[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Interview with Dr. Stanley 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. Gryskiewicz is spelled g-r-y-s-k-i-e-w-i-c-z and this is Friday, January 15, 1999. This interview is being conducted by phone. I am in California and Dr. Gryskiewicz is at the Center in Greensboro, North Carolina. This is the second session with Dr. Gryskiewicz. We did an earlier session on November 5, 1998, so we will continue the conversation today. This is tape #1.15-99-SG-2.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

You sound wide awake for 7:00 in the morning.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

I'm feeling pretty good this morning. Stan, we're now on tape. Let me ask you, if you would, as we closed out last time on the 5th of November, you mentioned there were some good stories to recall about the effort to launch the first LDP in the London. And I thought maybe we would start there today.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah. The first LDP we ran in London was when I was a student there. David Campbell gave me a year off to complete, to start the [unclear] program. So while I was there, I briefed. The nice thing, which you can go on record saying, he kept me on salary during that period of time, which was lovely. I was a graduate student and was able to afford a centrally heated flat, which is unusual in London. David then—we agreed that we would try to run our first Leadership Development Program outside the U.S. and I would try to market it. In fact, I did market it to be advertised in the London Times. We advertised in brochure format and we advertised in the London Times. And I remember having an ad set up and one of the unfortunate mistakes we made was the return address I gave was my home flat. Of course the landlord, I don't know, he must have read every newspaper that came across. I had a phone call that first morning. It appeared by 8:30 in the morning asking me what right did I have to put his address. Sorry about that. I was able to call up the London Times advertising section and the next day they had the address changed to Birkbeck College, which in fact was hosting. So that was taken care of. That's one interesting story. The other interesting story was that David would only run the program if we had 12 people. We had 10 people signed up and I had come back to Greensboro for Christmastime. And I think this was for I think a February run, and he made what we call an L-1 decision by himself. He said, "There will be 12 people there." And he assigned two Center staff people to go. These are people who had not been through our training program. I think one was from accounting and one was from marketing,

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early form of marketing program, worked for Linda Helgerson. So the two of them went along so we now had 12. We ran our program in London with the two Center staff people, two people from Alcan, two people from United Glass and a variety of other sorts from around Europe and the U.S. So our first adventure, we held it at Birkbeck College. The master of the university or the college was there. That was an interesting phrase. We had to get used to calling him master. The master's dining room served as our facility for dining. Two stories about him that I remember. There was a repartee going on the last night, the banquet night, where the master was in fact at the head table. David Campbell got up and told a joke about economists because the master was in fact an economist. David said something to the fact that if they laid all the economist end to end—I think this is an old story, but he repeated it—they would not come to a conclusion. And the master stood up and believably said, "I've heard stories if they laid psychologists end to end, it wouldn't surprise me at all." It was just a great, great response and what we term now, especially in Europe, that the evening meals are another module. Not just an event where you sit down and eat, which Americans do. And Europeans, it's an event. And that was a good learning for us. And then the third interesting story was the final meal, the final night, one of the head of the department who had a relationship with CCL then, went to check out to make sure that the master's dining room was spread properly and the drinks were out. And as he walked in, he noticed a stranger standing around at the table and he actually saw her take a gin bottle and put it in her coat pocket. He asked her who she was and she wouldn't identify who she was. So he got the university policeman to come and escort her out. And as he was escorting her out, Nick Georgiades noticed that there was a briefcase where it shouldn't be. And this was the time in the 70's when all over the Metro system there or the Tube system there were the signs if you see an unattended briefcase, call the police. So he forced her to take this briefcase and she said, "It's not my briefcase." So at that time, we didn't believe her about anything because we couldn't even search her even though we saw her put the gin bottle in her pocket. So we forced her and the policeman forced her to take the briefcase. And she kept protesting it's not my briefcase but I'll take it. Well, when we came down an hour and a half later for cocktails, one of the senior managers of this Irish organization kept wandering around in a frantic way looking under tables and all that. What had happened was he had come down early and put his briefcase there. And we urged this other person to take the briefcase with her and oh, we were embarrassed at this point.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

So she was just there to lift a little liquor.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

That's all. But what happened the next morning was there was a phone call message that came through that the briefcase had been found on campus. So she obviously was just around campus some place and he was able to recover his passport. But it was a momentary panic, interesting. But from that first attempt, just putting our foothold there, making it happen. We had a series of contract programs with Alcan and United Glass that ran for the next three or four years that really started our activity in Europe. Another activity that happened was—I think I had mentioned George Davis, where I had given a presentation at one of the local colleges on creativity. And that was two scientists from Unilever research. And that then led to a series of contract programs and in fact, one of those scientists came to work at CCL for two years, George Davis. Actually moved his whole family over. So that first attempt and those early attempts, even though the student was starting to put our foothold or at least a footprint in Europe has paid off. So really the message was we had something they needed and wanted and even though they didn't know it yet, I clearly think we influenced management and development as they operate in Europe today, back in the 70's, because they did use psychometrics then. They were very much concerned about testing and having individual data on people. That was very much a Labor Party labor issue. It was a labor government in charge then. It was also a socialist issue that had come out of Europe in the 50's and 60's, privacy issue. All those were issues you can't have this information [unclear] . The trade-off was that the information was now shared with the individual where it hadn't been used before to help them be more effective. And now, if you go to a management training program in Europe, they'll be using feedback, they'll be using some of the same tests that we brought over. So that really is an assessment for development model that we brought over in the mid 60's or '77 is now very much a part of European programs. So that was a direct influence.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Right.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

On my return, one of the interesting things that I remember doing is Campbell used to have every two weeks all staff meetings in our auditorium. Our auditorium used to seat 48 people. When I returned in September of '77, the whole staff could sit into that. So now we're over 500 but then, the whole staff. And David asked me to talk about my experience for about 15-20 minutes. I took the first five

