[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

This is an interview with Dr. Stanley S. Gryskiewicz of the Center For Creative Leadership for the Center's Oral History Project. My name is Joe Mosnier of the Southern Oral History Program at UNC-Chapel Hill. The date is Thursday, November 5, 1998. We are at the Center's Greensboro, North Carolina headquarters. This is cassette number 11.5.98-SG. May I call you Stan?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yes.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Stan, do you want to start us with a sketch of your family history, your upbringing, where you were born, education?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Sure. Let's see, I was born to - I'm considered second generation. So I was born in New Jersey. I was born in Hackensack, New Jersey just outside New York City in November 1946 with all the post-war, immediate post-war concerns. I was the youngest of the family, so I think that had a lot to do with maybe a sense of more security. My parents had raised three children by the time I came along. So there was some sense of a bit more security than I think some of my siblings may have experienced.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

You were born what year?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

1946.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

'46, okay.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

November of 1946. We then, as part of what was going on in the growing metropolitan area, my parents wanted to escape the impact of the city even a bit more. They in fact grew up in Brooklyn. They were born in Brooklyn in the Polish ghettos of Brooklyn. Green Point was the area. And they moved over the Hudson River to New Jersey. And then as the city was starting to come out further that way, they moved further and further up into northern New Jersey. So I attended high school in northwest New Jersey in a place called West Milford, West Milford High School.

And when I finished high school there, I was very much involved in leadership activities, church, school, sports, the whole wonderful what you would expect in a high school experience. I did all those things and went on to a university. I had been accepted at the State University of New Jersey at Rutgers but lo and behold, this school in Florida called Stetson University gave me a full scholarship which was important to my family. And Stetson is the Baptist school of Florida or has traditionally been that, so there was some encouragement around that as well. So I went off to Stetson and four years there as an

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undergraduate in psychology.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Is that your family was Baptist with your surname?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yes. It happened because of both of my parents had been divorced and the Catholic church would not allow them back in the 1930's. And there was a sweet little Aunt Edith who lived next door to them who I remember singing at her husband's funeral. I was a voice major with a voice scholarship major. But I guess what she did was knock on the door one time and said to my parents I notice you don't go to church, how would you like to go with us?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

How about that.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

So I was raised in a Baptist church. Not the conservative Baptist Church, which I thank God for. It was American Baptist and it was a bit different. So went to Stetson on a voice scholarship. And I had a voice in the old days for singing great range. I was all state chorus. I sang all the way through church through my school choirs. Did all that, and then when I went to Stetson, I tried out for concert choir, and they gave me a full scholarship to sing in their traveling choir which was a big thing at Stetson. So for the first three years, I sang for my education. By my senior year, I was working as the dorm residency advisor and doing all that stuff with a changed psychology major.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Why psychology?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Well, I'm getting personal, and that's okay with me, but is that okay with you to use this kind of information?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Oh, yeah, I think it's very important.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Why psychology was because I grew up in that church experience and I often thought that I had a calling to be a minister. But I always liked people. I remember being really frustrated in the library at Stetson one time. And this was before I even knew Jungian topology. I remember saying damn, I don't think as quickly as some of these people. I have feelings. I understand emotions and feelings, and these people don't understand that. And this was before I even understood the Jungian dichotomy. And so I was always real sensitive, sensitive around people, intuitive around people. And I related to people well. I was president of the student union when I was a junior at Stetson. So I moved along through that quickly. When I was president of the union, we passed a bill that said we could have dancing on

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campus. This was 1966,'67, somewhere in there.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Letting your hair down.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

And you see, they used to have dancing in fraternity houses. And I was a member of a fraternity, so we could dance on weekends. But if you wanted to attend a school function dance, you had to go off campus, which meant traveling, which meant accidents, people hurt. So we said this is ridiculous. So we had this vote, and of course the Baptist Convention reduced our funding that year. But it was one of those learning experiences for me. So again, there was this sense of wanting to work with people, for people, this intuitive emotional side of me. The music was another thing. When I would sing, I was part of a greater unit that I can't quite explain yet, that taps something beyond me or the human side. So all those emotions were there, and then psych was a way for me to give some parameter to it, some words to it, some explanation. And fortunately enough, there were in that department some personality psychologists that were the softer side of psych then. So I really grew up in the 60's when there were the rat runners and the classical conditioners.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Rat runners and the?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Eye-lid conditioners, the people who would blow puffs of air in your eye. That was classical conditioning, you would say. Which when I studied that, I said this is not what I think psychology is about, of course. And I said no, this is where psychology is going. We're becoming rigorous. We're becoming scientific. Well, being in a probably second or third tier university, those people wanted to model with I think what they thought. But some of the older professors in the department were wait a minute, there's more to this. There was a Father Lawson that ran the Episcopal church around the corner where most of these people of the same ilks of Baptist orientation that I had said wait a minute, this is not what I bought into or this is not what I see of the world. So Father Lawson would entertain a lot of converts down at his church on Sunday evenings, and we'd go down there and have discussions with this guy. Lovely guy. So that plus some of the older professors in the psych department reassured me that maybe there's more to it. This is just a phase. Psychology is going through a phase here and trying to become more scientific. So I had that experience. And then was married -my first marriage in my junior year. So I needed to start bringing in some money and worked my senior year. And finally applied to graduate school. So I decided to go for the master's degree two years at a chunk, because I was trying to be responsible.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

So you would have graduated college '67?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

'68. So I went off and I applied to a couple of graduate programs and was not advised well in that with Stetson and just didn't get into the good schools. But I did get a full scholarship from Wake Forest for their master's degree in psychology. And I went off to Wake Forest. And it was for free, so I was pleased to do that. And my mother was also quite happy it was another Baptist school.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Was Wake Forest here then?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yes, I was here. It opened the campus here I think in '56 or something like that. So I went off here to the psych department and the same dichotomy I found that there were these two guys that were the new behaviorist learning theorist guys, but there were some wonderful people in that department who thought differently. And I found that they were more clinically oriented just like the ones at Stetson. They were more personality psychologists. They were more well-rounded in their education as well.

One of them is still here today. You met David Hills?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Yeah. You mean here at CCL?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah. I'd bring him in. He was my stat professor and my clinical psych professor, he taught both. And he was—you need to talk to him just for your other issue around history. He and his wife both settled. They got their Ph.D.'s at Iowa. They both came to Winston-Salem back in the 50's to be active in the civil rights movement even though they were at the university. When his wife died at Wake Forest in the early 70's, the chapel was filled with African-Americans, they were so active in the community. And most of their friends at Wake Forest didn't realize this. It was a wonderful tribute. So Dave Hills. The name is Dave Hills. He's here and comes over one day a week on Thursdays. He's now in his 70's. He retired as a full professor. But he was one of the guys who was encouraging to me about there's more to psychology than rat running. There's this whole people side. So he was supportive of that. And then there was another thing that was going on that I eluded to at lunch the other day. The whole humanistic movement in psychology was born. It was coming along then. And there were two professors—there was a staff of 10 or 12 at Wake. And so you had the two were the rat runners and you had these other two, and Hills was sort of in the middle. These other two who were social psychologists who really got caught up in the encounter group movement and brought Carl Rogers, brought

