Meeting Elliott

Speaker A Well, I'm Jerry Harvey, and I'm a professor emeritus at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. I didn't teach there for 35 years, and I say that because I wrote an article called Learning to Not Teach. The theme of it being if you can teach it, it's not worth learning, and if you can learn it, why bother teaching it? And I got an award for Not Teaching excellence, and before that I was ten years with National Training Laboratories during the heydays of the Tea Group movement from about 1962 to 69, I guess, or 71. And great experience in my life was there with the gods, with the Douglas McGregor's, Ken Benny's, Chris Ardress, Warren Bennett, terrific experiences and did something dumb. It was the basis for my writing, The Abilene Paradox, and in effect, was pushed out, although I wanted to quit anyway and went to George Washington and stayed at George Washington the rest of my academic career. And during that time I've always done outside consulting, speaking, writing, and I say outside, I mean outside the university. Although I've never been able to distinguish one life from the other, the university evidently does. So that's how I got here. I met Elliot through a friend of mine at GW who asked me if I'd read a book called A General Theory of Bureaucracy. And I told him I'd never heard of it, and he said, It's by a guy named Elliot Jacks. And I said, well, who the hell is Elliot Jacks? I've never heard of a guy. And he said, he's a rather odd duck. He's a little like you, but a lot smarter. He's on a different stratum, one might say. And I didn't know what a stratum was at that time, but I assumed it wasn't good when he was talking to me. And I went to the library to see if we had the book. The library at GW has a million and a half, 2 million copies. Had one copy of a General Theory, and it had been checked out once, which didn't show an overwhelming popularity. And I asked the librarian about it, and she says it's not one of our major books in management. So I read the book and thought it was the most exciting book that I had ever read, the most challenging, the most demanding, the most creative book I'd ever read in the field of organization behavior. And I decided to use it in a class I was not teaching. And I called the publisher and they didn't have copies of it. And I asked for Elliot's number, and they said, he lives in this call England. And they said, he lives in the States. And I said, do you know where he lives? And they said, he lives in somewhere called Arlington, Virginia, on Ridge Road. Well, I can nearly throw a rock from my office and hit where Elliot was living. And I called him and introduced myself and told him it was the most exciting, creative, innovative, demanding book that in the field of organization behavior I'd ever read. And I also told him he was absolutely the worst writer that I'd ever read, and if he could learn to write English, he might get somewhere with the book. I didn't get the best response, but he said, Would you be interested in having lunch? So we had lunch, and I was absolutely enthralled both by the content of what he had to say and him, and I knew why the guy had said he's on a different stratum. He was not anyone that I had known, and he was certainly brighter than I was. And we got to talking, and one thing led to another, and he wanted a library card at GW University, and we couldn't get him one here's one of the great researchers in the world, and we couldn't get him a library card. And I took the problem to our department chairman, who's also on a different stratum, and told him it was hopeless. We couldn't get him a card. And he said, let's make him a faculty member, which we did, and got him a library card. And we started meeting fairly often, maybe once a week or once every two weeks, and talking. And I was so stimulated by what he had to say. It changed my whole way of thinking and doing things. I won't say it was the best thing that happened to me. I was a lot happier not knowing a lot of that stuff. So I'd go up on Ridge Road. It's up here, and it's about halfway between where we are now and National Airport. And I was traveling out of national five times a month, and I would leave his house, and half the time I would be so stimulated and so enthralled by what he had to say, I would end up in National Airport. It was like a horse going back to its barn. My car would just end up at National Airport. And then one thing led to another, and we started talking not only about his work, but about my work. He was very good about that, and that's how I got involved in Elliot and his work. But his work is just to the day died was stunning to me and was the most intriguing, demanding, stimulating that I ever saw.