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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-0010, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
David DeVries earned a Ph.D. in psychology, motivated by a childhood in an immigrant family that positioned him as an outsider. He soon applied his expertise at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), an institution dedicated to leadership education and research. DeVries spent fifteen years at the Center, eventually rising to the position of executive vice president. In this interview, he gives an organizational history of CCL, tracing it from its beginnings as a loosely organized think tank to its arrival as an influential player in private sector leadership. The story of CCL seems to be one of competing impulses: researchers' creativity clashed with the need for streamlined business practices, the conservatism of CCL's funders sometimes stood in contrast with CCL's style, and even the success of certain ideas might stifle the drive to find new ones. But as creative and unrestrained as industrial psychologists like David Campbell were, the organization's leaders, including William C. Friday, who served as honorary chairman from 1976 to 1996, were able to corral that creativity and build a successful organization. This interview offers a portrait of a unique organization and the ways in which business leaders resolve the tensions between creativity, profitability, and personality.
David DeVries, who spent fifteen years at the Center for Creative Leadership, reflects on the organization's history and its contributions to leadership training.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is an interview of David DeVries. It is being conducted in Chapel Hill on the phone. David DeVries is in Greensboro. Today's date is November 23, 1998. Just turned on the machine and I'll start with our basic first question which was when and where were you born?
I was born on August 11, 1943 in Holland, Michigan.
Holland, Michigan, okay. I know that you received your Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. What about your prior education, your bachelors and master's degree?
I had actually gone from K through 12 through college in a parochial school system in Western Michigan with my undergraduate degree being from Calvin College which is a reformed Calvinist institution. And then I moved from there to the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and got my master's there as well as my Ph.D.
Okay. What drew you to social psychology? Were there mentors or important teachers that headed you in that direction?
I think as is true with most career decisions, it was formed by a variety of influences. I was the seventh son in a family of seven sons. So you quickly learn, just for your survival's sake, to read the group around you. When you are constantly on the short end of the stick, you better be very tuned to your older brothers and their moods and how generous they were feeling towards you at the time. Those were pure survival skills. I also grew up in an immigrant family. Both my parents immigrated from the Netherlands. And I was in the U.S. culture and yet on the outside looking in on it. That gave me a lot of interest in behavior of groups. So then I did some experimentation in undergraduate school classes that involved social psychological concepts. The research I did during the election for the U.S. presidency – which was the race between Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson, showed that people in Michigan who voted for Goldwater scored significantly higher on personality tests that had to do with authoritarianism, the f scale. That is, people who supported Goldwater had this much more authoritarian personality than those voting for Johnson. All of those things intrigue me.
Which then ultimately led to your Ph.D.?
My going into the social psychology profession.
I know you went from John Hopkins to the
Sure, I'd be glad to. It's quite a memorable event. I can still remember it. It was dinner at the Marriott on the Potomac River overlooking the capitol. And David Campbell, who had just joined the Center, had been placed into the operating role and was looking for talent. And he had heard about me and I about him. So we had dinner. I described at some length my work at Johns Hopkins which I was very passionate about at the time. And then he told me why he went to the Center and then he framed the opportunity for me in a very interesting way. He said, "We have about a million dollars a year in the way of operating funds." At this point, 95% of it came from the grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation. "And we really don't quite know how to spend it. Why don't you come down and help us figure out how to spend it?"
That is an interesting opportunity.
Psychologists don't get many of those in a lifetime. In fact, the profession has had damn few of those much less an individual psychologist. So the way he framed it really intrigued me. This being an organization that had not yet found its purpose and the funding of it would give it some time to do so and some time to make some mistakes in coming up with its purpose. And that plus my being fed up with having to commute to Washington D.C. very regularly in order to defend my research to the federal funders. That got old very quickly and I decided to go to the Center. It was a tough decision because it really felt like I was moving to the South. It wasn't clear to me to what extent the Center was a sort of narrowly-defined kind of Southern institution or whether it really did have a larger vision in terms of leadership and a population of leaders that I really wanted to work with.
Do you recall any vivid impressions of arriving in Greensboro in 1975? I mean there have been characterizations of the wooded aspect and the fact that the Center was sort of somewhat isolated from the community. Do you recall impressions of the early...
Yeah, I have impressions of the community and the Center. I remember my
initial interview. I was being driven into the Hilton Hotel which is in
downtown Greensboro by this African-American driver. As we passed
Greensboro College, he pointed out that until just a couple of years
prior to that
That they were looking to you so strongly for an agenda.
Yes. But it was both very affirming and a little unnerving. It made me feel very much needed and certainly launched my decision to come.
Now you've mentioned David Campbell as one of the key players. Were there other key players that you initially interacted with that you have strong memories of?
Interestingly enough, even during the interview and then during my first
year when I was in the Center, there were two visiting scholars. The
Center had
Because of their skepticism as you heard it each time they met?
