Influence of My Father\'s Work in My Life

Speaker A In terms of my own life, this effect upon me. He certainly steered me towards going into engineering, which was away from history, which was my preferred option. He said, you can always be a historian, but if you've got engineering I don't know yet whether it was the right decision or not, but I think I put clear water between myself and what he was doing from quite an early age. I think it was difficult, I suppose, to fully appreciate a person of his somewhat commanding intellect because he could be as quite as blunt and forthright with his family as he was with other people outside. And I think that it can be rather disconcerting to be faced with that sort of conversations from time to time.

 But for one level, he was a good father. I admired and respected him a lot, so I've got no complaints on that particular school. I joined the BOC Gases Division and whilst there they brought in a man called Brian Wilson who'd come from Ici. He'd done a lot of OD work. He was later to go on to head up Cranfield and I moved from being an engineering role, which I was currently working into OD. I don't know whether my father was quite flippant about it. He said, I see you've joined the enemy in terms of a behavioral psychologist rather than the area which they were then working in. But I felt that was a pity because I think that knowing now more about both sides of the coin, I think there's a great deal of complementarity between the work. Certainly McGregor maslow Herzberg and what he's done. And I think that, in fact, to have shown the links between his own and that work would have, I think, given even greater credibility to his own ideas and Jake's ideas than was present at that stage. Sam.