Postlude

The arc of events that have shaped my intellectual passions, all of which Sophocles describes: language, thought, feelings, community, change, human advancement, and a promising future—still remain obscure to me, perhaps easier to describe than understand. I remain as confused as my students when we argue the age-old dispute between those who think history is determined by events—that we are all, a la Tolstoy, “slaves of history”—or those who favor Carlyle and believe that history is simply a succession of biographies, that every great institution, in his words, is “the lengthened shadow of a Great Man.” (It never occurred to Carlyle that there could be a Great Woman.) On the face of it, my path has seemed more Tolstoyan than Carlylian. It's as if I've stumbled, literally careered, into one zone of intellectual opportunity after the other, sort of an academic slalom, what I suppose many years later, Karl Weick would have referred to as a set of “eccentric precursors.” The only thing I am certain about at this point is that history has favored my career.

There was a young soldier I got to know in Germany in late 1944 who had his mind set on attending Antioch College (in Yellow Springs, Ohio) after the war because of its co-op program where students divided their time between the classroom and a job. That sounded appealing to me, too, because it was affordable. (Word of the G.I. Bill had not reached me.) Yellow Springs did sound a bit rural to a city boy; on the map, the two closest “metropolises” were Xenia and Springfield. But it still sounded attractive because of some vague idea that the life of the mind should have some connection to the so-called real life I had been experiencing in the Army. So, in 1947, at the advanced age of twenty-two and after four years in the Army, I ventured to Yellow Springs, Ohio.

At the beginning of my sophomore year there, in 1948, a new president was appointed, a forty-something, rather dashing professor from M.I.T., Douglas McGregor. He announced at his first student faculty “assembly” that he found his four years of psychoanalysis more important than his entire undergraduate education. This explosive and unexpected admission was taken in a variety of ways. Most of the faculty were disapproving and cynical and wondered, “What have we got ourselves into?” There were a few, at the other extreme, who thought, “Gosh, what a candid and brave thing to say!” There were no opinions in the middle, a rather common Antioch response to just about anything. McGregor brought along with him a brilliant and fascinating Merlin, one Irving Knickerbocker, an early pioneer at Black Mountain College—an institution perhaps even more supremely radical than Antioch. Their main interest was what appeared to be a new field of study, group dynamics.

In the first year of his tenure at Antioch, McGregor, along with his sidekick, Knickerbocker, decided to suspend all classes on successive Fridays (for the full academic year) for community-wide discussion groups that were to come up with a set of “goals” for the college, what nowadays we would refer to as a mission statement. There were “trained facilitators” and “process observers” and panelists and position papers and rapporteurs and spokespersons and God knows what else to coordinate this campuswide creative bedlam. Most of the faculty were either disapproving and cynical about what they bitterly referred to as “examining our own navels” or worse, and the students were somewhat stupefied but also somewhat excited about getting “Fridays off.” For any number of reasons, it turned out to be something of a “learning experience,” as we Antiochians learned to call virtually anything. And it was one heluva lot of fun.

Another ridiculously creative idea McGregor floated (and for which he raised a million dollars from the Kettering Foundation) was for Antioch faculty to take advantage of the co-op program by taking a year off to do real work in a nonacademic setting. Like a mini-co-op program for faculty. The faculty once again were disapproving and cynical. (I learned later that being disapproving and cynical is in our blood.) One hapless assistant professor, an art historian I seem to recall, did take advantage of this opportunity, opting for a job at what was then called Standard Oil of New Jersey. Nothing's been heard from him since.

Without any critical hesitation, I was enthralled with McGregor and his ideas—especially his concern with integrating theory and practice and his belief that the behavioral sciences could lead to a better understanding of organizational and group life, which in turn could lead to more enriching lives. After all, the motto of Antioch's founder, Horace Mann—burned into the limbic zone of our brains—was Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity! So, Candide-like, innocent and wondrous, I started on my academic odyssey, totally unaware that the career I was about to enter would turn out to be one long, adventurous co-op program.

Act I: The Academic Journey (1951–1967)

This entire act is set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in three locations: M.I.T., Boston University, and Harvard. All of the action takes place within W.B.'s memory. He is twenty-six.

Keep in mind the zeitgeist of the 1950s and 1960s. World War II had ended only six years before the beginning of the period and remained deep in our collective memory. Between the ghost of Hitler and the victory of democracy and its close relative, science, there was hope in the air. Everywhere. Science and technology made us supremely confident that we were entering a new age. The shadow of Hitler's ghost dominated our thinking.¹ Those of us interested in social and political research were committed to the idea of democratic leadership and had an urgent need to understand more about the horror of collective pathology of groups and organizations such as those we witnessed in Germany, Russia, and the other Axis powers.

Keep in mind also that the behavioral sciences came of age during World War II. The Office of Strategic Service (OSS, the precursor to the CIA), the Office of War Information (OWI), the U.S. Army statistical branch, the Operations Research Group, plus hundreds of intellectuals who escaped Hitler's wrath developed a hugely successful behavioral science. The four volumes of The American Soldier, edited by S. Stouffer and F. A. Mosteller; The Authoritarian Personality, by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik and others, which purported to measure the “authoritarian personality” with its F-scale (for Fascist); the robust statistical and experimental methods created by the Operations Research Group, led by the likes of P. Morse, G. Kimble, R. Ackoff, and C. W. Churchman; the seminal work of the Tavistock Institute in the United Kingdom, directed by A.T.M. Wilson, working with E. Trist, F. E. Emery, E. Jaques, and others; the psychological testing of the OSS, with at least two future presidents of the American Psychological Association, D. Katz and J. G. Miller (as well as the inventor of the Likert Scale); the work of C. Hovland and I. Janis on persuasion and influence and Margaret Mead on propaganda at the OWI, all led to the creation of a truly scientific ethos for social research. Wars are a golden opportunity to restructure societies and to this extent, World War II was a Good War.

