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CHAPTER 13
Meetings With Remarkable
People

I have a philosophy. I call it the hole-in-the-hedge philosophy. There isn’t much to it. You don’t bother much about goals, plans, accomplishments. When you see a hole in the hedge, and the grass looks greener on the other side, you go through. If you don’t like it over there, you can come back. You can even be fickle about it and go back and forth while you make up your mind. As a matter of fact, you don’t worry much about making up your mind. Something usually happens to make it up for you.

It isn’t a philosophy that is likely to make you rich or famous or even do much good in the world. I don’t recommend it to the ambitious or the overly serious. But you have a lot of fun.

Also get into some trouble.¹

ROBERT K. GREENLEAF, 1954

In midlife, a wondrous gift often comes to those who have made themselves eligible through curiosity, learning, and openness to the bitter— and sweet—juices of life. A more complete solar system begins to take shape in the evolving psyche. The young sun of self-centered ambition and petty ego transforms into a more mature, life-giving source of solid 173values. Old planets of abiding interests find their proper orbits; fresh knowledge and spirit give shape to emerging bodies; a passing comet of insight may be captured and made a permanent part of the structure. This is still a time of dynamism, of seeking, but the shape of the search becomes clearer. The mind works faster and makes richer, deeper connections; heightened powers of discrimination filter out trivial knowledge. It is the time of the beginning of wisdom.

Robert Kiefner Greenleaf had such a time in the years between 1946 and 1964. The once-budding astronomer sought to populate his internal solar system not with dead planets, but with the luminosity of astonishing men, women, and ideas. He found them everywhere, and many of them, including the ideas, sought him out.

Shortly after the war, AT&T aided Bob’s emerging inner cosmology by putting him in charge of executive development for the entire system. This responsibility was an addition to his duties overseeing all personnel research. He was a confidant to the company’s president and various board members. Douglas Williams knew Bob well during this period.

Formally, Bob was an assistant vice president at the fifth level, but that did not mean much to him. He had created every one of his operational titles since his early days in New York. He was once offered a promotion to vice president but turned it down. According to his daughter Madeline, “He said they’d make him do things he didn’t want to do.” Besides, said Newcomb, “There was a certain level in the phone company at that time where they all played golf together; they all belonged to a certain small collection of country clubs.”³ Bob was neither a golfer nor a country clubber. What was important to him was to be in a position that gave him the latitude to scurry through any interesting hole in 174the hedge. By the end of the war, he was free to work with every stratum in his far-flung organization, to initiate projects, coach, mentor, persuade, teach, scheme, and fulfill Professor Helming’s advice to change his company from within. He was also free to choose interesting assignments outside the company, which gave him the opportunity to meet top thought-leaders and work with interesting organizations.

Bob’s informal titles did have meaning to him because they were chosen by others. He was variously known within the company as “The Conscience of the Bell System” and “The Abe Lincoln of AT&T.”⁴ An incident that happened in 1958 shows why Bob was held in such high esteem and also demonstrates his willingness to show his sword when it came to spending the company’s money responsibly. Bob recalled the event in detail:

The informal title in which Bob most delighted was given by president Cleo Craig, who once introduced him as AT&T’s “kept revolutionary.” Perhaps Bob liked this impish comment because it acknowledged 176the role he secretly chose for himself when he joined the company in 1926. Craig blew his cover, but also blessed him for his unusual corporate efforts. Around the time Craig made the comment Bob wrote, “I stay put, keep poking around at holes, spend remarkably little time doing what other people want done. [I have become] a sort of professional at this hole-in-the-hedge business. Hole-in-the-hedge men must be patient, must live a long time, and ultimately come to be viewed as slightly peculiar.”⁶

Douglas Williams described what it was like to spend time with Robert Greenleaf during this period.

Bob always remembered the motto of one of his early, impressive bosses: “If it ain’t fun, it won’t get done!” and noticed that it was natural for that same able supervisor to lead so that other people grew. “It wasn’t something that he was trying to do because somebody told him he ought to. That’s the way he wanted to be; life was more fun that way.… I think that’s a test. If it’s grim, it’s probably not going to work very well.”⁸

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After the war, Bob realized that “henceforth the military establishment would be a much larger factor in our peacetime society than it had ever been before. Since I had no military experience I concluded that I should cultivate relationships with the military people.”⁹ He worked on small projects with the Army and Navy but forged his closest relationship with the Air Force. He was given security clearance and a formal appointment: Consultant to the Secretary of the Air Staff. In that role, he gave talks to high-level officers in the Pentagon and was a regular lecturer for several years at the Air War College at Montgomery Field.

In one presentation on “Listening—A Basic Executive Skill,” presented to the Third Air Staff Management Development Conference, Greenleaf showed his mastery as a teacher. He began by asking questions and responding to the answers, using the key technique he would be 177teaching that day—the skill of mirroring a statement, something he had learned from the Hawthorne counselors and psychologist Carl Rogers. For example:

General Eckert: “I wonder after listening to the other comments if we might not break this down into two categories: the listening that has to do with getting the job done—in other words, for decision purposes—and the other kind of listening, to get the most out of people.… The extent to which one should listen for this [latter] purpose, I don’t know.”

Mr. Greenleaf: “In other words, you have one level of listening which might be called ‘information getting,’ to get the points which other people have to contribute to the problem at hand. Then, you have another level of listening, where you are trying to understand what makes this fellow do what he is doing.”

General Eckert: “And to stimulate him to get things done.” Mr. Greenleaf: “Yes.”

During the session, Bob waited for the right question that would allow him to go into his prepared slides. It came soon enough: “How do you get from listening to results?” Greenleaf then presented bite-sized, bullet-point content and, after the break, asked for responses. Finally, he engaged the group in an experiential exercise based on the case study of a manager who got dramatically different results from a foreman by altering his approach to listening by using the mirroring technique.

