William Hodder, longtime leader of Bloomington-based Donaldson, dies at 92

William Hodder led the transformation of one of Minnesota's blue-chip companies — Donaldson Co. — and helped forge a bond between the state's business community and the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management.

"Bill was a great example of a very successful leader," said Bill Cook, a former CEO of Bloomington-based Donaldson, a manufacturer of filtration equipment.

Hodder, of Edina, died of natural causes on July 6. He was 92.

Hodder's parents divorced when he was about age 5, and his mother raised him and two siblings in Lincoln, Neb. He attended the University of Nebraska, earning a bachelor of science in business administration in 1954. Soon after, he married his college sweetheart, Suzanne Holmes.

After a two-year stint in the Army, Hodder landed a job at IBM as a computer salesman. The company sponsored Hodder for Harvard University's management development program, and he rose in the company. By the mid-1960s, he was working for IBM in the Twin Cities when he got called for a job at the company's headquarters in New York.

But he and his family wanted to stay in Minnesota. So he moved on to Dayton's, serving as president of its Target stores division from 1968 to 1973.

In some ways, IBM's storied business culture never left him. Throughout his life, the desk in Hodder's study featured a small sign emblazoned with the word "THINK" — IBM's ballyhooed slogan back in the day.

"It was facing us [his children] when he called us into his study," said Kent Hodder, his oldest son.

While at Target, Hodder was named to Donaldson's board of directors in 1969. In 1973, Donaldson hired Hodder as its president, and in 1981 he became CEO. He added chair to his title in 1984.

At the time, Donaldson primarily made filters and filtering equipment for diesel engines and counted big manufacturers, including Caterpillar and John Deere, as its customers. But the early 1980s downturn hit Donaldson's customers hard. In 1983, the company suffered its first annual loss.

Hodder accelerated the company's diversification. Donaldson moved into filters for industrial products beyond diesel engines; it expanded internationally, and it entered the aftermarket for industrial filters.

"By the 1990s, [the strategy] had clicked," said Cook, a friend of Hodder's and who started his own career at Donaldson in 1980 and served as its CEO from 2004 to 2015.

Over the last years of Hodder's CEO tenure — he retired in 1996 — Donaldson's earnings steadily grew, and the company often posted double-digit annual stock returns.

Hodder also served for decades as a director for several Minnesota companies, including Tennant, Reliastar, SuperValu and Norwest. In the early 1990s, he led the Minnesota Business Partnership, which represents the state's largest corporations.

Hodder was instrumental in creating the Carlson School's Board of Overseers, now known as its Board of Advisors. It was founded in 1979 to better link the school to Minnesota's business community. Hodder was the board's chair for six years.

"He was really trying to get the school to be more business friendly," said Sri Zaheer, the Carlson School's dean from 2012 until this month. "He wanted all of the major firms in the Twin Cities to actually help students in the school."

Hodder was preceded in death by Suzanne, his wife of 57 years, and daughter Susan C. Hodder. He is survived by his four other children, a sister, a half-brother and several grandchildren and step-grandchildren.

A celebration of Hodder's life will be at 3:30 p.m. Aug. 31 at the Minikahda Club in Minneapolis.