CHAPTER 17
New Skin for New Wine

The best strategy of developing the Center’s program at this time seems to be one of responding to opportunities rather than an organized, idealistically-oriented program. Our major aim of helping the colleges build for more responsible participation in society is going to be a most difficult one to follow. The colleges, at this point, are more concerned with survival in short-range terms than with an influence that would be as difficult as the one we are urging—even their own survival might depend on it in the long run. Consequently my own personal efforts will be to exploit available opportunities rather than a bald frontal kind of program. By this process the Center may never be credited with a major contribution, but its influence might nonetheless be greater.

ROBERT K. GREENLEAF

President’s Report, Center for Applied Studies, Inc.
November 29, 1968

With Bob’s early retirement he entered into a new phase of leadership. While his learning would continue until the day he died, he was now ready to apply to the wider world all his preparation, all the accumulated 252insight and wisdom, all the lessons from his failures and triumphs. If a better society required good and able people to step out, he was ready. Otherwise, of what use was all that preparation, all that seeking?

Robert Greenleaf was now an official consultant. Once word got out that he was available, organizations lined up for his services, but many wanted to hire him as an employee rather than a consultant. Three universities, including Dartmouth, offered professorships, one with no explicit teaching requirements. “There were other offers of long-term foundation consultancies,” he wrote. “A prestigious management consulting firm invited me to join them; a large foundation asked me to be their executive. I turned down all of these offers because I made a firm resolve when I retired from AT&T that I would not go on anyone’s payroll. I had had thirty-eight years of bureaucratic participation, some of it onerous, and I wanted no more of that… I decided that henceforth I would work at my own pace at only the things I wanted to do and only with people I enjoyed working with.”¹

It may have been harder to turn down offers from four major publishers to write a book. In that decision, Bob trusted his intuition. “I did not feel a book coming on,” he recalled years later. “That would come, if it came, in its own right rhythm.”²

Bob wanted an umbrella organization to give legal and financial structure to his work and board members who could advise and support his activities. While he believed that every important effort started with the individual, he also believed that organizations were the way to get things done in America’s modern, complicated society. So he dusted off the proposal he and Joseph Fletcher worked on during Bob’s year of teaching at Harvard and MIT and, on September 10, 1964, held the first meeting of incorporators for the Center for Applied Ethics at 50 Federal Street, Room 1000, Boston, Massachusetts.³

The legal Statement of Purposes said the Center would promote, research, publish, educate, and consult in “the broad range of ethical concerns in the fields of law, business, government, education, medicine, religion, and other areas of professional practice…” That part reads like a boilerplate paragraph, but the statement goes on with a twist: “and to develop inward resources, by reference to perspectives provided by great theologies and ethical systems, which will enable decision makers in professional disciplines to be governed by individual moral and religious insights in exercising their reasoning-intuitive processes.”⁴ This legal 253document manages to mention, in one sentence, reasoning, intuition, morality, religion, universal and individual codes, external research, internal resources, decision-making, and professional disciplines.

In a “covering note” that first proposed the Center, Greenleaf wrote, “[The Center] is proposed because too much of the current concern with ethical conduct is with code and law, too little with ethical man striving to do his creative best.”⁵ That same document set the tone for the Center’s relationship to religion.

In his work at AT&T, and in his later writings, Greenleaf frequently mentioned two important questions that individuals and organizations asked far too infrequently: “What are you trying to do?” and “Whom do you serve?” You cannot do everything, and you cannot serve everyone. One must choose the focus and do what is reasonable and possible with available resources. The first question, “What are you trying to do?” was covered by the memorandum proposing the Center. A statement approved by the Center’s board in 1967 clarified the second question, “Whom do you serve?”

Greenleaf always understood that focusing on strong people could bring charges of elitism; it was something he mentioned in his letter to Harvard’s Dean Baker in 1963. He believed, however, that able leaders were present in every strata of society, and their potential leadership was not merely a function of their position, education, income, ethnicity, or religion. That was a lesson he had learned from Terre Haute’s working folks, from AT&T’s tough linemen and from the experience of Danish Folk Schools. If a person, young or old, was not judged to be a person of promise, he or she could become one through his or her own learning and reflection, taking advantage of every available person and resource, however meager. After personally training thousands of people at AT&T, Bob did not believe any program or system could turn around those who were smugly satisfied and unwilling to step out as leaders. All one could do was offer the opportunity to grow, and nurturance for those who had already decided to make a difference with their lives.

