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CHAPTER 18
The Servant Series

Late in 1968, while Apollo 8 dashed to and from the moon, Robert Greenleaf was at home reworking his Dartmouth lecture notes. He had an idea, just a phrase really, but it held language that opened a window to everything in which he believed—everything. The phrase was “servant-leader.” It had come to him in October while he and Esther were driving through the parched and stunning landscape of Arizona.

The previous year, Bob had consulted with the planning group of Prescott College about the attitudes entering college students bring with them to campus. Largely as a result of his prodding, the college had divided the 1968 freshman class into small seminar groups that met weekly 273with faculty members for discussions of their evolving perspectives. Greenleaf’s view was that, “It is possible that without such an effort, one impact of the academic program might be to accentuate some of the destructive tendencies that are brought to the campus when these students enter.”² He well knew about those disturbing tendencies because, as the 1960s unrolled, Bob had been in frequent touch with presidents and trustees of major universities like Harvard, MIT, Dartmouth, and Cornell.

The Prescott venture was part of a two-year thrust approved by The Center for Applied Ethics in March of 1967. (The Center changed its name to The Center for Applied Studies the following January.) Bob was to spend much of his time during this period in seminars with up to fifteen undergraduate colleges, working with faculty members to nurture students with the potential to enter public service, helping them to clarify and test their abilities, illuminate the moral implications of public service, and set a lifelong pattern of self-growth.³ Besides sponsoring Bob’s personal activities, the Center had quietly funded summer study programs and other opportunities for students from its earliest years, so this organizational thrust was not new.⁴

“I went out [to Prescott] prepared to do a week of afternoon voluntary seminars,” said Bob, “but I found that this upset the faculty for some reason that I do not know. It was not a course, but they were really up in arms about this being done, and exerted an influence on the students that made it virtually impossible for me to carry out the task that I had gone there to do as a volunteer.” ⁵ After the debacle the phrase “servant-leader” popped into Bob’s consciousness, and he decided to write an essay with that title.

As with so many other important things in his life, Greenleaf had prepared himself for this moment without knowing the goal of his preparation. In his travels around colleges, he always spoke with students and visited the campus bookstores to see what they were reading on their own. He saw rows and rows of books by the German novelist Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) and decided that “if I wanted to understand the students, I’d better look to see what Hesse was up to.”⁶ (Newcomb Greenleaf believes Esther may have also influenced Bob’s decision to read Hesse since she was his “advance scout” for important books.) Bob read every Hesse book in the order in which it was written, and simultaneously read a biography of the writer so he would know what was going on in the 274author’s life at the time. What he discovered was a gifted but tortured artist who tried to reconcile spirit, nature, and society while suffering from bouts of mental illness, failed marriages, and general turmoil. Journey to the East is connected in imagery and content to Hesse’s next book, The Glass Bead Game (1942), which he—and many reviewers—considered his greatest creative work.

Greenleaf was fascinated by Leo, the main character in Journey to the East.”

With students demonstrating on campuses, administrators running for cover, and parents and politicians up in arms, what did Greenleaf think he could accomplish by writing a short essay? It was simply what he could do. Recent consultancies with MIT and Cornell, the Prescott experience, and further contacts with students, faculty, and administrators in the Boston area convinced him that the situation was beyond repair by patchwork. Colleges were in too much turmoil for workshops to do much good. University structure and governance was the larger problem, but neither Bob nor the Center was prepared to tackle such a large-scale issue. The Center could, however, become a “resource for new content,” a catalyst for a “new value-oriented 275influence in the universities,” and the way to do that was through the word.⁸ The sword did not seem to be working, at home or abroad.

In the resulting essay, The Servant as Leader, Greenleaf suggests that a new moral principle may be emerging: “The only authority deserving of one’s allegiance is that which is freely and knowingly granted by the led to the leader in response to, and in proportion to, the clearly evident servant stature of the leader. Those who choose to follow this principle will not casually accept the authority of existing institutions. Rather, they will freely respond only to individuals who are chosen as leaders because they are proven and trusted as servants.”⁹ So followers choose leaders—authentic moral leaders—because they have proven their willingness to serve and even risk losing leadership by “venturing out for the common good.” But servant-leaders also make choices; they choose to build personal strength, “to opt for leadership as a meaningful lifestyle, toward which an individual may progress by conscious preparation.”¹⁰

Since the ultimate audience of the essay is students, Greenleaf quotes several prominent student leaders, among them Ms. Hillary Rodham, president of the student body at Wellesley College, who turned a few heads with her graduation speech:

Greenleaf applauds the spirit but also notes that society does not owe its citizens a “more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living. And those who pursue it too narrowly may lose their way. What we may achieve is likely to be something unasked…”¹²

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He then confronts the then-prevailing notion that “the system” is the problem. “The better society will come, if it comes, with plenty of evil, stupid, apathetic people around and with an imperfect, ponderous, inertia-charged ‘system’ as the vehicle for change.… The real enemy is fuzzy thinking on the part of good, intelligent, vital people, and their failure to lead. Too many settle for being critics and experts.”¹³

Servants may choose not to be leaders, not to “go out ahead and show the way,” but like Leo, “The true servant must lead in order to be a complete person!” Leaders are not trained, he asserts, they evolve through their own natural rhythms. One must master the knowledge of a field in which one leads, but “leadership overarches expertise, and it cannot be reduced to a style.”¹⁴

In the essay, Greenleaf touches on most of the major-wisdom ideas he refined in a lifetime packed with learning. A quick summary will suffice.

