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CHAPTER 16
Breakout From AT&T

As I see it, leadership that devotes itself wholly to operating successfully in the here and now—essential as this is—will not measure up to its total responsibility. Leadership is equally called on to build vitality for the long pull… A business must generate vitality under all the circumstances that confront it—not only in times of crisis, but just as much under conditions of success… ¹

ROBERT K. GREENLEAF, 1960 Ghostwritten speech for
AT&T President FRED KAPPEL

Beginning with his Jungian dream work in the late fifties, Green-leaf began thinking seriously about taking early retirement from AT&T. By 1964, his first year of eligibility, all the children would have left home, and he and Esther would be free to travel while he taught, consulted, and wrote. Bob had been a teacher for AT&T employees from his earliest days with the company, and since 1950 had been a visiting lecturer at schools like Dartmouth, MIT, and Harvard Business School. He had consulted on a formal or informal basis with companies like IBM and had built a solid writing portfolio, even though many of his pieces were ghost-writing or were published anonymously 230for Alcoholics Anonymous, the Laymen’s Movement, the Cooperative Movement, and Quaker newsletters.

As far back as his high school years, Bob Greenleaf had been a superb writer. His identification with the common working man urged a simplicity of expression, while his broad reading and deep reflection lent depth to ideas. Bob’s bosses at AT&T recognized this ability early in the game. His Management Ability pamphlet and uncountable internal memos usually went beyond mere reporting; they addressed pressing business issues and embodied a concern for human growth in managers and subordinates, along with practical suggestions about what steps the company should take to secure its long-range future.² Given all this talent, it was natural that top executives—especially AT&T presidents—would ask him to write their speeches.

Bob was as good a ghostwriter as he was at everything else he was asked to do. This ability was fortunate, because he found a paucity of ideas in the “top people” for whom he wrote.

No job is more anonymous—and thankless—than that of a ghostwriter. Why would Bob consent to do it? First, his preference was to operate behind the scenes More importantly, however, it was a way for him to live out his long-term mission to influence and change his company from within.

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White House ghostwriters would agree, especially the best ones like Peggy Noonan, who wrote some of President Reagan’s finest speeches.⁶ Greenleaf was able to use others as a mouthpiece for his ideas about how a business could achieve greatness.

His speeches followed classic form, right out of any good textbook: establish rapport with the audience, preview the ideas, make at least three key points and support each with statistics or stories, visualize possible results, call your listeners to action, and summarize. It’s no different than the familiar advice: “Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em. Tell ‘em. Tell ‘em what you told ‘em.” Greenleaf added plenty of stories that were motivated by the content, had the speaker freely admit he did not know all the answers, and provided lines that flat-out inspired the audience.

As for content, every ghostwritten speech was different, but most contained common elements:

1. Frank attention to economic realities. Every business must make a satisfactory profit, protect its assets, develop new products, and strengthen its position in industry and the economy.
2. Concern with relationships, “that is, the rights and duties that exist between the business and the people whose lives it affects.” Does the business conform to legal and ethical standards, maintain good shareholder relations, and satisfy the wants of customers? Does it maintain good relations with competitors to improve the industry? Does it earn the respect of communities in which it operates and influence favorably the climate in which all businesses operate? “Are the people in the business growing in terms of morale, attitude, ability, initiative, self-reliance and creativity? Is the business contributing as it should to the welfare of its people… to do for themselves in such matters as economic security, health, safety, family stability and community responsibility?”⁷
3. Concern with improving management. A company should continually improve its knowledge of and control over its business, nurture future top management, and contribute to the body of management research.
4. Overarching themes. Set goals beyond the immediate, safe ones. Delegate responsibility, expecting that some will fail, and make each person responsible for both successes and failures. Encourage lifelong learning; offer extensive training but expect each employee to be responsible for his or her own personal growth and development. Practice foresight as an ethical responsibility.⁸

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Greenleaf used dozens of pithy stories to illustrate his points. When insurance executives asked President Cleo Craig to give a speech describing how the Bell System forecast coming trends, Greenleaf supplied a ready story for the speaker.

Greenleaf, who was a reader of Emerson, often used short, vivid language to make points.

“If a man puts a fence around what he wants to know, the inevitable result is that what he does know will serve him less and less.”¹⁰

“Be courageous in separating those who cannot meet the standard. In the end this is better for all concerned… we all know that management takes backbone.”¹¹

“If you can get the idea of quality into people’s blood and people’s bones, they are alert and receptive to a goal that is beyond their reach.”¹²

“Every business needs something to strive for, something to become, something to achieve, goals to reach. What kind of a business should it be? What should be its role in the industry or the economy? What position is it striving to attain?”¹³

Writers know that one learns how to write by writing. After honing his craft writing for others, Greenleaf finally hit a point where he wanted to write for himself. He had recognized that impulse in his earliest journal entries and, several times, jotted down notes that he expected to be part of a “spiritual autobiography.” Most importantly, he knew he now had something to say.