Scene 1 (1951–1955): Beginnings

On McGregor's advice, I went to the mecca of the scientific studies of group dynamics, M.I.T. By the time I got there, alas, most of the researchers I came to study with had gone; Lewin had died and many of his students—who would shape a fair amount of social psychological research for the latter part of this century, researchers such as H. J. Leavitt, M. Horwitz, L. Festinger, H. A. Kelley, K. Bach, M. Deutsch, and S. Schacter—had spread out at university centers all over the country to set up laboratories for social research. A good many joined Rensis Likert to establish the new Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. A few remained at M.I.T., Alex Bavelas and Herb Shepard being the most important for me; with them I managed to create a wild mosaic of a curriculum, with half of my studies at Harvard's Social Relations department, a lot of seminars with Bavelas and Shepard, and more courses than I would have liked in economic theory at M.I.T.

My department predated what is now called the Sloan School. It was simply called Course XIV, the Department of Economics and Social Science, numbered that way as are all departments and schools at M.I.T. in a more-or-less hierarchical scientific order, starting with math as Course I, physics as Course II, and so on. The buildings are also named thusly as in the famous domed Building 10, the seat of administrative power. (As far as I know the Sloan School is now Course XV.)

By the time I got there in 1951, economic theory—under the leadership of Paul Samuelson, Bob Solow, and Charles Kindleberger—was clearly the dominant emphasis and I found myself leaning ever more determinedly away from that and toward the social psychology of human institutions. When I told Paul Samuelson that I had decided not to do my dissertation in economics but in organizational theory, his face was a study of blissful, palpable relief.

Scene 2 (1956–1959): “Sperm in the Air”

Cambridge and Boston were alive with talent and ideas. How incredibly lucky I thought I was to end up here, not having the slightest idea of what I was getting into and what becoming an academic was all about, and feeling culturally inferior to everyone I met. (I realized later that I wasn't alone in feeling that, but we were all too insecure to come clean about it.) The atmosphere was electrifying, intense, competitive, challenging, animating, intimidating, incandescent, almost oppressively “hot.” Many years later I wrote a book about Great Groups inspired by that era; and just last year my colleagues and friends, Jean Lipman-Blumen and Hal Leavitt, wrote an outstanding book with a similar theme, Hot Groups. Even today, when I think back to those times, they still, to use the words of the Doors, light my fire.

Perhaps the best way to describe the intellectual excitement in the air is an anecdote about Sigmund Freud. He was one of the last Jews to escape from Vienna in 1938. After a short stay in Paris, he settled in London. One day he accidentally met a fellow Viennese, the novelist Stefan Zweig, and asked him how he liked London. “London,” Zweig spat, “London … how can you even mention London and Vienna in the same breath! In Vienna, there was sperm in the air.” Politically incorrect or not, when I arrived in Cambridge in 1951, there was sperm in the air.

That's what I meant earlier when I said that history favored my career. Perhaps it's another of those imponderable “eccentric precursors,” I don't know, but I can't exaggerate the importance of place and time in one's intellectual development.

In 1955 my thesis was completed and I stayed on that academic year as an assistant professor at M.I.T. Aside from teaching I worked very hard publishing pieces of my thesis in sociological and psychological journals.² But what I'm most proud of is an article I coauthored with my mentor, Herb Shepard, published in Human Relations, “A Theory of Group Development.” It was based primarily on our experiences in leading T-Groups at M.I.T. and at Bethel, Maine. In a neo-Hegelian and perhaps overly formalistic way, Herb and I tried to make sense out of the two basic issues all groups have to confront, the issue of power and authority and the issue of intimacy. How those issues were addressed and resolved pretty much determined, in our view, whether or not groups could accomplish creative and productive work.

Between 1956 and 1959, I was awash with ideas and exciting colleagues, in fact way over my head. With that portentous headiness of youth and promise, reflecting and basking in the zeitgeist of that time, we thought our research and writing could change the world. Ken Benne and Bob Chin asked me to join them at Boston University. I held four positions there: teaching six hours of undergraduate social psychology at the school of business, coteaching the introductory general psychology course to the Ph.D. students in the Department of Psychology with the department chair, Nathan Maccoby, and teaching what was then called the Pro-Seminar with Ken and Bob in the Human Relations Center. My fourth job was directing a research project on the role of the Out-Patient Department nurse in nine major Boston hospitals, a study sponsored by the American Nursing Foundation that was later turned into a small book. That was twelve hours of teaching plus leading a research team composed of two doctoral students, both gifted social psychologists—Malcolm Klein, who retired recently as chair of USC's Sociology Department, and Norm Berkowitz, who migrated over to Boston College in the 1970s. We were also helped by the head of nursing at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, Molly Malone, who provided the knowledge of nursing that we sorely needed.

BU also had an active evening school, so to augment my salary, I taught a course there. Not a bad “load,” I thought, for my annual salary (including summer teaching) of $6,500.

That was my day job. I also accepted an appointment at Harvard's Social Relations Department teaching a section of a group course that met three days a week. The other “section men” were Freed Bales, Phil Slater, and Ted Mills. I also spent a lot of time at Harvard with two other researchers whose future paths went in somewhat parallel directions. Will Schutz was working at Harvard on a quantitative study of compatibility in small groups with the instrument that later became known as FIRO-B. The other was Timothy Leary, who was developing an observational scale based on Harry Stack Sullivan's interpersonal theories to elucidate the dynamics of groups. That was in Leary's antediluvian (pre-LSD) days, when he could accurately be described as a brass-instrument empiricist. Schutz became a guru and pioneer at Esalen and now leads a management consulting business. About Leary, well, I'm not really sure.