• The pyramid organizational structure with its dominating leader is no longer adequate. You can blame Jethro for that. (See Exodus: 18) When Jethro decided his son-in-law Moses was wearing himself out, he suggested the management principle of delegation: Place men over groups of tens, fifties, hundreds, and thousands. Moses gets to speak to God, the little people talk to their supervisors. Greenleaf has a wry take on this arrangement. “A close examination of Jethro’s principle reveals that it does not assume Moses in the role of servant. Clearly he is the dominating leader, dedicated though he may be to his job, and this arrangement seems designed primarily to assure his survival in that job.”¹⁵
• The leader needs to “have a sense for the unknowable and be able to foresee the unforeseeable” through intuition and reflection. Foresight, in fact, is the central ethic of leadership.¹⁶
• Everything begins with the initiative of the individual. “The leader has to initiate, push, provide the ideas and the structure, and take the risk of failure along with the chance of success. This is partly what the element of spirit is about; spirit sustains the leader as he or she takes the risk of saying, “‘I will go; follow me!’ when he or she knows that the path is uncertain, even dangerous.”¹⁷

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Most of the highlights of the Dartmouth lectures are covered here: listening, language as a leadership strategy, the art of systematic neglect, personal growth, persuasion, tolerance of imperfection, acceptance of the person. The essay ends with a final appeal to young people, urging them to recognize mediocrity in positions of influence because “That fellow is there because a few years ago someone like me failed to prepare for that job.”¹⁸ He urges them to demythologize leadership, to become more open to the meaning of chaos, live closer to the awe of mystery that is beyond “the logic of the spirit,” and remember that “not much that is really important can be accomplished with coercive power.”¹⁹

Bob completed the essay in March 1969 and sent several hundred copies out for comments. It had become his habit to solicit feedback from as many people as possible before he committed his words to final print. In the fall, he worked with an editor to revise the manuscript and by March, 1970, had sold three hundred copies and given away another three hundred.²⁰ Word of the essay spread through Bob’s regular—and wide— circle of friends. This piece seemed to take on a life of its own, building an underground network. Students and university faculty and administrators read it, but so did leaders in government, businesses, hospitals, elementary schools, and foundations. Catholic Orders of Sisters were especially enthusiastic.

Clearly, The Servant as Leader touched something deep in a vast audience beyond students. When asked about the source of that common spark, Greenleaf suggested that some readers may have had a person in his or her life like Bob’s father, a model servant-leader who established a pattern that had lain dormant. “This is not a bandwagon idea; it is not a best-seller kind of thing, but nevertheless, these people do exist and some of them have become very important to me… These people now are in all walks of life, and they are to some extent lonely people; but they don’t find themselves in environments that reinforce this disposition in their nature… I suspect that it’s quite common in our society that there are people with high levels of idealism who have had experiences that have shaken their hope that you can live productively with those ideals. Perhaps what I have written has given some people some encouragements, that there are ways to deal with whatever situation one finds oneself in and be more of a servant by trying than by not trying…”²¹

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As for the Catholic Sisters, Bob guessed that, “they of all people have probably made one of the largest servant commitments with their own lives, and they recognized an articulation of their principles of service that may have been new to them.²²

More than one Sister took issue with Bob on the source of the servant-leader idea, though. Soon after the essay was published, a Catholic Sister visited Bob for a conversation, one which he recalled vividly fifteen years later. “Where do you find in history the first reference to servant?” she asked. Bob replied, “In the Bible, of course. I’ve checked the concordance and I found thirteen hundred references to servant.” She then asked sharply, “Why then do you attribute what you have written to Hermann Hesse?” He answered, “Because that’s where I got the idea of the servant as leader. If I had not read Journey to the East, I may never have written anything on this subject.” Then, like a good Quaker, he continued, “The Bible did not end revelation. In my belief, revelation is continuous.”²³

A few years later Greenleaf’s friend Bob Lynn pushed him on the same point. At the time, Robert Wood Lynn was senior vice president for religion at the Lilly Endowment and a respected theologian with teaching and administrative experience in seminaries.

Ken Blanchard says something similar; “I know Bob felt that we should be citizens of the world. Countries were arbitrary, and he was 279concerned about religions separating us, but I think that servant leadership without a spiritual foundation is just another management technique.”²⁶

Another insight comes from Bill Bottum, an Ann Arbor businessman who was close to Greenleaf in his later years. According to Bill, one day Bob confided that the image of Jesus washing the feet of disciples, as described in John: 13, was one source of the idea of the servant-leader. But Greenleaf told his friend Bill something similar to what he told Bob Lynn; he wanted to speak to people of all persuasions and not have his ideas relegated to the exclusively Christian category.²⁷

We can certainly take Greenleaf at his word that Leo gave him the language to crystallize multiple streams of images, ideas, and intuitions, the model of his father, the work of John Woolman, practices of the best leaders and managers at AT&T, and his own inclinations. We can also believe that the Bible played a role in the mix.