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Abraham Maslow, brought all those people here to what was called then the Piedmont Program. It was a spinoff of Esalen, and they were running this Piedmont Program. And spinoff in the sense that Esalen supported this Center here. And every summer, for at least three or four summers, it would go on in Winston-Salem. And when I was a graduate student, I would participant with my professor John Woodmansee. John Woodmansee was the person was leading this whole charge. And another sweet connect for you is John Woodmansee's professor at the University of Colorado was Stuart Cook. Stuart Cook was a scholar in residence here in the 70's. Stuart Cook is also most of his testimony supported the Brown versus Board of Education. So I really feel a legacy from some of these great, great psychologists. You're going to hear that again from another one I'll talk about shortly who spent time here who were connected into my personal history and growing up history. So there's this humanistic movement going on. Because of that, there was not much research done in the field. And John Woodmansee had been a social psychologist with Stuart Cook and said if this is a legitimate human behavior, we should be able to some way try and measure this. So we came up with an interesting model. We had a control group and we had an experimental group, and we had students going through encounter group experiences Friday night, all day Saturday, through 6:00 on Sunday. And we had these exercises that you would go through in a typical encounter group. That was experimental. And the control condition people, the same amount of time, but they would read together. They would have discussions, but it wasn't any of the talking about personal stuff. So we then the measure was congruency scores how you filled out an adjective checklist and then how I thought you would have filled it out. So we did a pre and we did a post in the sense that there should be a change and there should be no change in the controlled condition, but there should be more overlap of congruency between how you said you feel and how I think you feel because I've been through these experiences with you. It was a nice piece of work. We got it published. It was a nice little tight little dissertation. It was an attempt to be experimental and became my master's thesis. So here all this stuff is bubbling with me at Wake around people stuff and the personal side was my marriage was falling apart. It just three years of education, not really focusing on us. And so I said I've got to go make some money. I've got to try to save this. My wife agreed. It wasn't just we both would readdress it. So I started looking for a job in-between masters and going back and doing a Ph.D. And there was this little ad about half of that space in something called "The Monitor." American Psychological Association had an employment bulletin, and it was called Smith Richardson Foundation, looking for masters level

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psychologists who have experience in group assessment. And it's only 17 miles away in Greensboro. And I said what? So I wrote off a letter, and I got a phone call from this guy named Doug Holmes who said "Stan," that's my name of course, he said, "I'm with the Smith Richardson and I saw your resume, and would you come over?" Went over and interviewed and met with Doug Holmes, Bob Dorn, met with Jim Farr. And Jim Farr's interview I still remember to this day, because you know I had had all these others and then I was going to meet the big guy. This was downtown on the 5th floor of the Piedmont Building.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

And this would have been when exactly?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Oh, this was in the spring of 1970.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Oh, okay.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

And Jim Farr said, "Why do I want to interview you?" That was his first question, "Why should I hire you?" So I don't remember my response, but obviously it was okay. I was hired. They offered me the job of masters level psychologist. They offered me a starting salary of I think it was $8,000 a year. And for me, you know, when you're a graduate student, that was gold. You know, wow, money. So I came back to Wake Forest and said, "I've been offered this job." And they said, "Well what about, we don't know what this place is." And I said, "Well, I don't either but look at their advisory board." And on their advisory board was for me one of the gods was the cognitive dissonance theorist. I'll give you his name in a minute. We'll come back. So there's one god that I saw and the other one was Vick Vroom. The other one was Art Brayfield. There were a couple of other names at that level that I said, "I read about these people in my textbooks, and they're advising this place called the Smith Richardson Foundation." I've got to give you the name of this cognitive dissonance theory guy. He was known. As the cognitive dissonance theory would predict that I would forget his name.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

We can come back.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Leon Festinger. So all these people—and I went to see John Woodmansee and David Hills and said, "Do you know about this?" They didn't know about it. They didn't even know about the Smith Richardson Foundation, and there was no world wide web to look it up on. So they suggested that it looked interesting and if I wanted to take the job, I would still be around with the stuff going on in Winston-Salem around the growth movement. One of my neat little stories about that growth movement summer was Carl Rogers was here.

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And it was the year after Maslow had been here. Maslow died while Rogers was here, and we spent the whole weekend dealing with Carl Rogers' grief, which is living in the here and now. So the great man, the great master who was to teach us, we dealt with his grief for that weekend. That was a real poignant moment for me, too yeah, I could deal with that. And then I'd jump back and I'd think about my ministerial thoughts and working with people and think no problem. Dealt with that. So instead of having him have some kind of a lecture experience or anything. So I took the job here.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Yeah. Let me ask you a few questions. You walk in the first day at the Piedmont Building and what do you see?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Grunge. Grungy, dirty building, olive green dirty carpets, because we were renting the space. And then it became clear to me, and I think I remember this from the interview, they had a picture or a painting of what we were moving into, artists' descriptions of the building that we would be moving in there by '71. So it was this sense of okay, I'm being paid $8,000, but look at this old—no one put any paint on some of the walls. But that's all right. We're going to be moving into this new building. It's out on 220 north. You can drive up and see it if you want and it's really going on up there. So it was this downtown Greensboro back then was still active. There were women went downtown shopping with white gloves on at Meyers. So you would still—that was old south. And then some of the old hotels were down there, the Dixie Hotel, the O. Henry Hotel, and they were just short walks from the train station downtown.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

What did you make of Holmes and Dorn? First impression, as you recall.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Bright, really bright people. Tense. Holmes was very tense. A very tense guy, very bright guy.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Intense or tense?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Tense. Tense. And I guess I ought to say intense as well but tense guy, where Dorn was more laid-back. And the difference was that Dorn had been—I found out Dorn did his work for a while and then went back to do his Ph.D. and had been working in Peace Corps. and had been around. Where Holmes was a newly minted Ph.D. Dartmouth undergraduate, went off to—where was his Ph.D. from? He did it at a significant university. So he was out to prove the world. And he was really bright, but he also would play mind games with some of the other guys. Because essentially what Farr had set up, Jim Farr had set up, was he brought in four really

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bright people and gave them the freedom and they fought it out.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

That's Dorn, Irv Taylor?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Dorn, Irv Taylor, Doug Holmes and there was a guy, he was in the computer area. Rick Sandler worked for him, but there was someone else who became a licensee of ours later on. There was a fourth guy. So I came in and I was working for—now all of a sudden, my mind is tripping on me here. What I remember happening was I was interviewed by—I was told I was going to be reporting to Dorn who was working for Holmes. When I showed up, Dorn had been elevated and somehow I stayed over here. And that was when they moved away from just doing assessment because Dorn was tied into assessment. But then Dorn was given the mantle of doing more training education stuff. So I stayed over here with the assessment group. I liked Bob Dorn immediately. He was my—we had an ability to relate and this guy was all head. This guy was heart. He's bright, but he also had a heart. A lot of it had to do with I think he had this work background for awhile. So there was that experience.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

How about Jim Farr, what did you make of Jim Farr?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

You know, he had the aikido room here. You've heard about that, and he's throwing people around the room. Which he would turn over a wife every two or three years. He was obviously really extremely bright as well and good with one-on-one coaching and counseling with the executives. I think he had his own business. He was doing that at the same time.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Farr Associates?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Untenable to be a technical director of this place and trying to get off the ground. That's one of the reasons he left these four alone. He was out running his business. And I remember him a real imposing guy. Big, physical guy. And with his aikido. This is one of those stories that you can put on there. We had a party at his house one time. So I was off in the corner talking to his wife. He came over and put an aikido hold on me with his fingers and hey, what are you saying to my wife? And Jesus, having a conversation. Sort of real macho kind of guy. And that didn't fit my style.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

What did you make at the time in your early few months on the job, did you get a sense of what the foundation—the relationship between the foundation and this group of

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scientists? I mean the foundation wasn't really made up of folks with that orientation, but somehow they were endorsing this effort. So how did you figure all that out?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

The only time that I felt that it was comfortable at what we were doing is the time that the old man showed up in a wheelchair one day and he was smiling. And he would ask questions. So as long as he knew what we were doing was fine. Because he didn't die until after we moved out to this first structure out here.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

For the tape, that's Smith Richardson, Sr.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah. And he had a twinkle in his eye. And he sort of seemed to communicate. He intuitively understood what we were trying to do. And there was a sense of it's okay what you're doing. He got excited especially working with young people then. And then there used to be the equivalent of the Richardson like the Morehead. Not the [unclear] Morehead, but he'd try to do his own thing and especially working with the young people. You know, in his book he was saying—have you read the book that he wrote?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Um-hmm.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Remember the part about show me the young person when I hire will eventually be the leader of the organization, so he was into development. He was into assessment development kinds of stuff then. So as long as he was around, when he was around he really did—whether it was his twinkle in his eye or his reactions to what we were doing, the smile on his face, I knew everything was okay then. But you've got to remember also I was not at this level, so if there was stuff going on, I didn't hear as much. This guy loved to go out and drink. So if you would go out...