They were all my teachers and a wildly diverse lot. My “boss” at BU's school of business was a proper Bostonian with a name that bespeaks his Brahmin status, Lowell Trowbridge; Ken Benne, a Columbia-trained philosopher and one of John Dewey's last students, who could talk and always did so on any topic with cosmic virtuosity; Bob Chin, also a Columbia-trained social psychologist who worked with all the Greats there but especially with Gardner Murphy and Otto Klineberg plus the philosopher Morris Cohen, then at CCNY, where Bob did his undergraduate work. Then there was Nathan Maccoby, the redoubtable and crusty chairman of BU's psych department. I asked him many years later why he asked me to coteach that Ph.D. course with him, that I knew so little at that time. He said, “I know. That's why I asked you. I thought that everyone in the psych department should know at least a little general psychology.” There was also Mikki Ritvo, later to become a high-flying management consultant, who deserves more than a sentence and who turned me into a feminist. And the young Ph.D. candidates I mentioned earlier, Klein and Berkowitz, along with the wildly bright and funny Barry Oshry and the deadly serious and saturnine Arthur M. Cohen, provided the acid antidotes to any and all pomposities that were in the air. They never lacked for material.

Those three years swarmed with Great Groups, perhaps the most lasting of which was the troika of Benne, Chin, and myself. Together we coauthored and edited The Planning of Change, my first book, published in 1961, an attempt to encompass in one volume the most seminal and original essays in the yet unborn field of organizational change. The book is still in print after forty years and was in its way and in its day influential. In that volume, Ken coined the phrase “change agent” and Bob's essay on system change still sets the standard on that topic. Of course, the very title, The Planning of Change, betrays our hubris, I suppose, but says far more about the optimistic climate of the time—that we could actually plan change. A humorous sidenote to all of this is that my mother, forever proud and innocent of my work, was convinced that a “change agent” was the person who made change for New York's subways.

On the other side of the Charles River, Schutz, Slater, Mills, and I did a massive amount of research on group psychotherapy, specifically developing measures of group interaction by observing the groups of the preternaturally gifted and amiably naive psychoanalyst and chief of clinical psychiatry at Harvard, Elvin Semrad. He wanted us to help him figure out why his clinical interventions seemed to be so effective. So for three years we observed his groups, composed of about fifteen first-year psychiatric residents, which met every Saturday morning. The following Wednesday afternoon, we would meet with Semrad and would spend between three and four hours poring over the protocols of the preceding Saturday morning's meeting, sharing our observations and ideas about groups and leadership. They were often riveting discussions and we learned a lot—and every once in a while, we thought we were on the bleeding edge of discovery. But we never did fathom the mystery of Semrad's magic.

Also during that time, I spent a fair amount of time with Mills at his small group research lab at Harvard. He was taken with Georg Simmel's work on the effect of numbers on group decision making, especially three-person groups since that number is uniquely vulnerable to isolation and coalition building. Aside from helping him analyze the data, he got me to play the stooge in one of his ingenious experiments. Later on I got even with Ted by recruiting him to SUNY-Buffalo (from Yale, where he was chairing the Sociology Department) something for which he's not completely forgiven me.

Scene 3 (1959–1967): M.I.T.

It wasn't the salary that brought me back to M.I.T. in 1959. The $9,500 was only $500 more than what I was making at BU and the academic marketplace was booming with opportunities. Leaving BU and its sunny collegiality wasn't easy. From Ken Benne, especially, I learned what it was like to be an intellectual; on my next “co-op job,” I learned how to be an academic.

What lured me to M.I.T. was my Antioch role model, Doug McGregor, who returned to establish a new “area”—there were no departments in the Sloan School—to focus on the study of human organizations. He was in the process of assembling a remarkable group of people including Ed Schein, Don Marquis, Dave Berlew, Per Soelberg, Bill Evan, and later on—with either visiting or adjunct status—Dick Beckhard, Bob Kahn, Harry Levinson, and Bob Greenleaf. Doug, among other things, taught me everything I needed to know about recruiting, which served me well later on during my administrative years. Any offer Doug made would be one I couldn't refuse.

Looking back, those seven years at M.I.T. were unquestionably the most intense and academically productive of my career. Back in those days (for reasons that still remain obscure to me), M.I.T. didn't grant tenure until you were thirty-six. To my knowledge, the only exception to this rule was made for the future Nobelist Bob Solow. It has often been said that academics should have remained the unmarried clerics they once had been and it was true enough. Life on the M.I.T. faculty was the academic fast track. The competition was from the start unbearably intense. So what else is an under-thirty-six-year-old, untenured associate professor to do but publish? I published like a madman, like there was no tomorrow. Checking over an old vitae, I saw that there that I had written something like eight books (some coedited or coauthored), twenty-seven academic articles in referred journals (including my first article on leadership, published in Administrative Science Quarterly, “Leadership Theory and Administrative Behavior: The Problem of Authority,” December 1959), my first major article on organizational change, also in the ASQ (“A New Role for the Behavioral Sciences: Effecting Organizational Change,” September 1963), and a slew of other articles in journals such as Sociometry, American Psychologist, and American Sociological Review. You could tell I was a real academic. There wasn't an article I wrote that wasn't punctuated with a colon in the title.

Well, there were a few exceptions because somewhere in my bookbag, I came upon a “prophet's rod,” and wrote several articles about the future. The future has fascinated me since my bar mitzvah, when I based the traditional “Today-I-Am-a-Man” speech—something I slaved over for months—on the prophet Jeremiah, an interesting choice for me since few have come to my lips since.

For me the future is a portmanteau word. It embraces several notions. It is an exercise in imagination that allows us to compete with and try to outwit future events. Controlling the anticipated future is, in addition, a social invention that legitimizes the process of forward planning. There is no other way I know of to resist the “tyranny of blind forces” than by looking facts in the face (as we experience them in the present) and extrapolating to the future—nor is there any other sure way to detect compromise. More important, the future is a conscious dream, a set of imaginative hypotheses groping toward whatever vivid utopias lie at the heart of our consciousness. “In dreams begin responsibilities,” wrote Yeats, and it is to our future responsibilities as educators, researchers, practitioners that these dreams are dedicated.