For some readers, the source of Bob’s catchy phrase was not as much an issue as the word servant. Some women and people of color had a problem with this word because of its historical associations to slavery, menial household servitude, sexism, and oppression. As late as 1985, Bob confided that, “I just didn’t hear anything from black people.… There were a couple of exceptions… but to them the word ‘servant’ is a loaded word.”²⁸ Still, Greenleaf thought that it was worth taking the risk to use servant. It might encourage discussions that a milder term would not, and besides, he did not know of a better word to express what he meant.²⁹ History would prove his instinct correct. Within ten years after his death, black thinkers and authors like Lea Williams, Michele Hunt, Artis Hampshire-Cowan, Bill Guillory, and others would write about servant leadership and relate it to the black experience.

Lou Mobley, a retired IBM executive, was one of the two hundred people who received the first copies of the slender orange essay. He used it for a seminar at Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas, where it caught the eye of Jack Lowe, founder of Texas Distributors (TD), a heating and air conditioning firm that had worked with high-powered developer Trammell Crow on some of the biggest construction projects in Dallas, like the Furniture Mart. Jack began ordering more copies and passing them out at work. His repeated orders caught Greenleaf’s attention. Bob called up Jack one day and asked, “What are you doing with all those 280copies of my essay?” It turned out Jack was not only giving them to executives, but to everyone—installers, office workers, people with college and elementary educations. Furthermore, they were all reading it and applying its insights as they met in small groups to redefine TD’s mission and structure.

In Jack Lowe, Bob discovered a remarkable person, a natural servant-leader, a businessman who literally loved his employee-partners, even when he (and they) could be demanding. Lowe’s biographer reported that, “In Jack’s eyes, Greenleaf had incorporated religious ideals into a management philosophy, and he loved it. But Greenleaf, content to ‘stand in awe of all creation’ when it came to religion, hadn’t conceived the servant-leader as a part of any particular doctrine, and he seemed mildly surprised that Jack had.”³⁰

Bob and Esther became good friends of Jack and Harriet Lowe. The Greenleafs were houseguests when Bob came to TD to conduct seminars or just to see what Jack and his company were up to. Bob and Esther were devastated by Jack’s death on Thanksgiving Day 1980, and so was all of Dallas. Texans remembered that by the time a court ordered Dallas to desegregate its schools in 1975, Jack Lowe had already formed an Education Task Force to come up with implementation plans. He was so trusted that even the judge in the case let Jack and his diverse group bring him the final plan, provided they could reach consensus. Jack eagerly continued working for the community even when the doctors told him it might kill him, and it did. His heart could not keep up with his frantic pace.

Like James McSwiney, Jack Lowe was a servant-leader before he ever heard of Bob Greenleaf. The Servant as Leader essay simply gave language to who he already was, someone recognizable in one of Jack’s favorite verses in the tenth chapter of Mark: “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.”

Jack Lowe’s son, Jack Jr., was chosen to lead the company after his father’s death. To this day, TD—now TDIndustries—is the longest-running organizational experiment in servant leadership. The company is consistently in the top ten of Fortune 500’s list of “The 100 Best Companies to Work For in America.” Employee-partners still receive copies of The Servant as Leader and discuss it on service runs, in the lunchroom, and in groups. One of Esther’s paintings graces the wall of the TDI conference room.

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The second—and final—version of The Servant as Leader was released in 1973. Greenleaf made revisions that broadened the audience beyond the university community because, clearly, a much wider group was already responding. He removed sections that would have dated it, like “The 1970s,” which included the quote from Hillary Rodham. He also deleted several instances of the word love. “The word is overused, has too many connotations and is not precise enough,” he explained to Joe Distefano in 1985. “Jack Lowe, Sr. was really mad at me about that; I took a dressing down from him. As long as any of the original versions were around, that’s what he bought.”³¹

One of the most important additions to the final version was his “best test” for a servant-leader. From his assessment work, Bob had learned that some things that were deemed “impossible” to measure really could be measured. For all his talk about motives, awareness, intuition, and ultimate mystery providing the impulse to serve, the proof of the pudding for this servant-leader was a pragmatic, steely-eyed measurement of outcomes.

There is a curious addition near the beginning of the essay’s final version: a discussion about prophecy. Greenleaf, borrowing from his friend Abraham Heschel’s insights on the Old Testament prophets, says, “It is seekers, then, who make prophets, and the initiative of any one of us in searching for and responding to the voice of contemporary prophets may mark the turning point in their growth and service.”³³ In that section, Newcomb Greenleaf believes his father was struggling to understand his own role as a prophet. In one letter Bob supported Newcomb’s intuition: “If more vocal Old Testament prophets were among us today, I am sure they would rail at our institutions, all of them.”³⁴ By the time this was written Bob had experienced a powerful—and unexpected—response to the 1970 version of the essay. People were already writing and calling, wanting him to be their guru, but that was a role that he would not accept. He would be mentor to a select few but guru to none. He saw how 282the work of Kurt Lewin—and Alfred Korzybski for that matter—suffered when disciples gathered ‘round. Furthermore, he was not about to supply people with their answers. That was their job. Guru would not do, but prophet was acceptable, and if hearers chose their prophets, it was out of his hands. His responsibility was to simply say what he had to say.