Consultant Greenleaf’s first new contract was with Ohio University in Athens, where he was able to experiment with a model of undergraduate education he had been developing since his long correspondence with Carleton’s president Cowling in 1934. OU was headed by Dr. Vernon Alden, who had been hired away from Harvard Business School in 1961. At age thirty-eight, he was the youngest president in OU’s history. Alden had worked with Lyndon Johnson to prepare the War on Poverty legislation and chaired the committee that developed the U.S. Job Corps. He was a heavy hitter, one of the brightest young men in America; he was also an imaginative risk-taker.

When Harvard Business School’s Assistant Dean J. Leslie (Les) Rollins retired, Alden lured him out to Southern Ohio—without portfolio or salary—to begin working on a scheme. “We wanted to create a program at a large state university that would be much more like the experience that a bright young student would have in a small private college,” Dr. Alden recalled years later.⁷ In other words, they wanted their Athens on the Ohio to be more like a Harvard on the Charles. Rollins was one of the founders of Greenleaf’s Center for Applied Ethics, and Alden knew Bob from his lectures on corporate ethics through the years at Harvard. 255Vern and Marion Alden frequently entertained Bob in their home during those years, reveling in conversation that ranged over wide areas but often landed back on the themes of undergraduate education and leader-ship.⁸ When Bob became available as a consultant, Dr. Alden asked him to help Les develop a program that would identify and nurture students from every discipline with exceptional potential.⁹ Through their combined contacts, OU secured funding from the Mead and Mellon foundations so no money would be diverted from the university’s normal budget.

Bob and Les went to work. With the able assistance of Frank Zammataro from admissions, they pored over the transcripts and applications of more than a thousand incoming freshmen. They interviewed nearly a hundred and chose around twenty-five to be part of what became known as the Ohio Fellows Program. The program had an unusual design for its time. Ohio Fellows could choose their courses. During the summers, they were placed in internship positions with top decision-makers—often presidents or directors of organizations—in business, government, and nonprofit settings. They were sent around the world to meet photographers and governors and engineers. Whatever their passion, their goals should not be limited!¹⁰ Finally, Ohio Fellows were encouraged to have formal and informal discussion groups and were treated to a succession of lectures from mind-boggling speakers, many of whom were secured through Bob and Les’s contacts: Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, columnist Ann Landers, anthropologist Margaret Mead, Ford executive Lee Iacocca, Senator Ted Kennedy, Cleveland Mayor Stokes, historian Arnold Toynbee, religious historian Houston Smith, even U.S. Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson. The lectures were open to all, but Ohio Fellows were able to spend time with the speakers in small groups.

Greenleaf frequently presented his essays to Fellows discussion groups. At a reunion in 2002, former Ohio Fellows from around the country converged to remember and celebrate their days in Athens. They spoke of Les Rollins’ consistent, tough, but loving challenges to excel. They recalled Bob Greenleaf’s brilliant writings, his penetrating questions and deep silences, and that look which seemed to communicate, simultaneously, a statement and a question: “I accept you,” and “Are you realizing your greatness?” One woman said that Bob Greenleaf planted a seed that changed her life, enabling it to grow into a life of service. A man 256remembered how a speech given by a visiting lecturer—Jack Sheen of Corning Glass, later a member of the Federal Reserve Board—and exposure to Rollins and Greenleaf moved him to forget the law profession and work with small banks. The core of that OU graduate’s current message to clients was, “The reputation for unbending professional and personal integrity is not an intangible asset. It is a measurable cash value asset.”¹¹

In April 1967, Greenleaf gave a rousing—and absolutely unsentimental—talk to freshmen who had applied for appointment as Ohio Fellows their sophomore year.