Yeah, exactly. Fortunately, not only did we then kick off a research program during those years, '75 to '78, but the leadership development program got finally coalesced and really got going as well in those years. So you had a one, two punch. You had LDP which now has evolved into the most visible management development program in the world. And then also simultaneously, a research program.
When you mentioned a minute or so ago that David Campbell asked you to set up a separate research function which was a first for the Center, how did you go about sort of separating that out from the strands of other activities going on there in terms of how did you decide what research to pursue and how did you bring together the people to do it there?
By the way, let me correct one mis-impression I must have created. There, in fact, had been research programs in prior years but in 1973 or '74, the board of governors terminated a lot of people including those research programs. So no research program survived that purge.
Okay.
In fact, there was a lot of skepticism for the next couple of years about whether research that had any meaning that could be applied that could be done independently at the Center or whether it had to be imbedded within more applied projects, projects that might actually focus on a training program.
And then you'd look to the output.
Right. So go back to your question.
As you were starting then essentially then the second phase of a research program, how did you pull together the resources from within the Center? I have an impression at that time that the Center was more fluidly organized than it was in later years.
Several ways. One is that David Campbell gave us some cover. He took Morgan and me and he put us out administratively into a separate group. We had a half-time assistant. And then I reported directly to David and not any longer to Bob Dorn who was in charge of the major training programs. That was one way. The more interesting answer to that is that what we did is we just started to deliver some goods and then every time we created opportunities, including some externally funded work, we could go back and capture existing but underutilized resources. So we had people like Mike Lombardo who had become an anomaly in the place. People didn't really know what to do with Mike and gave him a more creative role.
In what way? In the sense that he had talents that could be used in a variety of areas or he was best being a devil's advocate everywhere?
Yes. You know, creative people often have rough edges around them.
Creative people like having some influence over the parameters of their
work. And Mike was only being partially used. The same thing was true
with Ann Morrison. Ann was not well managed and was getting frustrated
and the Center was getting frustrated with her. So I said to David, "Let
me see. I think here's what we could have them do with us and work on
with us." And of course, both Ann and Mike proved to be remarkable
contributors. Part of it was picking people around the Center whose work
was not all that meaningful in terms of the group they were in but
picking very carefully, because we only selected people that had some
original ideas. So it was a boot straps kind of approach. It was
generating some outside monies and then taking those
I'd noticed that, yes.
It was really absurd. So we'd walk in to 18 to 20 of the brightest minds
in the U.S. coming from corporate America, psychologists and academia,
just the full range. Military leaders, each of whom ran budgets of tens
of millions of dollars and we were a 25 person organization. And they'd
come in with these outrageous hopes and expectations for this fledgling
place. And one of the challenges we had back then was how to take their
ambitions for us and make them feel like we were moving meaningfully
toward keeping those ambitions. When it was a fledgling staff and an
organization that really didn't quite know what it was about and whether
it could achieve. And that was part of the wonderful craziness of the
Center in the 1970's. You also had and this was really a fascinating
kind of dynamic story, I remember sitting many a time at the end of the
table giving a briefing and to my left would inevitably be sitting next
to me at the end of the table
Yeah. You wondered when you had risen to his radar screen, I imagine.
Right, exactly. Anyway, that was part of the feeling. But the research agenda came from David Campbell. He dictated some of it, a small part of it. He got us into the whole issue of performance appraisal in which we did some work that was pretty good. The agenda also came from us in terms of our interest in simulations as a method to better understand leadership. And out of that came very interesting simulations which set a whole new field, the behavioral simulation. This is called Looking Glass. You know, out of it came some very interesting questions about how leaders really do develop and what is the relationship between training programs with on-the-job learning. How do you maximize that? That evolved into a whole series of reports with the centerpiece being the lessons of experience as a training program tool for developing executives. And that, interestingly enough, that topic came not from us as researchers. It came out of a series of conversations that we had with a group of people called the Research Sponsors. We started out with four firms that paid us $25,000 a year to have the privilege of coming into the Center and suggest interesting research projects, projects that they and their corporations would like the answers to. So you would have your human resource people be participants in that and we would create dialogues with this group. And out of those dialogues, came, I think, some of the more interesting ideas for research. That was an unheard of mechanism for researchers setting up agendas. And it was a mechanism that was absolutely appropriate for the Center For Creative Leadership.
Because you were dealing with the people that were on the street and in the field if you were dealing with senior H.R. people.
Exactly. So it reduced somewhat the risk of the researchers framing questions that might intellectually be interesting to them but to which the consumer of this research would respond with, "Why the hell would you ever ask that question?"
Yeah, or who cares when you give the answer.
So that was another wonderful kind of innovation that was going on in the late 70's and early 80's out of the research group. And that model has spun off and is now used in the field of behavioral science by other organizations as well.
Where they invite corporate responders to come in and feed to them?
Yeah, research consortia. And then out of the discussions with the consortium emerges agendas for action research agendas.
In I believe it was 1979, you became director of research. I was curious about how you made the transition from researcher to administrator and what it had meant to you.