In structure and style, the final version is less like a lecture in print and more like prose-poetry. Each section is shorter, more evocative, than the first version, and the whole piece defies an easy bullet-point summary. When asked about this, Greenleaf said, “I have been conscious of the need for brevity.… I don’t know that I consciously said, ‘I will stop here and let the reader supply the rest,’ but I did consciously not write for an uninformed audience.”³⁵ Joe Distefano told Greenleaf about an observation from a person who had been influenced by Bob’s writing—Father Ray Barnhart, the President of Loyola University.

Another way of putting it is that The Servant as Leader takes the reader on a hole-in-the-hedge journey that parallels Bob’s own life experience. “Look! Here is an opening in the hedge, in which he is talking about language. Wait, there are other openings about awareness and foresight and community. But this essay is about leadership, isn’t it? What is that paragraph about prophecy doing here? Let’s go through that one.” Reading it reminds one of Robert Frost’s answer to Bob when he asked the great poet about the meaning of his poem Directive. “Read it and read it and read it, and it means what it says to you.”³⁷ The essay does have a structure with consistent internal logic, but nothing is spoon-fed. Some readers believe its organization and style are part of its enduring appeal, because it jolts ordinary thought processes, fascinates, and sticks in the craw. Others, like Bob’s friend Douglas Williams, believe it suffers from its denseness. “My 283thinking goes like this,” wrote Williams. “Bob’s writings should have been gone through by a few successful, hard-boiled managers with plenty of experience on the front lines. Then a top-grade editor who possessed a fine writing style himself, after hearing these tough guys’ views, could edit Greenleaf’s phrasing so that it would get through to men such as these who were responsible for operating results.”³⁸

In the spring of 1971, The Journal of Current Social Issues was almost entirely devoted to a reprint of the essay under the title: “The Servant-Leader: A New Lifestyle.” James Perdue, a university administrator in New York, read the article and was convinced it was the work of a young faculty Turk at a major university. He was surprised to learn the author was a man who was not only not young but was not even an academician and had never worked as a college administrator.³⁹ Responses to The Servant as Leader mounted through the years as people discovered it for the first time, both in its essay version and as the first chapter of the 1977 book Servant Leadership. An assemblyman in Sacramento wrote that it helped him understand his journey for a more unitary life; the questions he must search out in his work and his personal life were the same questions. A young doctor named Patch Adams, who thought humor had a role in his mission for health and wholeness, read Bob’s essay and found language that described his deepest identity. Patch became one of Bob’s correspondents. Nuns and activists and businesspeople—so many seemed to experience a shock of recognition when they first read about the idea of a servant-leader.

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In retrospect, the logic of Greenleaf’s next few essays is obvious. After addressing the importance of an individual acting as a servant-leader, the next step up the ladder is to consider how institutions may act as servants. In 1972, Bob published The Institution as Servant, which looked at organizations in their role as organic, breathing servants to internal and external constituencies. Then he asked himself, “Who is responsible for the overall performance of institutions?” Legally, it was—and still is—trustees, and Bob had direct knowledge of how the best trustees, J. P. Morgan being the most obvious example, did their jobs. In 1974, he published the essay Trustees As Servants, which outlined the motivations and roles servant trustees could play and even suggested the possibility of a “trusteed society.” The following year, the Center published Advices To Servants, a 284collection of papers and talks Greenleaf had written, mostly in response to challenges that had faced his consulting clients, that integrated the servant-leader idea. In 1977, Paulist Press published the book Servant Leadership, which included the previous four publications on the servant theme and additional material. Finally, in 1979 Greenleaf published a novel called Teacher As Servant: A Parable, which completed the circle of servant leadership concerns back to undergraduate education.

The second essay, The Institution As Servant, did not receive the same rousing response as The Servant as Leader. It’s one thing to hear inspiring words about individual aspirations and acts of servanthood but quite another to have someone suggest how you should run your business. “People who were intrigued by the first essay were intensely bothered by the second one,” said Bob, “particularly people who were chief executives of big things. I recall one very acrimonious session with the head of a large corporation who had been immensely impressed by the first essay and terribly bothered by the second one. He didn’t feel I should have written it, and certainly should not have distributed it. It was heresy. You couldn’t manage the nation with that kind of idea.”⁴⁰ Others were less direct but just as upset. Perhaps they were finally beginning to understand that, while Greenleaf was a quiet revolutionary, he was a revolutionary nonetheless, and such people could be pesky.