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

You mean Doug Holmes?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Doug Holmes. So if you would go out, even though he had a family. Dorn would go home to his family. This guy had a young family and his wife, she had to run the home. But he'd go out for a drink every night and debrief. And so if you wanted to, you could find out what was going on. And I chose to do that a couple of times. And then I realized if I didn't do that, I would be missing out on some important information. So I did that probably more than I should have and wanted to as my marriage was still unwinding, the first one. But then he would tell us about what was going on here. And you won't believe what Irv Taylor did. But Sternbergh, and you're going to interview Sternbergh,

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Sternbergh was his shadow. And then this guy who had a dark side, he really did have a dark side, he would recruit people in that were really strange people. And I think maybe I got under his radar or maybe because Dorn was part of that decision or what, but he went out and recruited a retired—a guy who just got out of the military, he was a captain, and put him over the rest of us. And that poor guy had a difficult role to play. Al Kovacic, his name was Al Kovacic. So he and Al would go out and drink. And there was less and less of the rest of us being invited to go out to drink, because he wanted distance from the rest of us because he thought maybe we knew these people. Doug was really a paranoid guy. That one you can't say that part, but he really had this sense of these people were out to get him and he needed to build this bubble around him and protect himself and you would hear about this when you'd go out to drink at night.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Let me interrupt for one second.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

So he hired some young really bright people here, but some of them were so quirky that they were hard to interact with each other. It was difficult to interact this way. Some of them even to interact with clients. Sternbergh and I were the only guys he could really trust to interact with clients at all. Anyway, so that was the thing to set-up Holmes going after these three. And then there was a big bloodbath, was it '72?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Yeah.

Let me ask you first what were your duties when you started? What did you do?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah. I came in and my job was to with my assessment experience, develop a behavioral assessment experience. So as a precursor, we had this one day assessment in the LDP now. We had a week-long assessment. And we built it on Ray Bradbury. We built it on science fiction and the reason, the rationale behind that was is you wanted to have a simulation that had the basic structure of managing people, managing numbers, managing technology, but in the setting that people would not be familiar with so that their underlying skills would be seen, but no one else would have an advantage over another person because they had run a metal organization or like our Looking Glass. We would not have chosen a Looking Glass back in that day because there could be somebody from the glass industry there. So we really removed it. So it was red planet versus green planet for the colonization of a new planet. Some of that still shows up in the one simulation they do today which is Earth II. And so you have—and we really wanted to do this assessment, this behavioral assessment to learn. So we said there was a primary leader,

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there was technical leader, like people leader, I think it was called. And then there were five roles, financial leader. And then there was this role called termite. And termite was the minority. And the termite could run havoc with the rest of the system. So you had this role for Red Planet. You had the same roles over here on Green Planet. And you were out here to colonize this new planet. So you were in competition with each other to make this happen. And part of that was living out Doug Holmes' life. So we sat down and designed this simulation, and we were reading. Doug brought in a whole pile of science fiction books and we used that. And we knew there were certain skills that each one of these roles would play, so we built those in. So what you did in the simulation—the simulation would last three and a half hours, and you had a chance to play each one of these roles. So the simulation was repeated. And there was enough difference between the roles that when you played financial leader, you didn't learn something from here, but obviously, you learned through the whole system, so that was a flaw. But anyway, one of the ways you could get feedback was you know, Joe, you're really good with people but your technology skills are not there. We wouldn't be that blunt, but that's one of the things you could say. And then the termite role was fun. I really loved that role. I was responsible for writing that role. It was the person who got in, tried to change things. While they were trying to move along this way, this other person was pulling it off. That's Doug Holmes again. So people—and that went on for five days. There was also a test battery that is probably three times the amount of tests that we use now. There was also dream interpretation.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Really?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Who did the dream interpretation?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Doug. Doug is a clinician. Doug as a clinician did the dream interpretation. And this is a story that I wondered about that stuff, is it really true. So besides designing this, we were the first people to do feedback to. And so every executive, early executive, early guinea pig that went through our program, we would sit down and prepare a case study. So if I'm going to sit down with you at 1:00 this afternoon, I walk into a case study that morning at 9:00 where I present my summary findings of the test and the behavioral stuff here. And I would sit down with Doug and my colleagues and say I'm going to give feedback to Joe and these are the three things. There's something I don't know about over here, what do you think? And we'd have

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discussions. And so when I left that meeting, I was pretty well set on how I was going to, what I was going to communicate to you. And then of course, it was still my scale on how well it was communicated or not. So we would do that. And then the dream, we said to these people because it was quite an intense week, if you have any dreams, when you come in the next morning for breakfast, there's this room with a tape recorder, just tell us about your dreams. So we would at the end of these sessions, the preparation sessions, any dreams? And yeah, Doug, there's this one dream and this one person's been telling me about this. And Doug looked at me and said, "Only if you're close to this guy at the end of the session, why don't you ask him if he had some death experience early on in his life." I said, "Okay, only if I get close to this guy." It was a young African-American, and we had a great session. And he said, "Oh, was that at all?" He said, "Thank you, was that all?" And I said, "No, there's one more thing I'd like to ask you." We got back into another three hours. What happened was he was a twin and his sibling died in birth.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Oh, my.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

I went back to Holmes and what it taught me is when you're a clinician, you build up experiences. And what sounds odd to us, if you've been in that setting, you question. And that's one of the learnings I took away was, over the years of working with managers, I can generalize from other experiences I've had with managers and am able to do it.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Who were the people who came into do this? Who were the participants?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Early, our participants were whoever we could get, anyone we could get. A lot of them were the Richardson Fellows.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

So those were the young people?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah, young people. And early on, we had—the Army had its—my book now is about positive turbulence or scanning the periphery. And so the Army had people who were scanning the periphery and finding out what's going on out in the behavioral sciences. And they found us, so they started sending young officers here.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Oh, so that's actually something I hadn't appreciated. So in your sense, the Army wanted to be surveying the outlying parts of this field to keep up with what people were testing.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

I mean it's intelligence gathering basically is what they're doing. So they would come in and then there was this John Red eluded to that we finally had to pay people to come. The only people who didn't pay was the military. They paid their own people to come, and we put them through everything. For the first two and a half years, programs Doug Holmes had developed, Bob Dorn, Irving Taylor and Don Penner had developed. And it was eight weeks maybe, ten weeks. And then at the end was when they had this evaluation to tell you what works, what doesn't work and that. And that's when the bloodletting took place after that. So those were the early days of people. I think we had a couple of castoffs as they say turkey farms, NCNB didn't want to have around, so they sent them to us. That's NCNB from the old days. And some of them were not. Some of the early executives who came through are city executives today.