Actually, I was in charge of research much sooner than that. But in '79 I got put in charge of more than simply research. I was put in charge of some other functions, too. But how did I make the transition?
Because I may not have the dates right. I know at one point then you became executive vice president. So essentially, you were transitioning more and more to administration.
Exactly, yes. I did it in two ways. One is I had been in such a role at Johns Hopkins before I came to the Center, because I was in charge of a large contract from the federal government to do research. So I had a team of researchers working with me. So I had gotten into some of that administration prior to that. Beyond that at the Center, what I realized was that we had accumulated some people around me who were superb researchers but were uninterested in administration and as a result, not very good at it. And I've always believed that researchers are very much of a threatened species. Maybe not vanishing but threatened species and are typically largely misunderstood my senior management in whatever organization they operate in. So I've always felt a particular kind of responsibility for protecting the interest of research. That's one reason I was willing to go down that road and again, over time, I spent more and more time doing less and less research.
But you saw your role as more coordinating the efforts of others and
allowing their research to shine in some respects because you could keep
them sort of focused and
Right, exactly. It's a delicate job of matching the organization's needs with the passions of the individual researchers. That's a very delicate role and it can't be unilateral in either direction. And it's a subtle kind of influence process. And I also think the reason I wanted to go more into administration is I started to realize once we got past that first phase establishing the legitimacy of the place, and that was not only a challenge for the board of governors, it was a challenge professionally within the profession. I remember within two months after arriving at the Center, I attended the annual meeting of psychologists in Chicago. I did not want to wear my name-tag because it had the Center For Creative Leadership on it. And I took it off because people laughed. Back in the mid-70's, people found that phrase, "creative leadership," so presumptuous that they laughed. And then I had to explain where it was in Greensboro, North Carolina, and it was too arduous. I just took the thing off. And that shows where we began. But after about two or three years, I started to realize that we did have a unique role. There weren't any other places like the Center. I really got to believe in the mission of the place and the uniqueness of the mission. And then I realized that as the training programs were starting to become successful, that we had to have an equally strong advocate for the research function and that's what I took on.
Okay. How, when you look over the research trajectory under your tenure, what are some of your perceptions of that trajectory, high points, low points?
The high points had to do with establishing a legitimacy of the function
in the first place through some specific research programs and the
results of those programs. The high points to me are Looking Glass, the
simulation and the research generated by that. Another high point is the
whole work on how executives grow and develop which resulted in a
variety of outcomes including "Lessons of Experience." High points are
the work we did funded by IBM on a methodology that was just starting
then as a way of spurring the learning by executives in how they lead.
And that has to do with what's now called the "360-degree feedback"
where you get people who work with the individual executive,
subordinates, peers, more senior people in the organization to fill out
a leadership questionnaire on the individual. And those summed ratings
are shared with the individual as a stimulus for growth. We did some
pioneering work on that to help the individual to understand the value
of that as a methodology
Well, I would imagine it is somewhat organizationally difficult to focus both on your research and recruiting the next wave, the next generation. But to offer to them what I think of as a different opportunity than was offered to you and your wave of researchers when you think about so much had already been accomplished.
Yeah. But I think you're being kind to us. I could argue the opposite as
well. I think what happened was we weren't as open to their perspectives
as we should have been. I think we tended to hire more people who would
support our vision rather than people who would come in with their own
I don't know if there is an ideal research facility. But if you had a vision for one, how close do you think the Center For Creative Leadership came to being the ideal research facility?
If what drives you as a researcher is a desire to explore ideas that
have some reasonable chance of efficacy, I think the Center has been and
remains the ideal. I just don't think you have out there in the world an
institution that provides as many pieces of the puzzle as the Center
does. Now, if as a researcher I'm really driven to understand the kind
of neurological factors in decision-making, then no, the Center is not
where you'd go. You'd get more if you were in a typical kind of academic
environment. But if you're concerned about not only establishing models
of leadership but then making those models influence the way people
actually lead, there is no better place in the world than the Center for
Creative Leadership. And I say that without qualification. And why?
Because there's a wonderful intellectual history there now. There's a
legitimacy to the function. There's a critical mass of researchers. Most
importantly, it's a crossroads for interesting thinkers from around the
world. There was a time I remember last few years I was at the Center,
there was this one intersection at the Center For Creative Leadership,
where if you just stood there with a cup of coffee on any given day, you
could stand there for a couple of hours and meet some of the most
interesting minds in the world in leadership. You could just stand at
that one intersection and have a day of conversations and it was that
stimulating. And CCL had become that central. And then people from all
over the world were coming to the Center to find out what people were
thinking. So that, to me, that's great fertile ground for any
researcher. CCL also has thousands of executives coming through those
doors who come into the Center in a reflective mode and love nothing
more
At least some people have said that research in the past few years has become institutionalized, a little more set into an academic model of research. I know you've been gone from the Center for eight years now and that may not be close to your experience, but is that a valid statement from your perception?