The Institution As Servant begins with a premise that seems benign enough:

Then Greenleaf starts to sound like the prophet Amos. Institutions, he says, suffer from a lack of trust; governments rely too much on coercion; health and social services work to banish symptoms rather than restore 285wholeness; too many businesses have an inadequate sense of their wider responsibilities; universities prepare people for narrow professional careers, churches have abandoned their value-shaping roles; organizations of all kinds are led by administrators rather than leaders.⁴²

And that’s just for openers. Now comes the truly threatening idea: CEOs hold too much power. “To be a lone chief atop a pyramid is abnormal and corrupting. . . When someone is moved atop a pyramid, that person no longer has colleagues, only subordinates.”⁴³ Furthermore, most of these chiefs are unbalanced because they tend to be “operationalizers”—managers promoted to a position that also requires “conceptualizers,” or big-picture thinkers. “Whereas conceptualizers generally recognize the need for operators, the reverse is often not the case,” wrote Greenleaf.⁴⁴

Bob’s solution was to turn the pyramid into a circle. The lone chief then becomes a primus inter pares, a “first among equals” in issues of governance. Whenever possible, decisions are made by consensus. Whatever the organizational structure, guardianship by strong trustees and an astute board chair are critical. No one should be powerless in an organization.⁴⁵

Bob had not lost his mind; such a thing was possible. The Religious Society of Friends had operated that way for over three hundred years but, more to the point, Bob had visited three successful international corporations in Europe that used the primus inter pares model: Philips, Royal Dutch Shell, and Unilever, although Philips was the only one that actually used the term. Bob suspected that many American organizations that tacked up a pyramid for an organizational chart actually functioned informally with primus inter pares decision making, especially at the lower lev-els.⁴⁶ Here and there one can see contemporary—and successful— experiments that prove the model can work, as long as the designated leader is committed to it and has the support of trustees who matter.⁴⁷

The third servant essay, Trustees As Servants, published in 1974, attracted widespread attention from the usual quarters, but especially from nonprofit groups. “Trustees (or Directors) are legally and ultimately responsible for the institution and everything that goes on in it,” writes Greenleaf. ⁴⁸ Trustees hold the organization in trust for those who work within it and for the general public. Greenleaf’s take on the proper trustee role is a far cry from the behavior of directors who rubber-stamp a CEO’s recommendations or serve on a board only for the social cachet the 286position brings. In fact, he asserts that trustees commonly do not function in a way that builds trust.⁴⁹

For trustees to be trustworthy, they must handle power ethically. In one paragraph, Greenleaf summarizes what he means by the ethical use of power and links it back to the “best test” of servant leaders. Greenleaf italicized the entire passage:

Greenleaf suggests that rather than reacting to crises, boards should initiate goal setting, information gathering, performance reviews, reorganizations, and behavior that builds trust. To help them in their responsibilities in understanding the dynamics of their organization, boards could hire someone who does research and reports directly to them. Trustees should continue their own learning and remember that everyone, including each trustee, needs to be accountable to others.⁵¹ Since the Chair of a board is the positional leader, even in a primus inter pares arrangement, Greenleaf made the highly original suggestion that an Institute of Chairing be established.⁵² From his long experience with Friends Meetings, he knew that the knowledge, attitudes, and skills required to chair a group that operates by consensus are quite different from those required by Roberts Rules of Order, which is cited as the bible for parliamentary procedural questions in the bylaws of most American institutions.

In the years since the publication of those first three essays, one abiding criticism of Greenleaf’s thinking has been that it is “too soft.” The argument goes something like this: “Greenleaf is an idealist. Does he not understand the realities of ego, power-striving, and, well, proper order?

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Does he not know how things get done in the real world of organizations? Besides, where do we find these saints he calls ‘servant-leaders?’ No one I know is that pure!”

Neither was Bob Greenleaf. For all his qualities of servanthood and humility, he had his personal shadows, but they did not happen to include a need to diminish others as persons. He could be tough about doing research the right way, tough about strategy, personal accountability, thorough analysis, integrity, and facing inner and outer realities. As time goes by, fewer people who knew Bob personally will be around to testify to this essential quality, so it is important to get them on record. “Bob was a very tough teacher, who had a lot of idealism but absolutely not an ounce of sentimentality,” says Mac Warford, who worked closely with Bob in his later years. “He had a wonderfully compassionate heart, but there was nothing sentimental about it, and I think that’s where people have read him superficially.”⁵³

Dr. Ann McGee-Cooper had a conversation with Bob in which he talked about a number of matters, including the healthy ego. Ann, a gifted author, artist, scholar, entrepreneur, and presenter, was introduced to Bob’s writings by Jack Lowe at TDIndustries. She was so profoundly affected that she joined the Greenleaf Center board and based all of her own consulting work on servant-leadership principles. Ann once asked for clarification on a statement Bob made about trustees. “Am I right? The trustee doesn’t have the ego need to be the leader; that’s not the motive. The motive is to help the right things happen, and so they quietly work behind the scenes helping others to learn the skills.” Bob responded:

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So Greenleaf was not out to change human nature by eliminating ego needs; he knew better. Rather, he invited people to examine the ways in which their ego needs were met—the moral integrity of their aims. Once that was clear, the means for achieving aims fell into place. Bob saw more hope for people who were at least honest with themselves about their aims, whether noble or diminished, than for those who camouflaged true intentions behind great causes or personal grandiosities of selflessness. The latter could usually be smoked out into the open, because the way they got things done was incongruent with their stated mission. He once wrote the epigram, “Means determine the ends,” a neat twist on the argument about whether ends justify means or vice versa.

In the same conversation with Ann McGee-Cooper, Bob told her about a man who was probably more representative of the norm than some idealistic management and leadership theorists would like to admit.

