visiting the orphanage in her spare time. Through this experience, she learned she enjoyed one big takeaway: bringing groups of people together for important projects would make a difference in the community.

Melendy served in a board position for the University of Texas-Pan American board of trustees as an executive committee member of the Employment Policy Foundation board. She is also a personnel chair for Dallas Women’s Foundation Board and a member of the Hewitt Health Care Delivery Task Force.

Melendy was born in a small town called Terrell, which is about 20 miles east of Dallas. She lived in the state of Texas her entire life.

She was the youngest of four children born within five years of one another. She has one older brother and two younger sisters. They all grew up in very close quarters, as well as their connections to each other, and are still close today. When she was three years old, her parents moved their family from Terrell to Dallas for her father’s job.

After graduating college, her father helped her get a job in banking working for Republic Bank in their information technology department. She helped support the bank’s information system needs for their commercial customers. There were no online systems, personal computers, or the Internet. She majored in accounting because she wanted to understand business finances better.

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