I don't know about putting it that way. To me, the research has become uninteresting. More and more I respond with "so what?" And it's research that doesn't leverage the opportunities researchers have being there because they're surrounded by some really bright practitioners. They have the opportunity to really ask the $64,000 questions, the ones that even before you can get an answer to the question people say "Yeah, that's it. If you could get your hands around that issue, my, God, what a difference that would make." I'm not sure why that's the case, but it is. I think that's my biggest concern right now.
Okay. I have a question changing the subject slightly about intellectual property and the concept of the researcher coming up with the eureka or ultimately the product that is a brilliant thing that can be used by a variety of companies. I was curious if you had seen in your tenure at the Center issues around intellectual property or changes in the view of intellectual property while you were there.
I'm not sure I understand the question. You're talking about intellectual property from sort of a legal sense of who owns it?
Yes. I mean and certainly the Center owns that which is created by its researchers. But what I was curious about specifically was if you have a bright researcher who can then create while he or she is working for the Center a wonderful product and then could conceivably take it and change a module in it and become an independent with that product.
That's a wonderful question because there's a lot of mythology that goes
around that topic at the Center for Creative Leadership. I remember
sitting in these early board
Now how do you define vulnerability?
Well, vulnerability in the sense that if Dave DeVries leaves the Center and uses some of the models, some of the concepts, some of the methodology that he helped develop at the Center on his own that David becomes such a powerful competitive force that the Center will be threatened, and that's a bunch of hokum, quite frankly. But I have found that there's enough support for that at the Center that it does influence decision-making. I find that really discouraging, because one of the things that the Center For Creative Leadership can do now is leverage its great reputation and strength. But if it looks at its role in the field now and in the future from that position of vulnerability and weakness, it's going to act like a 300-pound weakling. But I just find it paradoxical.
I understand it and the way you characterize it does highlight it. I
hadn't thought of that as an end
Right. It really is. Plus, there are times that specific questions of ownership of actual instrumentation are legitimate issues and have to be dealt with using the best legal minds there are within the guidelines set by our country's laws and by our professional understandings. The American Psychological Association has a well-defined set of ethical guidelines. But that's not really the issue.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
I think we're past the leader, so this is side 2 with an interview of David DeVries. You were talking just a moment ago about intellectual property.
Right. And so just let me finish by saying that I think the Center needs to embrace people who have left the Center, that the Center could benefit from that. And that for every client that I might take away from the Center, I will give them two, particularly if the Center and I as an ex-employee keep a constructive relationship. And that's true for all the people that have come through the Center and gone off on their own or to another institution, whatever. And that notion of people coming and going is central to the long-term viability of the Center. And again, I would say that if anything, I stayed too long at the Center for not only my own sake but for the Center's sake. And I would suggest that my generation of the Center, that that was true for a lot of us.
That 15 years was too long?
It was too long in terms of what we could really contribute to the Center. I think the first five to ten years we made some big contributions and then it tapered off. I think the original model of the Center is ultimately the more viable one. Bring in young, bright, ambitious, energetic researchers, trainers and have them contribute to the Center's efforts, learn from the Center, build contacts around the world and then move on. You get this constant influx of new ideas at the Center. The custom of the "lifer" at the Center is just absolutely inappropriate.
Yes, it's somewhat antithetical to what the Center is about.
Exactly.
In the early 80's at some point you became executive vice president. Several people have mentioned that you were qualified to be president. Did you ever aspire to be president? Was that something that interested you?
I didn't really aspire to be president. I aspired to shape some of the decisions that the president had access to that was in his or her purview. I felt some frustration about some of the limits that I particularly saw the vision for the place. But no, the presidential role in that organization is an incredibly complex one that involves keeping a wide array of constituencies pleased and satisfied. This goes back to the point I made earlier which is the Center For Creative Leadership has a ridiculously ambitious agenda for itself. Which is to say it should somehow impact the quality of leadership as it's practiced around the world. I mean it's absurd that that organization could sort of single-handedly make any kind of noticeable impact. But that doesn't prevent the mission from being held out in front of the staff on an ongoing basis nor do I do think it should. But the person who really feels the pressure of that huge goal or huge mission coming into conflict with the day to day realities is the president of the Center for Creative Leadership.
Because he's moving between the board and the people that work there and the external public.
Exactly. It's not just the board, it's the whole group of outside people who think they know best what the Center should be about and feel that they, one way or another, have got themselves in a position where they have a right not only to express an opinion but to stay around to see if anything happens as a result of their opinions being expressed.
Yes.
I think the late H. Smith Richardson must have been a genius because he
set up the mandate for that place in a way that positioned it to
potentially do great things, to position it to be a one of a kind
institution. And it's a wonderfully simple mission that you can
understand in about ten seconds and at least for me, it never left my
mind. We used various ways of describing it but the metaphor of the
bridge is a very good one. It's a bridge between the world of ideas and
action. And it's two way traffic on that bridge. And I don't
When you say in the way it was acted out, then your concern was, your desire was to see the commerce back and forth across that bridge.