Greenleaf quoted E.B. White, Robert Frost, G. K. Chesterton, Saul Bellow, Emerson, a document on system analysis, and even a medical doctor who wrote a book on how to take people with medical training (that is, M.D. degrees) and turn them into doctors. Sixty-three-year-old Greenleaf advised nineteen-year-old kids on ways to nurture creativity and intuition, and on the importance of developing tough, behaviorally defined outcomes. He allowed that, “The hippie movement, for all its 257nightmarish qualities, might be a part of the searching of the younger generation for a new ethic, and we of the staid middle class should bestir ourselves to try to understand it in these terms.” By contrast, Greenleaf referred to a recent television documentary about hippies, which took the shallow position that, “Terrible temptations are being held out to our groping youth. How can we protect them, and ourselves?” If students were to take responsibility for their own self-development, they had better begin by accepting the world as it is—busy, stressful, imperfect, para-doxical—and go from there.

A core of faculty members volunteered to help with the Ohio Fellows Program, but most were suspicious that it was subversive, which, of course, it was—subversive to the normal way of doing things in universities. Perhaps that is a strategic reason why, in spite of the program’s innovative design and news value, the school kept internal and external publicity to a minimum. Dr. Alden explained an even more important reason for operating “under the radar,” just like Greenleaf did so frequently at AT&T: “We felt it might distort the program if it were publicized too much.”¹⁴

A young administrator named Kenneth Blanchard was one of those who understood the Ohio Fellows program and was an eager supporter. Ken came to OU in 1966 after a frustrating job search. At least five schools had declined to invite him for on-campus interviews after positive initial contacts. Even though he had a Ph.D. and was destined to become one of the most respected business thinkers and authors in the last two decades of the twentieth century, an official from Dartmouth told Ken that several references reported he had no academic interests and was not especially intelligent! Greenleaf’s friend Joe Distefano alerted him to the experiment 258at OU; Ken wrote Vern Alden, and Alden referred him to the School of Business Administration, which promptly hired him.

Ken Blanchard took an immediate interest in the goings-on of Rollins, Greenleaf, and the Ohio Fellows Program, and he and his wife Margie reveled in the visiting speakers. During his first year at the university, Ken joined Greenleaf and the Ohio Fellows for a weekend and was “enthralled with his thinking. In fact, when I got a chance to teach, I tried to put his servant-leadership concepts into practice.”¹⁵ Blanchard later recalled that the weekend was “really the only the time I spent time with [Bob]. He was a very gentle, caring man, a very insightful man. He really challenged you in his gentle way. In retrospect, I would love to go back and sit in on more.… Margie and I were twenty-seven years old and were trying to figure out who we were, and at the time I had no anticipation that I was going to be a teacher. The faculty all said I couldn’t write; I needed to be an administrator, you know…”¹⁶

Like Greenleaf, Ken Blanchard was a rebel in his own quiet way. When he began giving students final exam questions on the first day of class, faculty members asked him what he was up to. “My servant-leadership response was: ‘not only am I going to give them the final exam during the first day of class, but what do you think I’m going to do all semester? I’m going to teach them the answers! You better believe it, so when they get to the final exam, they’ll get A’s!’ To me, life is all about getting A’s, not about following the normal grade distribution curve.”¹⁷

When Blanchard heard that Paul Hersey, chairman of OU’s Management Department, was a fabulous teacher, he asked Hersey if he could audit his class in organizational behavior and leadership. Hersey said, “Nobody audits my class. If you want to take it for credit, you can,” and walked away. So, Blanchard enrolled in the course like any student (the school finally decided it would only charge him $55 tuition), wrote the class papers, and became friends with the professor. The next year, Hersey walked into Blanchard’s office and said, “Ken, I’ve been teaching for ten years, and I think I am better than anybody, but I can’t write. I’m a nervous wreck. I’d like to write a textbook, and I’d like to find somebody to write one with me. Would you be willing to do that?” Ken said, “Well, we ought to be a great combination; you can’t write and I’m not supposed to. Let’s do it!”¹⁸

From that conversation Ken Blanchard, Paul Hersey, and Dewey E. Johnson went on to write the classic textbook Management of Organizational 259Behavior and to develop concepts that were embodied in Situational Leadership^®. Greenleaf had a powerful, if indirect, effect on the latter work because he invited his old friend and co-founder of the Center for Applied Ethics, Joseph Fletcher, to OU for a lecture. In 1966 Fletcher, an Episcopal priest, had written the book Situation Ethics: The New Morality in which he outlined three approaches to making moral decisions: legalistic, antino-mian (lawless or unprincipled approach), and situational.¹⁹ Fletcher urged a situational approach based on what love requires in each situation. “Only love is a constant,” he wrote, “everything else is a variable.”²⁰