Bob knew it would be unrealistic to expect such a person to change his stripes simply because he read a book about servant leadership, but even this executive could benefit from further reflection about the aims of his use of power.

Another criticism about the servant-leader style is one of time. The world does not always allow time to seek consensus. Moreover, are there not times when the leader simply needs to say, “Do this, and now!” and times when people have to be laid off or fired?

Absolutely, says Greenleaf. But the tough times, the busy times, are handled better when a servant-leader is in charge.

Perhaps the best evidence that Bob was a tough—if idealistic—realist rather than a sentimental idealist was found in his personal demeanor. “He was a man of sorrow, well acquainted with grief,” recalled teacher and author Parker Palmer.⁵⁷ “Along with his vast experience, his deep knowledge, his wisdom and his hope, Bob possessed what I can only call an abiding sadness. I want to call it ‘sadness as moral virtue.’”⁵⁸ Parker saw the melancholy that arose in Bob when he looked at the “gap between potentiality and reality, between the contents of the human soul and what’s possible in our social relations with one another.”

Those who have conducted servant leadership workshops are familiar with a common response from some participants: “I believe in this stuff but, you know, the person who should be listening to this is my boss! He’s the one with the problem.” Or, “This will never happen in the system we have at my workplace.” Greenleaf put the responsibility for acting as a servant-leader squarely on the shoulders of individuals, be they CEOs, board chairs, janitors, or middle managers. One cannot blame the system or even those who run the system for one’s own choices.

Perhaps a good way of cutting through the rationalizations about why such a thing is impossible is to consider the metaphor of a hologram. When recorded on photographic film, a holographic image looks like 290static on an unused television channel. Look as you will, you will see no actual image there. But there is magic in this thing. You can cut the film into a hundred pieces, run a laser through any one of them under the proper conditions, and reconstruct the original scene in its entirety. The whole vision is contained in every centimeter. In like manner, Greenleaf believed every individual could create the vision—and reality—of servant leadership in their “own little island, within whatever scope they have, whatever initiative is in their hands. And, they have to be realistic and survive—otherwise they can’t serve—so they make some compromises.… Whoever you are, if you are leading something, try as much as you can to be a servant.”⁶⁰

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When Bob worked with Paulist Press to collect his servant essays and other writings into a book, he wanted the title to be The Servant as Leader, the same as the lead essay, but the publisher vetoed him and called the book Servant Leadership: A Journey Into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness. Bob thought the title Servant Leadership was a step backwards from Servant As Leader. “I had written The Servant as Leader,” he told Ann McGee-Cooper, “because you have to come back to what an individual can do. Everybody works under some constraints, and what I’d rather see would be the expansion of the idea that leaders become as much servants as they can, under the realities they operate under, wherever they are and whatever the structure is.”⁶¹

The title of Servant Leadership certainly did not hurt sales in the long run. After Paulist Press published it in 1977, the book had an almost unprecedented sales history. Most books enjoy their highest sales in the first several years after publication, but Servant Leadership increased in sales each year for more than two decades and never went out of print. Paulist Press published a twenty-fifth anniversary edition in 2002.

The book Servant Leadership reproduces Bob’s first three essays in the servant series, profiles two servant-leaders, and contains sections on servant leadership applications in business, education, foundations, and churches. It ends with reflections on the servant responsibility in a bureaucratic society, America and world leadership, and Bob’s reflection on Frost’s poem Directive. The book is actually a collection of writing he had done over the previous twenty years, going back to his days of Jun-gian dream work. Even Bob’s close friends had never seen all of these writings.

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By the time Servant Leadership was released, Bob was in hot pursuit of publication of his next book. It had two working titles: The Servant as a Person and Jefferson House. Bob sent out the first draft for comments in 1975. By the time the Paulist Press Center published it in 1979, it was called Teacher as Servant.⁶² It was a novel, the story of undergraduate students who responded to a notice on the campus bulletin board headlined, “DO YOU WANT TO BE ASERVANT?” Those who did respond, and were accepted, moved into Jefferson House, a dormitory housing an experimental community of students. Under the supervision of Housemaster Professor Billings (a volunteer who originated the idea of Jefferson House), students sought to discover the meaning of being servant-leaders in their personal and communal lives. It was a noncredit program but still demanding. Students engaged in study, discussion and reflection, joint activities, internships, and efforts to help make their school a better university.

Bob was excited about Teacher as Servant. It fused the idea of servant leadership with experiences like those he helped create for the Ohio Fellows program. It was an opportunity to say what he would do about the lack of programs to nurture leadership on college campuses—a situation that he had observed and criticized since his 1934 exchange of letters with Donald Cowling of Carleton College. Now, with this book, perhaps he could get through to faculty and students.

The ideas in the book were strong, but it was a commercial flop. Bob never seemed to understand why, but reviewers of his draft manuscript did. They were a typical collection of Bob’s friends, including the Presidents of Grinnell and Asbury Colleges, foundation directors, teachers, an editor, an executive with the Koinonia Partners in Georgia, a medical doctor in Kansas, and a psychiatrist in Virginia who had recently been getting in touch with her aggression.