Right. I have found in the last few years in particular, the place has
gotten conservative, at a time when it could be even more expansive.
When I got there in 1975, it was ridiculously expansive. I was telling
you that. This brilliant group of 20 governors would come in every
several months and expect us to have sort of materially changed the
quality of leadership in the U.S. and there was somewhere around 25 of
us. So back then, one reason we did some interesting things was we were
given such a hugely expansive agenda. Now in 1998, the place actually
now has such credibility among the world in the field of executive help
that it virtually could do
When you speak of sort of the stage that it's in now, could we also back up a bit to the 80's and the period when during your tenure there a great deal of growth took place? In particular, I was curious about the San Diego and Brussels decisions, how those evolved, the plan to expand from one site to two sites, then three and four.
Right. Well, you can cut that many different ways. And again, even decisions like that are opportunistic decisions. But let me give you the one for public consumption, all right?
Okay.
Colorado Springs was there because David Campbell
So it was a decision-making process where you looked at the West Coast and said do we want Portland, do we want San Francisco, I mean...
We were really looking in the southwest part of the country because
that's the only place that was attractive year round to participants
from across the U.S. So we looked at
Okay. Now I've read there were some early connections for the Center in London. How did it end up in Brussels? Was that a similar decision-making process?
The reason we ended up in Europe at all was that again, in the 80's, early 80's, it was clear that our economies were becoming much more international in scope, that leaders in corporate America had to understand they were just going to have to deal with people from other cultures and that we wanted to be sure in our own development of leadership models that we got some exposure to leaders in other cultures. We were also starting to get demand from Europe. We set up the licensee in the early 1980's outside London, Asheridge Management Center. They took our principle training program and started to run it and got huge response to it, just wonderful response. It was clear that CCL's approach to executive development was really unique in Europe. No one was doing it, period, no one. They weren't even coming close to it. And we discovered the European managers although they were about 10 or 15 years behind the U.S. in terms of their openness to this kind of personal feedback, that the future was only going to be a bright one for this kind of leadership training. So we decided to no longer let the Asheridge Management College be the principle purveyor of this program in Europe. We developed a few other licensees and decided to have our own presence there as well. Brussels was selected for pragmatic reasons, just beginning with the fact that already then it was the center of the EEC.
EEC?
European Economic Community. And it was a reasonably cheap place to do business. It was on the continent. We explored several other cities like Paris and Amsterdam and Frankfurt. But that's why a European presence was created for the Center.
Okay. I'm looking at my watch and realizing we're beginning to run out of time and I have probably another 20 minutes or a half an hour that I think I have and it may be a tad more than that. So I was wondering should we just call it quits for today?
I think that would be a good idea.
Then should I call Lynn and schedule with her?
Yeah, why don't you do that. In fact, if you'll hold on, I'll get Lynn on the phone right now.
Okay and I can schedule. That would be wonderful.
Well, I enjoyed this very much. You're asking good questions. I find them interesting questions.
Well, thank you, and I truly appreciate your time because I know this takes quite a chunk out of your day but I think it's been very valuable at the same time.
I enjoy it because as you can tell, I still believe deeply in the place.
Yes, yes. But thanks so much.
Okay. You have a good holiday.
You too.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
This is a telephone interview with David DeVries conducted by Beth
Millwood on December 2, 1998. Dr. DeVries is in Greensboro and I am in
Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
You mean in terms of the vision or the process itself?
Well, I'm curious about how the process worked there as it was evolving in the early 80's and, secondly, if there are ones that you can point to and say, yes, we set a vision and followed it.
Wonderful question. Remember, you're talking to a 55-year-old. A few
years ago—I wish had some of those documents in front of me. I mean
yeah, there was a really significant one when we were the first time
asked to do
And were those sort of reviewed or integrated or it was...
No. The initial CCL-wide plan was an aggregation of those individual
visions and maybe looking at some themes across those. That's one reason
the planning process was so awkward initially. The Center, when it hired
you, said in effect, "you will be expected to generate your own work
plans." And that's one reason it was such an anomaly for the Center to
do an institution-wide kind of plan. I think what evolved in the 80's in
terms of the strategic planning was that—you asked if there was anything
that's memorable or interesting about it. I think what it forced us to
do was to draw up a bit as an institution in the sense that it forced us
to start to say "no" to at least a few things. That was a very difficult
thing to do throughout the 70's and 80's if a professional staff person
had a bright idea, to say, "Well, it's an interesting idea but we can't
fund it." And one of the things that the strategic planning process
allowed us to do was to say, "Here are some areas where we're going to
focus, here are some other areas where we're not. And it's not that that
work isn't of value but it's not where we, as an institution, want to
focus." It helped out some, on that. I can't say it made those decisions
totally easy, those decisions of saying to a staff person, "Well, that
project you proposed is interesting but we just can't sponsor you." The
planning process also got the research function to grow up in that it
helped define the role of the research in the Center and defined some of
the links between the research and the
And you said this occurred when in the 80's?