I'm trying to think of the—one of them is a retired—Charlie Reid here in Greensboro was the city executive for a bank and he still may be. Mal Murray worked for First Union.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Who was that?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Mal Murray. Malcolm, I guess. Mal Murray moved on. But those would be interesting people to contact because they were in that original group.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Right. Tell me about how a year or two into this effort, you're out in the new building now, what's your sense of how well you're making out? How well is the whole project going?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

I remember just working my ass off. Just really working hard. A lot of concentrated head effort, concentrated especially getting ready for this evaluation and during these first courses, two, three hour night's sleep and then going in. And then having this father figure guy here in some way, this Holmes thing, [unclear] . And I just couldn't believe it. And then what I really picking up on it was catching up—he was speaking to himself in his relationship with these other people. And I remember really having a bad—I remember going home one night and just having a bad night. Who am I? What am I trying to do here? What's life about? What is this really doing? Is this contributing also to my marriage falling apart? All this intensity of the work and it's so new and who's paying attention to it and all this kind of stuff. And sensitive Bob Dorn knocked on my door one time and said, "Are you doing all right?" And I think Bob was for whatever reason, he may have been playing the game back to find out what Holmes was doing, but I think he was more

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sensitive as a human being to stresses that were going on. And he essentially eluded to me that don't worry, things will be okay and what you're doing is valuable. And I never heard this from Doug Holmes, never heard of it. So that was a precursor of another event in my life, was my father dying. So my father died in June. We had just moved into this house. It was '73. My wife and I (first wife) pregnant with our child. All the stresses of this competition going on, doing our show. Moved into the house and that first Monday morning, we moved in that weekend, there was a policeman at the door, because we didn't have a phone in yet, and said, "Call your sister." So I went immediately to Florida and Dad's funeral and coming back that following Sunday, the week to put things in place with siblings and your mom. And so I flew back a week later and there was my wife and Wendy said to me, "Bob Dorn called. And if you feel up to it, he said only if you feel up to it, he'd like you to give him a call. And he understands if you don't want to." Well, yeah, okay, I'll give Bob a call. So he came to my house. And he said there's a reorganization going on. Essentially he was eluding to what he had eluded to before. And he said, "The announcement is going to be made and I want you to know that Holmes will not be there. But I'm asking that you stay and work with me, do that for me and Sternbergh." So I had information on that Sunday the next day that a lot of guys I had been working with including this captain that they were going to be—and Bob just wanted, he said, "I know you've been through a lot of stress. I wanted you to know this is what's going to happen and not to worry."

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

That was your first inkling of trouble brewing at the Center?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

No, no. I knew that the evaluation was going on, but I didn't know what the impact would be on me. I'm sorry. I didn't know what the impact would be on me personally. No, I knew there was trouble brewing because of the assessment that went on.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Remember that, the assessment. Your recollections of that.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Oh, the assessment period?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Um-hmm.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

We had to prepare documents. I remember because at my level, we had to each prepare our documents justifying what we'd been doing over two years and collecting what meager data we had on the Mal Murrays or the people like

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that, what kind of change they went through, trying to quantify it. But everyone was doing their own packet of information, I remember. And it was presented in huge books and each one of these guys had to go in before this board made up of Ken Clark, Bill Bevan and Bert Brim. So the materials were submitted, then they had to give their presentations. And then they were called in later on for evaluations.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Did you sit in on these presentations?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

From behind the one way mirror.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Really?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Uh-huh. And I remember the board reacting to Irving Taylor's stuff. One of the phrases was "Why couldn't you be more creative with your measures." And the word was that Irving was just so esoteric, so outside the box. And Irving had his own—you heard about Irving being shot by his brother. Did I send you that—I will send this to you. Irving made one contribution that was wonderful to the field. He produced a book, he edited a book, and he brought together some of the best thinkers in our creativity field to a conference here in Greensboro, sent a post [unclear] . He got Aldine Publishing to do it. And the book is called Perspectives on Creativity. And he brought together the known thinkers then in the field of creativity. His paper was still too esoteric even with that group. That group was saying you need to be more tied down to reality. And my copy of the book, which I was just rereading again looking for some final endings to my book, I had taped in the back the UPI announcement of Irving's death. And literally it says here he and his brother had been arguing over the mother's will and he was a police captain for Houston. It was in Houston. He asked the lawyers to excuse him. The lawyers went out of the room. There was this gunshot. He walked out and put the gun down on table and said, "Call the police, I just killed my son of a bitch brother." So that's Irving. That was Irving. And these two would go at it all the time. So I was behind the one way mirror for the presentation and for some of the feedback. Again, it was easily done. The people who were conducting these were not aware of how easy it could be done. We knew this building. We knew what we could do and not do. And we weren't told not to do it, so we did it. And we were listening and we heard Holmes' presentation.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Since you had this extra special clandestine view, can you paint a little more of that detail?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

I just remember things like sitting around

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this huge U-shaped table and then Doug Holmes being up here and wearing a tie and being uncomfortable wearing a tie and perspiring greatly. I remember that about him.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

So around this table was the board or just this committee?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

This committee and I think maybe John Red was in there. But it was just this smaller group.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Would George Eichhorn have been around then?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

He probably was. George and I have this special story, too, about George. I'm going to jump to that quickly. When Irving left, I sort of took on some of the mantel of creativity. And there was a guy here named—the one who was murdered who introduced me to a more practical side of creativity which was problem-solving, creative problem-solving and a process called synectics. And I went up and took the synectics course.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

It was Ben Gantz?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Ben Gantz, yeah. By the way, I have a picture of him I just gave to Tom. Did you see that?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

No.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

I found one, a picture of Ben. I asked Tom if he would make a copy if you wanted it, so he has that. And there's a picture of Doug Holmes there, too. When we take our break, we'll see if he has those. So Eric George said to me, "Stan, I want you to know that I really do like what you've done with creativity here." He said, "I've been watching you and what you've done is priceless. You haven't thrown the baby out with the bath water." That was his phrase. And I took that to mean that I was more applied in looking how I could use it to solve real problems in industry. So where he was getting feedback was in some of our early programs where I had a whole day on creativity now because Irving was gone, some RMI executives were going through. Richardson was sending his RMI executives.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

That's Richardson-Merrill, Inc.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah. And I'm trying to think of some of the names, but these were about to retire executives who George knew or George may have hired. So they would all go tell George about their experience and obviously they were telling George good things about the creativity module. George would

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even before all this happened, on Friday afternoons at 4:30, walk around the building and see who was here. Any letter you sent out, any memo, had to go through George's office. You had to send a copy to George's office.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Before you sent it out?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

No, as you sent it out. Sorry. So he had everything. And this was an amazing thought. When I was going through my photographs the other day and I found Ben Gantz's picture, Bill Sternbergh was not here. He had left, and he was doing a degree then at the University of South Florida or somewhere down there. And Ben died and we both knew Ben. So I called him in Florida. I had never made a long distance call from the Center before. And there was this moment hesitation can I do this? George, can I make a long distance phone call. He said yeah. Ben Gantz has been murdered. I can tell Sternbergh. Whatever year he was murdered, there really was this tight ship around which you couldn't.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Before we sort of turn to the question of what happens with the great purge and thereafter, what's your perspective on what exactly happened to prompt Farr to leave? Do you know the specifics of the disagreement between Farr and the board?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

I think it was around the same, the purge issues, too.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

So it was the quality of the work and also...

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Quality of the work and he really couldn't do two things at one time. How can you be a technical director and you're trying to get some direction and he's not even here while these guys are fighting?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

So he wasn't physically present much of the time?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah. He wasn't physically present. It was like two and a half days he was with his group and two and a half days he was here. And he had a guy named Dick Furr who ran his business for him the other two and a half days. And so Dick Furr would be here or he'd go up to Dick Furr's office. And it was even worse than the other Piedmont Building. We were on the third and fifth floor and Furr's office was on the fourth floor. It was really strange. So Farr could run up and down the stairs, which he would do instead of taking the elevator. But that was really a difficult thing, I believe. He was just an absent manager.

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And it's like being presented with look at all this trash going on in the organization, do you know about it? And part of his [unclear] may have been I don't care or whatever. But I think it I were a board member, I would have been saying if we want this thing to grow, we can't have an absentee manager.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

How about also again, before we turn to this post '73 stuff, John Red's role riding herd on this group in these early years?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah. I saw him as well, you know, in the sense Farr was reporting to him.