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minutes, maybe five to ten minutes, to walk around the auditorium and look every person in the eye and call them by first name and thank them for supporting me while I was in Europe. You cannot do that anymore. Back then you could. You knew them by first name. You could walk up and look them in the eye. And I remember making a dramatic attempt to—I wanted to make the statement that my success was based on the support they had given me and the gaps they had filled while I was over in Europe. I walked literally around. I really walked around the auditorium to each seat and looked them in the eye and shook their hand and looked at them and called them by first name and thanked them. That we can't do anymore. When I came back yes, this new research crew was up and running. DeVries, McCall, Lombardo, they had about two years. I think Campbell brought them on in '74, so this was two and a half years later and they were up and running. They were about to receive, I think at that point, the Looking Glass contract or the grant from Office of Naval Research to start Looking Glass. So they now had a product that they were about to offer that was designed—Looking Glass, to my understanding, is designed to provide a vehicle for collecting research data. But it turned out also in the long run as we know now, to be a good training vehicle in the simulation of running an organization for a day. And the Looking Glass, of course, was simply looking at yourself getting the feedback, high intensity feedback. So that was the next major product that the Center pushed out. First, the Leadership Development Program and then Looking Glass. And that was a direct result of those researchers putting that together, Morgan McCall, Lombardo, and DeVries.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Right. Can you tell me how the three of those folks—what sort of institutional weight, what sort of space they took up so to speak, [unclear] in those years?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah. It was a little bit of the applied research looking at each other askance. The researchers are saying you guys are not doing stuff based on research or you guys don't pay attention to collecting data. And we're looking at them and saying hey, you guys aren't earning any money. Some of that. But they really insulated or encapsulated themselves in the organization and they used that time, which we know now was so valuable, because now that we don't have that ability to do that. They went off for a year and a half to think through and design a damn good simulation. And they interviewed managers to collect data on what would an organization look like. I remember they walked into a senior executive at an oil company and said, "What's your day like and what's your in-basket like?" The guy said, "Here's

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my in-basket. Look at it." So they were out there collecting real data that they used to put together the simulation. Again, it was to be a research vehicle. But here's the interesting thing. We started to see the value of the potential of being a training vehicle so a real significant event happened. There was a man named Don Hawk who was brought in. Have you heard that name yet?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

I think I have, yes.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

He stayed here about two years. He was sort of a dark character. Campbell, I think I told you the story that David Campbell was a talent junkie and he would hire lots of interesting people and he was one of the ones that just wanted to get a real business manager in here to help run this place. So they brought in Don Hawk from a company out of Chicago called—it will come back to me. It was a pharmaceutical company out of Chicago. And so brought in a real manager to work with us weirdos here. So he wore a suit and jacket every day. He went over in a big way. But it was this point where research wanted to hand off the Looking Glass simulation to the trainers. So what essentially was the whole thing of throwing something new over the fence. The trainers hadn't been involved in it and now they're being asked to teach it. And there was a decision made that they wouldn't take it. And Hawk was part of that decision. So researching said screw you, we'll do it ourselves. And they took it back in and developed their own training program out of it and started generating money.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

What do you think motivated the resistance?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

It was purely a lesson that we were actually teaching in our leadership program was that if you involve people, they don't own it. And you could point fingers both ways. If research really wanted us to—they had to encapsulate themselves to produce this. And in their encapsulation, they alienated but they also didn't get buy-in from the people who could train it, because when it initially started out, it was not meant to be a training tool. It was meant to be a research tool.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Is that to say specifically that Bob Dorn balked?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

No. Bob Dorn had been replaced.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Ah, by that time.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

He was sort of sent on sabbatical. There was

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this strange stuff where he and Campbell had a falling-out and Bob was—whether he was admitting depression or what was going on at that point. Did we strike that part about the depression or is that saved?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Well, that's on the tape but you can certainly excise it from the transcript.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

There was this period of time where he got in a funk and Campbell was—as you know, Campbell is really an action oriented guy, so he replaced—he put Bob Dorn on sabbatical a little bit and Don Hawk was brought in. And when Dorn came back, he was reporting to Hawk. So it was Hawk and DeVries presenting to Campbell what do we do with this thing? That's how I recall it. And then Hawk said he didn't want it. Hawk tried to bring in his own program, by the way. He hired someone to help him teach it. And it was the same kind of thing. It didn't fly and it was a program he had been doing at his other company and it was called the Management Development Program. MDP, it was really creative.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

This is the first I've heard of this, actually.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah. It was not a step forward or a leap frog. It was a leap frog backwards for the program. And again, when Hawk left, the program died because there was no buy-in by anybody here.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

How extensively was MDP offered in Hawk's time?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Well, [unclear] in the early program you have this selling process and awareness raising process. But it was offered and put out on the marketplace once a month but I'm not sure it actually ran once a month.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

And you did it at CCL?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah. And it was meant to be or his concept was it was a follow-on to LDP.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Oh, I see.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Bring marketing people into the building who would come and shake their heads and walk out and say this is not what I remember. So it was a lot of tension. Hawk left.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

You said he was there for two years?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah. And he and I think the person he hired,

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left together. So they moved off to— I think he moved into consulting. No, he went to Texas Commerce Share Bank after that.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

How interesting.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

But he was from a pharmaceutical company from Chicago. He was here about two years and really didn't fit in. He even kept his jacket on all day. Drove me nuts.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

That's interesting.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah, very interesting. So that was the Don Hawk era which was about two years.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Yeah, late 70's.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Tell me about you come back from London and begin to move very directly into an effort to launch a whole bunch of creativity work.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Right. That was Campbell again. Campbell said, "Okay, you're back." And he said, "I know what happens when you come back from sabbatical, you can't go back to doing the same thing you were doing." And I said, "Yeah, that's true. It's going to be difficult to go back into the classroom to just do the Leadership Development Program." So where I [unclear] the module on creativity still in that and was hiring other people to help with that, he asked me to set up a creativity program. So I'm not very creative. I first called it the Creativity Development. And there was a leadership development division. Then we developed a creativity of the division. But then the real break came when I was able to hire—we had about 12 to 17 people in the group that we called ICAR. And that happened in the 80's that we moved from this original stuff that Campbell said, "Okay, you're working your Ph.D. You're about to finish it. Know that when you finish it, you're going to start this whole creativity division." So there was this preliminary work, talking, strategizing around that. And when I finished the Ph.D., he said go for it. And eventually that Creativity Development Program, Creativity Development Division became ICAR, which is Innovations and Creativity Applications and Research. So the ICAR title ran and that's where we really grew our work. And our work early on was on my dissertation Targeted Innovation, which is a creative problem solving course. We then took it to a course that we called Creative Leadership for R & D

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managers. And it was essentially a leadership development program but in the middle, we had a new simulation for R & D people in an R & D setting called RADMIS. We developed a simulation called RADMIS. We also marketed it just to managers in R & D settings so they could be around other scientists. We thought there was a market niche so we went after those people. There was a man named Jim Bruce. Has that name surfaced yet?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