Anyway, that's what fascinated me about the future—and still does. So with my prophet rod in hand and Phil Slater's genius at my side, we wrote an article that was published in the March/April 1964 issue of the Harvard Business Review forecasting the demise of the Soviet Union and the triumph of democratic capitalism. We based our 1968 book, The Temporary Society, on those ideas, a book that later won HBR's McKinsey Award for the best business book for its year. It was, I have to say, a succes d'estime with mostly glowing reviews in places like the New York Times as well as academic periodicals. It was also a total flop commercially, remaindered scarcely eighteen months after publication, never to be heard from again until Jossey-Bass republished it in 1998.

I wrote several “more academic” papers around that time as well. My favorite was actually a keynote speech given at the American Psychological Association meeting in Los Angeles in 1964. I titled it “Organizational Developments and the Fate of Bureaucracy,” at which time I took aim at the Weberian classic work on bureaucracy and predicted its demise. Of course, I always took careful academic refuge behind such terms as “between now and the next fifty years or so,” just to be on the safe side. In any case, I redrafted that speech into a paper that only the IBM house organ, THINK (November/December 1966), thought well enough of to publish. It was titled, “The Coming Death of Bureaucracy.” That was one article they should have taken seriously—they soon became victims of that scourge. As I peruse that same old vitae I see that for reasons still mysterious to me the Junior League Magazine reprinted it in 1968. My readership was becoming strangely eclectic—especially when I removed the colon.

My argument was based on a number of factors that I developed in a reprise of the 1964 APA speech, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future” (American Psychologist, July 1970), from which I will now quote:

1. The growing influence of intellectual technology, and the growth of research and development.
2. The growing confluence between men of knowledge and men of power. [Or as I wrote about it in 1964, “a growing affinity between those who make history and those who write it.”]
3. A fundamental change in the basic philosophy which underlies managerial behavior, reflected most of all in the following three areas: (a) a new concept of man, based on increased knowledge of his complex and shifting needs, which replaces the simplistic, innocent push-button concept of man; (b) a new concept of power, based on collaboration and reason, which replaces a model of power based on coercion and fear; and (c) a new concept of organizational values, based on humanistic-democratic ideals, which replaces the depersonalized mechanistic value system of bureaucracy.
4. A turbulent environment which would hold relative uncertainty due to the increase of R & D activities. The environment would become increasingly differentiated, interdependent, and more salient to the organization embedded in it. There would be greater inter-penetration of the legal policy and economic features of an oligopolistic and government-business controlled economy. Three main features of the human organizations would be interdependence rather than competition, turbulence, rather than a steady, predictable state, and large rather than small enterprises.
5. A population characterized by a younger, more mobile, and better educated workforce.

   These conditions [I argued] would lead to significant organizational changes. First of all, the key word would be temporary: organizations will become adaptive, rapidly changing temporary systems. Second, they will be organized around problems-to-be-solved. Third, these problems will be solved by people who represent a diverse set of professional skills. Fourth, the groups will be conducted on organic rather than on mechanical lines; they will emerge and adapt to the problems, and leadership and influence will fall to those who seem most able to solve the problems rather to programmed role expectations.

Those words, written about thirty-five years ago, no longer seem quirky or outrageous. Certainly in the new, wired economy, we'll behave more like a biological community: growing, evolving, merging, developing, adapting organically without the necessity of centralized control.

I've left for last my work with Ed Schein. First of all, we authored a book Wiley published in 1965, Personal and Organizational Change Through Group Methods, wherein we took a hard look at the successful and unsuccessful examples of changing social systems via behavioral science interventions. Many of our colleagues protested because we included some examples of woebegone failures and pointed to some of the adamantine qualities of bureaucratic systems. Before undertaking that, we were the senior partners of a compendium of readings and essays, Interpersonal Dynamics: Essays and Readings on Human Dynamics (Irwin-Dorsey, 1963). Working with us as coeditors were Dave Berlew and Fritz Steele, the latter an M.I.T. Ph.D. and as bright as they come, and the former one of the most elegant minds and writers, who, with Dave McClelland, his Harvard Ph.D. thesis adviser, started the hugely successful firm, McBer. John van Maanen was senior editor of the fifth and final volume of Interpersonal Dynamics.

On top of all that publishing, Ed Schein, Dick Beckhard, and I were able to interest Addison-Wesley in a series of paperbacks on the nascent and inchoate field of organizational development. I dropped out of the editing and left it in the able hands of my two colleagues and, as of now, it's fair to say that the series has proved to be extremely successful with at least forty titles in print.

Two other events must be mentioned, having nothing to do with publishing, before I move beyond the colon and into Act II, my administrative saga. The first has to do with two international adventures. Serving in Germany in World War II was not exactly an experience that would develop one's understanding of the global economy. You got dog tags, not passports. So when overseas opportunities presented themselves at M.I.T.—and because of its being M.I.T., there were many such opportunities—I jumped at them. And the encouragement of Dean Howard Johnson, later to become M.I.T.'s president, provided the support I needed to take advantage of overseas activities.

The first was anything but a hardship post. I was invited to spend a year (1961–62) teaching at IMEDE in Lausanne, Switzerland, now known as IMD, one of Europe's leading business schools. At that time, IMEDE was primarily an executive finishing school for Nestlé's high potentials and primarily supported by that company. There were fifty senior executives in the class, about a third of them from Nestlé, the rest from all over the world. The modal age of the class was thirty-six, the same as mine. IMEDE then drew its faculty from the Harvard Business School. I was one of the few exceptions. The year was memorable for two quite different things. First, because IMEDE was an HBS satellite where the case study method was king, I learned—again, with the faculty tic of disapproval and cynicism—how powerful and subtly nuanced the case method can be. I was a novice at it but my officemate, Ed Learned (one of the founders of the policy area at Harvard), Frank Aguilar (then a DBA candidate and Baker Scholar), and Dave Leighton (who taught me all about marketing) were among my many mentors.