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

This is side B of the first cassette with Stan Gryskiewicz.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

And I was mentioning about John Red. His style was to leave people alone, I think, and that's what he did with Jim Farr, too. But Jim Farr had this, in terms of personality differences, I don't know if you've interviewed the two of them. Jim Farr was this huge personality who would walk into this room and take it up. And not so with John Red. John Red is the consummate gentleman. I recently visited the submarine that he served on during World War II. And I don't know how, but he did it. But he's over six foot. And if you've been inside one of those World War II submarines, he went out on ten patrols, night patrols. I don't know how this guy did it. So he was Yale, conservative, deeply concerned about values. And Jim Farr was on the edge, riding motorcycles, doing aikido. Two different personality types. I think Jim Farr was at Minnesota or NYU or something like that. So that's the difference, I think. John's the consummate southern gentleman from Chattanooga who then went to Yale. I think he just managed the world and saw the world differently.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Tell me about settling in after the reorganization. Bob Dorn has come to your house after you had to be down in Florida.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah, yeah. Then the announcement was made and all these people—as much as Holmes had stuff going this way, well, when he brought in this captain, there was a lot of stuff going this way, too. So here were these people who all of a sudden realized that we looked around and we're going to go. Sherry Douglas, she may be worth interviewing. I think I can get you—she's in Austin, Texas now. She's got another name. But I can get that for you. And then there was this

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new Ph.D. that Doug had just hired and three months, six months later, she lost her job. So she had to leave. The captain left. He went to work for Celanese. He's now working for Exxon, I believe. There were several people. There may have been one or two more, but I remember those distinctly, those three.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

How was that, the reorganization handled?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Joe Wexler was another one. Joe Wexler was yet another one who left. And he's now with Compaq Computers and doing fine.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

How did they handle it? I mean did people pack up and leave?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

No, I think they handled it pretty well. They gave them a period of time. They gave them, I think, some cash. And they helped them find work.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

So it wasn't just...

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

No, no, no, no. This organization has never done that. I don't think it's ever, ever done that. In fact, one of my learnings as a manager, one time I managed a large group here was to fire someone, which is always a difficult thing to do. So the Center let the guy stay here for a couple weeks. Well this couple of weeks turned into a couple months. I remember having finally to go down and take him and say, "David, you need to go." I took him to the front door. He said, "Oh, okay." It was David Strong, and he's out in Hawaii now. But he also had a lady inside the organization that he was living with, so he would spend a lot of time at her desk. So I finally had to say, "David, David, David." So he was out. But we've never done anything that was you're out of here. Never, never. At least I'm not aware of it. It may have happened, but...

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

How did Bob Dorn kind of regroup for everybody and get things going again?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

He had this guy working for him named Al Scarborough. So he had Scarborough, Sternbergh, Gryskiewicz, and Peter, a guy named Peter who left too. Peter left too, Peter Murdoch. He was an English psychologist from Manchester University. So Bob clearly had to move us in the direction of we needed. And what they said was okay was a leadership training program. So we've got to make this happen. So we fussed around for a long time trying to find out what that would be and it was this group of executives they brought in

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again, listened to what we said could be in this thing and tried out some of our exercises and they were giving us feedback like yeah, yeah. And John Red eluded to this the other day. Remember, one of them was my former father-in-law. He was an executive at Prudential, and he was very supportive, liked what we were doing. So early on, we had Prudential people coming through courses. But in terms of moving us along quickly, it took really was David Campbell coming in to finally say there's a northbound train. We need a curriculum. We need to run a program.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Let's spend a little time on that. Did the arrival of Ken Clark at the level of chairman of the board of governors and David Campbell as this person who's going to have this big role as recharting research direction.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

You've heard my story about this, I thought they had the wrong Campbell. Oh, it was great. I said, "This stupid board we have, we've got the wrong Campbell." There are at least three Campbells at the University of Minnesota. We heard Campbell form Minnesota. David is the last one that who's had any interest in research and leadership in management. There was a John Campbell. There was a Donald Campbell. And then they said, "No, it's David Campbell." You mean the interest measure guy? John Campbell is an industrial organizational psychologist. What? You know. Oh yeah, the other name that was floating around then was Marvin Dunnette, which was another big name. But David Campbell, I said, "This stupid board." We had the sense of the board doesn't know what they're doing. But David came on with another great person who for me was Donald MacKinnon, who opened doors for me and he was the one who got me to go back and get my Ph.D. And he was the one who counseled me through my divorce. This guy in his 70's here and he was telling me, "You know, I've studied creative people all my life and there's a lot of turbulence in their life." He said, "Not to worry, this will pass." A wonderful human being. So Campbell and MacKinnon came in at the same time.

And I want to tell you a little bit about MacKinnon, can I do that?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Oh, absolutely.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Then I'll get back to Campbell, because Campbell and I are still buddies. But MacKinnon, he was the...

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

He was the senior fellows?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Senior fellows that came in for a year. And so MacKinnon came in from IPAR, Institute For Personality

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Assessment and Research at Berkeley. Well, I mean he started that institute. A big name. And I'm finding out that Ken Clark was the guy that was able to attract all these big names here. And they brought Campbell, too, from Minnesota who was 39, 38, somewhere around there. And I would assume in the back of their minds, they had Campbell would eventually run this place. But they brought both of these in. So here was this...

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

And Clark had been Campbell's [unclear]

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

That's right. So here you have a late 60's person, late 60-year-old and we have this late 30's. And MacKinnon and I just hit it off, wonderful gentleman. I would go to lunch with him. It was like reading history and systems of psychology because he studied with Young. He studied with Freud. He was at Harvard when the Harvard Clinic was set-up. He was one of the first graduate students coming through there. He went to Europe, went to Germany and Switzerland in the mid 30's when it was really tough to be over there. And he told wonderful stories about the rise of Hitler and the setting and Wertheimer. He knew Max Wertheimer. He knew all these people. These are gods in the pantheon of psychology, and this guy studied with them and he'd tell you about them and their personal lives. And he's a personality psychologist, too. So MacKinnon and the person who he was studying with at Harvard, and we need to get his name as well, was the first person this guy and MacKinnon's mentor to turn clinical psychological constructs into studying healthy, normal behavior. Prior to that, it was abnormal behavior. And this other guy came along and said wait a minute. And of course where that was first applied was the OSS. And so MacKinnon set-up the OSS. He had just come back from Germany and I'm sure he was intelligence gathering. Have you ever read a book called The Catcher Was a Spy?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

No, I've not.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

You must read this book. It's about Mo Burg who was sort of a third string catcher, professional catcher, but was a Princeton graduate. And he was traveling around professional baseball teams in Japan in the 30's and he visited a hospital there and took early videos or early movies of the Tokyo Harbor that eventually got into out war plans. But read the book, wonderful, wonderful book. But MacKinnon was doing this, gathering data. And so he came back after there and set-up the OSS, and they were using assessment devices to assess he would say participants in irregular warfare or soldiers in irregular warfare. That was his description. And I have, if you ever want to see, I have all