A year after he began his dream work, Bob began writing his first book, which he called The Ethic of Strength. It took six years to com-plete.¹⁴ In the preface, Greenleaf says the book “was the fruit of many 233discussions over the past ten years with individuals and groups of persons interested in their own growth and development” and was augmented by lectures he gave at MIT and Harvard Business School through 1965. ¹⁵The audience was young people who, Greenleaf assumed, “wanted to excel, to assume some important responsibility and carry it with distinction… I assumed further that they were especially concerned about their ability to be right and just and honorable in all of their dealings.”¹⁶

In the manuscript, Greenleaf argues that one needs strength to make ethical decisions. He defines strength as “the ability to see enough choices of aims, to choose the right aim, and to pursue that aim responsibly over a long period of time.”¹⁷ It sounds traditional enough, but the fact that Greenleaf always italicizes the word strength is a tip-off that his meaning is anything but traditional.

Much of the rest of the book is an attempt to lure readers beyond knowledge and analytical systems toward the role of a seeker who is open to new knowledge, able to live in joyful awareness of the moment and committed to growth, all in the context of radical responsibility. And what is the source of this capacity? Entheos, a sixteenth century word from the roots en, “possessed of,” and theos, or “spirit.” Greenleaf wrote that “Entheos is the essence, the power actuating the person who is inspired [by spirit]… I choose the word entheos with this connotation because to be strong in the times we live in—to choose the right aim and to pursue that aim responsibly over a long period of time—one must have inspiration backed by power.” Greenleaf’s contention is that anyone who makes decisions should, as an ethical imperative, develop this kind of seeking, openness, and strength.¹⁹

The last, one-page chapter of the book recounts a dream Greenleaf recorded in his journal on March 2, 1957.

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Bob did not explain the dream. It does not take much imagination, however, to see the value the dream places on organic processes over sterile procedures. The dream’s wisdom figure offers a potent symbol that suggests a predetermined course through the labyrinth of possible paths will not work. When making important decisions at work or at home, says Greenleaf, we need to cultivate strength, nurtured by entheos, to choose the right aim and to pursue it responsibly over a long time. This approach is not simply “another way” of making decisions. It is an ethical requirement for making any decisions.

Bob’s journal shows that he was alternately excited and discouraged about the book. It remained unpublished during his lifetime, and he left no clues as to the reason. When it was discovered in the Greenleaf archives at Andover Newton Theological School in 1992, even his son was surprised to hear of its existence, although letters show that some of his contemporaries were aware of the project. To this day, The Ethic of Strength remains fresh and useful.

Meanwhile, Bob was working on other writings, perfecting the form that would become the most natural for his message—the essay. In 1962, he published a small pamphlet called “Education and Maturity,” a reproduction of a talk he gave at Barnard College in 1960.²¹ “The most important lesson I have learned about maturity is that the emergence, the full development, of what is uniquely me should be an important concern throughout my life,” he wrote.²²

Greenleaf goes on to outline four requirements for living into maturity. First, if one accepts responsibility, one must expect commensurate stress. “I see no exceptions: no completely whole persons, nor any chance of it. You must not look forward to any idealized achievement, no perfect or enduring adjustment to your life work.”²⁵ Second, one most hold fast to the essential inner person while participating in legitimate, external conformity. Third, find personal significance outside the complications of status, property, and “achievement.” Finally, engage in processes of growth, drawing on the power of entheos to track the “changing patterns and depths of one’s interests.”²⁵ “The ultimate test of entheos, however, is an intuitive feeling of oneness, of wholeness, of rightness; but not necessarily comfort or ease.”²⁶

Bob and Esther continued their practice of attending lectures and conferences, making friends with people who interested them and had something to teach. For years, Bob’s interest in poetry had drawn him to Robert Frost, and more than once he attended Frost’s readings and engaged in dialogue with the master American poet.

When Frost died in 1963, Bob wrote an “engagement” with his poem Directive.²⁷ Bob’s take on the poem, which he never claimed was the only “right” interpretation of it, echoes his struggle to face the losses that would be associated with giving up old patterns should he retire early, to find new solid ground, and to embrace emerging spiritual understandings. One line from the poem jumped out at him: “If you’ll let a guide direct you who only has at heart your getting lost.”