Pedagogically, Bob was brilliant. He started with the learners’ own experiences; modeled what he taught; combined content, experiential learning, and reflection; took care to relate his lessons to the military situation; and refused to indicate in any way that he had a final answer to fit all situations. “Now, in presenting this kind of an idea, I am not making any judgment at all about when it is appropriate to listen in this manner and when it isn’t,” he said in his summation. “It all depends on what your goals are at the moment, what the other pressures for your time are, how you would weigh the time that it would take against what you could do with that time doing something else. All I am suggesting to you is that if, in the course of your executive work, you find yourself in a position where you want to spend some time to understand the attitudes of other people, where you want to spend some time to influence the attitudes of other people, here is a skill by which it can be done.”¹⁰

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The session was also an example of Bob’s approach to persuasion. Preaching and moralizing to this group of powerful men would have been counterproductive. It was more effective to let them make the intuitive leap and decide for themselves the rightness of his position.

Greenleaf enjoyed his years working with military leaders and, in a way, was comforted by the people he met.

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Through the years, Bob had read the work of Kurt Lewin, the German-Jewish refugee scholar who brought his family to America in 1933. Lewin started his academic career studying medicine but shifted to psychology, philosophy, and mathematics at the University of Berlin and became passionately committed to doing social science.¹² Lewin brought rigor to experimental research on topics most thought were beyond the reach of legitimate scientific inquiry at the time: needs, hopes, fears, aspirations, personal will, anger, leadership styles, group dynamics, and the social climate of groups and minority groups. These were exactly the issues that engaged Greenleaf. “[Lewin] demonstrated that such work could meet the accepted standards of scientific research by using operational definitions of variables, control groups and experimental groups, outcome measures, etc.,” wrote Lewin’s daughter. “He developed a mathematical approach to psychology that he called topological psychology. He also wrote about his philosophy of science for psychology, which he called field theory.”¹³ Many of Lewin’s ideas gave context to discoveries made in the Hawthorne studies, especially his key insight that behavior can be understood as the function of interaction between the person and his or her environment, expressed in his famous formula: B = f(P,E).¹⁴

Lewin was known as a practical theorist (“There is nothing so practical as a good theory,” he wrote in 1943), but he was also a philosopher of 179science, a transcendent teacher, and a shrewd, perceptive observer of human nature who could clear his mind of preconceptions and be open to the here and now. During the war he pioneered “action research” which involved asking those being studied—in his most famous case, housewives— to change things in some way and then studying the effects. Like Green-leaf, he loved to have fun along the way and was “commonly described as being enthusiastic, encouraging, lively, innovative, congenial.… Rather than being a grand system builder or a charismatic patriarch, Lewin comes across more as an osmotic stimulant, or a catalyst of new thought.” 15One can see why Bob was attracted to this scholar, even though they had never met.

In 1945, Lewin founded and led a research center at MIT for the study of a new discipline he called group dynamics. The following year, he participated in a Connecticut workshop on minority relations and discovered the importance of feedback in group process—that is, the power of relationships between individuals in the “here and now” of group experience rather than the “there and then” of intellectual discussions. It was the world’s first “T-Group”—or Training Group, a relatively unstructured group that harnesses the power of shared experience to further adult learning and transform behaviors. ¹⁶

Lewin decided that he wanted to explore this new phenomenon; he had the idea that extended interpersonal interactions with a group could help remove forces that commonly restrain new ideas, allowing individuals to explore alternatives to their habitual behaviors and modes of thought. People could then change and, eventually, change society. He looked for a site where participants could live together in a “cultural island” for three weeks and do this work. He found it at Bethel, Maine, and made preparations for a conference there in 1947. The event took place, but Lewin could not attend. He died in February 1947. ¹⁷

At the urging of his friend Dr. Carl Hoverland, a psychologist at Yale, Robert Greenleaf did make it to the Bethel conference. Disregarding instructions to leave families at home, he packed up the whole Greenleaf tribe and took them along. So it was that Bob was present at the legendary founding meeting of the National Training Labs (NTL, now the NTL Institute). It was a singular event, packed with intensity.

Those who experience a traditional T-Group for the first time find it unlike any other group experience. There is no agenda, no problem to be solved. Participants are not encouraged to exchange opinions and 180intellectual ideas or to discuss issues, nor is the trainer a traditional group leader. Everyone sits in silence until someone finally speaks, often out of anxiety or a need to impose structure, seek safety, or establish commonality. Feelings about self, power, and authority emerge. Interpersonal relationships and intrapersonal dynamics become the content of group interactions. It can be an exhilarating—and, for some, frightening— experience.¹⁸

In Bob’s small group at Bethel, he met Kenneth Harold, a young instructor at Columbia Teacher’s College. They became fast friends and decided to lead their own T-Group when they got back to New York. Bob convinced the New York Adult Education Society to sponsor a group the following winter, and he always remembered the experience.

Not long after the Bethel conference, T-Groups—which also came to be called “sensitivity groups”—took off like one of the military’s Atlas intercontinental ballistic missiles.

That is what happened, but not necessarily what would have happened had Lewin survived to direct the Bethel conference. “I have often wondered where we would be today if Lewin had lived,” wrote Green-leaf, “because he was a rigorous experimental psychologist. His students turned out to be cultists and the ‘sensitivity’ movement emerged from the session I attended.… I think that would have been anathema for Lewin from all I know of him.”²¹ After the eight evening meetings he conducted with Ken Harold, Bob quickly disassociated himself from the larger movement. “I decided this was enough of this for me. I would not have anything more to do with it. But I also learned something.”²²

Greenleaf’s strategy was to always learn something from his experiences. When he heard about new ideas like T-groups, he tried them out in the real world, reflected on lessons learned from the experience, then modified the theory and tested it again. This experiential learning cycle was both scientific and humanistic. The key to it, and the element so often missing in traditional learning and teaching, was reflection, which opens the door to intuitive insight. Even when teaching arithmetic and algebra to working men in Cleveland, Greenleaf made space for both cognitive thinking and reflection, and the idea of a servant-leader would eventually come from Bob’s own reflection on a lifetime of experience.

