Mitchell Rales

Origins and early life

Mitchell Rales was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in August 1956, one of the four sons of Norman Rales and Ruth Abramson, and grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, where he captained the football and baseball teams at Walt Whitman High School.

Work and career

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency describes him as a Jewish businessman whose parents gave their names to the Rales Jewish Family Service in Boca Raton, Florida; his father, Norman, had grown up in New York's Hebrew Orphan Asylum. He earned a degree in business administration from Miami University, in Ohio, in 1978. In 1983 he and his elder brother Steven took control of Diversified Mortgage Investors, a real estate trust created in 1969, and in 1984 they renamed it Danaher and began turning it into an industrial company.

He was its president until 1990, has chaired its executive committee since 1984, and with his brother shaped the Danaher Business System, the method of continuous improvement adopted in 1988. Danaher later turned to health care, buying its first diagnostics business in 2004 and its first life sciences company in 2010, and today it serves biotechnology, life sciences and diagnostics. In 2006 he and his wife, Emily Wei Rales, founded Glenstone, a museum of art made since the Second World War, set in a wooded landscape in Potomac, Maryland, on land he had bought in 1986.

A large expansion opened on 4 October 2018, and the museum, which draws on a collection of about 1,300 works, admits its visitors free of charge. He served as president of the board of trustees of the National Gallery of Art in Washington from 2019 to 2024, and in 2019 he and his wife signed the Giving Pledge. In 2023 he joined the group led by Josh Harris that bought the Washington Commanders, the football team he had cheered for as a boy.