Far more cosmic was my introduction to the global economy. The European Economic Community (EEC) was just getting its sea legs. What with the student mix at IMEDE and global business cases, plus writing a case with my students on a French company in Annecy, my eyebrows were continually raised about both the future of globalism and its discontents.

When the possibility of another global adventure came up, this time as faculty director of the Indian Institute of Management at Calcutta, I went for it. Just as IMEDE was an HBS proxy in its early days, the IIM-Calcutta was initially staffed by Sloan School professors conjointly with an outstanding, primarily Bengali, faculty. When I left IMEDE, I thought I understood perhaps at most 40 percent of what was going on in my students' heads; at IIM-C I figured a max of 10 percent—but that 10 percent was far more provocative and interesting than the cultural knowledge I picked up in Europe.

I loved working with the Bengali faculty. Intellectually, they were world-class, argumentative, brilliant, and ferociously articulate on any number of matters. Just to give you a little idea of what I was facing there, a playwright (who is also the home minister for the state's Communist government) recently said, “Intellectually, I humbly proclaim we are more advanced than anyone else. We discuss the great questions: What is post-modernism? What does Noam Chomsky have to say about this or that? The Bengali may have no food on the table, but he's off arguing somewhere about the Vietnam War or the last book he has read or whether it is a good idea to change every signboard in the city from Calcutta to Kolkata.”

In addition to codirecting the school (our own Arvind Bhambri is one of IIM-C's distinguished MBA graduates), I helped to establish an international organization on OD known as INCOD. My cohorts on that project were my Indian colleagues, Suresh Srivastva, Ishwar Dayal, and Nitish De; a social psychologist from the University of Michigan and the director of our sister institute at Ahmadabad (IIM-A), Kamala Chowdhury; Allen Cohen, on leave from HBS and that year at IIM-A; John Thomas from M.I.T.; Barry Richman from UCLA; and Howard Baumgartel from the University of Kansas were all U.S. representatives. Two others joyfully contributed in translating our dreams into reality, one an Indian, Udai Pareek, and his U.S. counterpart, Rolf Lynton. These stalwarts, working at the very soul of social change, ridiculously ahead of its time, established the Aloka Institute to train Indian change agents.

The other event I referred to earlier is a sad one for me to recall now, let alone write about. Doug McGregor suffered a massive heart attack and died at the tragically early age of fifty-eight. He was the emotional and intellectual center of our group. I was—we all were—very dependent on him: his brio, his informed optimism, and most of all, his unbridled capacity for joy. No one could light up a room the way Doug could after two martinis, smoking his pipe and telling an off-color joke. He was a thoroughly engaged man and totally supportive. Doug was, in the finest sense of that phrase, a “change agent,” able to change an entire concept of the hollow Organization Man and replace it with a theory that stressed our human potential, our capacity for growth, and a theory that elevated man's role in an industrial society. The truth is that a large segment of our professional lives now operate in an environment he created.

He was also a close personal friend. I remember the time in 1960 when I wanted to buy a small townhouse in a mews on Beacon Hill and asked him whether he thought it was a sound investment for someone without tenure. In a heartbeat, he said, “I'll lend you the money for the down payment. And don't worry about tenure.” His word was always good. I still worried.

I was his reluctant successor at M.I.T. and in a way I don't think it's too fanciful to think that my next career move was a way to incarnate his dreams along with my own.

Act II: Just Do It (1967–1978)

This entire act takes place at two universities, SUNY-Buffalo and the University of Cincinnati. Our protagonist served as provost at the former for four years and president of the latter for seven.

University campuses, throughout the world but especially in the United States, were roiling with conflict and riots and to someone whose own education—at least that part of it that led to degrees—was completed when campus was synonymous with a certain degree of detachment, even civility, the late 1960s and early 1970s were a nightmare. It was first of all baffling and unreal. One could not believe that a campus could be dangerous, that a student could firebomb an office or a policeman beat up a faculty member. But all those things were happening on campuses in those days. Sometimes the mist in the early evenings was smog and sometimes it was tear gas. Fear and violence, states we had only recently come to identify with the American urban experience, became part of the university climate as well.

The moments of horror were captured in gut-rending photographs, rows of police and guardsmen behind masks, a shattered science building in Wisconsin, the Bank of America in flames in Santa Barbara, a dying student sprawled in the grass at Kent State. Universities had moments of horror during that period and they also had moments of almost frantic joy. The atmosphere was that of wartime. Between the terrible reality of the battles were the stretches characterized by boredom, sometimes by enormous freedom as if one were relieved by the special circumstances of all normal duties and responsibilities. When the students weren't denouncing their ideological enemies or confronting (and often being beaten by) the police, they seemed to be having a wonderful time. In this ambivalent emotional climate, the mundane business of going to class, teaching and learning, often went on uninterrupted.

It was the worst of times … and it was the worst of times, “So why,” an M.I.T. colleague asked, “did you choose the period of greatest campus upheaval in history and leave a full professorship, with a corner office overlooking the Charles River, and go to Buffalo as provost?” He spat out “Buffalo” with the same sort of contempt that Stefan Zweig spoke of London. I suspect that he gave up on me completely when I accepted the presidency of the University of Cincinnati in 1971, because I've not heard from him since.

I needn't go on at length here about my eleven years as an administrator because I've written a great deal about it in the past. In fact, three of my books dwell on this period in detail. (The Leaning Ivory Tower, Jossey-Bass, 1973, Why Leaders Can't Lead, Jossey-Bass, 1989, and An Invented Life, Perseus, 1994.) Things have become clearer to me with the passage of time. One thing that's become clear is that why I chose to go into administration and what I learned were two quite separate things. Whoever knows all the “why's” of one's own motivation, but here are some of them:

Ever since my days at Antioch, I wanted to follow in McGregor's footsteps and become a college or university president. I won't argue that that's rational, but it was a strong factor.

