CHAPTER 9
A Passion for Learning

So my search shall bear fruit—not in final accomplishments on which I shall rest—but in ever widening horizons. My satisfaction shall derive from the contemplation of these horizons and in the satisfactions that accrue from expanding my powers to explore them. Life then is growth; when growth stops there is atrophy. The object of the quest is the capacity to grow, the strength to bear the burden of the search and the capacity to live nobly—if not heroically—in the situations that develop.¹

ROBERT GREENLEAF

They called it The Great Depression, but there was nothing great about it, at least not for most stockholders. Owners of AT&T stock, however, were the exception. There was no reason for them to expect that the company would continue paying pre-Depression dividends of $9.00 per share. In 1932, net earnings were only $5.96; in 1933, $5.38; 1934 figures were again $5.96; and in 1935, per share earnings totaled only $7.11. ² AT&T had laid off 20% of its work force. At its most desperate time, Western Electric had 110 laid off 80% of its employees.³ Still, like clockwork, shareholders got their $9.00 per share checks from AT&T.

Company President Gifford, who had replaced Theodore Vail at the helm, argued that the company had a moral obligation to pay the high dividend and would make up the difference from surplus until the last penny was exhausted. He had another reason, though, which he explained to the Federal Commerce Commission in 1936. A lower dividend would have lowered the price of stock, which would have had a domino effect, lowering workers’ wages and, finally, threatening the overall financial security of the company.⁴ Whatever the mixed motives, including “The Spirit of Service,” the fact is that the $9.00 dividend held, and it caused AT&T stock to be seen as one of the safest investments in the country. Every cent paid from surplus during those years was replaced many times over through enthusiastic purchases of company stock in the years following the Depression.⁵ In the long run, doing the right thing was also a profitable decision.

Bob Greenleaf was secure in his own job at the communications giant, even though he was at the lowest level on the District Staff. He explained his responsibilities this way. “At that time, the corporate staff’s organization chart looked exactly like the organizational chart of an operating company, and for every function in an operating company there was somebody on the [corporate] staff who was thinking about, and looking at, that function. My staff group was thinking about the personnel function in the Plant Department. There was a similar [corporate] staff for Traffic, Commercial and Accounting.” ⁶ In other words, Bob was a roving researcher, evaluator, teacher, and troubleshooter, visiting various Bell Companies’ manufacturing plants around the country to identify sources of personnel troubles, developing criteria to assess potential new hires, evaluating those who were worthy of promotion, and setting up procedures for training supervisors.

One of his first assignments was to research and write a paper on the number of college graduates being hired by AT&T. This task led to a more general assignment to look into the then haphazard AT&T employment practices. Even though little hiring was being done during the Depression, the company knew things would pick up and wanted to be ready with tools to evaluate potential employees. Bob was not satisfied that any existing assessments could match aptitudes and potential with job requirements. A corporate executive insisted that he investigate phrenology, the ancient art of reading character by studying the shape of the head and 111 its bumps. During that period, phrenology had adopted pseudo-scientific language that made it more palatable to modern thinking, and this had won it several devotees among AT&T executives.

Phrenology looks for external manifestations of internal character, personality traits, and aptitudes. Esther knew a little about the field. In 1924, her uncle Arthur Newcomb and his wife, Katherine, had written a two-volume illustrated book on the subject, in which he used photos of the heads of Esther and her two siblings, among others, as illustrations of certain types. The caption for Esther read, “Young woman of fine texture. Almost pure plane type of profile. Natural talent for music, literature and art, with refinement, gentleness, sympathy and affection.”⁷

In the 1930’s, interest in phrenology was renewed, so Bob was able to take an evening course in the subject from Merton Holmes, author of the 1899 book, Descriptive Mentality From the Head, Face, and Hand.⁸ In the book’s preface, Holmes says that “each mental faculty has a direct influence upon one or more parts of the face, hand and body,” so he assessed the whole body in his readings, including lines in the palms.⁹ Greenleaf recalled that he was impressed with the man but not the system.

Bob was under pressure to keep trying to see if it could be adapted for the company’s purposes. He saw no way to duplicate or adequately evaluate Holmes’ intuitive techniques. This stalemate began to change when he met the mustachioed and goateed Johnson O’Connor.