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these early slides. He gave me his photographs. He brought in his photograph album of all the assessment experience they did in Washington and he said, "You see this young person here?" Well, that's Mo Stein. And Mo Stein was the 70's psychologist. See this guy here? This is so and so. So I said, "Don, do you mind if I take pictures? I'll give them back." He said, "No, no, no." So I got slides made of the photographs. And one of the things I was able to do with that was Mo Stein, when he retired from NYU, I gave him a set of those. He couldn't believe it. He had not seen—did not know they existed or didn't remember they existed. And he's going through this weeping, watching himself as a kid. So MacKinnon was here. MacKinnon had talked about his OSS experience. When the war was over, he got a Carnegie grant and he went from Bryn Mawr up to Berkeley to set-up the Institute For Personality Assessment Research and then brought in people to study creativity. And why creativity? I said, "Don, why creativity?" He said, "Well, you know of all the people I've assessed, leaders, scientists, there was one common trait that went across their—the effective people, there was one common trait, and that's creativity." New applied perspective on creativity. So thanks, Don. I'll file that one away, too. So he had part of the assessed poets, the assessed writers. He did architects. MacKinnon's was architects. He said the architect was really the creative person because they had real world constraints. You had to be creative in those real world constraints. So he did all that set-up in the 50's, 60's, retired from there, and then came here in the early 70's. And he was here for a year. My personal turbulence was going on. And I brought him back several times as we ran these creativity weeks symposia that we did for ten years. And he would come back, and I got to know Mary his wife, a sweetie. And whenever they would come here, I would have—this is before liquor by the drink—I knew that every night at 5:30, they had a vodka martini. So whenever I would check them into the hotel, he would look at me and I'd say, "Check the cabinet." He'd smile. A little vodka and a little vermouth and the olives. 70's, you know, they were wonderful people. He was Harvard trained, Harvard educated. I think he went to Bowdoin College as an undergraduate and then went off. So he was just a great human who influenced my life and my career greatly around creativity, around helping with my personal divorce and then also saying go back to college. In his phrase, "Go back and do Ph.D." He said, "I know you're great, because I've worked with you. I know you're good, you can make a contribution. David Campbell knows you can make a contribution, but other people don't. If you open up the trunk, we know that. But you've got to get that trunk into certain places and the way it's going to get you there..." He used the analogy of the

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baggage tag. And that baggage tag has to say Ph.D. So with his encouragement and David and Ken Clark giving me the time off, I went back and did the Ph.D. And MacKinnon came over to visit me in London.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

How about that.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

He was on a trip with his family and he stopped at the University of London and he checked into the—he said, "I'm at the hotel called the St. Ermines." I said, "St. Ermines, what the hell are you doing, where is this place?" He said, "Well it's on this cul de sac." Well, I read the book. If you read some of the early books about espionage in World War II, St. Ermines was a safe house and one of the hotels that he was very comfortable going back. I wish I could have spent more time talking to him, because he had so many—and then lunch, Myers-Briggs stuff, he said, "Oh yeah, I know it." And you studied with Young? He said, "Yeah." I said, "Now you were at Bryn Mawr?" He said, "Yeah, I was." He said, "Now wasn't Isabel?" He said, "Oh, yeah, she was my student at Bryn Mawr."

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Isabel?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Myers, Myers-Briggs. So that the lady who turned Young's construct into a test was his student. I'm finding this over lunch eating a hot dog. What? Tell me more. It's like you. And he was yeah, she was my student. I said, "What chose you to...?" And he said, "Because I thought she was doing stuff that made sense." The other story about that is Isabel's mother—Isabel grew up in D.C. Her father was the head of the patent office. And the daughter was self-educated before going off to Bryn Mawr, the mother educated her. And the mother had these discussion groups in her home. I guess the intelligencia of D.C. would come together and so when Isabel came home from Bryn Mawr with a bow for Thanksgiving or something like that, invited him. "Can I bring him home?" And sure she could. And the story is as they were going on that Sunday to take the train to go back outside Philly, the mom said to Isabel, "He's not your type." And the mother said, "Hmmm, type." She read over 100 biographies and autobiographies and put together a categorization of this topology and presented it to her group. And someone in the group said to her, "This is really good, but have you read Carl Jung?" She had replicated his topology. And then Isabel got interested and Don MacKinnon was her professor. He studied with Jung. So there are circles within circles in this organization, because we depend a lot on that Myers-Briggs. There are a couple of instruments I think we've had a lot to do with their success. Myers-

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Briggs would have succeeded with or without us, but was very helpful in our work and then had the link back to Don MacKinnon. Wonderful little guy with a little gray mustache, just like a Harvard professor, just out at Berkeley, and yet, he had a twinkle. Berkeley was a little different back in the 60's, but he had a twinkle in his eye. I said, "How did you get back?" He said, "Well, we used to drive across country." What was it like driving across country in the 40's and 50's? He said, "Well, we'd sleep in our car." Wow.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Did you feel optimistic once things settled out after '73? Did it feel like things were going to move and go?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yes, yes. I don't recall ever having—remember, I told you about that really down night, that one night that I had where I thought why am I wasting my time here? Once that got—and I'm sure I was caught up in all the psychological games going on here. And since I was down at this level—but after that, no, this is we have a contribution to make here, and we're going to make it. And my whole theory about the humanistic movement, we have brought assessment for development as opposed to assessment for selection. MacKinnon came out of assessment for selection. And that had got into the people who were running assessment Centers for Sears and for J.C. Penney and for A T & T and were doing selection. And remember the story I told you about we brought Doug Bray in here? Okay, I'll tell you that story now. One of the things we did when this guy was already gone, we brought in—I said to Bob Dorn, I said, "I've been reading this stuff by a guy out in California who's running something similar to us. Can I call him?" So Dorn said, "Why don't you go see him?" I can go to California, I can go to California? Yeah, why don't you go see him. So I called this guy up and I went out to see this guy and he was running assessment for development in a company called—it was a pharmaceutical firm. And his name was Dale Miller and Jack Zenger. And the company was the first company to make birth control pills. I'll think of it.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Syntex.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Syntex, yeah.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Carl Djerassi.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

I don't know the name. Okay, but so Jack Zenger was their H.R. person who had written an article called "Third Generation Management Development." And he had emphasized how important it was for the person to know himself. And so I called him up and said, "Can I come by and

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see you?" Sure. And he then introduced me—after an hour with him, he introduced me to Dale Miller. And then I got invited to participate in one of their assessment experiences, and I actually gave feedback to some of their managers, because I had credentials. I mean I had been working in this area. And this was before Ph.D.s. So I went out there and saw them and then I went out to China Lake in California where Clara Erickson was doing her stuff. G.E. was doing it, but they stopped doing it, with a man named Walter Story. And there was CCL. So we decided to have a meeting here. We invited all these people to come and talk about what they were trying to do with assessment. And I had MacKinnon come back to it. And I invited some of the guys who were doing assessment for selection. Doug Bray and A T & T. And we got into this discussion. And by the way, Zenger and Miller are now one of the biggest consulting competitive houses that compete with us now. So they both left Syntex and went off and started a company, and it's a global company now. But I remember at this meeting up by the old fireplace, which you can see the fireplace, but it's a much smaller room now. We sat around and we were talking about the future of assessment for development as opposed to selection. And Doug Bray was sitting up there and said, "Of all the years you've been running this, you mean you've never given feedback to any of the people that you've assessed?" No, never have. We're talking thousands. We're talking maybe a hundred thousand through. No, I never have. There was this incredible reaction on my part, which you could read me when I would give my reactions. So I said, "So we've got such good people, we can just select the best and we don't have to worry about developing the rest." And so I professionally I just sort of chalked this guy off as old world and it wasn't going to be the future of where our field was going. And it was really the Clara Ericksons and the Zengers, Jack Zenger, and the Millers and what we were doing. And you see, the other thing is around this time, I went off and did the Ph.D. in London.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

You left when to do that?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

August of '76. And Campbell kept me on salary. That was incredible. I was making $18,000 a year by that time. And that was when the dollar and the pound were equal. I was the only graduate student that had a centrally heated flat and I lived in Hampstead. It was what a life. I had a great year, a great, great, great year. I mean get on the tube in the morning after the rush was over and I'd get off at Euston Station and I'd walk toward Senate House and to my college and go to the library and read. And I found in some little podunk little North East London Poly had the best library and all assessment stuff and creativity stuff. And I

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was how did it happen here? Well, there used to be some association of personnel that fell apart and they willed all their books to this little library. So I went over there and was where did you get all this wonderful stuff? And the librarian liked me, because no one else appreciated what he had there. But I went off to London, and we were in our first part of the trade-off for Campbell was he said, "Let's run our first LDP outside the country." So we did it in January of '77.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Yeah. Before you tell that story, why did they pay your salary? I mean why did they think that made sense? Obviously they wanted to keep you, they wanted to tell you they wanted you, but how did they work that at?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

The money was put in the bank here, and I would write checks and transfer the money over. So why did David do that? I had been divorced by then, I was paying child support. He didn't want to—I had a sense, and maybe this is true still, but when people come in from the beginning, you're never paid as much as people who come in later on in the organization. So maybe I was underpaid. Maybe Campbell had a sense of he'd been a graduate student. And they kept me on the medical, too, and all that stuff.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

There's a story I've heard in my course of time here about how that decision was made. Do you know that story?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Oh, about Campbell walking into Ken Clark's office and writing a note?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Yeah.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

But I don't know about the salary part of that.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

No, just that's the story I heard.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

David's told me about that.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Slipped a note to Clark or Red?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

No, Clark.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

In a meeting. And he looks at it for a second and signs the bottom and that's it. We'll pay Stan's salary while he's in London.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah. Campbell said, "Can we pay his salary?"