I was tired of being Montaigne in the bleachers. He once said, “If it were my due to be believed I wouldn't be bold.” Easy to be bold for someone in the bleachers, a detached analyst and objective observer, several terrain features away from the action. I wanted to be bold in the arena, to see if my written words could be embodied in the practitioners' world where deeds more than words counted. I recalled the words of Robert Graves's poem:

Well, it wasn't quite fighting the bulls that I had intended but it turned out to be a terrific eleven-year validity check on my ideas.

Related to that, I suppose, is what all composers or playwrights must desperately want, getting their work performed, realized. How would a composer know how the music sounds without hearing it; how would a playwright know how the scenes actually play without seeing and hearing them. How would I know if my words had resonance, practical consequence for the world of management?

I had ideas—ideas about higher education—and I wanted an opportunity to see if I could be a champion of higher education reform.

I had an epiphany (I don't use that word lightly) visiting Michael Murphy in his San Francisco apartment in 1966 or so. He was the founder of Esalen and a brilliant expositor of New Age philosophy. He was lamenting a recent story about Esalen in Life magazine. Before the magazine issue was published, Michael was thrilled at the visibility a story in Life would mean. That kind of coverage was what every entrepreneur would die for. But he was, for good reason, appalled by the story when it appeared—featuring not the intellectually challenging ideas of Esalen but only the hot tubs and massage and the one nude group. (Hey, this was the 1960s!) What made matters worse, Michael felt, and again for good reason, was the cover of that same issue of Life. It was a different kind of nude group: dead, naked Biafran children, stacked grotesquely like cordwood, the result of a brutal tribal war. I was appalled by the juxtaposition of those two stories and wanted to get beyond disembodied analysis, beyond disengagement and detachment, and yes, beyond the colon: to do something!³

Then I suppose there were a whole lot of ineffables that even when I look back through the shining ether of time, I'm unclear about. When I try to express them, they sound tritely jumbled…. As John Cage once said, “I have nothing more to say but I'm going to say it anyway.” So I won't.

What I learned was far more important than these ruminations about the why's:

• About power: In my academic writings, I underplayed most forms of power while emphasizing the role of the leader as “facilitator” and stressed, to use McGregor's famous metaphor, an “agricultural model” of seeding, nurturance, and climate building. I utilized a domesticated version of power, emphasizing the process by which authorities attempt to achieve collective goals and to maintain legitimacy and compliance with their decisions, rather than the perspective of potential partisans, which involves diverse interest groups' attempting to influence the choices of authorities. Put differently, I realized that an organization was as much a political model (that is, allocating scarce resources) as a human-relationship model.

• About change: Similarly, my writings had implied a rather simple model of change, based on gentle nudges from the environment coupled with a truth-love strategy; that is, with sufficient trust and collaboration, along with knowledge, organizations would progress monotonically upwards and onwards along a democratic continuum. In short, the organization of the future I had envisaged would most certainly be, along with a Bach chorale and Chartres Cathedral, the epitome of Western civilization.

One other thing about change I learned was that to be an effective leader qua change agent, you had to adhere simultaneously to the symbols of tradition and stability and to the symbols of revision and change. I was seen by many constituents as emphasizing the latter and tone-deaf to the former. I think there is more than a little validity to that perception. I should have learned more about the City of Cincinnati and its proud traditions and some of my interventions appeared to slight faculty sensibilities.

• About bureaucracy: A lot more stubborn and obdurate than I had thought. Not a bad lesson for someone who was called the “Buck Rogers of Organizational Change.”⁴ Perhaps universities are more resistant than most. The old saw about universities being harder to move than cemeteries has a ring of truth about it. The clogged cartography of stakeholders in a modern university is both breathtakingly confusing and filled with conflict. Much like internal stakeholders, interests vary and that brings up another old saw, that the way to success for a university president is to provide sex for students, a winning football team for alumni, and a parking place for the faculty.

When I was at Cincinnati I would hold “Open Hours” every Wednesday afternoon where anyone could come in and surface their problems, complaints, ideas, or whatever. It was an expedient move, I thought; so many people wanted a hearing that this was a way I could manage to squeeze everyone into a 2–5 P.M. time slot. At first, I would see students, faculty, or administrators—or for that matter, anyone from the community—one on one. Then word got around and more and more people wanted an “audience with the president.” Both to keep order and have a decent place to wait, I opened up the adjacent boardroom and stocked it with soft drinks and cookies. Finally, it got so jammed with supplicants that the boardroom was no longer adequate to contain all comers, at which point I invited everyone to sit in my office. Open Hours began to resemble something like a fifteenth-century Persian court, supplicants of various kinds crowded into my office. Most of the problems were bureaucratic glitches and upsets. I didn't want to make decisions that department chairs, deans, and vice presidents should make, so university officers were invited to attend. The university ombudsman was always present to take notes and follow up. The sessions often went into the evening hours and it was not unusual for me to leave the office after seeing the last person out at eight or nine at night. Often, people came in groups to lobby me—townies with complaints about unruly students, parents unhappy with their children's grades. Many of the sessions were also hilarious and, if they accomplished nothing else, they exposed to me the DNA of the university. I noticed one elderly woman, perhaps in her sixties, who seemed to have no relationship with the university, who came every week and sat quietly observant, knitting and looking on quite contentedly. One Wednesday I asked her if she had an issue she'd like to raise or a question she'd like to ask. “No,” she replied, “I'm here because it's the best show in town.”

I held these Open Hours for two years and then decided to stop. I had hoped, naively, that I would set a model that other university administrators would emulate. Even more naively, I had the unrequited wish that somehow or another these sessions, along with other administrative interventions, would de-bureaucratize the campus, make it more responsive to faculty and students. Perhaps I should have kept at it longer, I'm not sure, but it was a painfully revealing—going back to my Antioch roots—“learning experience.”

It wasn't fatalism that gripped me, only realism.