“Joe Fletcher really had more of an impact on me because of the situa-tional ethics,” says Blanchard. “I was grappling with my own spirituality, and he was kind of a rebel saying nothing was fixed.”²¹ Spirituality was the vehicle for Greenleaf’s influence to return to Ken Blanchard’s life in the early 1990s, when he began reflecting on Jesus as the ultimate servant-leader. Today, his FaithWalk Leadership organization helps people live their faith in the workplace and follow the servant-leadership model of Jesus.²² Meanwhile, Blanchard’s 1982 book The One Minute Manager has sold more than ten million copies—and counting.

Greenleaf was as much a mentor to the school’s president as he was to its students. When non-academic employees staged a strike in 1968 (Athens is in a pro-union part of the state), Ohio’s Attorney General told Dr. Alden that state law made it illegal to recognize the union and provide for check off dues. Alden heard of threats to dynamite the heating plant and decided to let the students out for an early spring break. “During that period of time, Bob worked very closely with me,” said Alden. “He was a kind of counselor and father figure. Because I was so busy, up to my ears dealing with the strike, he wrote several memoranda that we used in dealing with the press or dealing with the public at-large. And at the end of the strike, he wrote a philosophical paper describing the medieval roots of the university, saying we were very vulnerable to a union, which is really part of the contemporary corporate era. Business is much more capable of handling that kind of threat than is the university. So, that paper is what I used in addressing the university community when the strike was over.”²³

Vern Alden’s administration survived the strike. During his time at Ohio University, enrollment and faculty doubled in size. He oversaw a significant expansion of campus infrastructure, an increase in research activities, a broadening of academic programs, and growth of the university’s role in regional development and international programs. Today, 260you can visit the Vern Alden Library on campus, look up his impressive record, and read his book Essays on Leadership, which includes many of the ideas he got from Bob Greenleaf.

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In October 1964, Bob and Esther returned to India, where Bob was destined to make a significant contribution to that country’s management research and development efforts. Douglas Ensminger of the Ford Foundation had asked him to look into ways of revitalizing the Administrative Staff College (ASC) in Hyderbad. ASC was a training school for top administrators based on a military war college model begun by Sir Noel Hall after the war and set up at Henley on the Thames. It was not a very creative model but was simple to understand and easy to export to various countries in the British Commonwealth. By the 1960s, the ASC operation at Hyderabad, which was housed in one of the nizam’s (ruler’s) old palaces, was “doing little to contribute to India’s urgent needs for top ad-ministrators.”²⁴ Bob was not surprised. He had asked some of his friends in Europe about Sir Noel Hall and concluded that even though the idea of the Staff College was glamorous for its time, the man behind it was a slick

“huckster.”²⁵

During that first trip to India when Bob decided to take an early retirement from AT&T, he met the Minister of Heavy Industry, a “remarkable” Madras lawyer named Combatore Subramamiam, who asked him to solve an especially heavy problem. Even though India had iron ore and coal near their new steel mills, it was cheaper to ship all raw materials to Japan for processing into bars and sheets than to do the work in-country, even with India’s pittance wages. Rather than prove how smart he was by giving a quick answer, Greenleaf suggested a two-year project to study the problem thoroughly, using an international team of consultants with experience in such issues. Subramamiam agreed, the Ford Foundation provided the funding, and the Staff College gave permission to house the three-person team on their campus as an independent venture.

Bob spent half of that first trip traveling and getting a feel for the country and its industries, following his instinct to “seek first to understand” through research, personal contact and, finally, reflection. In the course of his journeys, he learned a lesson about the effects of recent Indian history.