Bob was as reflective in his personal letters as he was in his essays. The year before he wrote the commentary on Directive, he and Esther visited an old friend who had recently been diagnosed with a very serious illness. That night Bob went home and wrote a letter to “B” in which he offered “not advice, but just some reflections stimulated by our discussion.” Bob’s letters to friends and colleagues were always gracious, always curious about the recipient’s situation, but also full of thoughtful insights about ideas that were important to him and Esther at the time. They were gifts from the heart, often compassionate, always stimulating. The one to “B” is worth quoting at length.

Greenleaf congratulates “B” on accepting his physical situation as an opportunity. “I just hope that when the opportunity shall be mine I can do as well,” he wrote. The letter continued:

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In addition to his duties with AT&T, Bob managed to invest another lifetime of activity with outside organizations. From 1950 to 1957, he was a member of the faculty for the Graduate School of Credit and Financial Management at Dartmouth College and an occasional lecturer at the School of Industrial Management at MIT and Harvard Business School. He was a trustee of the Russell Sage and Yokefellow Foundations and upheld membership in various professional organizations like the Society for the Advancement of Management and the American Management Association. Meanwhile, he continued his formal and informal work with the Quakers.

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Esther stayed busy too. Besides raising the children and entertaining, she continued her artwork, attended conferences, hosted study groups with Bob, and read voraciously. The Greenleafs were good friends with Peter and Doris Drucker, who lived nearby in Montclair, New Jersey. Bob considered Esther to be Drucker’s intellectual equal and always remembered how she would “nail him when Peter took off on a fanciful idea once in a while.” One time, Esther lectured Peter soundly on the evils of Coca Cola, a substance she consigned to hell right next to chocolate.³¹ Esther also stayed involved in volunteer efforts. Through a Quaker venture in New York City, she taught pottery to inmates at the women’s prison in the Greenwich Village area. One afternoon a week, she made her way through the guards and bars to turn pots with thieves, prostitutes, and murderers. She found some of them to be “very remarkable people.”³²

In the fall of 1962, Bob took a leave of absence from AT&T to serve as visiting lecturer at the School of Industrial Management at MIT (renamed the Sloan School of Management in 1964) and Harvard Business School. According to author Warren Bennis, who was a young MIT professor at the time, Douglas McGregor had asked Bob to the MIT campus. It was an unusual move, because the renowned MIT program, which was established with the goal of educating the “ideal manager,” did not usually invite practitioners as visiting professors.³³ By 1962, McGregor’s 1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise was the talk of managers everywhere. In it, he presented two contrasting theories of human motivation: Theory X assumes workers are lazy and must be motivated by threats and authoritative management. Theory Y assumes workers are creative, eager to work, and wish to participate in decision making. Needless to say, Greenleaf was a Theory Y man. Partly as a result of McGregor’s work, a movement was brewing, which would culminate in the creation of the discipline of organizational development a few years later.

Author Peter Vaill, one of the pioneers in the organizational development movement, was a doctoral student at Harvard Business School when Greenleaf taught there. He recalls that during this period, Bob was also in consultation with principal Hawthorne researchers Fritz Roethlis-berger and William Dickson about an effort to convince American businesses to adopt the idea of internal counselors (also called listeners or facilitators) along the lines of the Hawthorne model. The idea never really caught on, in spite of the 1966 book by Roethlisberger and Dickson, Counseling in an Organization: A Sequel to the Hawthorne Researches.³⁴

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One of the classes Bob taught at MIT was “Intuition in Strategy and Decision Making.” It was oversubscribed, and Bob had to teach two sections. “This was not so much because the study of intuition was popular as it was the desire of many of those highly trained analytical minds to heckle the fellow who had the temerity to offer such a course in that bastion of conscious rationality,” he wrote the editor of Business Week twelve years later. “But we had a great time and some of my students confessed an enlarged view of their human potential as a result of the effort.”³⁵

At a lunch in June of 1962, George Baker, the Harvard Business School Dean, asked Bob if he would share his reflections after his academic year at the school. The following summer, Bob wrote the Dean and expressed deep gratitude for the experience (“I found my own creative wheels spinning in new and significant ways…”) and wished that other strategically-placed business people could have a similar opportunity. Then he shared several ideas sparked by his time as a professor. “These are not recommendations, or even suggestions,” he wrote, “because I do not have a full enough understanding of what is possible or the priority of needs to urge anything.”³⁶ Surprisingly, the first comment had to do with architecture.