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A few years before the Bethel conference, Bob attended a series of seminars led by Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) and developed greater subtelety in his use of language and his cognitive map of the world. Ko-rzybski founded the discipline of General Semantics. His 1933 book Science and Sanity: An Introduction to non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics remains influential to this day.²³ Korzybski’s experiences as a Russian soldier in World War I—he was wounded three times—caused him to reflect on the causes of human violence and the differences between humans and animals. He decided that because of the flexible capacity of the human nervous system and our facility with language, we could “time-bind” experience across generations, but this same genius caused us to make the error of believing that language represented the 182full reality of a situation. We needed more consciousness and precision in how we used language.

Korzybski formulated several famous rules that summarized his key insights.

• “The map is not the territory.” That is, the map of reality we create with language is not reality itself. Most people learn this truth through the childhood phrase “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” but as adults we act as if words really were sticks and stones. Korzybski would say that this simple misidentification has led to countless wars.
• “The map does not cover all of the territory.” Our words and descriptions of what is true cannot possibly capture the full richness of infinitely varied “reality.”
• “The map is self-reflexive.” The map itself—our language—becomes part of reality.²⁴ One way out of the insanity of identifying language with reality is by training ourselves to use qualifiers. Do not describe the way something “is,” but explain how it relates to the whole. In writing, use quotes and dashes to indicate specific sources and general implications.

There is much more to Korzybski’s thought but, to paraphrase sales guru Zig Ziglar, we need to be trained away from our “stinkin’ thinkin” about language.

Greenleaf did not connect with Korzybski personally (“He was not my style of fellow,” Bob said) but believed he benefited from the encounter. “I think there’s probably a residue from my having made a foray into that field, but it is not very clear what it is. I have a feeling that we don’t do anything that doesn’t leave a permanent residue, but we don’t always know what that is.”²⁵ After his exposure to Korzybski, Greenleaf did often use qualifying phrases in his writing. Several of his favorites were, “From my worm’s eye view” and “From my small corner of the world.” Similar comments—and their accompanying attitudes—were also integral to the approach to persuasion he learned from John Wool-man. They were embedded in his comments to Air Force generals and business colleagues. And Korzybski’s ideas certainly gave support to 183the non-directive style of language that emerged from Bob’s natural humility.

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When Bob and Esther joined the Quakers’ Yearly Meeting at Mt. Kisco in 1935, Bob became quite active in Friends affairs. In 1937, he was a delegate to the Society of Friends World Conference where he heard a presentation by Dr. Elton Trueblood, a prominent Quaker scholar, author, teacher, and theologian. At first, Bob was not especially impressed with Trueblood, and he would soon become disillusioned with the Friends. After the World Conference, he took the lead in promoting a Friend’s Center in New York, and he “Got in the middle of a fight between ‘old and weighty Friends’ in the two local meetings. Dirty, name-calling, no evidence of Light—inner, outer or any other kind. No place for a hole-in-the-hedge man.”²⁶ His daughter Anne’s death in 1939 caused him to further question the Quaker connection. “We lost two children—numbers one and three—inner resources not adequate, no help from Friends,” he wrote in a private journal. “More trouble in the Society.”²⁷

After moving to Short Hills in 1941, the Greenleafs severed most connections with the Friends, tried the Unitarians again and dropped them, then became free agents for eight years with no ongoing church affiliation. The lure of the Quakers was strong, however, and Bob and Esther found their way back. They formally joined the Summit, New Jersey Friends in 1951. Three years later, Bob wrote in a private note, “[I] still have reservations although I am now Chairman of Ministry and Counsel. Speak very seldom in meeting, give all the Friends machinery above the local meeting a wide berth. Have a long way to go before I will feel ‘right’ about any formal religious affiliation. Hole-in-the-hedge philosophy isn’t working here.”²⁸

Bob’s renewed interest in the Friends came, in part, from four small books by Dr. Trueblood, which he discovered in 1950. Unlike True-blood’s 1937 World Conference address, these writings “meant a great deal” to him.²⁹ One of the books, The Predicament of Modern Man, published in 1944, was praised by Reinhold Niebuhr and Norman Vincent Peale and was reprinted in a condensed version by Reader’s Digest.³⁰ In one chapter of this slim, readable volume, Trueblood analyzed the creed of a “power culture” in which leadership had lost sight of human equality.³¹ In the book’s most memorable line, Trueblood called ours a 184“cut-flower civilization.” “Beautiful as cut flowers may be,” he wrote, “and much as we may use our ingenuity to keep them looking fresh for a while, they will eventually die, and they die because they are severed from their sustaining roots. We are trying to maintain the dignity of the individual apart from the deep faith that every man is made in God’s image and is therefore precious in God’s eyes.”³² Trueblood also wrote about the “insufficiency of individual religion,” which may have put off the Bob Greenleaf who admired the Friends’ individualistic approach to revelation, but attracted the Bob Greenleaf who believed that organizations were “how you get things done.”

Bob wrote to Trueblood, who suggested that he look into the Laymen’s Movement, an organization formed in 1941 to encourage people to integrate their personal spiritual values into their daily life and work. Some of the early members were Norman Vincent Peale, J. C. Penney, John D. Rockefeller, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.³³ Bob became involved in the Movement and found it “my most congenial affiliation. Holes plentiful, manna for a hole-in-the-hedge man. Feel I am making some progress.”³⁴ In 1951, Bob finally met Elton Trueblood in New York at an annual meeting of the Laymen’s Movement. After the meeting in the city, Bob accompanied Dr. Trueblood to a retreat house in Rye, New York that had recently been given to the Movement. This place would come to be called the Wain-wright House and would figure prominently in Bob and Esther’s life for the next few years as the meeting place for world-class doers and thinkers.