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That's exactly right. That's where I met my second wife, who's been wonderful. I mean graduate students would love to come to my flat, because my poor wife had these five little pence coins you had to put in your flat to keep warm.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Tell me about—before we do the departure to London and all your work over there...

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

The one point I want to come back to about that was that I just realized like Asheridge has just left our circle of LDP users going off on their own and running their own assessment for development program. In the 70's, the Europeans, especially the Brits, thought this stuff was awful. Testing, psychological testing, privacy. The socialist government was really much in power then and the privacy issues would still reign and you can't make decisions on—you can't get test people here, you can't have these kinds of training courses. See, all training courses up to that point were lectures there. So we came in with something totally new. So that same battle we fought here early in the 70's, we fought again in the late 70's in Europe. But now you've got Asheridge and all these people doing what we were doing and doing well at it. But in the late 70's, it wasn't accepted there. And in a real way, I believe we had an influence on management development in Europe as well as here with this assessment for development. Okay, you can go back now.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Tell me about David Campbell's arrival in '73 and sort of what he meant.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Really a breath of fresh air, naive fresh air. I think it was just middle western honesty fresh air, naive person.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Naive?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Naive in the sense of doing things without considering hierarchy. Doing things without saying that whole thing why not, asking the why not question. And here's another little simple thing like that phone call. Campbell had some scholar in town and we all went somewhere. And it was getting late, so Campbell said, "Let's go have dinner." I had never been invited out to dinner at any place. And then, he ordered a bottle of wine at the table. I had never. And then he paid for it. Because with Holmes, we split up our beers. And Campbell said, "Sure, the Center's going to pay for it." And I remember asking Campbell about that. I said, "Do you remember that?" He said, "Yeah, I remember that, sure." Why did you? He said, "Well, I just took the bill into Tom and told him to pay me." And Tom did. Tom paid him.

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So I guess it was just like me making that phone call for the first time. So there was that fresh air sense of let's get on with it. I introduced David at a conference last summer, this summer, in Istanbul. And I introduced him as the Nike psychologist, "Just do it." And he just does it. And some people would say it's not refined, it's not complete. Now while these guys are twiddling their thumbs refining something, David is already onto three levels past them. And that's the way he ran in the shop as well. In that northbound train lecture that David did.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

I don't know what—tell that story.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

You haven't heard that story yet?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

No.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

He called us al into the room with Dorn and the people working for Dorn and said, "I've been told there are three things I need and one is a staff, second is a curriculum and third is a brochure or a catalog to be an educational institution to protect it." He said, "I've been told that by the Richardsons or the lawyer for the Richardsons." And he said, "I've got a staff." He said, "I can get a catalog, but I need something to put in that catalog, and we will have a train." And remember, we were trying this and trying that. And he said some incredible date like two weeks or six weeks, I want this.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

No, I think it was two days I want this.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Was it?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Yeah. I think there were a few pieces of paper that resulted from that and I think it's February, '74. And he says to Bob Dorn 48 hours, or I'll figure it out myself.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

That's right, that's right. That's exactly what he said. So that was it. That was what we called the northbound train.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

But I take it that although this is in the form of some type of ultimatum, we've got to do this, that Campbell didn't ruffle feathers in the wrong way.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

No, he did not. I don't know if it was just his style. Here's another way that made him human to me, when he gave that speech, he was nervous. I mean you sit and do this in front of a bunch of assessment psychologists, right? So we're looking at his behavior as well. And he was nervous.

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His voice was cracking, his hand was shaking when he said this. So he was passionate about what he was saying.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

So this is not somebody who walked in the door in 1973 and soon is in this role of vice president for research who is just stomping around as if he's a field general who's been doing this all his life?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

No, not at all. Not at all. And because of his human quality, you were more likely to follow or do the things as opposed to a Doug Holmes or opposed to Jim Farr, for me personally. So I saw the human side of David all the time, and he was willing to talk about his human side. I have—did anyone ever share with you the list that he would read every first of January?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

No.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

I have that. I was going to take it with me. It's in my briefcase. I'm going to see David on Sunday night. I was going to say David, do you remember this list? And he would read over this list of what we should do to be good citizens of CCL.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Oh, really?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yes, great. I've got to get it. One was simple things like whenever you're working on a piece of paper, date it. Be kind to each other. And all these things of respecting clients. And he said, "I just feel like it's a need to read this once a year so we have this as a community." And that's when we would all sit in the auditorium. There were less than 40 people here. And the other thing he would do to show his human side, which some people may have gotten twirked about, but I thought it was fine, was whenever he would travel, he would take photograph slides and he would show his slide shows. So the staff meeting would always end with another slide show somewhere. And I love to travel. I always have this urge to travel, so I loved to see his slides. There was only one time that I got a viscerally reaction to his slide show was after having spent a year in England and realizing how difficult it was to make things happen like phone calls or travel or anything like that. And he had just talked about how he had traveled across the country and been here and showing all this slide show. All of a sudden I realized there are a lot of people who can't relate to this, David, because they can't make it out for themselves. And I never had that experience until I got outside of our culture here and lived in England for a year and came back with that. And I was almost ill to my stomach. I could feel my stomach

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reacting. I said, "Now I understand why some people may be reacting to this, David." And he took that counsel. And he still continued to do it, but he listened to me. And we had a great run-in with each other in London setting up the program in London. And I sensed he was running that project, and he was making a lot of what we call L-1 decisions, making decisions without involving other people. And David, you can't do that here. I pulled him aside one-on-one and said, "We just can't do that here." What he was doing was making some decisions about personnel issues around running the course. And I said, "This is a cultural difference here, you don't understand this." And he was quiet. He listened to me, and he went off, and about three hours later, I had a note from him with a postcard he had found and he said, "Campbell and his damn L-1 decisions, I understand." So a lot of the times, Campbell could not come back and tell you. But I think he and I are better at doing that now. But he would always get back to you. Whether he agreed or disagreed with you, he'd get back to you on things, that kind of stuff.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

What was Campbell's professional reputation when he arrived here? You mentioned he wasn't the first Campbell you thought.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

The industrial organizational psychologist, but then as I read more about his work and we were using the Strong Vocational Interest Blank.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

So at that time, the Strong-Campbell was not yet put together?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

That was what he was working on when he was here. There was the Strong Vocational Interest Blank. There was a...

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Strong Vocational Interest Blank.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

There was a blue form and a pink form.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

That's great.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

He's never lived that down, because he was running that Center and part of his Strong-Campbell was trying to get rid of those differences. So David, even though John let David do a lot, but there was this—David was in that, and he was just shooting everywhere. And 25% of the time paid-off, and those pay-offs were big. He hired—he brought in DeVries and he brought in McCall and they brought in Lombardo. He brought in the lady who's no longer here who brought in Bill Drath.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Was that Linda Helgerson?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah. She was a trip. She was the most masculine of all the women who have ever worked here. I mean not in today's terminology but in the sense that she had balls. She would just say, "Hey, guys, you want to be a first class organization? You need some public relations. You need a brochure. You need a logo." Why do we need that stuff? And she would take them on. And if you disagreed with her, she'd grab you. And so she played her role. But of course, because of that, she pissed off a lot of people, too. And Campbell didn't. He didn't piss off as many people. He would piss some people off, but not as much as Linda would do. But Campbell got us going. He was the fulcrum. He brought in some bright people, nurtured them.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

When did DeVries, Lombardo, McCall arrive?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

That had to be '74, '75.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Yeah, before you went to London.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah. So Campbell was a talent junkie. And he brought in some people here who—they asked me about Andre Rudi.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

I've never heard that name.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

David said we need to learn how to use video technology. He found this guy...