In 1922 O’Connor had developed an aptitude test for his employer— General Electric— that was so successful he left the company and established a center for aptitude evaluations that eventually became the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation. Along the way, he also started the Human Engineering Laboratory. When Bob met him, O’Connor’s operations were based at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. O’Connor believed every person was given a combination of innate—what we might call “hard-wired”—potentials in areas such as 112 figures and symbols, color perception, inductive and analytical reasoning, idea flow, numerical aptitude, spatial or “structural” visualization, musical aptitude, manual dexterity, and memory.¹¹ His research showed that women scored as high as or higher than men on all categories except spatial visualization, so he held no prejudice against hiring women for any position for which they were qualified.

In O’Connor, Bob found a bright, quirky, fellow seeker who shared some of his attitudes. O’Connor believed in a liberal education for all young people but thought that living two years in a great city and taking advantage of all its cultural opportunities would provide a better education than many four-year colleges. He insisted that people “get the facts,” to continue a process of lifelong learning that would maximize their capacities, but he also advised them to “forget the facts” in order to broaden personal awareness and experience the fullness of life. Like Bob, he was a born teacher who cared deeply about words. In fact, O’Connor would find much of his future fame through work on developing vocabularies. Furthermore, O’Connor’s wife, like Bob’s, was creative; she was an architect.¹²

When Greenleaf heard about O’Connor, he crossed the river to New Jersey and took a course with him. He realized that O’Connor’s validated tests could prove or disprove some of the claims of phrenology, so they planned a little informal research experiment. Two people trained in phrenology would make judgments about the capacities of students and then compare their estimates to actual test scores. The experiment was never completed.

Bob’s varied duties gave him a reason to broaden his learning far beyond phrenology. He followed the latest thinking in higher education, psychology, industrial and social psychology, labor relations, and political and legal trends. They all affected personnel matters at AT&T. After five years of traveling, listening and sensing, Bob identified a common theme in the successful AT&T and Bell operating units: leadership.

Greenleaf observed the best practices of those he considered top leaders and described them in terms one would normally associate with a supportive coach or a great teacher. “I know well the great impetus of a word of encouragement, a constructive criticism, or a redefining of objectives when I seemed to have lost my way,” he wrote in a 1934 letter to his old college president.¹⁵ He noticed that the best leaders and supervisors operated outside the traditional command-control model.

Such leaders were to be cherished, but one never knew where they would emerge. In spite of his exposure to O’Connor’s work, Greenleaf was skeptical that tests alone could predict success. In 1935, he wrote about this uncertainty in the context of admission policies for universities but drew on his assessment experience in industry. “In the past few years I have given considerable attention to this question of appraising aptitudes, interests and 114 achievements, and I am not happy with the prospect that we shall ever be able to do a precise job of saying who should enter and who should not.”¹⁷ Still, he knew his kind of leadership when he saw it.

By 1935, Greenleaf was already making the argument that great leaders worked through others and that worker empowerment was good business. Speaking before a gathering of industry professionals, he said, “The advanced thinkers at supervisory levels are beginning to see the possibilities in the idea that an industry that sets the development of the potentialities of its people as one of its primary aims is ensuring the accomplishment of the end and aim of the industry.”¹⁹ In that same speech, he offered an idea that presaged by twenty-five years Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y views of workers and management. The old-fashioned controlling boss described by Greenleaf corresponds to McGregor’s Theory X. The Theory Y approach honors workers’ capacities.²⁰

Bob Greenleaf was not the first to voice such sentiments. We have no evidence that he read Mary Parker Follett, for example, but it would be a surprise if he had not, because her work was widely known and studied before World War II. Follett was a social worker, political scientist, and 115 theorist who applied her insights to management. She argued for equal participation by workers in problem solving and leadership. Rosabeth Moss Kanter summarized Follett’s leadership views: “Follett proposed that a leader is one who sees the whole situation, organizes the experience of the group, offers a vision of the future, and trains followers to be leaders.”²²