Greenleaf was destined to help Rev. Trueblood create a powerful movement of his own that would bring small group experiences to local churches. About the same time that the Bethel conference was inventing T-Groups for the secular world, Elton Trueblood was rediscovering the power of small groups in the religious community. As chaplain at Stanford, he invited interested parties to attend lunchtime discussion groups, and the idea of small groups spread to every living unit on campus. Across the country, similar religious-based gatherings, sometimes called “cell groups,” were happening on campuses like the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The Inter-seminary Movement was exploring group possibilities, and the Iona Fellowship—based on the model of St. Columba-was picking up steam. Trueblood knew this was nothing new. Even the Third Order of St. Francis was designed for “meeting the needs of those who were involved in common life.”³⁵

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In 1947, Dr. Trueblood moved his family to Earlham College, a Quaker school in Richmond, Indiana, where he wrote a best-selling book called Alternative to Futility that argued for a cross-denominational fellowship dedicated to renewal of church and society. Members of the fellowship would engage in commitment, witness, fellowship, vocation, and discipline, all within existing church structures.³⁶ “In the new order there are no clergymen and no laymen, but all are engaged in the same divine vocations,” wrote Trueblood, “which means putting the claims of the Kingdom of God first, no matter what profession one may follow. The formula is that vocation has priority over profession.”³⁷ Trueblood thought discipline was the key ingredient too often missing in Protestant groups. Two of the five elements of discipline he proposed were solitude and si-lence.³⁸ These were sweet thoughts to Robert Greenleaf, who loved his time alone.

Small laymen groups began popping up here and there, but True-blood had no name for them until 1949 when he read the words in Matthew 11: 29: “Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me…” It was a luminous moment. “Within a minute or so, as an entire complex of thinking came together.… Suddenly, we had a name for our hitherto nameless fellowship.”³⁹ The name was Yokefellow, and Yokefellow groups began to flourish in churches throughout the country, all without much central organization. In 1952, at the urging of Edward Gallahue, an Indianapolis executive who founded the American States Insurance Company, Trueblood acknowledged the need for a cabinet to provide business counsel, spiritual support, and financial backing to the Yokefellow Movement. Meanwhile, the Lilly Endowment in Indianapolis stood ready to support the group’s evolution. Trueblood was a personal friend of Eli Lilly, grandson of the pharmaceutical company founder, and also acquainted with the Endowment’s first Director, Harold Durling, who attended the original lay conferences at Earlham College.⁴⁰ Bob Greenleaf liked the idea of Yokefellow. “The idea of the yoke, with its emphasis upon the ministry in common life, appealed to [Greenleaf] as both fresh and valid,” wrote Trueblood in his autobiography.⁴¹

On a clear, lovely day in 1952, Elton Trueblood, Earlham College President Thomas E. Jones, and Robert Greenleaf gathered on Bob’s front porch in Short Hills, New Jersey. There was no prepared agenda, just an eagerness in all parties to listen to each other.

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From that humble beginning, centers of Yokefellow work opened in various parts of the country. The movement had its first national conference in 1954, branched out into ministries in prisons and other settings, and gradually embraced the whole world with Yokefellow International. Trueblood had the “redemptive fellowship” not bound by denominational labels that he had proposed in The Predicament of Modern Man.

Bob’s second idea, the Earlham Institute for Executive Growth, was a more modest effort but one that allowed him to help Earlham do what he believed Carleton College should have done nineteen years earlier—reach out to the local community. In 1954, Bob had further conversations with Jones and learned that he “wanted to do something for business and industry as a way of saying thanks for their financial support of… Earlham.”⁴³ Greenleaf proposed a series of weekend meetings that would include case problem discussions; skills training in “talking with people” (in other words, listening); discussions with guest speakers; intensive exposure to 187principles of economics, human relations, management policies, and functions; and, finally, individual analysis of each participant’s job and performance, including a detailed study of an actual problem on the job.⁴⁴

Robert Huff, the Institute’s first director, wrote Bob to prepare him for the initial meeting and described some of the Richmond businessmen who would attend. “For the most part they are fine men with a genuine concern for employees and a strong community pride. They do tend toward self satisfaction and smugness.” Huff expressed hope that the Institute could develop programs that “might administer to their personal needs as top managers and owners which would reflect in better human relations, happier, less strained lives, and a better community. Such conferences on a community basis, rather than industry or wide geographic basis, might be able to produce great returns and might set the pattern for other colleges and communities.”⁴⁵ In the next two years, Greenleaf, at his own expense, rode trains with names like The Indianapolis Limited and The Spirit of St. Louis to Richmond to speak with the Earlham faculty and attend each of the Institute’s first sessions with local businessmen.⁴⁶ He returned frequently as guest speaker.

The Institute for Executive Growth carried on for nearly fifty years, graduating over eight thousand management people from their Executive Training and other programs. It kept the core of Bob’s vision, which James Beier (then Assistant Director and later Director of the Institute) summarized in an article for Earlham’s alumni magazine. “Mr. Greenleaf’s concept for executive training was based on the fact that no matter how much an executive knew about a particular business function such as production, sales, finances, etc., he had to get the thing done through people. And how well he could accomplish this goal would largely determine his success or failure as an effective leader and executive.”⁴⁷ Today we might use the notion of “emotional intelligence” to describe one’s capacity to get things done through other people, but Greenleaf clearly believed executive leadership required more than human sensitivity. It also demanded hard data, an understanding of principles, listening skills, self examination, and discipline.

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Bob and Esther got involved with Wainwright House activities soon after Bob discovered the conference center. Wainwright was only thirty miles from downtown Manhattan. Its peaceful grounds, glorious Main house (an exact replica of the chateau de Raincheval in France) 188 and “nonsectarian holistic educational” programs soon attracted the likes of Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, and United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskold, who hosted conferences there on conflict resolution.⁴⁸ The Greenleafs helped plan various programs and retreats. The one with the most lasting history was a course called Receptive Listening.

