CHAPTER 11
Quaker at War
Simply practice being aware. Look, and be still. Feel, and be still. Listen, and be still. Give the practice of awareness time, time when you are alone.1
ROBERT GREENLEAF
Pearl Harbor ruptured the last vestige of American isolationism. Now the European war was also America’s war, and companies of every size were mobilized to produce more, faster, and better. AT&T was one such company, and Robert K. Greenleaf was in the thick of things.
Corporations were urged to take advantage of every available human talent in support of the war effort. In 1941 Bob was moved from the AT&T’s Plant Operations section—with oversight of personnel around the country—directly to the Personnel Department. One of the first things he noticed, even before Pearl Harbor, was the absence of black people in non-menial jobs. He thought that situation should change. The Personnel staff in Manhattan was relatively small, with about thirty female clerks. Bob interviewed every one of them, told them he intended to hire a black woman and asked how they felt about it. Years later he recalled, “They all said ‘fine’ except one who said, ‘Well, when she comes, I go!’ and by golly 141 she did. But anyway, we hired the first non-menial black in the (AT&T) system, and it worked out pretty well. The other girls took her in socially, and when I retired, she was still there—still in a clerical job, but it was a non-menial job.”2
When America entered the war, it was clear that AT&T would need to work closely with the government to win the conflict. In fact, the United States formally declared AT&T’s communications network and the Western Electric production facilities as military resources. Bob was a Quaker by “convincement” so he did not fully share the pacifist leanings of cradle Friends. Still, he pondered the ancient ethical dilemma of using force in the service of a greater good.
What about love for one’s fellow man? What about the use of force? Can one use force which may mean doing violence to somebody, and do it in the spirit of love for fellow man in the broad sense?
These are indeed perplexing questions and those in authority are not of much help; eminent men so contradict one another that the layman is confused rather than benefited by their counsel.
For my own part there is an acute inner conflict. Personally I am averse to force—that is, I don’t want to get my own hands in it. Yet I believe that an orderly world must impose some restraints and that these are morally right and exercised in the spirit of love for fellow man. I see no essential difference between the power exercised by the policeman and that exercised by an army. Yet I personally want no part of either but feel them to be necessary. That poses a neat moral question; have I any right to live under the protection of someone who takes risks and does the dirty jobs that I can’t bring myself to do?3
As it turned out, Bob did everything he could in his position. After passing rigorous security clearances, he and his boss were listed as Consultants to the Board of War Communications with the right to look at classified documents, the only people in the Personnel Department with secret clearance.
There was plenty of work, because the government saw AT&T’s network and Western Electric’s manufacturing facilities as giant security problems, wide open to sabotage and espionage. It fell to Bob and his boss 142 to do the legwork to investigate and certify key people around the country, decide which employees were so valuable they should be exempt from the draft, try to meet the almost impossible security demands imposed by wartime civilian and military planners, and negotiate with people in the highest levels of government. Because of his boss’s abrasive personality, many of the negotiations eventually landed on Bob’s desk. “I had some lousy bosses along the way and one of them was during the war,” he later recalled.
I was home taking a few days of vacation during the summer and I got a call from this boss saying that he had been down to Washington and started some negotiations with one of the government agencies and couldn’t go back to finish it. He would send out the papers if I would go back down (to Washington) and pick up the negotiations. I said, “Sure.”
So I went down and walked into the chilliest ice box I’ve ever been in. Boy! This was really frigid! We slugged away all day, trying to negotiate whatever it was we had to work out, and I kept wondering, “Now, what the hell is wrong here anyway?” At the end of the day I invited these fellows to go out with me. I plied them with a few drinks then I finally said, “Now, what the hell goes on here? This is the chilliest thing I’ve ever been in.” Well, they said, “If you want to know, we’ll tell you! That fat man (my boss) came down here and really pushed us around and called us a couple of snotty little bureaucrats. Finally we said to him: Look, you get out of here. If we count ten and you are not gone we will call security and have you thrown out.”
I didn’t know anything about this. My boss had sent me down to feed the wolves because he had literally been thrown out!4
Bob did not run into the office of AT&T president Eugene McNeely and tell him about the incident. In fact, McNeely was unaware of it until well after the war. Nor did he speak unkindly about his boss around the office. He did his job, bided his time, voiced his opinions directly to bosses when they were solicited, and tried to operate with integrity in his own sphere of operation.