No.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Jim Bruce was head of R & D at Kodak and left after Kodak's retirement, spent a year or two here on sabbatical or transition. And he was a friend of Kenneth Clark's. And he sat in on one of our early programs and also had been through LDP. So his idea was you need something here that's going to keep the R & D people interested. So he proposed developing a simulation. And RADMIS stood for Research And Development Management Information Simulation.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Okay, so it's i-s.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

So that was the RADMIS program. He developed it and used a programmer from RIT, Rochester Institute of Technology, where he lived. And we simply had a computerized simulation where project teams would work together five to six people to get a new product to market. And in a four hour simulation, they ran through a two year product development cycle. And while they were doing this, we were observing them. There was an observer who was looking for team interaction, individual behavior. And at times, we knew that that program, the computer program, different probes would appear of problems. We call the probes which would say things are going well, but did you know... And we would see how groups would handle it. So the observer knew that okay, it's about two hours into the simulation, they're about to get probe number one. Let's see how they'll handle it. Some groups would take two minutes and make the decision and move on. Some groups would take the rest just to try to handle the probe. And we would then take that apart as the feedback setting. How did you handle this? What was going on with the group? Here's some videotapes. And in fact, we knew when the probe was about to come so we would turn on the videotape and then we would go back and watch it. And so the observer became the feedback giver in the afternoon, the process person in the afternoon. So there were two days of content and of course content they would need to use in the simulation which took place on Wednesday. And then you know what? It was a full day simulation. And then Thursday was the process

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feedback day. And then Friday was the goal-setting day. So that moved along nicely but then we decided that maybe we should—the research project—really if we wanted to included development in that and not just researchers, we needed to change the name of the course and we went into the market with a new name, with some little market research. But we decided to call it From Idea to Market Entry, FIME. And we then extended the market niche that we thought should be present and sold that for a couple years. So that was another course besides [unclear] that we taught. We had at the same time parallel we were developing the KEYS. Again, in the early days of developing KEYS which was our questionnaire on climates for creativity. And we did that with Teresa Amabile who is now at Harvard Business School, a full professor. She was then at Brandeis. And so I'm still talking about our creativity work here. And I had received a phone call from the editor of the Journal of Personality In Social Psychology who said, "Stan, you don't know about—I know your work but you don't know this person yet. Since I'm the editor, I'm reading her work."

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

I see.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

"And you need to read it. I'm going to send you copies." And I read her stuff and found out she was doing in the laboratory with young children what we were trying to do. She was looking at the environment that stimulates or inhibits creativity in her work with young children. So I then called her and said, "Teresa, you don't know me. I've read your stuff. I'm interested because we're looking at environments that inhibit or facilitate creativity for adults in research and development settings. Would you like to come spend some time with us?" Well of course she did and we brought her down here for extended periods of time. We started our data collection and research lab at Kodak and also at Hoechst-Celanese. And we essentially, with the data we collected, produced the scale initially called the Work Environment Inventory and decided that now that we had a validated scale on creativity and the Center was going to publish it, we needed another name for it. And so we developed the name KEYS, k-e-y-s, which is a measure of climate for creativity. But all that started with the original telephone call to Teresa, her spending time here, the tests and early research done, the developing of the instrument and the validation of the instrument and then up and running full-blown instrument called KEYS.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Luke Novelli had also come on to work in your group, I guess.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

[unclear]

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Tell me a little bit about Luke's work and more generally the whole issue of how you staffed. I guess you staffed up to what, a dozen or more folks?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

That's right. And Luke, we decided we were growing so quickly and I was really more of a applications person than a researcher and there was a reorganization going on then where each one of these groups would have its own research person. They were trying to—remember that old problem of research and applications not talking to each other?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Yeah.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

So DeVries came up with an organizational structure that had each applications group with its own research director. So essentially, it was pushing researchers out of their encapsulated area to work with the applications people. I really had a luxury. Mine was an easier transition because I hired from the outside. The people who moved into the other areas like the leadership area and there was another grouping, they brought with them the researchers like Mike Lombardo who had been here at ten years at that point. So he brought with him a lot of baggage, psychological baggage and departmental baggage and all that. But Luke had been an outsider so he comes in and didn't bring all that past history with him nor did our group see him as a part of that original research group. So we welcomed him with open arms. He became very active in our applications work but looked at it always from the research perspective. I then hired Sylvester Taylor. And then he hired Nancy—no, I brought in Nancy Koester. And so there were three of them doing this research effort. I hired Robert Burnside. I hired Elizabeth Holmes, David Horth. No, David Horth came in first through another source. Never mind, not David Horth. And then there was a guy named Mark Kiefaver who came in for two years and then left and started his own consulting business. And then I hired Karen Boylston. And we were all a very good—I liked the group. I think I must admit that part of it was my—I got bored after a while with managing. And after that group was up and running, this man named—about this time was when we brought in the new VPs. One was Walt Tornow and the other one—I forgot his name. This is terrible, I'm blanking. I know why I'm blanking. David Noer. And David came to me. This is after our group was up and running and I thought doing well and bringing in some good money. I was starting to get a little

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tired of managing. It was getting bigger than this little family I was used to. And I took another sabbatical in '85 and went off and spent the summer at Scandinavian Airlines and got a whole other world opened up to me about working in Europe again which turned me on. Doing work within a real organization, a service industry, which was the whole service industry was starting to feel its muscle at that point. How they served clients, what they were doing and SAS, Scandinavian Airlines was the place to be. That's where Jan Carlson wrote his book that in Europe was called Bringing Down the Pyramids. It was about a flattened organization. Here he called it Moments of Truth. And a moment of truth was the interaction of between that client and a staff member and a customer. And he really flattened the organization and that was really creativity going on in the organization. And I really was able to observe that and do research, interview the managers who were doing it. And it really turned me on, besides living in Oslo, that was just wonderful.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

You were in Oslo. How long were you there?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

I was there four months. Took the whole family. Little Kent was then three and was speaking some Norwegian by the end of the four months. It was a lovely time to be there and that organization was just taking off. So I came back. Did I want to go back into managing again after that? No, I was thinking about for a while. So it took me about two years to think about what else I wanted to do. David Noer was here. David Noer—Walt Ulmer came on in '85 as our new president. I remember receiving a phone call in Oslo and my wife was leaning out the window of this, if you can imagine these old high rise old apartment houses in Oslo. We were on the fourth floor and she said, "Had a call from the president." And oh, God, are we coming home early? Called him back and being a good general, he was just checking with the troops and said, "Just letting you know I'm in charge here. If you have any questions, not to worry. Have a good rest of your time there." That kind of thing.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