• About leadership (and about me): Those eleven years at Buffalo and Cincinnati were arduous, difficult, and enormously important. Doing it is remarkably different from writing about it. Business professors are especially vulnerable to a dangerous chasm between the practice of management and the study of management. In most professions, professors are practitioners as well as teachers and researchers. Take medicine—the professors are clinicians. Of course, there are a few who only conduct research, usually those who hold dual Ph.D. and MD degrees. But for the most part, medical school teachers and researchers also practice; they not only chair departments but also maintain a practice. Consulting, as many management professors do, is not the same as doing management. Faculty who teach direction and production at USC's top-ranked Cinema and TV School also direct and produce films; faculty teaching screenwriting also write screenplays. I don't think it's possible to understand a profession, as compared to an academic discipline such as physics or English literature, without practicing it. There is a profound difference, it seems to me, between reading up on something and performing it, between observed truth and participative truth. Eleven years of actually “running something” provided an understanding of the thick texture of leadership, the sweaty complexity of it, the triumphs and tragedies of it, the personal underworld that leaders experience. It's not for everyone, I know, but those years on the ground grounded me in an understanding of management that, speaking as an experiential freak, I couldn't have gotten any other way.

In many ways, I have to add quickly, it wasn't for me either. Not for the long run, anyway. The truth is that I wouldn't have missed it for the world and I wouldn't want to do it again. It's no false modesty to say that although I had a curious admixture of shortcomings and competencies as an academic leader, I knew in my heart that there were others who could do it as well or better. It simply wasn't my calling. There was a definite turning point, a glistening moment in time, when that realization crystallized.

I was delivering an evening lecture to the faculty and students of Harvard's School of Education, sometime in 1976. They invited me to speak on the topic of academic leadership and I spent a fair amount of time writing for the event. The auditorium was full and I thought I was at my best, enjoying myself enormously as I described wittily and ironically the existential groaning, the ups and downs, the backstage gossip of governing a large urban university. As I think back to that evening I was part social anthropologist and part standup comic. The audience seemed to enjoy it as much as I did. And then came a question from the dean of the school, Paul Ylvisaker, one of the most respected figures in all of higher education, a consultant to the Ford Foundation and a man whose wisdom was sought after by everyone from the U.S. president to Harvard's. He was the uncontested Clark Clifford of higher ed.

Now I thought that my experience responding to questions was sharpened to a fine point after so many years of teaching as well as spending a lot of time with the media, who loved asking embarrassing and difficult questions. My singular conceit, shortly to end, was that there wasn't a question I couldn't respond to in a convincing (and winning) way. At the least, I thought I was beyond being stumped. He was sitting near the back of the room and the question came out me like a long, high lob, floating lazily over the audience and masking its astuteness in that self-effacing (and deceptive) Midwestern drawl of his. It was short. “Warren,” he asked, “do you love being president of the University of Cincinnati?” I don't know how many seconds passed before I responded. The room was suddenly so quiet that I could hear my heart beating. Finally, I looked up at Paul and haltingly said, “I don't know.” Actually, that was the moment I knew the answer but hadn't yet told myself.

The truth is that I didn't love it and didn't have the passion for it and that what I was doing wasn't my own voice. I wanted to be a university president. I didn't want to do university president. Now that was a huge lesson for me because if there is one single thing I have found out about leaders is that, by and large if not every day, they seem to love what they're doing. C. Michael Armstrong, the exemplary CEO and chairman of AT&T, told me recently that his favorite day of the week is Monday. I told him that he should have his license plate read TGIM (Thank God, It's Monday).⁵ It won't be Jack Welch's strategic genius that will be remembered as the signature of his almost twenty years of GE's leadership. It will be the way he has mobilized and energized hundreds of thousands of workers across many types of businesses into constructive activity that will mark his place in business history. And when I coteach a course on leadership to undergraduates with USC's president, Steve Sample, I realize how much he loves what he's doing. I felt that fundraising was an unnatural act; that guy loves it. He loves dealing with the daily conflicts, the numbing daily interactions, being always on the phone in his car, trying his best to keep his Sundays “free” but not always successfully, and dealing with the countless other responsibilities that go with leading a major research university. No one can be a great leader without that passion and love.

Ylvisaker's question made me aware that administration wasn't for me. I didn't have the passion and love for it. That epiphanic moment I had was later confirmed over the following twenty years' researching the qualities of exemplary leaders. The simple fact is that all exemplary leaders have found their unique voice, their trademark. They know who they are and that what they do, no one else can quite do it their way. The late Jerry Garcia, the great, gray presence of the Grateful Dead, said it better than I just did. He once observed, “You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only one who can do what you do.”

To this day I don't know what Ylvisaker was picking up in my delivery or my body language that informed his question. It may have been my casual, detached delivery or something in my eyes. Perhaps he had read the W. H. Auden poem I recently came upon:

He must have known that I couldn't forget myself in that function.

Act III: USC (1979)

In 1978 I resigned from UC and received a Twentieth Century Fund grant to write a book on leadership. Shortly after, in April 1979, I found myself in a London hospital recovering from what my British doctors called a “moderately roughish” heart attack. I had been attending a conference at St. George's House in Windsor Castle. It so happened that my longtime friend from M.I.T. days, Charles Handy, was provost of St. George's House, the newly established continuing education center for the Church of England. Charles was also chairing the conference I was attending when I collapsed. I was recuperating in improbable quarters, the flat of Elizabeth and Charles Handy, compressed into the ancient wall of Henry the Third's wing of Windsor Castle. The Handys graciously and generously looked after me for three long months as I wobbled back to health.