The psychiatrist, not surprisingly, criticized Jefferson House residents for not being aggressive enough. The medical doctor said servanthood was not a valid goal; the only worthy goal was commitment to Jesus Christ. Another person wondered how the Jefferson House experience could be turned into a transportable curriculum. The most prescient feedback came, however, from the respondents (almost half of them) who criticized the book as a novel. Bob loaded as much wisdom as possible onto his fictional characters, resulting in characters that were wooden and not believable. “I’m annoyed with the student protagonist because he’s such a perfect chap!” said one reviewer. The editor nailed the essential problem:

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“Since you are merely using your story to get certain points across, like B. F. Skinner in Walden Two, there is a tendency for the story to be dry, speechifying, and high falutin’. Robert Rimmer solves these problems by distracting his audience with sex. Since yours is not a book about sex you don’t have this advantage.”⁶³

In 1987, with the support of AT&T, the Greenleaf Center republished Teacher as Servant in paperback, and it has recently been published again as part of the book The Servant-Leader Within. It remains an interesting read for its ideas. The book began to be rediscovered—or perhaps discovered for the first time—years after its publication. Twenty-five years after it first appeared, there were at least three incarnations of Jefferson House on campuses around the country, each with a customized version of Greenleaf’s original vision.

Bob did not get rich from his publications. After March 1979, all royalties were assigned to the Center for Applied Studies. “I have a bias against the licensing of ideas,” he wrote. “I would be happier if there were no copyright laws. In my own case, I would not have copyrighted my own writings if it had been possible to publish them without it.”⁶⁴

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Just after the publication of The Servant as Leader, Greenleaf returned to India and was tempted by an offer from his good friend Douglas Ensminger, the on-site Ford Foundation consultant. Ensminger wanted to spend his last two years before retirement working on what he regarded as the country’s most critical problem: family planning. “As matters stood there, in 1970,” Greenleaf wrote, “nearly all efforts to raise the quality of life in India were being defeated by population gain. This was clearly their most urgent problem.” ⁶⁵ Ensminger knew the strengths of his man Greenleaf. He asked Bob to provide support with “conceptual work” while he served in an action role.

Before making his decision, Bob visited India’s Minister of Family Planning, who was not encouraging. “The contraceptive that will work in India has not yet been invented,” he stated flatly, but the difficulty of the task was not the reason Bob turned down the offer.⁶⁶ On reflection, he decided that Indians needed to work this out for themselves and that it would take a long time. The Minister agreed. Bob did not want to be an instrument of foreign grandiosity in a country he had grown to love. His intuition provided an even deeper reason. “My rational reasons were clear enough, but in my deep gut feeling, it was not work that I wanted to be involved in, important as it was.”⁶⁷

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In hindsight, one is tempted to ask that fruitless question that historians caution against asking but delight in answering: “What if?” What if Bob Greenleaf had succumbed to this temptation to leave his servant writings just as they were being introduced to the world? After all, he and Douglas Ensminger were a powerful team, and they might have realized some success, gaining lasting fame in Indian history and helping millions of people. What if Bob had not followed his deepest intuition about his personal mission and destiny? No one knows the answer, of course, but we do know that much of what happened after the publication of The Servant as Leader would have been different.

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For the Greenleaf family, the 1970s were years of movement—and moving. In 1969, they moved to Cambridge for a year. In 1970, they moved into a new home they built in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Bob stayed on the go with his consultancies, and when Esther was not traveling with him to India or Italy or some domestic location, she moved ahead with her artwork.

Bob’s consultancies included foundations, hospital boards, churches, universities, and the Business Roundtable. He accepted only consultancies where he thought he could be of use, and that was a minority of those proposed to him. He conceded that consultants filled a necessary role by providing technical specialties that organizations could not afford to staff internally but, ironically, he was not convinced the great organizations needed them. “It has been my observation that institutions that I would rate as exceptional (well led) don’t use consultants at all,” he wrote to one correspondent in 1982.⁶⁸ Then again, Greenleaf’s idea of a well led company would be one that made room for conceptualizers in their top echelons, people who would bring fresh ideas and function more like internal consultants. He still tried to work with large and small organizations, like Ohio University and TDIndustries, who were open to outside consultants as a way of improving their performance as servants, but he had deep feelings in general about consulting.

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Greenleaf used his own consulting to not only teach but to learn. In fact, his first task was to learn—learn about the client and ask the kinds of questions that would cause them to learn about themselves.

Two interesting consultancies with foundations stand out. One was with the Richardson Foundation, the other with the Lilly Endowment.

From 1964 to 1968, Greenleaf consulted with the Smith Richardson Foundation in Greensboro, North Carolina. After making a fortune from Vicks VapoRub, H. Smith Richardson Sr. began to withdraw from daily responsibilities at the Vicks Chemical Company to consider how businesses could stay vital. He initiated organizational and management development programs that could have come right out of Bob’s work at AT&T.⁷⁰ In 1935, he set up the Smith Richardson Foundation, partly to encourage leadership with a broader focus and longer view.