How about that.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

But came back and was wondering about like the old story when I came back from London, do I want to go back to the same thing after having all those experiences. And then worked that through and Walter hired David Noer and Walt Tornow. And after being here a period of time, David Noer said to me—he had some conflict with Bob Kaplan so he was moving Bob Kaplan out and he wanted me to take over Kaplan's group and he asked me to write this memo about how I could

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combine my group with Kaplan's group since Kaplan's group was looking at organizational change that seemed to fit with where I had been. It was laborious and the memo just did not come. It did not flow. It took me two weeks to write the memo about organization and adding this other group of eight people to my group of 12. And I gave it to him and I remember going back that night and talking to my wife and she said, "You just don't seem..." And I said, "No, it just doesn't seem right." So she then asked the question, "What do you really want to do?" I said, "I want to be a senior fellow." And I talked to her about it and she said, "Why don't you tell Noer?" So the next day I went and told Noer and he said, "That's interesting. Why don't you write me a memo about that?" Well, I just wrote that memo in 24 hours. And then he read it and said, "Gee, I thought I was doing you a favor." But his concept of favor was just having more and more people underneath you. Again, I'm the old Center coming out of a different style. The managerial skills are not mine. So he and Walt Ulmer worked up this senior fellow for creativity and innovation for me. And I went off and became my own—I developed my own revenue, paid for my own way, essentially had freedom to do what I wanted to do again without the responsibility of 12 to 20 other people.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Right. This is '91?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Yeah. Can I ask this? I want to ask about all the senior fellow work but could we take a few minutes and go back and visit a few issues in these years from basically during the 80's? And let me check with you about a few things because I think your perspective will be real interesting. And then we'll pick up again with your senior fellow work. Your perspectives on the John Red to Ken Clark transition in '81 and in particular, the reorganization that accompanies that because David Campbell departs for Colorado and DeVries becomes, having been groomed a little bit, becomes I guess effectively the right hand man at the organization.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Right, yeah. Let's see. That was Campbell was doing a lot of shooting and in the dark and talent junkie and investing some money and some people would say throwing money away. And it got to the point where we had to downsize. We all took salary cuts.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Oh, right. This is late 70's, I guess.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

I think it was. Early 80's, maybe 80.

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Somewhere in there. He called a meeting again and we all fit into the auditorium and was the most nervous I've ever seen David. And where all other times he would speak to us without notes or with notes. But he actually read his presentation to us which was that we were all—senior management was taking a 15% salary cut and the rest of us were taking at 10% salary cut and four people would go. And when you have a small group, four people, that was dark days around here.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Had that been forced on—I mean what....

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

I'm not privy to all that. I think it was a forced thing. You've got to pay for some of your [unclear] . I've used that phrase before about Ken Clark described David as being forthright?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

I don't recall at this moment, but yeah.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

He referred to David as being forthright, a fourth right.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Oh, yeah, that's right, I do recall.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

And David did some wonderful things here but some of his decisions cost the organization money. So when you're shooting like David did in all these different directions all different things, some of that finally came home to roost. And I think the board finally socked it to him. I mean he made a decision about going to Europe without checking with the board. Hired my old dissertation adviser to be director of CCL Europe. That guy quit his guy at the university and then the board said, "Hey, we don't approve of this."

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Oh, my.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Boy, that was a painful time. Then negotiating with Nick Georgiades who said, "Look, I've quit my job. I had a professorship here." And he said, "Oh, you can find another job." Well, you know, the Europeans just don't operate that way. So there was a suit that took place and they finally got around to negotiating. It was hard to negotiate. There was some money paid and that was a hard reality David had to face up to by making another one of his decisions. After a while, the board started saying, "Wait a minute. What's going on here?" So that's when Ken Clark left chairman of the board and became president of the Center. So that's part of what happened at that point.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Would it be fair to say that the Nick Georgiades in some respect precipitated the Clarks taking a more hands-on role? Was it that event in particular that spurred that shift?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

I think that was just one, I would think. I would say that was a major one. If you asked me to tell you what some of the other things were, I'm not sure I could tell you right now. I think there may have been some the next rank down people saying David's whim decision-making is not good for the organization as a whole. And there was maybe I don't want to say cabal but some people at the next level down talking about wait a minute, what's going on here? And I think DeVries was part of that and I think Lombardo and McCall were part of that. So there was some sense of let's question authority here. Let's see what our leadership is doing. Yeah, it's exciting, but can we afford to spend this kind of money without thinking it through? David's next idea means I've got to leave my other idea that I've been working on. So there was some of that and just the financial decisions, the money wasn't coming in as quickly as it is now. So I think that but the Georgiades thing was a big one. I remember the board meeting and saying, "We didn't approve this." And then David had to get on the phone and tell Nick you don't have a job.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Ouch.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

That was a tough one. The tough one for me personally out of that was I still had to do my Ph.D. with this guy.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Oh, it had not yet been finished at that point. Oh, my.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah. So I learned about the politics of doing a Ph.D.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

I should say.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

To Nick's credit, he did not and even though he was angry with CCL and I could tell he was cold towards me, he was professional around me being his graduate student. And he got me through it. And as you know, it all depends on your external examiner. He could have gotten me a real S.O.B. external examiner but he got a real sweetheart who when I took my oral exam in the Senate House in London, I was there and was wound up tight as a clock and this guy tapped me on the shoulder and it was my external examiner. He said, "Hi, Brian

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Lewis, I'm your external examiner and Nick will be along shortly." When he sat down his first comment to me was he said, "I've been doing dissertations, external examining for a long time and I just believe that this should become a learning experience like everything else and the way to facilitate that is to reduce your anxiety. You have passed. Let's just answer these two questions for me."

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

How about that?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

That was just amazing. Now I could have had—my wife had an external examiner who didn't like the department in London. And that just took her an extra effort to make that all happen. Nick, to his credit, I mean he could have and easily gotten around it by saying the university appointed its external examiner, sorry. But he was able to—the university puts out three names and then Nick said, "Well, I think this is the name we should use." And he could have just as easily said one of the other two names. So in that sense, that was a trauma for me when that took place because that was '79, I guess.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Is it fair to say at all—way back when, when I started my investigation into CCL's history, looking at all of the paper trail that indicates the extraordinary influence of David Campbell across the 70's, my guess had been just speculating against the rough skeleton of facts in front of me—this is again, way back when I didn't know much more about than what was just in front of me and a few pieces of paper—my speculation was oh, it must have been that this young, very dynamic, very capable person more or less running the organization day to day, left for Colorado because he wanted to be president when John Red departed. And they made Ken Clark president instead. But I think that...