Bob had noticed the Harvard students’ “obsessive preoccupation” with job searches near the end of their time at the school. His idea was “a voluntary seminar in the first term of the first year with the aim of discovering how to prepare the student to deal with his job-finding in a way that favors a good choice in terms of reward, satisfaction, and using his life well.”

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His third idea was an experimental program for the top twenty-five or so students in the MBA program, chosen for their “scholarship, character, personality, and public conscience.” Following their first year, they would spend fifteen months in “three intensive six-week seminar type programs on the campus before, between, and after two five-month internships attached to a top statesman—a person of great personal stature in government (governor, senator, cabinet officer) and a similar man at the head of a large or medium-sized business.” Greenleaf wrote, “I am not concerned with what [this top group] will do for themselves, or even for their employers; they will do very well. But I am concerned about the broad social obligations which men like these should have because of their great talents; and I wonder what the chance is that they will recognize and meet these obligations.” It was an idea that used old-fashioned apprenticeships to develop natural talents—in this case, those of the gifted elite. The value of this approach would have been obvious to every laborer and craftsman back in Terre Haute, Indiana who learned his own trade in exactly the same way.

Bob did more than teach during his year at Harvard and MIT. He also managed to attend a National Training Laboratories conference for middle managers, work with the National Council of Churches in drafting a proposal on Executive Development for Church Leadership, and draft a proposal with Professor Joseph Fletcher for a Center for Applied Ethics. During the Christmas break, he and Esther traveled to England, Holland, Belgium, France, and Spain under a fellowship from the Ford Foundation, visiting schools of management in business and government.³⁷ He was spreading his wings, making global connections, learning with the eagerness of a one-year-old, and reaching conclusions with the experience and wisdom of the fifty-eight-year-old man he was.

In Europe, Bob found some version of the organizational principle of primus inter pares (“first among equals,” as opposed to a top-down pyramidal structure) implemented at Philips, Royal Dutch Shell, and Unilever.³⁸ While in England, Bob visited the Administrative Staff College in Henley. He was not impressed with its operation but did solidify contacts that would lead to five trips to India in the next decade. He also found that university programs for management education in England tended to be moribund, while the best companies were lively and innovative, the exact opposite of the situation in the U.S.

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In his report on the experience, Bob admitted that he had had little time to adequately understand the complexities of the university, governmental, and corporate organizations he visited but believed that his findings would “be the central focus of my personal effort for the next few years.”³⁹ Those efforts would focus on ways to identify and nurture those young people who would bring character, purpose, and excellence to public and private domains.

He goes on to suggest a plan to identify, nurture, and follow up with exceptional young people. It is a scheme much like the one he proposed to Dean Baker at Harvard, writ large, but with a caution.

Bob practiced what he preached. At every opportunity, he encouraged outstanding young people to claim their gifts and all young adults to dedicate their lives to distinction. When possible, he personally participated in their development. During the year at Harvard and M.I.T., he met a second-year student with whom he was impressed. Bob arranged for him to spend a year studying and working with a west coast business. Every four to six weeks the student returned to Cambridge to spend a weekend with Bob, report on his findings, and be challenged to do more. The young man was paid a good salary and, through Bob’s influence, was able to count it toward his doctorate.

Another outstanding student Greenleaf met that year was Joseph J. Distefano, a mathematician working on his M.B.A. at Harvard.⁴² The following year Les Rollins, Assistant Dean of Harvard Business School, arranged for Joe and another student to travel to New York every two weeks to work with Greenleaf. Years later, at the opening session of a group led by Greenleaf in Brown County, Indiana, Distefano told a group what it was like to have Robert K. Greenleaf as a mentor, both during that eight-month mentoring period and afterwards.

The next morning Joe sat next to Bob and Esther at breakfast. Bob silently slipped the tag from a Salada tea bag into Joe’s jacket. It read, “THE PEARLCAUSED THE OYSTER GREAT PAIN.”⁴³

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Early in 1964, Bob took a three-month leave of absence from AT&T so he and Esther could travel to India on a project for the Ford Foundation. It was the first of numerous journeys he would make to that country in the next seven years, investing a total of over one year there. As the decade of the sixties unfolded, he would make a lasting contribution to management research and development in India, one that is evident to this day.⁴⁴ During that first trip though, his most important move was the definite decision to take early retirement from AT&T at the earliest option, on his sixtieth birthday in July 1964. He seemed to have made the informal decision to do so five years earlier when he began to slowly dismantle his staff and find advantageous placements for them elsewhere. “I had a staff of twenty,” he wrote later, “and when I left, there was just one assistant, with whom I shared a secretary. I have wondered why nobody asked why I did that.”⁴⁵ From India, he wrote the office in New York to announce his intentions.