I think mid-80's. I think it was 1986-87, I think somewhere in that time. The experiment didn't last long. But that restructuring came in part, I think, out of that strategic planning process.
In terms of how it worked, I know Tom Bridgers just mentioned that there were many, and so your sense of it when you say it was a grassroots effort across the Center, what structure was set up to do long range plans? Were there sort of representatives called in from each sort of area or team or did they use a variety of different structures depending on what the plan was in that two or three year period?
It was—I'm trying to remember.
The typical process as it played out in the 70's and 80's was that the
strategic planning, which again, when we say long range, what does long
mean? It tended to be one and three years kinds of efforts, with the one
year plan being in some detail, three years being more broad brush. And
it was launched annually in conjunction with the annual budgeting
process. It wasn't driven by the budgeting process. In fact, again, one
change we made was we experimented with that and kept this process, I
believe, as long as I was there. We said, "Don't start with what you
think you need in the way of money. Start with what you want to do."
We'll start with the scope of work, we'll review that, and then we'll
come back and then we'll look at the issue of the budget that's needed
to do that. That would tend, that effort again, would play out and it
would be done principally within a group, with input from other groups
that were one way or another linked into their work. One impact that the
planning process really had in the late 70's and early 80's. It really
introduced some accountability – some much needed accountability – into
the whole planning process into the management of the place. I think it
was in 1979 that we had generated some really ridiculous, ambitious
plans. We spent money in '79 based on those and then ended up as the
year went on, very short of income. That led to our having to let go of
10% of the people. We had 70 people then and we had to let go of seven
people. It was pretty traumatic for the organization. And that was a
watershed event in the
On the bottom line, right.
Yeah. That was not needed in the early to mid 70's because at that time revenue was relatively irrelevant. Revenue from the staff's efforts themselves comprised about 10% of total revenues. Over 90% of the revenues came from the foundation. All you had to do was to show up at 8:00 and stay until 5:00 and keep your nose clean. So as we moved into the late 70's and as the foundation's support grew smaller in proportion to the total budget, we had to develop some real discipline. We had to define more clearly what we were going to be doing and what that would cost and also what revenues that would generate. And we had to do that with some reasonable degree of accuracy. And it was the shock of 1979 that really awakened us to the importance of that.
When I look at the organization in the 80's, one of the sort of interesting benchmarks is the arrival of Walt Ulmer in the mid 80's and, about a year later, a reorganization that changed some structures within, changed the sort of way the Center was structured as I understand it. And I was curious what role you played in that reorganization and your feelings on how you agreed or disagreed with it.
Gosh. I wish I could remember this in more detail. I was fully part of that decision-making process. I think Walt felt very strongly about it but I was also part of it.
Okay. I wondered if that was part of the reorganization.
That was part of the reorganization.
Now that only held for a brief while then and then research was...
I think it held until '91 or '92 or '93. It held while I was there. I
was still trying to implement it when I was there. It was a wonderful
shotgun marriage of researchers and trainers. And if it was going to
work at all, it was
Do you have any strong impressions of that period, I mean in terms of people at the Center that said this has been long needed or people at the Center that said we're not particularly fond of this idea?
Well, there was a lot of tension in the Center at that time and Walt became the focus of that tension, part because he was an outsider, part because he was a retired three star Army general and part because of the way he dealt with dissension. He had a limited tolerance for having dissension. He was a very open-minded guy but he had spent a couple of decades in an organization where dissension was more narrowly defined. And he walked into an organization where 80% of the professional staff felt like they individually ran the place. So he walked into a remarkably different culture. And there were times he was very good at being in dialogue around those issues. There were times when he would cut short the dialogue and that would really offend people. And it was a time of tensions also around the centralization of some functions and priorities. There were also some consequences of the place having grown a great deal in the late 70's and growth continued through the time Walt came. The place kept growing 15 to 20% a year in terms of not only revenue but in significant growth in people and the place was starting to become a complex organization. And so we were experiencing some real tension about that issue. Walt became a focal point for it. It was less easy for people to get angry with me. I was one of them. And they couldn't imagine that I could be part of these dastardly thoughts. My goal was not to make Walt the culprit. In fact, I really started to communicate to the staff when I agreed with Walt why I felt his positions were reasonable. I think that was part of the tension of the late 80's. But the tension went way beyond Walt Ulmer and his being a three star general and the way he dealt with the Center.
I think there were tensions that were building in the organization.
And they were coming from what, growth?
I think from growth, increasing complexity of the organization. I think
in part, the organization was facing a time when there was a kind of a
maturation of a lot of programs and people and some of the initial
excitement that had been there in the late 70's and early 80's was
diminishing. For example, the major program, the leadership development
program, had by that point in time, been running
It's a poor use of their creative talent.