When Bob first visited the foundation, its programs focused on creativity. He did with them what he did with most clients. He listened carefully, sought to understand their history and vision, and then wrote a paper that started with a philosophical base congruent with the organization’s history, moved things along with the suggestion of one or more possible directions for the future, and then gave broad details about how a new program could be implemented. It was one of those memos from Bob that led to the creation of the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), one of the most respected research and training organizations in the world. CCL may have evolved into its present form without the influence of Robert Greenleaf, but there is no doubt that he was a bumblebee that fertilized its flowering in the conceptual stage.

Bob’s long-term relationship with the Lilly Endowment in Indianapolis was one of his most interesting. In 1972, he got a call from his old friend Landrum Bolling, who was now the President of the Endowment. The organization had a problem: The Tax Reform Act of 1969 had mandated that foundations like Lilly Endowment give away at least five percent of its assets each year. The deadline for implementation was near, and the good folks in Indiana needed to decide, in a few months, how to give away millions of dollars to meet IRS requirements. Moreover, to handle the increased institutional demands created by this situation, the staff was growing exponentially, but without much of an organizational philosophy to guide it. (It grew from five to around seventy employees in two years.) Could Bob come and help them out?

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The Lilly Endowment was a perfect match for Greenleaf, because the Lilly family’s ethos of service and integrity guided the organization and its parent company. One story about “Mr. Eli,” grandson of the Civil-War era founder of the pharmaceutical giant, makes the point: After he was elected to the vestry of Christ Church Cathedral, an Episcopal church on Monument Circle in the center of Indianapolis, he was found one day cleaning out a closet and tidying up. “What are you doing in there?” he was asked. “This is what I’m supposed to do,” he replied.⁷¹ Mr. Eli was a natural servant-leader, and foundation staff who knew both Mr. Lilly and Mr. Greenleaf saw similarities in these two quiet, unassuming Hoosiers.⁷²

One would expect that a consultant who had been asked to help give away millions of dollars would show up with a shopping list of worthy projects. That was not Bob Greenleaf’s style. One of the first things he did was talk with the growing staff about the corrosive effects on the giver of being in a position to influence charitable decisions. Bob well remembered his first experiences as a representative of the Ford Foundation. He got smarter overnight; people laughed at his jokes and listened intently to what he had to say. They wanted the foundation’s money. “This incessant pressure from people who stand as supplicants has a corrupting influence on foundation personnel who are long exposed to it,” he wrote, “and this risk presents the same obligation to trustees as would any occupational hazard in any kind of institution.”⁷³

Bob also believed that no one should work at giving away money for longer than ten years. After that, the grandiosity and temptations to power could become systemic. After reflecting on this advice, more than one top Lilly Endowment executive decided to leave the organization earlier than originally planned.

The Endowment’s staff began to read and send out copies of Bob’s numerous essays, including one about foundation work that impressed them mightily, Prudence and Creativity.⁷⁴ Bob wrote that it was not difficult for foundations to be prudent. The trick was to also be creative in order to bring into being “socially useful ideas and procedures that institutions more harried by market pressures are not likely to produce, or to produce as soon. Creativity involves risk, experiment, and perseverance in the face of failure, somewhat the opposite of prudence.”⁷⁵ Foundation trustees, Greenleaf said, were responsible for seeing that their organizations walked this tightrope between caution and risk-taking. He joined the Lilly Endowment board for a strategic planning meeting—attended by Mr. Eli 296 himself—and out of that and subsequent meetings, the Lilly Endowment overhauled its philosophy of charitable giving, and even revised its logo to reflect the changes.

Jim Morris, who joined the Endowment in 1973 and eventually ran the organization, remembered that “not everyone was comfortable with the guy at first,” but Bob became a profound influence in his own life. “Very few of us had come from a conceptual or philosophical background. Bob gave us a conceptual framework for the values that under-girded our work. I used to read his stuff so often that I had it memorized. I had never thought about the word trustee and the role trustees play in holding an institution in trust for all of its constituencies.”⁷⁶

Jim Morris was another one of those behind-the-scenes servant-leaders. “I know it sounds corny,” he said, “but all I ever wanted to do in my life was be useful.” Morris was instrumental in a program of public-private partnerships that helped move Indianapolis from sleepy “India-no-place” to a vibrant community with mission and thrust. It would take an investigative reporter to uncover his web of positive influences on the city and state, because Jim never wanted the credit, but he did appreciate validation from Bob Greenleaf. He became emotional when he showed a visitor one of Bob’s 3x5 notecard messages blessing his community development efforts. Jim Morris eventually left the Endowment to run the Indianapolis Water Company and later became Executive Director of the United Nation’s World Food Program.

In 1974, yet another impressive person came into Bob’s life through the Lilly Endowment connection. Bob Lynn was a teacher, theologian, dean of a seminary, and on the board of another seminary. He started as a consultant with the Endowment and eventually became a corporate officer in 1976, sponsoring some of the most comprehensive research to date into American religion. By giving small grants for printing Bob’s pamphlets and other projects, Lynn was instrumental in keeping Greenleaf’s work in circulation—and keeping his Center alive—until The Greenleaf Center emerged as a self-sustaining force. His most important contribution, though, was his influence on Greenleaf’s thinking about religious organizations and their potential for transforming society. It was a topic that would dominate Bob Greenleaf’s last ten years, a period that was as creative and productive as any in his long life.