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

No.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

That just doesn't seem to be what happened.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

No, no, no. Ken Clark was his Ph.D. advisor so that's not it. David likes adventure and he followed a lady out there. You know that.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Yeah.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

And so there was an attractive lady in his life and his marriage was over. And so he went out there and he wanted a change of lifestyle and he thought of the Air Force Academy. So all that was really what was driving that.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

How much would you say that the Richardson's or H. Smith Richardson, Jr. in particular was—how heavily was he involved say in orchestrating the kinds of reorganizations that took place and Clark's coming on to replace Red and so forth? In other words, what was the level of his involvement in that sort of decision-making?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

I can't—I'm not as privy to all that but I can't help but think he influenced it greatly. In fact, when they had that first bloodletting that I talked to you about in '72-73, he brought together Clark, Bevan and Brim to do that, to evaluate it. So I'm sure he had a lot to do with it. They still impact some of the things, decisions that are made on personnel here. I mean if they like you, you're fine. I still think they influence subtly and indirectly and directly at levels where people's careers could move in different directions.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Interesting. Even now?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Tell me about—can you sketch a quick portrait of David DeVries, his style, his role in these years, the early 80's?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

He was more of a—Campbell was the Midwestern naive full of energy, the naivety I would like to emphasize and not a country bumpkin. Not that at all but more of a gee whiz kind of guy. DeVries was more—he was Dutch. He was more conversative. He was concerned about his dress, appearance. Campbell could care less. He was walking up on the stage to get an honorary degree in Colorado Springs last spring. He was about to walk up with white shoes on. He put on black socks, too. I mean he's not aware of those things. But DeVries was the professional who could relax but you know, he wore proper shirts. They fit him and were starched. He wore a tie when appropriate, not all the time. He did his degree at Johns Hopkins as opposed to Midwestern University. I'm sorry, he did his degree at Illinois but then went to Hopkins where he first taught at Johns Hopkins. DeVries was more political than David. He understood politics of organizations. He understood, that was the difference. So I would say a little bit more sophisticated than David was around leading and managing and managing a board and paying attention to those things.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Stan, let me interrupt one second. We're just out

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of tape. I'm going to switch the tape over.

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

This is side B of the first cassette with Stan Gryskiewicz on the 15th of January, 1999. We were talking about David DeVries.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

He was smooth, you know?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Um-hmm.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

There was a sense of smoothness and I don't want to use the word dignity but a smoothness about him. And David Campbell was somebody you could go out and have a drink with and relax. You couldn't do that with David DeVries. I mean you always had to have your guard up with him a little bit about what you said and didn't say. And maybe in some sense we could say that was appropriate because of the large organization. So there was that difference.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Was DeVries somebody who enjoyed a lot of staff support?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yes. Yes, he sure did and was right for the organization as a buffer between Ulmer. Ulmer tried to reach down. Ulmer was with the troops kind of thing but DeVries was a nice buffer. Some staff, I think there was a falling out between McCall and Ulmer and DeVries tried to get in the middle of that and smooth it out but he didn't and he couldn't. McCall was out. But he I think after a while, David just got tired of doing that. He may have felt passed over, too, so it was time for him to move on.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Let me ask you about early 80's, Ken Clark's tenure. Tom Bridgers mentioned to me that that was a period when boy, there was a lot of long term planning going on. People were writing memos and studies and organization plans and all kinds of things trying to find a way. Do you have recollections about that? Did you have a sense of that CCL was sort of trying to restructure itself or reorganize itself or refocus itself?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

There was a sense of that but I don't remember as many memos going back and forth about it. But there was this sense of—well, that's not true because DeVries was running the show by then, right?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Yeah.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

DeVries, again, part of his savvy of manipulating and working with the board or senior people, that was all part of the show. There was a lot of that going on, Tom was right. But you know, some of us in the trenches were saying let David do that. We'll go out and do things. There was still some of us who had been around from the beginning who thought that was the appropriate way to act. We had become larger and larger, it's less flexibility. It'd be very easy to get away with. But yes, Tom's right.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Another question before I turn to Ulmer and his arrival in '85 and some of the reorganization in '87 and so forth. Do you have recollections of—I guess along the way here in the 80's, there's an effort made by CCL to organize more formally a marketing department, if you will. I'm thinking of Linda Helgerson and Bill Drath and so forth. Did you have much opportunity to work with these folks at all, have contact with these folks?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Linda Helgerson, I told you she had more balls than most of the guys here. That she just drove it and said you guys are living in la-la land. You guys don't even have brochures. You don't know how to interface with the outside world. And so she was good about that. But I don't think she was a marketing person. I just think she had some savvy about how you appear to the outside world. She may have been more of a PR person.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

I see.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

So there was attempts at doing that. Again, this was one of Campbell's decisions. He brought in Helgerson. And it was again, one of these interesting people who along with that interest and activity in moving things forward had some negative sides to her. And she brought in Bill Drath and Bill Drath came in with his ponytail from Chapel Hill. And he was a writer for her. She brought him in as a writer and I think he was part-time driving back and forth to Chapel Hill. And just Drath has made a great contribution here and will continue making great contributions. But he did come in as a part-time writer for Helgerson. But he wasn't a marketing person. He was a writer. I mean if we had brought in a marketing person, they would have probably organized it differently and we wouldn't have had Drath here. But Drath, that was a great investment in Bill.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Yeah. What's your sense of when, looking back, when you'd say CCL finally had something you would consider up to speed corporate style marketing effort?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Well, they brought in this guy, Mark someone. Did you get that name?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

No, it's not ringing a bell.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Brought in a guy named Mark who lasted about two or three years and he tried to get them to—he'd been selling socks or pantyhose with the textile company and he tried to impose that kind of structure upon this organization. And some of the issues that they went through was let's review all our courses and see which ones work. And I had some personal problems with that because some of the newer courses were compared to the same criteria that the older courses were. And so some of the newer courses were dropped before they really had a chance to develop themselves. They had limited resources, so they focused on what they felt were the big winners. But that was the first attempt at coming up with some structured approach. Mark, Mark. There's a Mark in here. He was brought in and he was the first, I think, attempt because he actually came from a marketing background.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

You mentioned that they opposed these—had this rigorous look at some of these new programs and decided to let them go. Do you think that there were—I mean how serious was that over the long term for CCL, as you look back and speculate against what the prospects for some of these programs might have been if given greater opportunity to find a place?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