By the time Bob and Esther returned to India, Nehru had died, Subrainamiam had moved on to another role, and the new Minister of Heavy Industry had no interest in the project. To make matters worse, one of the consultants arrived in India and decided he would rather write a book. All was in jeopardy. “Fortunately, I had reflected extensively about what could be done with the Staff College,” Greenleaf wrote later. “I concluded that they had a problem because they had accepted a foreign (though glamorous) import model [of management training] and that they would only do better when and if they replaced it with a program that was generated out of their own experience.”²⁶ Bob’s idea was to “move the consulting project into the Staff College as a consulting company, a business that would develop clients among the widest possible range of Indian institutions, and use it as a resource of knowledge that would guide the development of future programs to serve Indian institutions.”²⁷

The Staff College principal, R. L. Gepta, was agreeable, but the strongest supporter of the idea was the exceptionally strong chair of the 262Staff College’s board, Dr. C. D. Deshmukh, who was also the top administrator at the University of Delhi. The only problem was the Staff College faculty. “They were in an uproar about it and half of them departed immediately because they could see that this institution was working in the direction of an earthy, practical resource for India and away from the prestigious showpiece that they thought they had.”²⁸ A strong board chair saved the day, however, just like J. P. Morgan had done in the early years of AT&T.

The consulting enterprise flourished. After the Ford Foundation money ran out, it continued as a self-sustaining non-profit organization and was able to provide financial support for the Staff College. It continues to this day, consulting with sugar mills, refineries, energy companies, and indigenous and international financial organizations like the World Bank. Faculty members stay in touch with current trends by working on research through consulting contracts, then share their fresh knowledge in the classroom.²⁹

Eleven years after Greenleaf’s final trip to India, the president of an American university asked him about the advisability of starting a business that could funnel money back to his school. He told the story of the Administrative Staff College. “I didn’t start a business to make money for the [Administrative Staff] College,” he wrote. “I would have been happy if the consulting company had been the idea resource that helped the College find a new way of serving India that made it a useful institution for those times. And I suspect that you wouldn’t do much for [your school] if all you did was start a business that would earn some money.”³⁰

Through five trips to India over six years, voracious reading, and wide exposure to Indian society, Greenleaf developed contrarian views about Gandhi, the future of India, and America’s hubris as expressed through foreign aid. On the latter, he wrote, “It seemed to me presumptuous that the more favored nations, because they have the surplus cash to finance an exchange, would be willing to teach the Indians our Western ideas but we had little or no interest in learning what they might teach us—different things, but perhaps of greater significance to us than what we have to share might do for the Indians.”³¹ When he presented this view to the Ford Foundation staff during his final visit in 1970, he drew a blank. “There was no interest whatever in using Ford Foundation resources for learning what the Indians could teach us to our benefit.”³² When Bob returned to America, he wrote a memo to Ford Foundation 263headquarters summarizing the same conclusions he presented to their staff in New Dehli. The result: “My memo was not acknowledged, and I have not heard from the Ford Foundation since.”³³

Greenleaf had an unusual take on Gandhi and his strategy of change. Gandhi had the vision of India as a village-centered handicraft society which, in fact, was what it had always been. “[Gandhi’s] place in history may be that of the greatest leader of the masses of people the world has ever known,” wrote Greenleaf, “But there is a question that the consequence of his work was the best that a person of his genius could have done for the world, or even for India.” ³⁴ Greenleaf considered Gandhi’s non-violent tactics essentially coercive, especially when judged by the model of Quaker activist John Woolman, who persuaded his fellow Friends to give up their slaves. “Massive nonviolent withholding of cooperation and a fast-unto-death by the leader are destructive,” wrote Green-leaf. “They are useful to stop something or destroy something, but little of importance can be built with them. (Nehru judged those tactics cor-rectly.)”³⁵ Gandhi eventually gained compliance, but not lasting change of the kind he wished. Nehru, an urbane, classical socialist, had no intention of following Gandhi’s ideas; he wished to lead the new country toward Western industrialization.

Many with whom Greenleaf spoke believed the country was not yet ready for independence. Maybe not, Bob decided, because he noticed that the ruling elite tended to take on the “worst of the arrogance of their recently displaced colonial masters. Since population growth had offset most of the gains in food production (that had been stimulated by foreign aid and technology) I wondered whether the life of the masses seemed any different to them from the conditions of colonial times.”³⁶ Then there was the religious violence that led to the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh, a bloodbath that resulted in an estimated million deaths at the time of independence.

Greenleaf drew a moral from all this.