Follett’s voice was part of a growing reaction against the division of labor that had been popularized by Frederick Winslow Taylor’s notion of Scientific Management (1911). Taylor showed how time studies, routing schemes, and planning by management (not workers) were tools in the “scientific” approach to maximizing production and minimizing costs. By giving workers highly specialized tasks and rewarding them according to the quality and quantity of their accomplishments, Taylor believed workers and corporations would both prosper.²³ According to some critics, the only things left out of this formula were the needs, capacities, and growth potentials of workers. Industrialists called this area “the human relations problem” but, unlike Follett, or even the great AT&T builder Theodore Vail, Taylor and most of his contemporaries saw worker dissatisfaction as a pesky side issue to be handled, not something that went to the heart of the meaning of corporate enterprise. Still, in spite of Follett’s writings and the building reaction to Taylor, Greenleaf’s ideas did not represent mainstream thinking in 1935.

Just how deeply Bob was thinking about diverse disciplines—and especially education— became evident in a remarkable exchange of letters between him and Dr. Donald Cowling, President of Carleton College, Bob’s alma mater. Shortly after he went to New York, Bob ran into Cowling (“Prexy”) at an alumni gathering. For the next ten years, they met once or twice a year in New York over a bottle of wine, which Bob likely did not share, because he was a teetotaler. It was fun for the president of a conservative, church-related college, though. “Once when Prexy was quite mellow,” recalled Bob, “he remarked slyly, ‘You know, I can’t do this in Northfield.’” They were unlikely friends. “He was a staunch conservative while I was a mild New Dealer,” said Greenleaf. “He was absolutely dedicated to Carleton and I, being something of a maverick who didn’t fit the established ways of colleges, was sharply critical of all collegiate education.”²⁴

In May 1934, Bob wrote a letter that opened various educational issues for discussion, the first in a series of wide-ranging correspondences about 116 the ultimate aim and administration of higher education. What prompted the letter was his need to explain why he was withholding financial support from his alma mater, a decision that “has not been pleasing to me.”²⁵ What Bob was seeing in the “real world” led him to believe that colleges and universities, including Carleton, were missing the mark.

Greenleaf went on to quote Van Wyck Brooks in America’s Coming-of-Age: “The typical university graduate has been consistently educated in twin values which are incompatible. The theoretical atmosphere in which he has lived is one that bears no relation to society, and the practical atmosphere in which he has lived bears no relation to ideals.” He then quoted a report by Henry Pratt Fairchild titled “Retrospect and Prospect,” which came out of a 1932 conference on The Obligation of Universities to the Social Order that Cowling himself had attended.

If Dr. Cowling was willing to take the risk, Bob was prepared to assist Carleton with Dr. Fairchild’s challenge to overhaul the entire college into an institution that effected “an immediate and practical translation into terms of direct social guidance and participation.” Bob went on to say, “Little in your program, as I know it, meets this challenge in any substantial way.” What Bob had in mind was something that more closely resembled the cooperative schools and societies that had so fired his imagination in recent months.

It was an audacious—some might say cheeky—letter for a thirty-year-old who had barely graduated from Cowling’s school. Years later, Bob admitted that with age he became “less critical of the performance of educators and more critical of their pretensions. But in those days, I was more critical of their performance.”²⁷ Still, the issues were vital to him 117 and, to his credit, he volunteered to work with Carleton in pursuing them by making an analysis of “all phases of the college program and point[ing] out those parts which are not in line with the socialized philosophy of education as I see it,” and by outlining “a practical program of student participation in cooperative enterprise on the campus which would be interwoven with the more theoretical curriculum so as to achieve substantially Dr Elliot’s idea of a ‘serviceable fellowship’ between theory and practice.”²⁸

Dr. Cowling’s response came six months later. “Personally,” he wrote, “I feel quite convinced that what this country—and the world—needs is more education of the type that Carleton and similar colleges represent— discipline in abstract thinking and a philosophy of life which will lead those so trained to devote their powers to the public good. We certainly do not need a greater emphasis on vocational or technical education.…” He defended admission standards for students and claimed that, while he had been forced to address physical needs on campus, “my chief interest has never been in the material side of the college.” Without any hint of irony, he accepted Bob’s offer to study ways in which Carleton did not conform to Bob’s personal philosophy of education and to make recommendations for change.²⁹

Bob wrote a follow-up letter in which he admitted he was thoughtless to not recognize all that Dr. Cowling had already done for Carleton. He went on, however, to articulate his general dissatisfaction with a higher education system that robbed both students and faculty of meaningful glory.