I think we would have had a larger footprint in the area of creativity in courses like—we introduced a course called Implementing Innovation which lasted for about three or four years while I was around and active with it. But we brought in intact cross-functional teams. So instead of signing up 24 individuals, we'd sign up four six person teams. And we would take them through the whole product development cycle and they would bring with them a real product they were working on. And we would visit them on site before they would come so we had a sense of what their problems were and their background setting. And we would assign them a, not a counselor, but it was somebody who would follow that group around all week and be their feedback processors. So we did a lot of interesting things but we had dumb things going. Our system didn't handle it well. Like we

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had a system that individuals would sign up but now we're having groups sign up, how do we do that? Or a group is cancelling, oh, my God. It was just a zoo and stupid just because we were treating these new courses with the same criteria and the same systems for the ongoing individual sign up for course churn it out kind of thing. And those were seen as not something novel, it isn't as useful. It was seen as boy, this is getting in the way of our system here, let's get rid of this sucker. So I think we would have had a stronger foothold in creativity. I think if I had been more of a manager, we would have had a stronger foothold in creativity.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

So is that to say you might have resisted the demise of these programs a little more aggressively?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Right. And I think if you went to this organization now and said who are the creativity people, there would be about four of us that they would identify for creativity. And the rest of the people—so I think we would have still had a creativity division or something around that nature.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

And was it ultimately Ulmer who set into place this momentum to pare down and streamline?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah. He surrounded himself with a bunch of retired colonels, too. Behind closed doors you would raucous laughter in the morning at their staff meetings and I can imagine what kind of jokes were being told. But he brought in two colonels from the Pentagon who did his bidding. But they did some good things like...

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Who were these guys?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

[unclear] But here's some of the good things that those systems people did. Believe this or not, but through 1987, when I think Barry came on board, any of us could call any travel agent we wanted to and order our tickets and then our accounting department was writing checks to 10 or 15 different travel agents. And Barry said, "Let's put American Express here." And so a lot of us were resisting that because we had these wonderful relationships with our own travel agents. I'd call up that agent and talk to them and now I had to call an 800 number. Well, eventually American Express got smart and they actually put a person here. We've got two people on staff here that are paid for by American Express. But those are some of the systems things that those guys put in that we didn't have in place before. Barry made the transition better at understanding what we do than Mike Sirkis

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did. But Mike really was the general [unclear] and we'll do it.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

How would you describe the general vision—that's the wrong word and context—the broad vision that Ulmer was trying to impose here, what did he really want to do?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

He wanted more systems in place. In fact, he taught a course for a while called Systems Leadership. And he was the only staff member. He brought in a couple other outsiders to help him with it and of course never got integrated into the Center. He said, "I'm too busy as president, I can't teach it anymore." But it never got integrated. So he looked at everything from a systems perspective. He also was known in the Army for getting down with the troops so he would walk the halls all the time and he would spend time with people. Authority things were issues for him. And you know we have a lot of anti-authority people here. He flared at me one time about he thought I was questioning his authority and I guess in retrospect, I was. And I remember meeting with the lawyers from the Center about whether we could—Ulmer always had this watch out about—this is a way you could characterize him—he was watching out for our non-profit status. So he bent over backwards to make sure we retained that. And even though the lawyers said you can do more than you were doing. So we were looking at doing some research, doing some consulting that we could do research on and he was even tentative at that. And I remember saying, "But Walt, the lawyer just said it's okay." And he looked at me and said, "I don't care what that lawyer said." The lawyer said [unclear] . And his eyes flared and I could feel the energy come right out. The next day he came back to me and he said, "You know, Marty—his wife—she said I flare a lot and I want to apologize for yesterday." So he was sensitive to that stuff but he was still the general in charge. He was not afraid of power and authority. And if there was a vacuum, he was happy to jump in where a lot of us would sit back and say well, let's think about this for a while. He'd jump right in. That was his style. That's why he was successful with what he was doing in the military. So his contribution was putting systems into place. He ran an organization differently than I would but again, that was why he was brought in and brought us to that next level of growth and systems in place. And then after nine years, I think he finally had a falling out with the Richardsons and that was part of his leaving.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Do you remember—I was told that he conducted a climate survey at some point relatively early on in his tenure.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Well, he was the first one to implement that. And he did that—now hang on, I'm going to back off of that. Before he came on board, Ken Clark did that. And he brought in a guy who had been with IBM who now teachers at Baruch College in New York. And I forgot his name but he did his first internal climate survey with people and fed that back to us. And then after Ulmer came on board, he was surprised that we'd only done it once. And he was so used to having climate surveys done that he did them after that. There was an attempt that. It was one attempt and it was a good experience and it was done well. Clark was here as president and DeVries was the vice president. And then Ulmer just made it a regular occurrence every two years.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Okay, so that became a standard thing. This was not a one shot thing with this kind of [unclear] character. One of the key things that I've really been trying to understand as the late 80's unfold, early 90's, CCL's finding its way to this rocket growth under Ulmer and all. But along the way, first McCall and ultimately Lombardo and DeVries depart. And if you try to understand this idea of the research commitment and involvement of CCL over the last 15 years, I mean the story kind of seems to go back to that point and kind of a hinge point. What's your perspective on how and why the departure of those two people came to pass and what the impact has been?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Well, in a nutshell, I think it was DeVries being passed over and his all those years of being worn down of working with the general suffered. McCall had that big flare-up with Walt.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

I don't know that story. I've heard that there was some conflict and it was kind of a sudden and abrupt departure for McCall. I mean was it something that merits much looking or was it just kind of a personal thing?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

I don't know all there is but essentially what I understood it was that Walt required him to do something and he said, "I'm not going to do that." Morgan was known to do things like that. Why should I do this, this doesn't make sense? And at some point, authority jumps in, at least from Walter's experience, because I told you to.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

I guess what I'm curious about is was there something at issue that reflected contrary visions for the real substance of the work of CCL or was it something more transient and petty than that?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

I don't have all the data on that, so I'm sorry. And at some level, you sort of knowing Morgan's personality and knowing Walt's, you would say that got in the way. But I'm sure knowing both of them that it was probably just a major difference on the way they approached leadership and the way they saw. It wasn't petty.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

There was something ultimately substantive there, yeah. And how about Lombardo's departure?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Lombardo's departure was more around an opportunity to make a lot of money. And that's always been a problem here. He had this product and he was able to take that product with him and do very, very well. Mike has now made a major donation to the Center. I'll never be able to do that.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Interesting. Shifting to another subject but this is also sort of an interesting feature of Ulmer's years. The move to broaden out to a campus network. Asheridge in '85, San Diego in '87, Brussels in '90. Your perspective on how that effort has unfolded for the Center.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