Right. And we were not able—I think it would have been more fun for all of us if we had had more really interesting things in the pipeline, new ideas, new programs, new research efforts. The research program was going. There was one powerful research program going at the time. But on the training side, there just wasn't a lot of innovation going on. And that led to some of the frustration, too. There was also an interesting tension built in by the mandate that the board gave to Walt Ulmer which in my sense was to come in and clean us up, clean up this operation.
To bring some order to it?
Yeah, exactly. And that did not come from the staff, that particular mandate. Very few of the staff saw that as a need or issue. They saw that effort as an infringement on their independence and creativity and all of that. After all, they would regularly remind us this is the Center for Creative Leadership. That effort (to rationalize the place) felt anything but like creativity.
Do you recall, I mean as I'm hearing the different phases of the Center, it's clear that it was an organization that was going through a maturational process, and I was curious if at any point there was within the Center staff, time taken out to reflect on all right, this is where we are as an organization. I know it's difficult to reflect when you're in the heat of it, but any attempt made to sort of look at the Center as an organization going through a maturation, some maturity difficulties? Was any of that ever done?
Yeah, we did. I launched when I finally got into the role of being in
charge of a variety of functions, training and research, annual off-site
discussions. I think
So that was somewhat of an annualized process with the board of governors, too?
Right, exactly. And of course, that's a function a board should serve and the board did serve that quite well. There's always been some very bright thinkers on that board who liked—the mandate, the mission of the Center For Creative Leadership, so they really enjoyed the intellectual exercise of saying what is your mandate, how far have you come, where do you need to go? And so that was helpful. Neither the board nor us, the staff, really had a very good sense of the impact the continued high growth would have on the place. And also, we did not have a good sense of the impact of the increasing complexity of the place would have on the organization, on its ability to be creative. I don't think we were very reflective on that score. And I'm not sure why not. But we didn't, and I think that's where we stumbled into some really unfortunate side effects that we were not very conversive with and consequently didn't really manage very well.
Are there examples that come to mind of that where you were sort of blind-sighted by the growth?
Yeah. I think that one reason we got very little innovation out of the
groups that were in the business of training was that we counted on them
year after year to generate 20 plus percent in added revenues. And as a
result, they just became rather totally focused on revenue generation.
We were talking about the board a minute ago and one of the questions that comes to mind for me is a comment made by someone else about the Center For Creative Leadership as a Southern institution. Another staffer made that reference and I'm not a Southerner, but I was somewhat struck by the statement. And this individual was referring in part to somewhat the mind-set and the habits of the board. But they felt that this carried over into some direction as it came down from the board. What's your reaction to the Center For Creative Leadership as a Southern institution, does it resonate at all?
Are you willing to define that a little bit more? I'm still a damn Yankee. I've been here for 24 years, but I'm reminded regularly of my origins.
Right. I'm one of those, too.
But I think of it as some conservatism in terms of not necessarily politics but in somewhat trying to stay with the status quo. I think of it as the jest that is often used that a Southerner will be polite to you until he has to kill you. But the reliance on civility and keeping things in a status situation is I think one of the ways I would characterize a Southern institution. I certainly would characterize the UNC-Chapel Hill as a Southern institution.
I think of it not so much as a Southern institution but it is clearly,
and has been from day one, a strong conservative influence on that
institution driven by the fact that its principal benefactors represent
a family that is one of the great industrial families of the U.S. And
also, a family that has sparked conservative thinking in the economic
and political domains over the decades. The Richardson Foundation, if
you look at who it's funded. All you have to
Right. I think now we're getting into some of the easier questions, not that any of these other questions have been tough at all.
It's been fun.
Good.
Are there any people at the Center that may have made a particularly deep impression on you? Any stories of some of your favorite people at the Center?
Well, yeah, of course I mean you have an hour to respond. What the place
is and always been is it's attracted interesting people, I think. Very
interesting people. I'm going to be seeing one this afternoon and that's
Jodi Taylor who is still there until the end of the year. She's leaving.
And Jodi is one of these rare psychologists who is an
Not your typical business meeting, right?
But I mean his creativity and his outrageousness would inevitably take you into the really uncomfortable zone where you would say, "Enough, David." But he didn't know limits and so he taught us that, "This is not a place where you have to worry about limits. Just do what you want to do." And there are darn few psychologists in the world who have ability to embody that. Your job is to figure out what it is that really drives you as a psychologist. Figure out what it is and do what you've got to do to make it happen. David Campbell is as huge today. He remains a larger than life figure. Flawed, but most very talented people are. And his leadership style got us into real trouble late in the 70's. That's when we had to make that 10% cutback. That's when Ken Clark, his boss moved aside nicely and brought the rest of us in to keep the creativity but make it a little bit more sane.
More accountable?
Yeah. And also what happened then was David announced to the board that
we had opened a branch in London, England and the board said what? You
don't know how to manage your operation in Greensboro, North Carolina,
you think you're running a branch in London, England? I don't know if
you've heard that story.
