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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview
S-0016, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill”
This is the first of two interviews with Stan Gryskiewicz, a psychologist who worked for the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina. Gryskiewicz begins this interview with a very brief discussion of his upbringing in New Jersey during the 1940s and 1960s. During the mid-1960s, Gryskiewicz attended Stetson University in Florida, where he studied psychology. Following his graduation in 1968, he pursued his master's degree at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. He began his career at the Center in 1970. Gryskiewicz offers a detailed description of his work there during the 1970s. After spending the first several years working closely with his supervisor, Doug Holmes, in developing behavioral assessment programs, Gryskiewicz survived a major reorganization of the Center's management. He describes this reorganization in detail and offers his thoughts on the immediate aftermath as management of research shifted into the hands of David Campbell. In addition to describing the leadership skills and capabilities of Campbell, Gryskiewicz offers vivid commentary of other leading figures at the Center, including Bob Dorn, John Red, and Donald MacKinnon. Gryskiewicz speaks at length about his own research in creative leadership development, particularly as it evolved when he completed his Ph.D. while studying in London.
Stan Gryskiewicz worked as a psychologist for the Center for Creative Leadership from its inception in 1970. In this interview (the first of two), Gryskiewicz describes his background in psychology, his initial duties with the Center during the 1970s, the Center's 1973 managerial reorganization, his perception of various leaders within the Center, and his research in creative leadership development.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
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?
Yes.
Stan, do you want to start us with a sketch of your family history, your upbringing, where you were born, education?
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.
You were born what year?
1946.
'46, okay.
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.
Is that your family was Baptist with your surname?
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?
How about that.
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.
Why psychology?
Well, I'm getting personal, and that's okay with me, but is that okay with you to use this kind of information?
Oh, yeah, I think it's very important.
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
Letting your hair down.
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.
Rat runners and the?
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.
So you would have graduated college '67?
'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.
Was Wake Forest here then?
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.
Yeah. You mean here at CCL?
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
And this would have been when exactly?
Oh, this was in the spring of 1970.
Oh, okay.
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.
We can come back.
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.
Yeah. Let me ask you a few questions. You walk in the first day at the Piedmont Building and what do you see?
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.
What did you make of Holmes and Dorn? First impression, as you recall.
Bright, really bright people. Tense. Holmes was very tense. A very tense guy, very bright guy.
Intense or tense?
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
That's Dorn, Irv Taylor?
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.
How about Jim Farr, what did you make of Jim Farr?
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.
Farr Associates?
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.
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
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.
For the tape, that's Smith Richardson, Sr.
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
Um-hmm.
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...
You mean Doug Holmes?
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,
Let me interrupt for one second.
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?
Yeah.
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,
Really?
Yeah.
Who did the dream interpretation?
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
Oh, my.
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.
Who were the people who came into do this? Who were the participants?
Early, our participants were whoever we could get, anyone we could get. A lot of them were the Richardson Fellows.
So those were the young people?
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.
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.
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.
Who was that?
Mal Murray. Malcolm, I guess. Mal Murray moved on. But those would be interesting people to contact because they were in that original group.
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?
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,
That was your first inkling of trouble brewing at the Center?
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.
Remember that, the assessment. Your recollections of that.
Oh, the assessment period?
Um-hmm.
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
Did you sit in on these presentations?
From behind the one way mirror.
Really?
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
Since you had this extra special clandestine view, can you paint a little more of that detail?
I just remember things like sitting around
So around this table was the board or just this committee?
This committee and I think maybe John Red was in there. But it was just this smaller group.
Would George Eichhorn have been around then?
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.
It was Ben Gantz?
Ben Gantz, yeah. By the way, I have a picture of him I just gave to Tom. Did you see that?
No.
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.
That's Richardson-Merrill, Inc.
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
Before you sent it out?
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.
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?
I think it was around the same, the purge issues, too.
So it was the quality of the work and also...
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?
So he wasn't physically present much of the time?
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.
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?
Yeah. I saw him as well, you know, in the sense Farr was reporting to him.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
This is side B of the first cassette with 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.
Tell me about settling in after the reorganization. Bob Dorn has come to your house after you had to be down in Florida.
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
How was that, the reorganization handled?
Joe Wexler was another one. Joe Wexler was yet another one who left. And he's now with Compaq Computers and doing fine.
How did they handle it? I mean did people pack up and leave?
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.
So it wasn't just...
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...
How did Bob Dorn kind of regroup for everybody and get things going again?
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
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.
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.
Oh, absolutely.
Then I'll get back to Campbell, because Campbell and I are still buddies. But MacKinnon, he was the...
He was the senior fellows?
Senior fellows that came in for a year. And so MacKinnon came in from
IPAR, Institute For Personality
And Clark had been Campbell's
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?
No, I've not.
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
How about that.
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."
Isabel?
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-
Did you feel optimistic once things settled out after '73? Did it feel like things were going to move and go?
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.
Syntex.
Syntex, yeah.
Carl Djerassi.
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
You left when to do that?
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
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?
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.
There's a story I've heard in my course of time here about how that decision was made. Do you know that story?
Oh, about Campbell walking into Ken Clark's office and writing a note?
Yeah.
But I don't know about the salary part of that.
No, just that's the story I heard.
David's told me about that.
Slipped a note to Clark or Red?
No, Clark.
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.
Yeah. Campbell said, "Can we pay his salary?"
Tell me about—before we do the departure to London and all your work over there...
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.
Tell me about David Campbell's arrival in '73 and sort of what he meant.
Really a breath of fresh air, naive fresh air. I think it was just middle western honesty fresh air, naive person.
Naive?
Naive in the sense of doing things without considering hierarchy. Doing things without saying that whole