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

What was the name again?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Andre Rudi. He found a guy who knew how to use video technology skiing backwards down the slopes in Colorado videotaping people and said this guy's got talent. I'm going to bring him to the Center so we can learn how to use videos. Great idea, David, but you know. Andre stayed here about six months and then when he left, the equipment left with him. It disappeared. But you know, Campbell said we've got to do something, and he was right. And he would do those things. Those were the wonderful years here, the experimental years, the exciting years. You really had a sense we were doing something. We weren't just sitting back and things mounting up on your desk.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Did you come back to the same place after your year in London?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

That's a good question. Let me think back. I flew back into San Francisco where the APA was being held, and I was met by people who were there. I really felt welcome back. It was a wonderful experience. They were knocking on my door. They woke me up. I was tired. They woke me up and they came in and said let's go out for a beer. Tell us about what's going on and tell you about what's going on at the Center. So yeah, it was still going on, because then Morgan was starting to have his influence and DeVries was starting to have his influence in the organization. So yeah, there was still the sense of excitement and moving up. And I think Campbell was proud of the fact that I went back and made the degree happen.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

I want to ask you more about that, too, a little bit more about the work you did in London and sort of what that meant to you in your career and so forth.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

That really was the—remember, I had the MacKinnon. Irving Taylor left. I was introduced to creative problem solving, group process, which was a natural for me. I had studied encounter groups. Now I'm looking at group process for stimulating creativity. And Don's comment about effective people are creative people. And so I went off to London to do more dissertation on creativity in organizations. And my dissertation was looking at the impact of creative problem solving techniques and idea generation in product development groups. And so my research was done in the U.K., and I replicated it in companies in the U.S. And so I had this comparison of looking at—there was...

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

You got that done in one year or you had done some of it?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

London required one year residency. And then once your proposal is accepted for your piece, you don't have to attend classes. So I used that first year to attend classes and write my proposal. And I was attending lectures by Marxists. I realized part of my take was boy are they naive. I mean great theory and I'm glad I could be exposed to it, but boy are they naive about organizations. Because these were academics teaching who have never worked in organizations, and I had that experience. And so Emery and Trist and coal face studies and they were studying coal miners three miles down underground trying to generalize theory about Marxist theory from that. And so I think about coal mining and dirty faces and I'm looking at creativity and problem solving groups for new product development. So I got tuned into, which helped the Center long-term, with Unilever research which led to us hiring a couple staff from Unilever,

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which now Unilever is a corporate sponsor. Unilever helped sponsor my research. So all that really got the Center—David, when I came back from the dissertation, finishing it all up, David said, "Okay, now it's over. I want you to start again a creativity Center at CCL. What do you want to call it?" So we had leadership development, so I now decided to call is creativity develop. So that was the very first ten years from the time I started. So it was now 1980. Irving had left in '72, '73. And the only thing we were doing in-between was to have a module in the leadership course then on creative thinking. Now I started moving it from just group process creativity but looking at individual creativity, effective creativity, and that was looking at styles of creativity. Assuming everyone's creative but what's their personal style of creativity, group stuff. And then in the 80's from that, we started developing you have creative people and you have creative teams, but you don't have a climate that supports it. So we started looking at organizational creativity, and that's where I did the work with Teresa Amabile on Keys. And Teresa—I found Teresa was here's how your network works, Joe, and you don't know it until it happens. I had a guy I had met at one of Campbell's cocktail parties, Bob Hogan.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

At APA?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

At APA, was a reviewer for "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology." And he applied for a job here at one time and didn't get it. Anyway, he said, "Stan, you don't know who this person is yet, but I'm pre-reading her research. You need to know about it. And her name is Teresa Amabile and she's at Brandeis." And he said, "I'm going to send you a preprint about what we are going to publish about her study." And he knew what I was dabbling in, and she was doing research on climates for creativity of young children. And I called her and said, "Teresa, you don't know me. I've read your work, and I want you to know that what you're doing is what we're trying to do in organizations. Are you interested to play with us?" That was my phrase. And she said yeah. So while she was at Brandeis, we brought her down her for several months. We continued our work. We developed the instruments called KEYS. She then went onto Harvard. She's in the business school there. So that was our—if you look at what we did with creativity in that creativity development unit, we had the individuals and we had the teams and Teresa would look at organizational stuff. And my latest stuff, what I'm writing about now is the periphery, the organization.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Just for the tape, Stan is sketching to kind of

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illustrate.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

And so what we did was we had to look at a slice. We had to look at people working at teams, working in the organization and the sense of organization renewal. So that's what we worked in. So it was called the Creativity Development Group. And then we changed the name as we grew to ICAR, and you hear it. Remember IPAR? Really my father Don MacKinnon. So it was Innovation and Creativity Applications and Research Group. We hired in Luke Novelli and Luke was my counterpart who ran all the research for us, and I ran the application side of it.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

I'm sorry, say that again. Luke ran the?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Research. He was brought in to be the research part of this creativity group. And we hired people. We had about 12 people at one time. And so anyway, we had this package. So Campbell essentially started this let's return to creativity again. We are the Center For Creative Leadership. Stan's got a more academic approach to it based on his research and application stuff. So baby out with the bath water issue. And so 1980 is when we started the creativity group. That spun out of my Ph.D.

Our first courses in England outside the U.S. because of the Ph.D. In our very first course that we ran over there, the LDP, there were two members from Alcan.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

'76?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

'76. January, '77. Two people from Alcan, David Veale and Angela Stafford.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Which is what, the aluminum company in Canada?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

And they had a U.K. division. And they then brought CCL in to run a series of ten contract programs for them. And then he introduced us to Asheridge Management College, because he had been on faculty at Asheridge and had been using Asheridge. And he said, "You need to update the way you teach management development." And that's how we got linked into all that. And then while I was there, I felt I needed to do something other than just—so I generated some money for the Center. So I did a couple of lectures at a college or workshops at college, Brunnell University, outside of London. So I did it on my creativity stuff and the money was sent back to CCL. And sitting in the audience in the first two times were these two scientists from Unilever. I said, "Do you have any real problems?" And they said, "Yeah, I've got this problem on tea bags."

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

I'm sorry on?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Tea bags, packaging tea. Which became the problem I used on my research for my dissertation which influenced...

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

This is cassette number two in the Thursday, November 5, 1998 interview with Stan Gryskiewicz for the Center For Creative Leadership's Oral History Project. My name is Joe Mosnier of the Southern Oral History Program at UNC-Chapel Hill. We are at the Center's Greensboro, North Carolina headquarters. This is cassette 11.5.98-SG.2.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

So out of that London experience came George Davis who left Unilever and worked here for a year and helped us with our creativity programs as a practitioner scientist. We had our running of our LDPs outside the U.S. and building of contract programs, which Alcan, then went to United Glass. The second public program we ran there, there was a company represented called United Glass, and we ran contract programs for United Glass. From that was the link to Asheridge. All that because Campbell sent me off to University of London for a year, which has led to very interesting relationships which still continue today. And I think and I'm sure—I wouldn't say this in Britain, but I would say it here, but I think we influenced management development. At least I was being taught around assessment for development in Europe if not, for sure in England.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

You know, let's stop there. It's a clean breaking point, because I need a minute or two of your time right now. So we'll stop there for today. Thank you.