When his letter arrived at 195 Broadway, nearly everyone was stunned. Bob was close to the AT&T president and board members. He was allowed to mount innovative projects, affect the culture of the company in positive ways, and work with outside organizations. The man had been allowed to define his own job for over thirty years! In short, Bob Greenleaf “had it all,” including widespread admiration. “Aren’t you happy here?” asked AT&T president Fred Kappel. Bob told him he was ready to work on his own time, with people he chose, outside a bureaucracy. “This I don’t understand,” said Kappel. I have never known anyone, in this business or anywhere else, who throughout his whole career has done only what he wanted to do. Where will you ever find anyone else to pay you to do this?” Greenleaf’s feeble reply was, “I want to try.” ⁴⁶

In fact, Bob was ready to live into the future for which he had been preparing. The teaching and consulting activities of the last few years had stimulated his juices. The situation at AT&T was not likely to become any 244more congenial to a “conceptualizer” like Bob. The managers, the “opera-tionalizers,” had been promoted to the top spots. After the breakup of AT&T in 1984, he was able to be more open about his feelings on this changing climate.

As an example of how controlling bureaucracies tended to deaden managers’ creativity, Greenleaf once told the story of a person who was promoted to president of a Bell Company just after the war. This outfit had been poorly run, and its employees were dispirited. The first thing the new president did was visit the territory. “He went into an office that had just been totally repainted,” remembered Greenleaf, “and on the wall at the entrance was a tattered, faded old war poster that had obviously been taken down when the wall was painted and then put back up. ‘What’s that terrible thing doing on the wall there?’ he asked. ‘Well,’ said the office manager, ‘the order came out to put it up and no order ever came to take it down.’”⁴⁸

Bob also believed most boards were populated by nuts-and-bolts managers, rather than big-picture thinkers. One day the Chairman of the Board invited him in to talk over a problem. After listening, Bob suggested that the solution might become more evident if the speaker developed a better understanding of how the problem came about. The man who was ultimately responsible for the performance of the largest business organization in the history of the world responded, “I don’t want to understand the damn thing. I just want to know what to do about it!”⁴⁹ For thirty-eight years Bob had been able to work comfortably within the bounds of such thinking, and even try to change it where he could. In fact, during his last five years with the company, president Kappel told him privately that his real job was to train his bosses.⁵⁰ Still, he was now ready 245to invest time with those who did wish to understand the problems and do the right things about them.

Bob agreed to stay through September so he could teach one of the scheduled Dartmouth sessions and tidy up some loose ends. On one of those final days, an old friend approached him. His friend, the president of an AT&T subsidiary, was nearing the mandatory retirement age of sixty-five. “I would like to spend my retirement years in a constructive and interesting way like you are going to do,” he explained. “Can you advise me?” Bob’s response was not what his friend wanted to hear, but it is something every working person should hear if he or she wishes to make solid contributions after retirement.

Bob always expressed gratitude for his time at AT&T—for the learning, the income that allowed him to provide for his family, and the opportunity to live out that vision Professor Helming accidentally sparked in 1926, but he knew the company would not try to replace him, and he was right.

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During the years after his retirement, Bob wrote numerous reflections on his time at the communications giant but seldom mentioned the impact he might have had on others. For those kinds of judgments, one must look to others, like William Sharwell.

Mr. Sharwell worked closely with Bob from 1955 to 1960. His experiences were typical of those of hundreds of people who worked directly with Bob during his thirty-eight years at the company.⁵²

On a morning before one of those day-long seminars, Bob arranged to meet Eric Erickson for breakfast and walk with him to the 195 Broadway building. Dr. Erickson seemed very nervous, not anxious to get to the 247conference. He finally admitted that he did not understand business or the jobs of business executives, and did not think he had anything to say them. Bob calmed his fears and the day was a smashing success.⁵³

Sharwell was able to experience first-hand Bob’s playfulness at home and strategic prowess at work.

At the release party for the book, AT&T president Frederick Kappel, who had given the ghost-written speeches, presented Bob with an autographed copy. Bob thanked him and then, with a twinkle, asked Fred if he would like Bob to autograph a copy for him.⁵⁴

William Sharwell was eventually promoted to head up New York Telephone during a period of outrageously bad service. At times, Wall Street telephones had no dial tone. Sharwell, a man who, by his own admission, did not know how to hook up a telephone, “spent a couple a billion dollars” and fixed the problem. Ironically, after building up the Bell System for so many years, he was asked to pull it apart as the Operations Divestiture Officer during the time of the AT&T breakup. His affection for Bob Greenleaf lasted into old age.