Years before, drawing from the lessons he learned from the Hawthorne studies, Bob had developed a three-day course in listening for AT&T managers called “Talking With People.” It was something for which he became famous inside and outside the company. One day an assistant dean of the medical school at Cornell heard about the course and came to Bob with his problem. The school had recently done a study of its graduated doctors and learned that patients did not consider them good listeners. This was more than a communications problem; it was also a medical problem, because patients were the most important source of information in determining a proper diagnosis and course of treatment.

“So,” said the assistant dean, “we did what we thought was the most logical thing. We went to the head of the Department of Psychiatry and asked him to put together a course on listening for fourth-year medical students. As it turned out, if we’d gone out on the street and tapped somebody on the shoulder to come in and do this, we couldn’t have made a worse mistake. We put up a fellow who never listened to anybody himself!” The savvy students quickly realized that their teacher did not know how to listen, rebelled, and caused the course to be cancelled in mid-semester. It was a disaster.

“Now we hear you are teaching managers to listen,” said his visitor. “How in the world are you doing it?” Bob’s most important bit of advice, besides finding a new teacher, was to change the name of the course from Listening To Patients to Talking With Patients because people did not generally think they needed training in listening but loved to hear themselves talk. “We don’t talk about listening in our course,” Bob told his visitor. “We teach it, but we don’t talk about it.” Bob gave the man AT&T’s manual for the course and never heard from him again. He always remembered that incident however, and reported on it in various writings.⁴⁹

Near the end of Bob’s career with AT&T, President Eugene McNeely called him and said, “I’ve always heard about your listening course. This interests me. I’m not a very good listener. How can I get into one of your courses?”

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For his Wainwright House course Greenleaf took the lead in creating a two-hundred-page Leadership Manual. It included readings from authors like Carl Rogers, Eric Fromm, and Rudolph Steiner on everything from non-directive counseling to Quaker worship, Zen philosophy, guilt, and the Brothers Grimm. There are sample letters to participants, meditations, a self-administered analysis of personal goals, and instructions for engaging in an “experiment in depth” based on Jung’s four psychological types. It was a typically eclectic effort from Robert Greenleaf. For three years, he and Esther led the course, which in its original version was presented over three weekends spaced a month apart.

The Receptive Listening Leadership Manual can be read as an echo of Bob’s own spiritual journey to that point. It’s all there: the exploration of wisdom from various faith traditions, an attempt to understand the nature of love and the depths of the psyche, a celebration of silence and reflection, poems and prose and prayers that seep into the soul. Those who volunteered to lead Wainwright House’s Receptive Listening course were likely to be a dedicated band of seekers—they could handle a course with “listening” in the title—but there was still misdirection in the name of the course; this was really an experiment in spiritual evolution and individual maturity.

Some of the best pieces in the manual were written by Bob, and they have to do with group leadership. His introductory essay is called “Some Rough Notes on Growth Through Groups.” Even that title is significant. It is not called “How To Lead A Group” or “Principles, Goals, and Objectives of Group Formation and Performance.” Anything along those lines 190would indicate that the writer had The Answer on how to do group leadership and would imply that the role of the group leader was to be one of teacher rather than peer, authority rather than fellow pilgrim. The phrase “Rough Notes” refers to a work in progress. The course is ultimately about growth rather than listening skills. “Growth is best seen as conscious striving but not to a predetermined end,” Greenleaf wrote. ⁵¹ It is the language of a hole-in-the-hedge person, always looking for openings, always leaving openings.

Still, Greenleaf did offer solid principles for group leadership. First, he did not believe in leaderless groups, although he thought a laissez-faire style of leadership like that used in T-Groups might be appropriate at times. Here is how he described the need for a leader in a group dedicated to personal exploration. (He would not say this leadership style was appropriate for all groups in all settings.)

Greenleaf warned against the ego traps of leading a growth group. Pre-planning may work if one has a submissive group. “Thinking” may work as a strategy “if a person has great erudition and the group members are of inferior intellectual achievement and accept the virtual student role.” Both of these strategies satisfy the ego needs of the leader but not necessarily the growth needs of the group. Although the Wainwright Manual contains detailed pre-planning and several heady intellectual articles, these are inputs, not outputs.

There is much more: leaders should bite their tongue and allow group members to arrive at their own conclusions, not as a strategy but because leaders will likely learn something new in the process, and group members will own the new insights; an effective group of this type requires discipline in preparation and commitment to attendance; all group members are there to give, not “to get”; the endless cycle of withdrawal and return must be respected; followership is as important as leadership.

One of the most interesting contributions to the Receptive Listening course came from Esther—the “creative periods” for each session, using ink blots, finger painting, clay modeling, creative writing, collage, and cray-pas. These were not mere craft projects, but activities that elicited feelings rather than ideas. “We know we are getting close to a rapprochement between the conscious mind and the deep psyche through creative art activity,” says the manual.⁵⁴ Following the same Zen-like approach to leadership described in the rest of the manual, the leader is asked not to give—or ask the group to give—”interpretations” of creative expressions, 192nor should participants be instructed to create consciously coded symbols. They should simply have fun and let things flow. The leader may then say something like, “Well, what does this little figure say to you? It looks like something or other, doesn’t it?” Esther (with Bob) wrote, “I have come to the point of wondering whether any of the work is accidental. Is it not all dictated by an infinitely clever, infinitely fast super-mind from within?”

Esther was ahead of her time. The recent discipline of expressive arts therapy takes a similar view of confronting artistic products, according to one of the more influential books in the field.

In Esther’s creative arts projects, images spoke from the depths, just as intuition spoke from the depths during the periods of silence and withdrawal that Bob built into the course. Both approaches tapped into the same awe-filled Source, using different modalities. This convergence is evidence of the profound influence Esther was having on Bob’s work and thinking.

After three years, Bob and Esther turned the course over to others, and it continued in one form or another for decades. To this day, there is a Greenleaf Room at Wainwright House.