During this period his informal influence grew within the company, especially with President McNeely. Bob was able to help him get things done precisely because he was not “empowered” to do so. It makes an 143 interesting story because it shows how Bob applied his Quaker learnings about persuasion within a hierarchical, bureaucratic organization, and did so without the formal authority so important to many managers. Here’s how it worked.
Bob recognized that McNeely was in a position to coerce and manipulate, but not persuade, employees. He held too much power to persuade, because others would wonder about his hidden agenda. “Have you ever tried to persuade someone whom you were sneaking up on?” asked Bob.5 So, Bob did the persuading.
Every once in a while I would find myself listening to McNeely talking about a nettling organizational problem, someplace where the outfit was really snafu, and he wouldn’t know how to get at it. If, after listening, I felt I understood what he was talking about, I might say, ‘Gene, would you like for me to get into that to see if I can straighten it out?’ And he would say, ‘Please do.’ Now, he would never ask me to do that because if he asked me, I would be empowered. In other words, I would be seen as his agent; but if I volunteered on my own, then I was on my own. I would have to rely on persuasion.6
“Persuasion” meant something different to Bob than it does to many modern thinkers on the topic. We know that John Woolman was his model for a master persuader, and that Bob learned the process in Quaker meetings and applied it in the workplace. Here is Greenleaf’s own definition of persuasion:
Persuasion involves arriving at a feeling of rightness about a belief or action through one’s own intuitive sense. One takes an intuitive step, from the closest approximation to certainty that can be reached by conscious logic (which is sometimes not very close) to the state in which one can say with conviction, “This is where I stand!” The act of persuasion, thus defined, would help order the logic and favor the intuitive step. But the person being persuaded must take that intuitive step alone, untrammeled by coercive or manipulative stratagems of any kind. Persuasion, on a critical issue, is a difficult, time-consuming process. It demands one of the most exacting of human skills.7 144
Word eventually got around that Bob might be acting at President McNeely’s behest, and for awhile it spoiled his ability to persuade. In other employee’s eyes, Bob was now empowered by the president with what was, to Bob’s thinking, the most limiting kind of power.
I think if top managers could realize the tremendous liability of holding this power, and how it really disqualifies them to persuade, they would know they can’t be accepted as a persuader. A persuader can’t have an axe to grind. This is part of the problem of our structures. We’ve never thought through what to do with persuasion when you set up a hierarchical structure, and yet many don’t know any other way to organize [their structures].8
The war dragged on, and everyone was expected to do his or her patriotic duty. At their Short Hills home, the Greenleafs had a large victory garden (encouraged by Uncle Sam so commercially-produced food could go to the fighting forces), but Bob wanted to do more. He decided he could make a small contribution to the war effort by becoming a beekeeper in his spare time. Sugar was scarce and, besides, some strange attraction drew him to bees. As usual, he read all the books on the subject he could find, then outfitted his yard with hives and the proper apiculture accoutrements, bought enough head coverings, gloves, and body insulation to dress a knight in armor, wrapped strong rubber bands around his pant cuffs and long-sleeved shirt cuffs, and waddled forth to his destiny with bees.
Greek mythology tells us that, in return for the honey that sustained him, the infant Zeus gave bees their sting, to be used only for defense. Because they abused this power, Zeus sentenced bees to death whenever they used their stingers.9 Zeus and Bob Greenleaf murdered a lot of bees that way. He was stung repeatedly and never developed immunity to the venom’s effect, as the books said he should. “I was not a natural beekeeper,” he wrote. “They didn’t like me, and I didn’t like them. It was a bad deal.”10 Newcomb vividly remembers those days. “We were always fascinated with photographs in Life magazine of some guy with bees crawling over him, because that was not our experience with bees. You got close to the hive and they were after you.”11 One day a hive began to swarm and went after the neighbors—and succeeded. One hapless woman stood on her back porch and cried while she combed bees out of 145 her hair. It seemed like a good time for Bob to give up his three-year-old bee business. The war would have to be won without the honey output from the Greenleaf hives.
