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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-0017, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill”
This is the second of two interviews with Stan Gryskiewicz, a psychologist who worked for the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina. In this interview, Gryskiewicz picks up where the first left off after a brief discussion of the Center's launching of the Leadership Development Program in London, where he was also finishing his Ph.D. When Gryskiewicz returned to Greensboro, the managerial upheaval was still under way. Gryskiewicz discusses these changes in detail, focusing specifically on his perception of various leaders, including David DeVries, Mike Lombardo, Morgan McCall, David Campbell, and Bob Dorn. In addition to explaining how these leaders interacted with one another and how their positions evolved over time, he also describes how the Center was working to develop new curriculum for its creativity division, which he spearheaded, and a more centralized marketing department. In 1985, the presidency of the Center shifted to Walt Ulmer. Gryskiewicz describes both the transition of leadership, noting how Ulmer's leadership style differed from earlier leaders and on how the Center experienced rapid growth into the 1990s. Gryskiewicz also offers his thoughts on the Center's expansion into the global market, the new programs and workshops it offered in creative leadership development, and its commitment to diversifying its managerial staff to include more women and minorities.
Stan Gryskiewicz worked as a psychologist for the Center for Creative Leadership beginning with its inception in 1970. In this interview (the second of two), Gryskiewicz describes the Center's development in creativity leadership programs and marketing, its evolution and gradual globalization from the 1970s into the 1990s, and the role of various leaders of the organization.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
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.
You sound wide awake for 7:00 in the morning.
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.
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
So she was just there to lift a little liquor.
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
Right.
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
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,
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
I think I have, yes.
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.
What do you think motivated the resistance?
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.
Is that to say specifically that Bob Dorn balked?
No. Bob Dorn had been replaced.
Ah, by that time.
He was sort of sent on sabbatical. There was
Well, that's on the tape but you can certainly excise it from the transcript.
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.
This is the first I've heard of this, actually.
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.
How extensively was MDP offered in Hawk's time?
Well,
And you did it at CCL?
Yeah. And it was meant to be or his concept was it was a follow-on to LDP.
Oh, I see.
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.
You said he was there for two years?
Yeah. And he and I think the person he hired,
How interesting.
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.
That's interesting.
Yeah, very interesting. So that was the Don Hawk era which was about two years.
Yeah, late 70's.
Yeah.
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.
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
No.
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.
Okay, so it's i-s.
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
I see.
"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.
Luke Novelli had also come on to work in your group, I guess.
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?
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?
Yeah.
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
You were in Oslo. How long were you there?
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.
How about that.
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
Right. This is '91?
Yeah.
Yeah.
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.
Oh, right. This is late 70's, I guess.
I think it was. Early 80's, maybe 80.
Had that been forced on—I mean what....
I'm not privy to all that. I think it was a forced thing.
You've got to pay for some of your
I don't recall at this moment, but yeah.
He referred to David as being forthright, a fourth right.
Oh, yeah, that's right, I do recall.
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."
Oh, my.
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.
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?
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.
Ouch.
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.
Oh, it had not yet been finished at that point. Oh, my.
Yeah. So I learned about the politics of doing a Ph.D.
I should say.
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
How about that?
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.
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...
No.
That just doesn't seem to be what happened.
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.
Yeah.
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.
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?
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.
Interesting. Even now?
Yeah.
Tell me about—can you sketch a quick portrait of David DeVries, his style, his role in these years, the early 80's?
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.
Stan, let me interrupt one second. We're just out
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
This is side B of the first cassette with Stan Gryskiewicz on the 15th of January, 1999. We were talking about David DeVries.
He was smooth, you know?
Um-hmm.
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.
Was DeVries somebody who enjoyed a lot of staff support?
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.
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?
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?
Yeah.
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.
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?
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.
I see.
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.
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?
Well, they brought in this guy, Mark someone. Did you get that name?
No, it's not ringing a bell.
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.
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?
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
So is that to say you might have resisted the demise of these programs a little more aggressively?
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.
And was it ultimately Ulmer who set into place this momentum to pare down and streamline?
Yeah.
Who were these guys?
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?
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
Do you remember—I was told that he conducted a climate survey at some point relatively early on in his tenure.
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.
Okay, so that became a standard thing. This was not a one shot thing
with this kind of
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
There was something ultimately substantive there, yeah. And how about Lombardo's departure?
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.
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.
When did you have San Diego, '87?
'87. And of course, Colorado Springs earlier than that.
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
You mean to carry the flag outside the organization?
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.
Virginia Tech sent a plane down for you?
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.
Right, right.
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.
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
What do you mean, his retirement?
Yeah.
It just happened in the last couple years.
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.
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.
And what would have been a view held by say Ulmer and his leadership team?
Yeah.
Okay. So they had...
Held by David Noer who reported to Ulmer.
So the train was leaving the station.
The guy
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?
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.
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.
'87 to '88, somewhere in there.
Okay, late 80's then.
That was when—do you want the whole story of how that started?
Oh, sure, I'd love to hear it.
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
And you're the only person in the room that's paying any attention.
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.
And you organized all this?
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