The Greenleafs went on to adapt the listening program to their local Friends Meeting, calling it Spiritual Growth, and holding meetings in their home on Sunday evenings. “This was then taken by members of our group to other Meetings, but after several years it died out,” Bob recalled. “The Quakers seemed not to have it in them to sustain something like we started. And my way of working at that time [was to] start things, get them well established, and then move on.”⁵⁶

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One day in 1956, Bob got a call from Thomas J. Watson, Jr., son of the legendary Thomas J. Watson, Sr. who had turned the moribund 193Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company into the powerhouse known as IBM. One month before his death, Thomas Watson Sr. had given his eldest son the reins of the company, and the forty-two-year-old heir was faced with a vexing problem. His father—Greenleaf called him “old TJ”— had hated organizational charts, saying everyone worked for him. About two hundred salesmen took him literally and often called from a prospect’s office to close the sale. Bob noted that “Old TJ loved it because it confirmed his no-organization theory. The fact that the rest of the organization was constantly scheming to get the job done without involving him apparently never reached him.” Factory managers had their own organizational charts but never dared admit it to the old man.⁵⁷ Young Thomas Watson knew the no-organization-chart idea had been stretched too far, but he did not want to lose whatever it was about IBM that had made it so unique and profitable. “So,” said Bob, “he picked his most respected officer, who was nearing retirement, and gave him the task of figuring out what to do—and then retire. He had to talk to somebody who wasn’t in IBM, and he couldn’t talk to consultants because he didn’t trust them. They would want to come in and organize it for him, according to their formula.”⁵⁸

Bob and three other prominent executives were asked to meet for an evening every two weeks throughout the winter and brainstorm the reorganization options. “It was a fascinating winter,” wrote Bob. “One of the fragments that stays with me was that this was a problem with everybody in management, who conceded that the old man was a genius but was cracked on this point. In a way it made for great esprit because they had to make it work.”⁵⁹ So it was that Robert Greenleaf helped reorganize IBM.

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At Wainwright House, Bob met a dazzling array of people, many of them famous. Bill Wilson (“Bill W.”), co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, lived nearby and attended conferences there. He and Greenleaf became good friends and Bob did some writing for AA publications.

AA was Robert Greenleaf’s kind of grass-roots group, organizationally and theologically. According to AA historian “Mitchell K.,” John D. Rockefeller, Jr. saved the group from grandiosity in 1938 when he declined the opportunity to give the fledgling organization $50,000 in seed money. “I am afraid money will spoil this thing,” he said. Instead, Rockefeller put $5,000 into an account at Riverside Church that Bill W. and co-founder “Dr. Bob” drew upon for their basic necessities of life.⁶⁰

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The experience with Rockefeller led Bill W. and Dr. Bob to formalize an organizational blueprint called “The Twelve Traditions.” They include: financing solely by member donations, open membership, autonomy of each local group, non-professional management, no political or sectarian activities, no ownership of property, and a guarantee of personal anonymity. “[Anonymity] reminds us that we are to place principles before personalities; that we are actually to practice a genuine humility,” says the Alcoholics Anonymous “Big Book.”⁶¹ It continues, “Each A.A. group needs the least possible organization… Rotating leadership is the best… All such representatives [including trustees] are to be guided in the spirit of service, for true leaders in A.A. are but trusted and experienced servants of the whole.”⁶²

Theologically, AA emerged from Christian sources, especially the Oxford Movement, but has no doctrinal requirement. The group simply affirms the existence of a power greater than oneself, a theology much like that espoused by the Ethical Culture Movement, so familiar to Bob and Esther.

Bob was impressed with the work of AA. “Although I have never been [a member of AA], I have had occasion to feel that I missed something— the fellowship—by not being one,” he wrote.⁶³ Bob would later describe AA as an ad hoc church.⁶³

Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick was a supporter of AA—his church was the repository of Rockefeller’s $5,000—and also an occasional lunch mate to his friend Robert Greenleaf. In Protestant circles, Fosdick was—and still is—known as one of the century’s great speakers. He reached millions through his books, radio addresses, and his pastorate of the influential Riverside Church from 1929 to 1946. Like Norman Vincent Peale, Fosdick stressed a practical brand of Christianity but also once wrote, “I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.” Fosdick became a valued member of Bob’s circle of friends.

One evening Bob went to a dinner at the Wainwright House and sat to the left of a woman who was a sparkling conversationalist. In the middle of dinner she turned to him, pointed at his lower abdomen and said, “You know, you haven’t thought about this for a long time.” “What?” he asked. “The cecum, in your colon. It doesn’t bother you. It’s a symptom that you’re aware of, but I believe I’d have it checked out if I were you.” Bob was amazed. In his early twenties, he was treated for pain in that 195very area, but it disappeared after he married and he had not thought about it for nearly twenty-five years.⁶⁴ The woman’s name was Eileen Garrett, and she was a famous trance medium. Bob and Esther became acquainted with her and the other most-famous trance medium in the country at that time, Arthur Ford. Both Greenleafs developed an interest in parapsychology.

“These two were extraordinary ‘sensitives,’” said Bob, “I spent enough time with them to know that they knew what was on my mind, but I was never convinced that they knew more than that. Both were fascinating people and well worth knowing quite apart from their special gifts.”⁶⁵ Still, Bob developed a theory that in the early stages of humankind, all had the gift of universal, wordless communication. As humans developed their intellect and began to manage the environment, these powers became a liability because of too much communication from too many sources. “As a matter of natural selection and survival, the people who had less of it got along better,” he told his friend Gerald Heard. “I have a feeling that we are just holding this in a kind of threshold now, that somehow if you can learn to live with this communication, you could turn the natural selection process around.”⁶⁶