Fifteen years later, though, an amazing thing happened, an odd gift of stinging-insect grace.
I was eating a picnic lunch out of doors, and the yellowjackets were out in force, being their natural annoying selves.… My rational estimate of yellowjackets would be definitely lower than bees, and bees and I didn’t get along. To my surprise, this day I felt no annoyance at the yellowjackets, and I found my hand going out for them to crawl on if they wanted to—and some of them did. Later I found that this urge extended to all stinging insects, including bees… Now I find that something has been added to the interest I originally had in bees: I have an affection for them and their kind.
These natural gifts, these dispositions to hold attitudes that give largeness of self, come unannounced. They have a newness and a freshness about them, and sometimes they go when they are most wanted. One cannot ask for them because until they have been given, one really doesn’t know what they are.12
A further point of this story is Bob’s openness to novel experience. Others with a similar history of bees and stinging insects might have discounted the strange impulse to allow yellowjackets to climb on their bare flesh. Bob did not; he paid attention and took the risk.
Paying attention—cultivating heightened awareness—was a major theme of Bob’s life and work, one that receives little emphasis from contemporary admirers of his writings. Bob liked the Freudian image of consciousness as an iceberg. Nine-tenths of what we know lies “below the waterline,” in the realm of the subconscious. For those rich resources to be useful, we need to bring them “above the waterline,” into conscious awareness. Heightened awareness is not the same as intuition but is important for the intuitive leap. Sometimes this awareness is a life-or-death matter. Pilots of small planes, for example, are trained to always be aware of emergency landing sites in case the engine unexpectedly fails.
One day during the war, Bob used his “above-the-waterline” consciousness to save a man’s life on the subway. 146
The doors had closed on his arm as he was about to enter [the subway car], and he could not get loose. The conductor failed to notice as the train took off, dragging the man down the platform to certain death if the train was not stopped before he reached the end of the platform.…
I became aware of the emergency by the commotion at the end of the car. A crowd converged on the door, clawing at it and shouting, ‘Stop the train!’ ‘Open the doors!’ An emergency cord hung overhead. No one pulled it. A similar cord was in the opposite end of the car. No one near it was going for it either. Two or three precious seconds went by before I realized that it was up to me; so I ran for the cord at the opposite end, bowling over a few people as I went. And I made it just in time.13
Bob wondered why he was the only regular subway rider who knew where the emergency cord was located, so he conducted his own research on the matter. For the next few months, he described the subway incident to various acquaintances—all daily subway riders—and asked what they would do. “Pull the emergency cord!” they answered. “All right,” Bob said, “There are three subway systems in New York, and the cord is in a different place on each system. This is the Independent line. Where is the cord? You have about five seconds to act: one, two, three, four, five.” He tried the test on about fifty people, then gave up. No one could answer.14
Bob concluded that “very few people accept that this is a dangerous world—morally, physically, intellectually—and hence [they] do not choose to be aware of where they are, who they are, what kind of world they live in, or what [the world’s] traps and hazards are.” 15 The responsible person, the person of heightened awareness, accepts the dangers but is not paralyzed by them. He or she prepares for emergencies by predetermining how to respond in emergencies.
Awareness is a combination of a constant conscious scanning of the environment and the concurrent searching question, “What would I do if I were in the action spots within my view?” The scanning is done partly by reading and listening to language. But it is also direct and elemental looking, listening, smelling, feeling, and constant questioning: “What is going on here?” 147
Above-the-waterline thinking is important for more than emergencies, however. It is the essence of life—and leadership.