Back in America, Bob’s consulting jobs grew exponentially. He worked with organizations as varied as the Committee on Structure of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (1966), the Harvard Divinity School (1965–71), and the Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli in Turin, Italy (1969–70). He was an Executive in Residence for the School of Business at Fresno State College (1968), and a faculty member of the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies (1968).

During these consulting days, Greenleaf once asked Douglas Williams to join him for an evening meeting with a few top people from a large corporation. “Along at the end of the get-together, when we were relaxing,” recalled Williams, “one of them asked Bob, ‘What do you do now?’ Bob referred to a couple of responsibilities he was involved with but then said, ‘Most of the time I just go to the top of the mountain and think big thoughts.’ This hard-bitten guy nodded understandingly. That was because he had gotten to know Greenleaf personally over a couple of hours.”³⁸

By foregoing the retirement rocking chair for a life of consulting, Bob increased his income significantly, according to his daughter Madeline. “I was always a very nosy child and looked at some documents that ‘happened’ to be lying on his desk at Short Hills. What I remember is that during his last year at AT&T he was making $32,000. But, they were comfortable. Either the first or second year after his retirement, he made $75,000.”³⁹ This, in spite of the fact that letters show Bob frequently asked only for expenses, especially with clients who were old friends—people like the Erteszek family.

Jan and Olga Erteszek were Polish immigrants who realized the American dream through the lingerie business, turning a $10 investment in 1941 into the multimillion-dollar Olga Company. Olga Erteszek was a beautiful, stately, soft-spoken lady. She also happened to be brilliant, and held multiple patents on designs for bras and other lingerie designs. Her husband Jan was a man of faith who wanted to run the company by Christian principles. He believed every person was a trustee of God-given talent and should give back to co-workers and the community. Jan met Greenleaf through the Laymen’s Movement in the early 1960s, and he and Olga stayed in touch with Bob through the years, speaking frequently by phone.

The Erteszeks worked to create a different kind of company. They instituted profit sharing before it was popular, reserved no designated parking places for themselves or other executives, took comparatively reasonable personal salaries, and were fond of saying, “Management is a function, not a class.” Both believed in hard work, top quality products, personal accountability, and having a moral impact without being evangelists. They were Bob Greenleaf’s kind of folks, and were on his short list of recipients who saw first drafts of his essays through the years.

When Bob visited the Olga Company offices in Van Nuys, California, Jan Erteszek’s secretary was reminded of her own grandfather. “He was large, raw-boned, and not high on fashion. To look at him, you would think he didn’t have a brain in his head, but Mr. E. talked about him all the time and put many of his ideas into practice.” More than once, Bob used the Olga Company as a site for student internships. In 1972, Jan asked him to develop a proposal for an Ethics of Leadership Program at Whittier College, where Jan was a trustee.

Jan and Olga Erteszek were typical of people in Bob’s constellation of friends and practitioners, people with whom he had serious discussions about experiments in ethical management, risk-takers who operated from an impulse to serve, thoughtful and well-read leaders who got things done. Some of these people and their organizations appear on his resume, but many do not. As an intense listener, he probably felt he learned more from them than he gave.

James W. McSwiney was another one of those special friends. Early in Bob’s consulting career Vern Alden introduced him to McSwiney, who was at that time a vice president of the Mead Corporation. Mac, as his friends called him, joined the company at age nineteen and stayed for fifty years. He was named President and CEO in 1968. His colleagues knew him as a larger-than-life leader with a quick mind, a person who chose to focus on solutions rather than place blame, and an executive who worked to nurture the growth of people. “You can’t effectively lead unless you help other people,” said McSwiney. “Even mediocre people can help you immensely, but only if you provide them with the vehicle… If you operate by persistent example it’s amazing how other people respond.”⁴⁰ In Mac’s early days at the company, George Mead especially liked him for his candor. “You ask me something and I’ll tell you what I think about it,” he said.⁴¹

When Bob met him, Mac was offering a management development program as sophisticated as those Bob had created at AT&T. McSwiney went on to transform board governance at Mead by separating the CEO and chair roles, establish an effective Corporate Responsibility Committee, and prove his foresight by declaring—in 1967—that “the world is going digital” and backing his claim by buying and nurturing a small company that developed inkjet technology and the databases Lexus® and Nexus®.⁴² In other words, Mac was a servant-leader before he ever met Bob Greenleaf, and had already taken the next step of applying his philosophy to corporate mission, governance and structures.