In one of Greenleaf’s many conversations with psychiatrist Karl Menninger, Bob told him of his contact with trance mediums. Karl asked Bob to arrange for a reading sometime when he was in New York. “Of course,” he said. “I would not want her to know who I was, though,” said Menninger. “No way!” replied Bob. “She would know who you were and would tell you your name. Besides, if I tried to pass you off as somebody else, she would know I had lied to her.” Dr. Menninger, who was a well-known author of the 1930 best-seller The Human Mind and other books, preferred that the public not learn that he had had contact with a psychic, so the meeting was never arranged.⁶⁷

Bob and Esther’s minds were expanded in other ways through an important friendship with Sir Laurens van der Post. Van der Post, born in South Africa, was one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary seekers: an author, farmer, Japanese prisoner of war, humanitarian, consultant to heads of state, anti-apartheid activist, film-maker, philosopher, chronicler of the Kalahari Bushmen, and much more. He was also Carl Jung’s close friend. In 1958, Jungian analyst Martha Jaeger wrote to Sir Laurens describing a recurring dream she had about a praying mantis. Van der Post regarded it as strange that he had received this letter from an unknown 196woman, because the word “jaeger” means “hunter” in German, and at the time he was having difficulty writing a book called Heart of the Hunter, which was yet another volume about the Kalahari bushmen, for whom the praying mantis was a god.⁶⁸ At the time she wrote the letter, Martha Jaeger was Robert Greenleaf’s therapist in a journey of dream therapy.

Like Greenleaf, van der Post was interested in looking for grand patterns in the human experience. He believed that poets, prophets, artists, thinkers, mystics, and seers all had something to teach about the heroic, inner mythic journeys. Part of his personal journey was to probe the human spirit and make the unconscious articulate.⁶⁹ Bob never wrote about the influence Sir Laurens had on his thinking, but Newcomb Green-leaf recalls hearing van der Post’s name often from Bob and Esther. In Sir Laurens, Bob found another towering intellect who eagerly sought holes in the hedge, cultivated profound awareness, and felt a responsibility to leave the world a little better than he found it.

Writer Margaret Wheatley may not have known of this connection when she quoted Sir Laurens at the 1999 International Conference on Servant Leadership, but Greenleaf would have approved of her choice of his words.

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In 1956, the psychiatrist Will Menninger, Karl’s brother, sought out Greenleaf for advice on how to raise money from businesses for the famous Menninger Clinic he had co-founded in 1919 with his father, C. F., and brother in Topeka, Kansas. Bob suggested that they establish a seminar on industrial psychology to spark interest and arranged for the Men-ningers to make a presentation at a Chicago conference (at which Bob presided) of the American Management Association. This conference put the Menninger Clinic on the national radar screen in the business community. Meanwhile, Dr. Will Menninger and Dr. Harry Levinson conducted a study of mental health problems in industry and designed a 197series of week-long seminars for executives and physicians under their new Menninger Division of Industrial Mental Health. The first seminar was held in 1956, and Robert Greenleaf was invited to make a presentation. According to The Menninger Clinic, “This was the first specialized function at a psychiatric institution and eventually provided evidence that psychiatry could be effectively applied in industry.”⁷¹ It was also one more idea Robert Greenleaf helped bring to fruition.

Through the years, Bob visited the Menningers several times in Topeka and made some lasting memories.⁷²

Years later, Bob would have called Les a servant-leader.

“One of the byproducts of my involvement [with the Menningers] was getting to know psychiatrists as a special breed,” wrote Bob, “and they are different.” Karl Menninger told him psychiatry was a “dangerous profession.” In fact, when Bob first became involved with the program he learned that several residents at the Menninger School of Psychiatry committed suicide each year.⁷⁴

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Dr. William Wolf was another doctor who had a deep influence on Bob and Esther during the 1950s. “Uncle Bill,” as they called him, held both an M.D. and a doctorate in chemistry. He wrote the first medical textbook on endocrinology, called Endocrinology in Modern Practice, and was interested in other subjects—like biorhythms—that were considered on the fringe of medical practice in his time.⁷⁶ When Wolf became interested in psychiatry he traveled to Vienna to be analyzed by Freud; eventually he developed his own approach to psychotherapy.

One evening Bob visited Uncle Bill in New York and complained of stomach pains. For ten years, he had been under treatment for an ulcer, eating crackers and milk before bedtime and taking pills for the pain. “I didn’t know you had an ulcer,” said Uncle Bill, who then spent a good deal of time asking questions and listening carefully to the answers in the way doctors of his generation were taught to do diagnosis. He put Bob on the table and gently massaged a point on his spine. “Did anything happen then?” he asked. “Yes,” replied Bob. “It stopped hurting.” “You don’t have an ulcer. This is where a bundle of nerves leaves the spinal column for your stomach. You have one of those trick backs that tightens up once in a while and when muscles squeeze those nerves your stomach hurts. When your stomach hurts, all you have to do is to gently massage these muscles and relax them. It will quit hurting.”

Amazed, Bob asked how Wolf knew such a thing, when other doctors had missed it. Uncle Bill told the story of how, when he was a young doctor, the New York Medical Society asked him and another doctor to enroll in a chiropractic college diploma mill in order to testify 199against the operation and shut it down. They were successful in their case, but ironically, in the course of reading the lessons, Wolf learned things that had been quite useful in his medical practice. “If you had gone to a good chiropractor he would have found the trouble right away,” said Uncle Bill, “because that is all he knows. He probably would not have told you how to fix it yourself, but he would have found it. You made the mistake of going to a medical doctor who treated it as a complicated medical problem.” Bob called it an interesting lesson in how the world moves along.⁷⁷

Uncle Bill gave the occasional lecture series on health, meditation, and the further reaches of human capacities. In notes he took from one series, Greenleaf jotted down some quite Eastern ideas about non-attachment.

The notes go on for pages. Between the aphorisms and instructions for meditations are references to Jung, Gurdjieff, Marcus Aurelius, Aldous Huxley, Hindu masters, and others. Uncle Bill was a brilliant man.