An important, almost Dickensian, coincidence occurred during my convalescence at Windsor. Jim O'Toole called, out of the blue, and invited me to join him on the faculty of the University of Southern California. It was a godsend. I was out of work. Literally. I was considering a number of professorships, but they all paled in comparison with going West and working with Jim, Ian Mitroff, Ed Lawler, Larry Greiner, Steve Kerr, Tom Cummings, and Dick Mason—and the all-star cast being assembled by the business school dean, Jack Steele, an intellectual outlaw who broke all the rules of the game and built the best management department in the world. I thought, oh yes, oh yes, here was a chance to really make a dent in the universe and make some useful mischief.⁶

I felt like Rip Van Winkle when I joined USC, or to be more current, like Austin Powers. It wasn't twenty or thirty years, only eleven since I left the world of scholarship, but the field I left in 1967 was unrecognizable. It hadn't just blossomed, it had become a heavy industry. I felt that the tiny municipality I had known was now Brobdingnag. Virtually every business school and other professional schools as well had their own version of an Organization Behavior Department, parading under a variety of names such as Management and Organization (our version at USC) or just Management sometimes commingled with Strategy and other combinations. There were to my astonishment a number of hugely successful, best-selling business books, mega-hits like Peters and Waterman's In Search of Excellence, Naisbitt's Megatrends, Blanchard and Johnson's The One Minute Manager, Covey's The Seven Habits, and anything Drucker wrote.

To put this in perspective, Doug McGregor's book on management, The Human Side of Enterprise, sold at its peak year (1965) thirty thousand copies and Abe Maslow's book on management—sure it had a weird title, Eupsychian Management—sold only three thousand copies when it was published. Last year, when it was republished by Wiley, it sold three thousand copies in its first week on the market.

I suspect that one of two factors, or probably both, may have caused this explosive interest: one was the unexpected and reluctantly accepted notion that maybe the attitudes, perceptions, and feelings of the workforce and the social architecture they worked under could have something to do with productivity. The other factor may have been the unprecedented competition that American industry was facing from Japan and Germany, which was occurring most dramatically in the late 1970s and the 1980s. In many industrial sectors such as automobiles and consumer electronics they were—to put it politely—eating our lunch. Tom Peters credits the multimillion-book sales of his best-seller primarily to the latter. Whatever explanation you prefer, one thing was clear: the United States was no longer Numero Uno and enlightened business leaders were no longer as supremely confident as they had been for the four decades following World War II. They opened their minds to our ideas.

It's also been one long boom for business schools. The last statistic I saw showed that eighty-five thousand MBAs graduated in 1998. A concomitant of that is the widespread growth of Ph.D. programs. In 1959 I chaired the Sloan School's committee to design its first Ph.D. program. Up to that point, most business schools did not offer Ph.D.'s. In fact, business schools were not thought to be an integral part of the intellectual life of the modern university. Most professors of business did not have doctorates. Those who did were either DBAs or had came out of industrial engineering or held an advanced degree in accounting.

What drastically changed the intellectual landscape of business education was the influence of two major foundation reports, both published in 1959. The Gordon/Howell report (sponsored by the Ford Foundation) and the Pierson study (funded by the Carnegie Foundation) were enormously influential and had a formidable impact on how business education was done. They led to the flow of vast amounts of dollars to a new breed of business professors and to a new type of business school. So we observed the new schools such as Carnegie-Mellon's Graduate School of Industrial Administration, the already mentioned Sloan School, the Stanford School of Management, and too many others to mention here carving out new curricula and new research agendas, and in the process shedding their Rodney Dangerfield syndrome.

If I could put important findings of these two foundation reports into one pithy statement (doing a grave injustice to both), it would be this: business schools had to get away from their almost exclusive reliance on “clinical experience” and develop a more rigorous and scientifically based canon. The tension between empirical experience and codified, systematic knowledge is still a live-wire issue, regularly contested in all professional schools. The extent to which schools of management learn how to make this a creative rather than a divisive tension will determine whether or not they can accomplish their academic purposes successfully.

USC, for me—emerging after eleven years of fairly grueling administrative duties—was like joining an intellectual spa, an “Intellectual Fitness Center.”⁷ This was Home, writing and teaching again; finding my own voice. To paraphrase Jerry Garcia, I was back to being the only one doing what I can do.

These past twenty years may not have been as intense as those Cambridge and Boston ones, but I've never been happier or enjoyed so many significant intellectual partnerships. I could fill a complete book if I were to mention all of them, but here goes with a few:

With the partnership of Jim O'Toole and others from the Management and Organization Department, we founded the Leadership Institute, one of the first such centers in the country.

Again with Jim as editor, we created a radically different formatted management periodical, New Management, a magazine that foreshadowed the very popular, hip 'zine, FAST COMPANY. With Dean Steele's support and Richard Wurman's design, we made the business of business interesting.

Working with Ian Mitroff and Dick Mason, we inaugurated a series of management books under the Jossey-Bass label.

I coauthored a number of books with colleagues: with Burt Nanus, Leaders; with Ian Mitroff, The Unreality Industry; with Pat Biederman, Organizing Genius; and with Dave Heenan, Co-Leaders.

The most intense and exciting collaboration going on at the present time is coteaching an undergraduate course on leadership with USC's president, Steve Sample. We recruit fifty of USC's best and brightest students and introduce these sharp twenty-year-olds to leadership through the Great Books, novels, movies, Socratic-like discussions, weekly essays, and a wide selection of guest speakers, from Michael Dukakis to former governor Pete Wilson, from the Reverend Cecil Murray to Mayor Richard Riordan.

Great cities and great institutions have the Spirit of Place. Certainly, the Boston area had it when I was there earlier in the century. I would argue that now Southern California and the university that is most emblematic of this region, USC, has that spirit.

We do know that cities that have remained great and glorious over long periods of time are those with a rich variety of population, economic enterprise, and social functions. Diversity endows them with resilience and the gift of maintaining identity in the midst of endless changes. Perhaps this is all an elegant justification for why these past twenty years have been, for me, so alive, so absorbing, and so invigorating, who knows. But I want to add something to what I said earlier—it isn't only history that favored my career, it's also geography, the spirit of the place.