When did you have San Diego, '87?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

'87. And of course, Colorado Springs earlier than that.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Earlier, yeah. That was just the sense that there was a larger public that we thought we could serve. San Diego was around the Pacific Rim or the high tech markets. So that was decided between either Austin, Texas or San Diego. And San Diego was the place that was decided because all those further west coast for us. If you look at quickly, we went out there with the intent of not running the same programs we run in Greensboro or Colorado Springs. Well, we quickly learned after a year if we were going to make money, we better start running the same programs we run in Colorado Springs and Greensboro. And they had people, equal number of people from the east coast as they had from the west coast out there. So we couldn't really establish a foothold in the area of high tech of specialty courses out there. So we quickly got into running the old bread and butter stuff and that worked. But it was a sense of becoming a national organization and then becoming an international organization. I think that's what was driving it. Walter thought [unclear] . Walter knew how to be a figurehead in some ways.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

You mean to carry the flag outside the organization?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

He was a good—I'll give you an example. He and I were invited up to Virginia Tech. He was to give a luncheon speech. We also had a chance to review the high tech classrooms they have up there and the satellites. They sent a plane down for us.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Virginia Tech sent a plane down for you?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Um-huh. And Walt took some of the lower troops down with us, too. Went up to see the basic people doing the technology then back to the Center. Then we all got on the plane and went up there and had a wonderful day. And as we were up there, one of the professors in the department—you know that my wife is Turkish—one of the professors in the department up there is the husband of a cousin of my wife. So introduced Walt to him and we had lunch. And when Walt got up to give his speech at lunch for the faculty and administration there, he talked about leadership and he then went on for about three minutes about the leadership or Attaturk in Turkey. I mean those little things. He knew how to do those little things. Or when our people from the JMA, the Japan Management Association were here and they were going back to Tokyo, there was a major snowstorm. He sat at the airport with me and the two Japanese people until they got on the plane.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Right, right.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Those little things he would do well. He knew how to do those well. But he was always like a gentleman. He learned to be aloof but also he was probably introverted and even though we sat at the airport for a while, I think we talked about surface things. I'm sure there was a lot about that guy I wish I had gotten close to but it was his choice not to do that. But he still had that—he knew how to work with people from different cultures because he did that in the military. So it was that we had a respect for each other around that. And that little thing that he did at Virginia Tech. and then making sure that the troops went up with us in the private plane that day to look at the technology up there at Virginia Tech. So those are some perspectives about him.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Right, right. One last thing before we turn back to pick up in '91 and the senior fellow position and the work subsequent to that point. And this confuses the chronology but I'm just going to go ahead with this anyway. What kind of

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brief description can you give of the factors that led to Bob Dorn's departure and the significance of that?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

What do you mean, his retirement?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Yeah.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

It just happened in the last couple years.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Well, a few years back. But I understand, I gather this vague sense from the comments a few folks have made that there's an interesting story there, that there were institutional tensions in play and so forth.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah. Now I did not work for him when all that was going on. And I was off to the side doing my thing. What I remember was there was the sense that Bob had done his thing and was not reaching out to do some changes in keeping up with the times, I guess.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

And what would have been a view held by say Ulmer and his leadership team?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Okay. So they had...

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Held by David Noer who reported to Ulmer.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

So the train was leaving the station.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

The guy [unclear] There was some of that. Now he could have stayed on board as a wonderful internal counselor, mentor, but they chose to move him out. And probably the person who replaced Bob would have been threatened because I mean he was a figure who had been around here a long time. And I'm sure I have some of that impact upon some of the senior people here, too. But Bob, you would identify Bob with having made his contribution and said this is enough as opposed to gee, what else could there be? He was also physically having some problems then. After he left us he had quadruple bypass. So he had slowed down physically. So all that may have contributed to how he was perceived sedentary in some ways.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Do you think that in your measure, let's see what I'm trying to say exactly, has the institution—what's been the impact on the institution of the nature of his departure?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Oh, okay. Well, some of the concern I have is the early spirit of the Center's gone, going. It's changing. And so he was a keeper of the keys around assessment for development about putting the individual first. Now he did that also for his staff. You know, we used to have even a nursery here where people could bring their babies into work and Bob would encourage that and look the other way. Where when Ulmer came around, the other people just didn't understand that and couldn't handle it. Get these babies out of here. The other thing I did notice that I learned I got faster and larger raises when I didn't work for Bob. Bob tried to keep everyone equal. And I didn't understand that's part of his values around salaries. But I have this sense of if you make a contribution, that should be recognized and that should stand out in some way and Bob tried to level that playing field. And it was clear to me that I was making more money than if I had stayed working for Bob. I was making more money than the people who had stayed. And whether that's good or not for the organization, I don't know. I think we're still dealing with salary differentials here at CCL with external. There are some things internally some people feel there shouldn't be some distinctions. But Bob really kept it quiet. But it was clear to me that if you worked for Bob you got your yearly salary and it was a small amount.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Yeah. Let's turn back to your work after '91. Let me ask first what year did you do the or when were you working in the Creativity in Organizations: A Jazz Musician's Perspective with Bradford? It sounds like a very interesting project.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

'87 to '88, somewhere in there.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Okay, late 80's then.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

That was when—do you want the whole story of how that started?

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Oh, sure, I'd love to hear it.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

I went to an American Banking Association in Palm Springs and while they were having their opening cocktail party, there was this jazz group playing in the corner. So all the bankers were talking to each other. They could care less who was playing in the corner. And since I didn't know the bankers, I went over to listen to this guy. And this guy was dropping tools on the floor. He was playing some jazz and then tracing the history of jazz with the music. So he had a group of ten people and they would play and then he would say

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well, now the transition from jazz went from bebop to this because of and then he would say now listen to this. It happened because we had a different kind of person. The culture is changing. Charlie Parker was a black man named in Kansas City and he had a different perspective. I'm listening to this stuff and saying holy Jesus, this is wonderful.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

And you're the only person in the room that's paying any attention.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

That's it. And so we had then these creativity weeks. Creativity weeks ran for ten years. A creativity week was an attempt to meet my need for stimulation but every year we'd bring in for five days people to talk about a day on individual creativity, a day on team creativity, a day on organizations, a day on climates and a day on something really way out.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