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During the 1950s, two people entered Bob’s life who would have a profound influence on his evolving views of religion and spirituality: Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Gerald Heard. Bob first met Rabbi Heschel in 1955 in his office at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Heschel was Professor of Ethics and Mysticism (a title Greenleaf adored) and already an acclaimed author.⁷⁹ Greenleaf asked Rabbi Heschel to speak to young executives attending the Bell Humanities Program the following summer at Dartmouth. Heschel accepted, and he and his family became friends with the Greenleafs. In some ways, it was an unlikely friendship.

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Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) was descended from the early leaders of Hasidism, an eighteenth-century pietistic movement.⁸⁰ According to his biographers, Heschel was an intellectual prodigy. “By age thirteen, Heschel had mastered the texts qualifying him to become a practicing rabbi: the relevant sections of Talmud and all four parts of the Shulhan Arukh, the code of Jewish law pertaining to every aspect of social, personal, and ritual life,” but his parents made him wait until age sixteen for the ordination.⁸¹ His first essay was published when he was fifteen; he became a poet and an accomplished scholar. Heschel escaped the holocaust by accepting a teaching position with the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, a move aided by his friend Martin Buber.

Greenleaf wrote about his bond with Rabbi Heschel, with whom he shared little in personal background or scholarship.

Heschel’s work speaks to the reality underlying religion, something he found to be concrete and poetic. The same primal, wordless awe Robert Greenleaf experienced atop Mt. Wilson in 1919 is echoed in many of the Rabbi’s writings: “Thus there arose, as though spontaneously, a mother tongue, a direct expression of feeling, a mode of speech without ceremony or artifice, a language that speaks itself without taking devious paths, a tongue that has maternal intimacy and warmth. In this language, you say ‘beauty’ and mean ‘spirituality’; you say ‘kindness’ and mean ‘holiness.’”⁸³ Somewhere along the way, wrote Bob, “the study of religious awe, not philosophy, became Heschel’s priority.… [to] analyze and arouse piety and teach secularized readers the ways of attachment to God through prayer, study and action… [This] radical amazement [became] an emotion of reverence before the very miracle of daily existence [and] reintegrated him into the Jewish way of life” during a period when Heschel was undergoing his own spiritual crisis.⁸⁴

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Like Greenleaf, Heschel decried the descent of religion into lifeless symbols. “It has become a truism that religion is largely an affair of symbols,” he wrote. “Translated into simpler terms this view regards religion as a fiction, useful to society or to man’s personal well-being.”⁸⁵

Heschel also shared Greenleaf’s concern with what Greenleaf called awareness and Heschel called consciousness. “This seems to be the malady of man,” wrote Heschel, “His normal consciousness is a state of oblivion, a state of suspended sensitivity. As a result, we see only camouflage and concealment. We do not understand what we do; we do not see what we face. Is there a meaning beyond all conventional meanings?. . . The awareness of transcendent meaning comes with the sense of the ineffable.”⁸⁶

In the Old Testament prophets, Heschel found an example of courageous humans who were willing to encounter the mystery directly and do something about it. First in his doctoral dissertation on prophetic consciousness and later in his book The Prophets, Heschel used the methodological tool of reflection to “analyze the components of prophetic inspiration (God’s presence within human awareness) and to develop a taxonomy describing this process.”⁸⁷ Just as Greenleaf nurtured intuitive insight for practical business problems, Heschel learned to cultivate insight for his academic work. “Insight is a breakthrough, requiring much intellectual dismantling and dislocation,” wrote Heschel. “It begins with a mental interim, with the cultivation of a feeling for the unfamiliar, unparalleled, incredible… Insight is the beginning of perceptions to come rather than the extension of perceptions gone by. Conventional seeing, operating as it does with patterns and coherences, is a way of seeing the present in the past tense. Insight is an attempt to think in the present.”⁸⁸

Even though Heschel came from a rich Jewish tradition and Greenleaf from a Protestant background, Heschel’s emphasis on a direct encounter with ultimate mystery—which he would call God—was not so different from Greenleaf’s attention to conscious withdrawal that invites mystery to become available as awareness, which then allows creative insight to emerge.⁸⁹ In the end, both the Rabbi and the businessman were not interested in analyzing or even understanding the mystery per se, but in the human response to it—here, now, in one’s particular historic situation.

Bob wrote about Rabbi Heschel as a model of a servant-leader.⁹⁰ Shortly before his death, Heschel was asked if he had any advice for young people.

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In the course of their lives, Bob and Esther made hundreds of friends—not mere acquaintances, but true friends. Bob stayed in touch as often as possible. It was part of his discipline. When he traveled, he carried an address book so he could mail off numerous letters and notes. When an article of interest crossed his desk at work or at home, he would often copy it and send it to friends who might be interested, accompanied by a personal note written on a 3 × 5 card paper-clipped to the document. Bob became famous for those small cards, many of which he mailed separately in envelopes, and hundreds of people who knew him still cherish their short, scrawling messages from a friend who cared enough to keep spirit alive between them. In fact, Bob’s famous salutation was, “In the spirit.”

Building a rich network of friends was as much a part of Bob’s “preparation for old age” as was his reading and exposure to new ideas. He kept a traditional filing system where he deposited everything from articles on Emerson to correspondence to obscure reading lists, but he was not a pack-rat. Things he saved were either useful or had the potential to be useful. In a 1985 interview, after reviewing Bob’s ventures into disciplines as varied as semantics, T-Groups and listening, Joseph Distefano asked him, “Were you conscious at the time of these elements being linked together and giving you some unity that you might eventually write about?” Bob’s answer:

No, not really. I’ve got a pretty good filing system in my head, and I mostly just filed them away as important ideas. At the time, I had no notion that I would ever set out to be a synthesizer… I never had a master plan that said, “Here is where I’m going to wind up and these are the things I will do to get there.” All I got from Elmer Davis was just “prepare yourself,” and I just prepared myself the way you would keep your muscles in tone. You never know what you will use your muscles for, but you keep working on them so that they will be there when you need them, and that’s really what I did.”⁹²