Bob frankly admitted that he and Dr. Cowling might simply disagree. Bob’s ultimate authority for his comments was his own experience at Rose Polytechnic Institute, Indiana State Normal School, and Carleton—as a student, not an administrator. Still, he believed Carleton was “failing to meet the needs of youth of these times,” except for a handful who were predisposed to a scholarly life. As for Bob’s offer to conduct a study and offer recommendations, “I feel that it would be futile for me to submit specific plans of action until an understanding on more fundamental considerations can be reached,” especially if Carleton was not willing to pursue the risk of experimentation.³¹

In this exchange, Bob spoke for every bright student (of any grade-point average) who had been dispirited by university specializations, cloistered mind-sets, and arbitrary administrative policies. He was young enough to still be warmed by the fires of idealism, old enough to give some thought and form to possible solutions. Dr. Cowling spoke for the traditional view of a liberal arts education which, in spite of its flaws, challenged the best to become better by exposure to grand ideas and ideals. He also wrote as a genuinely humble, but beleaguered and often misunderstood, scholar and college president who willingly poured out his life’s energy for the survival of Carleton during the worst financial crisis in the school’s history. Dr. Cowling knew that, without a college, there could be no experimentation. Greenleaf believed that there was no reason to have a college unless it ventured forth in fresh ways to serve the needs of students.

Dr. Cowling passed Bob’s letters around to several of his deans for comment. The Dean of the College reminded his president that “In order to graduate, Mr. Greenleaf had to be given credit for four hours in Mechanical Drawing from the Rose Polytechnic Institute with a grade of ‘D plus.’ I should not say from my study of his record that his judgment could be completely relied upon due to the fact that his education was not completely taken in a liberal arts institution.”³² It was a response which, in its own way, supported some of Bob’s arguments about the narrow mindset of many college administrators. Feedback from the head of the Department of Psychology and Education was more thoughtful, but noted that “Mr. Greenleaf’s argument seems to contain a latent confusion with regard to the essential function of a college such as ours.”³³

On his next trip to New York, Dr. Cowling had lunch with Bob and Dr. Fairchild (whom both had quoted in defense of their positions) and a 119 lovely dinner with Bob and Esther. Two weeks later, Bob sent Dr. Cowling a twenty-two page, single-spaced letter, his magnum opus on the subject of higher education until he wrote a book about it over forty years later. In it, Bob expanded on some of the problems he saw with traditional liberal arts schools and offered suggestions for improvement. He was both accommodating and frank in his comments. “At the risk of impertinence,” he wrote, “I have assumed that full and enduring understanding could be achieved only if the discussion were freed from all diplomatic obscu-rantism.”³⁴ Bob’s summary (included in the Notes for this chapter) does not capture the power of some of his writing. ³⁵ A few excerpts on selected topics:

On the role of teachers:

On college admissions policies and the importance of a diverse student body:

On preserving ineffective colleges and universities:

On teaching the whole person through theory and experience:

Greenleaf made three suggestions for immediate action. First, introduce four new courses into the Economics Department: Current Economic 121 Problems, Politics, History and Development of Cooperation, and Techniques of Cooperative Enterprise. Second, establish a College Extension Department “which would serve to ally the college and the Southern Minnesota Community in the work of extending the benefits of the civilizing influences in the community.” As a model, he referred to Grundtvig’s “poetical-historical” concept of education for the masses of people. “Now you may say that the community at large in which you are located is not your concern,” wrote Greenleaf. “If you stand by this opinion, then I say that you are denying a sphere of influence to the college which, in time, may be of far greater importance than the formal work of the college on the campus.… If you do not accept this challenge, who will?” Bob’s third recommendation was that “a faculty should be assembled half of whose members had had their predominate experience before coming to your faculty in other fields than teaching.” He decried the convention that “an advanced degree is necessary for membership on a college faculty” and expanded on a position that, even today, would be controversial, and would likely cause accreditation papers to be pulled from schools that tried it:

For the next several years the conversations continued. During one dinner, Dr. Cowling, exasperated, turned to Bob and said, “Well, didn’t you get anything out of your years spent at Carleton?” Bob’s impertinent reply: “Yes, I got something very valuable to me; I learned how to make a little bit of work look like a whole lot.”³⁶ 122

Dr. Cowling never committed Carleton to any of the experiments Bob suggested. “Prexy was the model of the responsible man,” wrote Green-leaf. “He felt the obligation to do his best. But he kept putting me off because these were the Depression years and the college was broke. Any innovative effort would cost money, so we always left it there.” The discussions—but not the friendship—ended sadly for both of them.