And you organized all this?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah. Published it ten years and you look back then and these are people who made their names in the field. These were young people we had found and we said, "Come and talk about what you're doing. But we want you to make it experiential." So we had it limited to 45 people. We had it experiential side of the theory. We had Marvin Minsky here. We had Alan Bean, the astronaut. Was it Alan Bean? The painter, the astronaut painter. We had all these people talk about creativity from their perspectives. And we invited people from industry. So this person was told they couldn't speak for more than 45 minutes and they had to have something experiential and then we as a group had to come back and discuss our learnings. And it was a wonderful ten years that we did that. So I invited Bradford to come to one of those, about the fifth one or the sixth one. And we couldn't afford for him to bring a jazz group so he brought records. And he would drop the needle, do the same thing by dropping—and that was pure magic. And went back in '87 and said we're going to do a version of this out in San Diego. We got a bar that was closed in the afternoon in the hotel and so we set it up as a studio. We brought our 50 participants in and Bobby performed in the bar. And then when that was over, we filmed Bobby and I talking to each other, dialogueing about creativity in organizations and creativity in jazz and we cut that into bits that we had him performing. We saved a lot of money on the technical side and you can tell by watching the videotape that we didn't have a good sound there. That was a real pain. But the truth is there. We did some good editing on it. So that's an example of creativity in teams. Bradford

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said, his phrase was, "Every night you have to come out and dance on a slippery floor," and we related that to organizations too, they dance on slippery floors. He said he called about the discipline of improvisation was another phrase that he used. And so we've got a list and I've always used his stuff in my lectures. He's got a list of about ten things that he talked about the history of jazz that relate to his creativity in organizations. And in order to be this creative you really have to have learned the basics first. He talked about learning basics in order to be creative. And he talked about how you manage creative people. And he said, "You can have a well-behaved band and well-behaved music but it won't be very creative. You've got to learn how to manage and bring into your group some of these people who are going to take you to—and his phrase was "take you to the next level." And he said, "Charlie Parker would play something and say anyone understand what I'm trying to do, can you relate to it? If you can, play along with me." Just in terms of a wonderful way of starting up a R & D setting. And so that again, that tape is a masterpiece but also we got Bill Drath. Thank God for Bill Drath sat in on Bobby's presentation and turned it into an article and Bobby signed off on it. We made Bobby the author but Bobby's not a writer. He's a musician and he teaches at Claremont College. He has a group that he plays with all the time still. A wonderful human being. Very articulate. Extremely articulate guy and he was born in Dallas. An African-American and he was just [unclear] . The guy played with Ornette Coleman so he brought that to the group. And I talked to you about Donald McKinnon, I guess.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Yeah.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

So we've had the Bradfords here, we've had sculptors here. We had in '92, we had commissioned an opera.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Oh really?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah. The opera was called "The Star Thrower" and it's from an essay written by Loren Eisley. This is how strange things happen here. "The Star Thrower" is an essay about a person who is dealing with the purpose in life and the story is about he's out on an island in the Caribbean and he runs ahead of the shell collectors to throw the starfish out in the water before the shell collectors come and takes them back and throws them out. And as a metaphor for life. And so I had been reading it. I had come across this group called Associated Solo Artists. Associated Solo Artists are people who have first degrees in science and then went back to do music. So they for a long time in their careers have been

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working with school systems. Now they were independent artists who were on broadway or playing around the United States but they would get together to work the school systems. Well I heard them and I said this is great. You can do this with management groups. And then I said, "We're going to do a creativity week. This is the tenth one. It's the last one. I'm tired of them." And I brought them in and said, "I want you to do a musical piece." Here's an example. John Cimino who was the director of this group has a degree in biology and in 1983 won the Pavarotti Award. So it's that kind of person. So he wasn't trained in music but he then made the transition. So he understands science and with that, they use music to communicate with R & D scientists or to people we were working with in the creativity field. So I brought him in to work with some of our management groups and then as I was going back to say okay, we want to commission you this piece. We don't know what it is. Took him back to the airport and as he was getting out of the car he saw this book from the back seat of my car, which I just throw things. And he said, "Loren Eisley, you know Loren Eisley?" And I said, "Oh yeah, I just learned about Loren Eisley and my favorite essay is the Star..." And he said, "Thrower." He said, "I've been wanting to write a piece of music about that." I said, "Here we go." So we wrote this opera and performed it here called "The Star Thrower." I will send you that essay. It's wonderful. And he turned it into a piece of music including orchestra. They wrote the music. We hired a local orchestra. We had a singing group. We brought in dancers. It was a wonderful event, wonderful event. We taped it. We invited the whole CCL to it. We invited the community to it. And it was the kickoff for this week-long conference that we had the last one.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Oh, I see. Maybe you could send me—do you have a copy of that tape I could borrow?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Yeah.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Yeah, I'll as you about those when we're done.

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

So those are some of the—you know, you mentioned Bradford. And then we had visual artists here and then we've had the computer artist here, Marvin Minsky. And it was one of his students who spent time here. Again, part of these creativity week, trying to look at creativity in other fields and saying what part could we extract and bring into the creativity of organizations. And of course then the impact for me is this new book called Positive Turbulence [unclear] . That's what it's about.

JOSEPH MOSNIER:

Right. Take me through your mind-set in '91 when you're a senior fellow. What's in front of you? What do you hope to really begin to do?

STAN GRYSKIEWICZ:

Well, I really wanted to represent the Center externally and I wanted to represent with the credentials I had at that time, where I had been 21 years here. And I'm learning now not to mention it too much part of the original group. I think that's becoming less and less in vogue, probably negative. But I wanted to represent the Center and I wanted to represent around creativity and innovation. It was starting to disappear because they had already reduced two of our courses that they didn't fit the system. And so I was running around the globe, globetrotting around creativity and we still had a course we were licensing, my dissertation. So as a senior fellow, I licensed the Japanese to run Japan Management Association to run our [unclear] Innovation Course. Then I did the same in Korea. And I was representing in conferences all around the world and then you hear the international trend start to [unclear] . Then we thought it would be—that was '92, it was seven years since my last sabbatical. Seven is an appropriate number in sabbaticals. '85 was seven before the one before that. So I suggested that with opening up the Brussels office that I should go spend four or five months there. So that's when I went with this mantel of being a senior fellow and having spent—did my dissertation in London, spent time in '85 with SS, I was able to bring that network into connection with the opening of the Brussels office. So that was my next part of the senior fellow role, representing CCL externally and no longer running two and three day, four or five day courses. More of the speech, the half days, the luncheon presentations, that kind of stuff. And it was really to keep alive the name of creativity and innovation at CCL. Mentoring some of the younger professionals coming along.