The trap that sometimes brings failure to otherwise successful people is to substitute routine for awareness. Awareness is a constant reaching out and responding to everything in the environment: the people, the sunset, the sounds of the street, the smell of flowers, the clackity-clack of the subway wheels. It is not tiring or boring. In fact, it is quite the opposite: it is the essence of life. Be able to withdraw into the silence, but do not turn off the current to the antenna so that you miss the signal that will bring you back in a flash.16
Bob’s views on awareness were not abstract or idealistic. One is again reminded of the training given pilots. Most people know an avid private pilot they would call a “flying nut.” This person seizes any excuse to mosey out to a little airport, hop into a small thirty-seven-year-old machine that weighs less than a car—and sometimes even costs less—”kick the tires and light the fires” and soar into blue sky. Even in clear weather (VFR in pilot lingo), pilots must constantly scan instruments, watch for outside traffic, work the radio, check course headings, observe checkpoints, notice possible emergency landing sites, manage fuel, listen for funny engine noises, comfort passengers, and simply fly the plane. It does not sound like much fun given the high stakes of failure, but they are addicted. Not many pilots are poets, but most are laconically articulate when it comes to flying. If you ask them why they pursue such an expensive and time-consuming pastime, they usually pause for a moment, get a faraway look in their eyes, and say something like, “Well, I feel pretty alive up there; I come back refreshed. I do have to focus to fly the plane, but I enjoy doing that as well as I can because I don’t want to ‘buy the farm.’” For pure pilots, heightened awareness is an end in itself and a matter of life and death, just as it was for Bob Greenleaf and that man on the subway train and, according to Bob, just as it is for each of us every day.
When he reflected on the narrative of his own life, Bob always referred to a pivotal idea he embraced when he was about forty years old. He claimed it came from a magazine article titled “The Uses of Old People,” written by Hoosier radio commentator Elmer Davis. 148
The gist of the article was that there are useful and necessary things to be done that are best done by old people, partly because old people have greater perspective of experience, but mostly because the things that need to be done do not fit into a career or they are too risky for young or mid-career people. He advised that younger people should look forward to old age as presenting an opportunity to be prepared for, rather than as a time to be put out to pasture when one wears out. It was a persuasive argument and, again, my doors of perception were open a bit wider than usual and that message came through loud and clear: begin now to prepare for what can best be done in old age.17
Greenleaf went on to describe how, after having his insight to prepare for old age, he eschewed trivial pursuits like golf and bridge (which he never engaged in anyway) and spent the years between forty and sixty in preparation for his later years, even though he did not know what he was preparing for. There is no doubt that Bob had been “preparing for old age” since he was a young man, turning his avid curiosity and lust for learning towards thinkers and doers and Big Ideas. In this case, however, he got the timeline wrong, confusing an article by Elmer Davis with one by Catherine Drinker Bowen.18 No matter. The idea of preparing for old age, when it came, simply crystallized something he was already doing— preparing for later years by pursuing vivid learning and vivacious people. There is no doubt he did so to “be useful,” to make a contribution inside and outside AT&T’s womb, but he also had a practical reason. He was already thinking about an early retirement. Bob did not know what he would do then, but he wanted the freedom and credentials to do it well and make a difference. His response to Bowen’s article was another example of heightened awareness; he was open to the fleeting idea of preparing for old age, was willing to take it seriously and, ultimately, prepared to change his life because of it.
In between having babies and creating a stable home life, Esther continued her artwork. She had long since moved beyond the representational period she entered for Bob’s sake and had begun painting and exhibiting more abstract pieces. Bob, who was now an enthusiastic partner in her modernist efforts, hung six of her paintings in his New York office: three of 149 her representational works and three abstracts. It was unusual to have so many paintings in an AT&T office and most visitors commented on them, which gave Bob a chance to expound on matters artistic.
They would look around and say, “Well, these representational pictures, I think I know what they mean, but I don’t know what these others mean.” The answer I evolved was, “Well, these representational pictures of objects are music with words, and the abstracts are music without words. After all, instrumental music is abstract; it’s just a concoction of sound and rhythm and it doesn’t have any meaning. You either like it or you don’t and that’s all there is to it. This is the same way. It’s a concoction of color and form that has no meaning. It’s just the way she felt, and color and form interested her more than being a camera and recording something.”19
Bob was not only proud of Esther’s work; he was enjoying his own explorations into painting, pottery, and jewelry making, all under her tutelage. He set up a workshop in the basement where he began making heirloom furniture, using his hands to create something tangible. He was growing in every way.
So was his family. Madeline Greenleaf was born in New Jersey’s Orange Memorial Hospital on January 30, 1943. She completed the Greenleaf family, but Bob’s education as a father was just beginning, at the precise time his professional competence was reaching new heights.