Bob spent most of his time with Mac listening and clarifying issues, not offering solutions. Whether they were meeting in Dayton with Mead’s friend Walker Lewis or walking the beach at Mac’s house at Sea Island, Georgia, each man learned from the other. “[Mac] needs someone who will listen,” said Bob. “My job was providing a focus.” ⁴³ In return, Mac was a sounding board for Bob’s evolving philosophy of leadership. “I don’t think he had had exposure to many people in positions like mine who were as candid as I was with him,” recalled Mac, “so he found it rewarding and meaningful, I think, to test some of his ideas and thoughts.” Mac read everything Bob wrote and provided extensive feedback. “It wasn’t just reading my thoughts, it was analyzing them, commenting on them, and writing,” said Bob. “He has probably done as much with what I’ve written as anybody.”⁴⁴ William Carr, who wrote a book about McSwiney’s time at Mead, speculates that Mac was the model for a fictional character in Greenleaf’s 1979 book The Teacher as Servant.

“I don’t know how you capture a person like Bob in a book,” Mac said many years later. “He’s not someone you read about in history books. For goodness sake, don’t write about servant leadership so people can say, ‘I’m already doing this because I know it’s good.’ A lot of people don’t do anything except repeat the rhetoric. The trick is to make it happen and [servant leadership] isn’t any good unless it comes from the heart.”⁴⁶

After the death of Dr. Donald Cowling in 1965, Bob’s old “Prexy” at Carleton, Greenleaf sat down and wrote a short memorial about him. John Nason, one of Bob’s classmates at Carleton, was now president of the college and asked Bob to expand the piece into a brochure. In 1966, Bob delivered his manuscript: Donald J. Cowling: Lifestyle of Greatness. Dr. Nason 268was generally pleased but concerned about three issues: (1) “At times your approach is a little too personal.” (2) “In my judgment you overestimate Prexy’s greatness.” Nason believed Cowling’s autocracy and inflexibility mitigated against greatness. (3) Nason disagreed with Bob’s stance of addressing present undergraduates. “Undergraduates are unpredictable and skittish. Sometimes one has to approach them indirectly and downwind.”⁴⁷ Bob held fast on all points. Education was personal to him, and what he had to say about Cowling, for all the personality differences between them, had been filtered through his reflective process. Furthermore, Bob was determined to address current undergraduates. “Students should know that the quality of the institution they now enjoy did not build itself,” he wrote in an introduction to the essay, reprinted in the book Servant Leadership.⁴⁸

One time Greenleaf asked Nason if Carleton College, in its modern incarnation, would hire a person like Oscar Helming, the teacher who set the course of Bob’s career in 1926. After some thought, Dr. Nason said, “No,” and this answer saddened Bob. Still, in 1969 Dr. Nason recommended Bob for an honorary doctorate. The news release accompanying the announcement contained several revealing lines about the honoree.

With that wry introduction to the wider world, Robert K. Greenleaf became a Doctor of Humane Letters. You would think the degree might entitle Carleton to expect increased financial support from the “retired industrialist,” but one of the school’s development officers visited him in Crosslands Retirement Center in 1985 and did not file an encouraging 269report. “Bob will do what he can but is not considered to be a capital gift prospect,” he said in his follow-up memo.⁵⁰ The Greenleafs may not have had much extra money lying around, but what the poor prospector could not have known was Bob’s history in following his father’s example for charitable giving. Loyalty counted for little in his decisions; he was guided by proven, practical results. There was another matter too. When Bob had given to Carleton in the past he asked that his name not be publicized, but they published it anyway. Finally, he wrote a note to the alumni office: “I am not a contributor to the alumni fund because I am resolved not to contribute to anything that publishes lists of donors… The college should remove me from the list so I am not an expense to them.”⁵¹ President Nason chose Bob on his merits for the honorary doctorate. He knew Greenleaf well enough that he did not expect a quid pro quo—an honorary degree for a major contribution—but Bob’s attitude must have been surprising to university development officers who expected charitable donations to be the college’s reward for recognition.

