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Speaker A You got 45 years. She can take a minute. No, talk about the instant. I want to know the instant has happened. Tell when it hit you. Just in less than a minute. We're going to get around. It's going to take 35 minutes to get around.
Speaker B That's quite a while.
Speaker A But I want you to hear each other's voice. And we're talking about something about the emotional or impact, the significance of the impact. Right. What year? And I took that class and I admitted the impact was as my 6th year studying business, the first I ever heard anything that made sense to me that I could actually use. It was scientific as opposed to the other OB baffle game I'd had before. And so I spent the summer in the Gladiator Institute of Management, summer 67, working with Elliot Wilford and other people over there and been a person ever since.
Speaker B Good model.
Speaker A Just follow that model will be terrific. Bob Miller. I was a fellow student at Southern Illinois University with Jerry. I was working as a graduate student. I had an internship with a consultant named John McCartney, who was working at Allen Industries as a consultant and following with Billy. Jack and I followed Jerry on at Glaster Institute in late 67 and stayed on Finagled extension. So stayed on at Glass Institute for about a year and then about another year at Brunell with Jackson Alice there. Matt, my date should be 68 as a matter of fact, because then I was working in Manchester at the business school. All this stuff hit me with a rush. It's just making sense. Not just Elliot's work in Wilford's, but all the tabby stuff. I chose 1973 as my date because that that was the year when I decided to quit the IBM company and go and work for the Tavistock Institute. So that's kind of crucial date for me, 73, but it had been seeded by that time. Working with the Tavistock and impact. Thanks. I'm Jack Fallow and at the time I was a young shop steward in the steel industry in Scotland. And two people came, pointed me to Elliott's. One was the engineering manager, electrical engineering manager who found an article and said, you will be interested in that. And I don't know why, I had no other relationship with him, but he stuck it under my nose and said, you will be interested. And I was. And the other route that came was I was searching for a method to do blue collar job evaluation because all the white collar people were getting salary increases and we needed something. And I asked around and somewhere from one of the trade unions, and I can't remember which, something came up about the earnings curves. And I didn't like the earnings curves because my earnings were so low that I didn't reach them. But when I added my extracurricular earnings to them as a rock and roll drummer, I discovered that I was fairly well on the curb. And then I thought, this is a good system. Steve Clement I met Elliot and I was colonel in the army in the late seventy s. And I was the translator for Elliot's work both in the army and CRA. We used to refer to Elliot as the oracle in the cave, and we needed to translate his theories into something that operators could understand and deal with. So I got the opportunity to do that both at CRA and a series of hypothesis which we'll talk about over that 25 year period, which we're still using in the air. My name is George Riley. 1975 I knew psychologist, industrial psychologist, working with big money and spelling company in BC. Came across a book called Zen and Creative Management by a man named Alfred Lowe. The first sentence in the introduction is, this book is a product of coming together in my mind of the theories of J. G. Bennett, the British philosopher, and Elliot Jacks. Think about three or four years later I came across General Theory of Bureaucracy. And I read it and I read it and I read it, and I just couldn't do the team building and the OD stuff I'd been doing inside. As an internal consultant, this company just done nothing. So I left the company, set up a private project and blah, blah, blah.
Speaker B I'm Katie Burke, and in 1979, one of the graduate students at USC came to me and said, you know, there's some money left over to bring a guest lecturer into the university. What have you heard about Elliot jacks? I said, Well, I haven't heard anything since graduate school when I read Changing Culture of the Factory, well, let's see if we can get it. And we invited him to come in February to Southern California from London, and he accepted. And so we had about two weeks of total immersion where he taught various programs at the university. The impact on me was the first testable proposition I had heard in the field of management.
Speaker A Okay, Katie Burke I have to thank because I was a substitute teacher at USC public Administration for my professor at UCLA, warren Schmidt. I was just finishing a doctoral program and I went down in the downstairs and I think it was the 50th some, some 25th or 25th anniversary of the school. He was giving a 50th, giving a lecture. And I had been a city planner and he says, it's all about time. And I said, yeah, it's all about time. And that captured me. And that was about 1979. Thank you very much.
Speaker B Yes. February, February invite people to Southern California. I'm Judy Hobra and I first met Elliot in 1980 when I was a mature student at Brunell. And as a mature student, I'd obviously had quite a lot of years experience in working in organizations. And the work, Elliot's work really started to help me to understand why organizations worked the way they did. So it was really.