Bob continued to admire Dr. Cowling, who always listened to his ideas, engaged them seriously and responded with his honest differences. When Prexy died, Bob wrote a tribute to him for Carleton alumni, which he later included in the book Servant Leadership.³⁸ Prexy was conservative and conventional, but Bob judged him a great person, one who led through serving.

During the first year of Bob’s correspondence with Dr. Cowling (1934–1935), he continued his wide-ranging travels for AT&T, luxuriating in the excellent train service available at the time. In 1928, he had paid five dollars for a quick flight over Cleveland in a noisy Ford Trimotor, but he did not travel by air again until 1962, not because of a fear of flying but a fear of the frantic.³⁹ “If I went to the West Coast, which I did quite frequently,” he explained, “I had that one day and two nights between Chicago and the coast when there would be no telephones, no visitors, no nothing. You could have your meal in your room so you really didn’t have to talk to anybody. And boy, I used that retreat time! Of course, there are people who get jittery when they hit a slack time. I doubt whether 123 they are as effective or creative, but they don’t like that open time.”⁴⁰ Even after airline service was well established he insisted on taking trains for his AT&T work. “I found trains a good place for meditation,” he later recalled. “Meditation early became one of my regular occupations.… I like my solitude.” ⁴¹ Train travel also gave him more control over his own schedule. “They couldn’t say, ‘Bob, we need you in Los Angeles tomorrow,’” recalled his daughter Madeline. “He didn’t want anyone messing with his life like that.”⁴²

In 1935, Greenleaf saw an example of the importance of corporate foresight reminiscent of Vail’s statesmanship. The National Labor Relations Act (The Wagner Act) was passed in 1935. The legislation took labor disputes out of the courts and put them under the National Labor Relations Board, which was given sweeping powers to judge unfair labor practices. It also gave workers the right to unionize, a frightening prospect for large employers. Because a similar law passed in 1933—the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA)—had been declared unconstitutional just before passage of the Wagner Act, a group of fifty top corporate lawyers met in New York and decided unanimously it was likely The Wagner Act would also be voided by the Supreme Court. They would go back and advise their companies to disregard it. Although Bob was just a “kid on the sidelines” watching the action, he vividly remembered what happened next.

Something more personal was on Bob’s mind in 1935, though: Esther was pregnant. They packed up their Manhattan apartment and moved in with Esther’s parents, who owned a small dairy farm at Mount Kisco, an old Quaker community north in Westchester County. By happy accident, the Woods—a fine old Quaker family—were their next-door neighbors and would have a profound influence on their lives in the near future.

They named their baby Elizabeth, but she was stillborn. The devastating loss affected Bob deeply but did not drown him in despair as it did Esther. He would have done anything to help her feel better but knew that each person’s grief must follow its own path. Bob bought Esther a baby grand piano because, among her many gifts, she was a musician, and he hoped that music could soothe the pain.⁴⁴ While she stayed home and played the piano, Bob continued his work and travels.

There was occasion for joy two years later, when they were once again living in Manhattan. On April 15, 1937, Bob rushed Esther to the hospital when she went into labor with her second full-term pregnancy. The contractions were coming fast and furious. Nurses put her on a gurney and, while running to the delivery room, shouted, “Don’t you let that baby come too soon!” They were afraid she might deliver in the hallway.⁴⁵ On that day, in the delivery room, Newcomb Greenleaf was born, a live, squealing, healthy boy. The parents were overjoyed. Soon after carrying Newcomb through the red door of their Manhattan apartment, they decided their growing family needed more living space and, besides, Esther could use some help with the baby. So they moved back to Mount Kisco to continue their adventure together and start a new one with the Society of Friends.