In the summer of 1968, Greenleaf gave five lectures to the Dartmouth Alumni College on the subject of “Leadership and the Individual.”⁵² It was a clear, clean, conversational series of speeches which, for the first time, pulled together Bob’s most comprehensive thinking about leadership. It remains a good read today, even though some of the references are dated.

“We are in a leadership crisis,” Bob said, “because not enough of those who have the opportunity and the obligation to lead have kept themselves contemporary,” and because the communications explosion and cultural conditions begged for “an inventiveness and adaptability that leaders heretofore have not had to have.”⁵³ Furthermore, the educational system “is not designed to prepare for leadership.”⁵⁴ Greenleaf referred to his friend John Gardner’s influential 1965 essay “The Anti-leadership Vaccine,” which claimed that colleges turned students into critics and experts rather than vital, inspirited people prepared to assume the tough chores of sustained leadership. Universities, according to Gardner, tended to discourage leadership.⁵⁵ Bob agreed and also believed that young people were precious because they would be the ones to update the traditional Western values that started with Moses, keeping gems of timeless wisdom but adding fresh moral insights and sanctions. Finally, Greenleaf 270argued that whatever progress we make must be mediated first through individuals and then through institutions. “The only access we have to inspiration, those subtle promptings of intuitive insight from the vast unconscious storehouse of wisdom and experience, is through the mind of an individual.”⁵⁶ Then he made a statement that sounds like a clarion warning to all of us who live in a wall-to-wall media age.

In the other Dartmouth speeches, Greenleaf reworked some of his classic ideas about leadership. The “strategies of a leader,” for example, include goal setting—and who could disagree—but also nontraditional strategies like:

• The principle of systematic neglect. An old boss told Greenleaf it was “just as important to know what to neglect as to know what to do.”⁵⁸
• Listening. “Listeners learn about people that modify—first the listener’s attitude, then his behavior toward others, and finally the attitudes and behavior of others.”⁵⁹
• Language as a leadership strategy. “Whoever articulates the goal that makes the consensus idea is a de facto leader.… Some of our best communication, especially to the young, is done obliquely—let it be something they overhear rather than something beamed right at them. Most of us don’t like to be lectured to, but we all like to eavesdrop.”⁶⁰
• Values. “In just three value choices, we can separate what we want from what we don’t want in a leader. We want a leader to be honest, loving, and responsible.… As I see it, responsible people build. They do not destroy. They are moved by the heart; compassion stands 271ahead of justice. The prime test of whether an act is responsible is to ask, How will it affect people? Are lives moved toward nobility?”⁶¹
• Personal growth. “The leader must be a growing person. Non-growth people are finding it more and more difficult to lead, especially to lead young people.”⁶²
• Tolerance of imperfection. “Some people, a lot of people, in fact, are disqualified to lead because they cannot work through and with the half-people who are available to work with them.”⁶³
• Acceptance. “The interest and affection that the leader has for his followers—and it is a mark of true greatness when it is genuine—is clearly something that the followers ‘haven’t to deserve.’”⁶⁴

Greenleaf concluded his last Dartmouth lecture with this: “Virtue and justice and order are good, but not good enough—not nearly good enough. In the end, nothing really counts but love and friendship.”⁶⁵

Greenleaf was offering a philosophy of leadership, one based on his lifelong research, experience, and personal reflections. It was not a theory of leadership, based on primate studies of territoriality or the influence of one’s environment or even the traits of a leader. (Napoleon listed one-hundred fifteen qualities essential for a military leader.)⁶⁶ Neither was it based on one’s position in an organization, a bullet-point list of tips and techniques that make one a leader, the amount of money a person earns, or the extent to which one is a hero to others. (When asked in 1986 to explain the difference between a hero and a leader, Greenleaf replied, “I don’t see any connection.”)⁶⁷ Bob Greenleaf offered a leadership philosophy of the “ands;” a moral leader is one who incarnates doing and being, who is plugged in to contemporary issues and finds inspiration in the quiet solitude of intuitive insight, who takes responsibility for each decision on its own merits and for the impact it will have on others, now and in the future.

Greenleaf did not know it at the time, but his Dartmouth lectures were a warm-up for the most important piece of writing of his life.