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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.
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
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.
One of them is still here today. You met David Hills?
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.
Let me ask you first what were your duties when you started? What did you do?
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.
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.
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.
And I want to tell you a little bit about MacKinnon, can I do that?
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 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.
I don't know what—tell that story.
You haven't heard that story yet?
No.
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.
No, I think it was two days I want this.
Was it?
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.
That's right, that's right. That's exactly what he said. So that was it. That was what we called the northbound train.
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.
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.
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?
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?
No.
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.
Oh, really?
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
What was Campbell's professional reputation when he arrived here? You mentioned he wasn't the first Campbell you thought.
The industrial organizational psychologist, but then as I read more about his work and we were using the Strong Vocational Interest Blank.
So at that time, the Strong-Campbell was not yet put together?
That was what he was working on when he was here. There was the Strong Vocational Interest Blank. There was a...
Strong Vocational Interest Blank.
There was a blue form and a pink form.
That's great.
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.
Was that Linda Helgerson?
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.
When did DeVries, Lombardo, McCall arrive?
That had to be '74, '75.
Yeah, before you went to London.
Yeah. So Campbell was a talent junkie. And he brought in some people here who—they asked me about Andre Rudi.
I've never heard that name.
David said we need to learn how to use video technology. He found this guy...
What was the name again?
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.
Did you come back to the same place after your year in London?
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.
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.
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...
You got that done in one year or you had done some of it?
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,
At APA?
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.
Just for the tape, Stan is sketching to kind of
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.
I'm sorry, say that again. Luke ran the?
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.
'76?
'76. January, '77. Two people from Alcan, David Veale and Angela Stafford.
Which is what, the aluminum company in Canada?
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."
I'm sorry on?
Tea bags, packaging tea. Which became the problem I used on my research for my dissertation which influenced...
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
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.
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.
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.
END OF INTERVIEW