So you asked a simple question and I've got to stop, because I could go
on and on
He has been interviewed, yes. I did not. Joe Mosnier interviewed him. He's the other interviewer on this project.
I mean John embodies to me the Southern gentleman. And he brings conservatism to his life. He also brings a tremendous dedication to human beings and he embodies that kind of integrity. And he also is an ex-CEO who for some reason believed over the years in what we can contribute as a field, psychology. And I worked for him for many years. I reported to him directly or he was at some point a peer of mine. And I just had a lot of good conversations with John Red in which conversations not only would I try to educate John about what we were doing but I also really valued his pragmatic take on what we were doing. Very pragmatic. Conservative. It was always nice because it gave me a sense of what might be the most conservative approach we could take on an issue. And then we might move away from that but it was always very useful. And John's impact on that place has been a quiet one but it was profound.
Okay. You've named some very interesting characters. Where do you see the Center in ten years?
Ten years from now? Either two of very different places. I couldn't give
you probability as to which one it would end up. One is it could be
basically where it's at now except it would be bigger. It's impact would
be greater on the field. But basically doing what it's doing right now.
It really could feel very much like the same place. I guess actually
what I would say at this point is I would assign a 70% probability to
that quite frankly. I think it's more likely that it's going to end up
there. Now it may be it will do what it's doing with more people around
the globe in perhaps more places with some slight varied adaptations to
specific leadership constituencies but basically doing what it's doing
and being successful at that. Another option would be that it in ten
years has redefined itself to be a organization that generates new
ideas, develops prototypes, and then spins them off into a variety of
other organizations for the full scale kind of dissemination of it.
Those organizations might in ten years from now be software
organizations so they create let us say the medium that is used to
disseminate this is anything but stand-up trainers. Rather it's a
variety of interactive software programs. The
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
This is an interview with David DeVries on December 2 and we were talking about where the Center may be in ten years.
Right. I was on the second of two examples or issues that these ad hoc new idea kind of development, whatever you call them, teams would be working on. Just how do individual executives, leaders reinvent themselves in a way that keeps them fresh, keeps them growing, keeps them being up to the interesting new challenges, basically, versus a more static model of leadership? Those are two. You could create a long list. But these would be very specific kinds of efforts which might go on three to five to ten years with real accountability in terms of what gets generated and how it's used. And then working all along to be sure that whatever products come out of those efforts and they do get disseminated widely, that the Center does not get—is not the principle agency for that dissemination.
So sort of creating them and then setting them free.
Exactly. Anyway, that obviously returns income to them and adds to their
own visibility but doesn't drag them into the day to day kind of
carrying out of that dissemination. That's the last thing that the
Center really should be doing and unfortunately, it's really gotten
caught up in that over the years. And now does that role get in the way
of really new idea generation? It remains a fact that the Center is not
nearly as good as doing that dissemination as its for-profit competitors
for a variety of reasons. The Center never has been as good at and never
will be as good at. That, by the way, that second model is more of a
virtual organization model. These ad hoc teams could be drawn from the
best and the brightest around the world. These do not have to be
full-time permanent staff. In fact, God forbid that it would be. A
portion of them could be but I could even see the majority of them not
being. These are people to whom
Fascinating concept, it truly is.
I think the Center should have been playing with that a long time ago. It's really disappointing. I work with a variety of corporations around the country and they already are at that point. And one of the sad things about the Center is that it has not modeled innovative approaches to the whole field of new idea generation, new products creation. It's sad because the Center knows about these models. It convenes organizations around the world that are using these models but it doesn't apply these models themselves. That has always baffled me in the last ten years.
I'm down to my last question, I think, which is to simply ask you if there is anything you wish I had asked you?
Well, you asked some very interesting questions. I think you might have asked a question which I tend to ask of people in organizations which has to do with where, take an example of where the Center had in its history a big mistake. What was the mistake, why did it make it, and what if any lessons did it learn from that mistake? That to me is a very telling question to ask of people in an organization. First of all, they say we never made any, suggesting a certain delusional state. Another response might be yes, we made some, but are sweeping them under the rug. By the way, I think of that as a "Southern response." And more importantly, as we found of executives, it's wonderful if you can get someone to say, "Yes, let me tell you, I can tell you some big mistakes I've made," and they own up to it and then talk about what they learned from that. I'm not sure the Center has yet figured out what its big mistakes have been and there have been big ones and what the implications are then for the future. I think we made some in the 80's, big ones. And I think they're making some big ones right now. I don't have the sense of the place, that there is a healthy self-awareness by the leadership of the place in spite of the fact that it has hundreds of people like me sitting on the outside taking pot shots at it. I don't think it's learning from its mistakes. It really scares me. It baffles me first of all then scares me. Because I think that's an ominous sign for an organization.
It's a vulnerability.
It is. It really makes you almost being blind-sighted. So that's a question I wish you'd asked me.
Well, I have truly enjoyed this interview and I thank you for the time that you've given me.
END OF INTERVIEW