Speaker A I'm Julian Fairfield, listening. I'm a slow learner. I first read the Elliot's work probably in the early 70s, late 60s, went straight through the keeper catcher in your terms. And then I was employed to read Elliot's work by McKinsey in the early 80s. Again thought, well this is sort of interesting, and we'll try it out a bit, and explored it. But over time it's become a way of thinking that's informed actually all my thinking for the rest of my life. So a slow learner. I'm Barry Dean. I have the pleasure of being an engineer by trading, and spent quite a bit of my time from 1964 to 1980 in construction and consulting, and did some of my early supervision, supervisory work in construction. Now that industry can be characterized as chauvinist, a bit brutal performance issues you resolve by sacking people. And then I moved into CRA in 1918 and discovered that I couldn't sack people anymore. That the last time that somebody had been sacked at this particular place was 30 years ago on a Tuesday. So I had to do something differently. And that's where I came across Elliot and the work that was being done. And Rod Carnegie's first memos introducing Elliot's work into CRA were so profound after 14 years in the workplace. So profound, and we still have them at home. Did you really believe that? I'm Jerry Cranis, I I run the Levinson Institute in the Boston area. My first connection with Elliot was actually more from the heart than the head. And he was teaching a course at Elliot that Harry Levinson started in the early seventy s, called the Modern Organization. And I had just joined the faculty a year earlier and Harry said, I think you'd really be interested in meeting this fellow. And I heard two of his lectures and then he fainted and he had had his first bout with his mitral valve. So I took him to the emergency room and spent about 8 hours with him. And I got to know him personally, but I had no sense of what he was really about then. It was in 1990, when Harry was trying to convince him to leave medicine and take over the Institute, that he took me down with Elliot for about three days when they were working with an executive team. And that was just when they broke the code on the work at the US Army Research Institute on Mental Complexity. And when Elliot described the findings, I literally fell out of my chair. That's the only time in my life that that wasn't just a figure of speech. But it really wasn't until about two weeks later that I said, what is going on here? That I started to read requisite organization. And I had my first and only Hypomanic experience reading that, in which I really saw a unified field theory was possible about something having to do with human condition, and it was mind altering.
Speaker B I'm Nancy Lee and I had worked for a number of years for very large companies at T, General Electric, Macy's. And I thought, these are not really fit places for people to be working. So I started to study organization behavior, and I started to teach it at Simmons College. And none of it made any sense to me whatsoever. And I was asked to speak at an American Management Association conference in California in San Francisco in 1982, January 26, and Elliot was the keynote speaker. And I heard Elliot speak and I thought, this is the first time anybody's ever made any sense in this field. So I bought his book, General Theory and thought, uh oh, don't think I can teach this, and started to outline it and turn it into teachable material, which I took to him and fortunately was able to work with him ever since.
Speaker A John Bryan actually, my first meeting with Elliot was through his work on middle age. I was writing my first master's thesis to define middle age. And his one concept, that middle age was not an age, but a stage, got me my first master's degree. So I was very thankful to the fellow. Didn't know he did organizational work until I came to Canada in 1983. My wife was an HR manager at Imperial Oil, and she invited me to an Imperial Oil staff training. A fellow named George Harding was presenting Elliot's work on organizations. And he started by asking this question, what is work? And the room became very quiet. I'm a guest. I'm standing at the back of the hall looking out here. None of these people from Imperial all had an answer to that question. Well, I'm a theologian. And so I said, let's answer that question. Work is the curse of Adam. Every hint of the room turned around and stared at me. But I noticed George wasn't writing anything on the newsprint, so I thought, maybe this guy's a Lutheran. So I tried answer. You know, work is a gift of God, the ability to co create. George still didn't write anything on the newsprint. Well, that night he shared the definition of work that Elliott had devised. I was impressed that there was somebody other than a theologian that had a doctrine of work. And as he talked about it, he began to say, here's a person who can measure work, this central human activity, and the measurement actually means something. Now, I was also trained as a psychologist, so anytime anybody says to me they can measure something to do with human beings, it's a valid measure and it makes a difference. I want to know what they're talking about. And that's what struck me and has kept me at it ever since. I'm Paul Tremlett working in the Toronto area, and George Harding comes back into play here again. The context for me was I was a line manager at Xerox for many years. And I got asked by the president to come in and be in charge of our management and organization development part of the company. And I said, Jack, I don't know anything about that. He said, don't worry about it. Sign it'll. Be good for your career. While it changed my career here and one of the good mentors that I had at the time informed me that Humankind has organized ourselves in group settings to get work done for thousands of years. But the study of it is about is a 20th century phenomenon. So we only know about this much. So you'll find that one of your jobs as a consultant or whatever will be an educator. You'll be a teacher. You'll find things that you think are knowledge and you'll want to share those with your customers or clients. So one day I had this client after I'd left Xerox and they had a situation where the corporate company had decided to sell a subsidiary. The CEO actually lived up in the corporate for a number of years, but he was retiring, so they actually put him down for this period of time to get this thing ready for sale in the actual premises with the subsidiary and all. We have a CEO and a president sitting in the same building together, which had never been the case before. And they were kind of bumping all over each other. And so I went and didn't know what quite the do with this. And so I went to George, who was an associate of the firm that we had at the time, and he said, Take this book, General Theory of Bureaucracy. Don't read the whole thing. You'll never get through it. He said, Read these three chapters. But it all talked about levels of work and differentiation of work. And I had to do the same thing, Nancy. I had to go back and put it in my own words, in my own way, shared it with these guys, and bingo, it was just like that. So I said, I think I found some knowledge. Okay. I'm Peter Mackenzie Smith. My first experience of these concepts was my own CPA in 1986 when a colleague of mine who also worked in HR in a packaging group, as I did, arranged for three or four of us to meet Jillian Stamp. And he didn't give us any explanation except she's an interesting lady and she's got an interesting product. So we all had CPAs and for myself and a couple of the others it was a sort of life changing experience. It was completely unique as far as I was concerned. And I was trained in the following year by Julian as a practitioner and then used it as part of my management weaponry for the next, whatever, 18 years. And then having been very rude to or about consultants for most of my life to become one about four years ago and at that stage because of the concepts. For me, BIOS was number one in the field of one. I'm Mark Van Cleef. I, similar to Jack, was trying to solve some problems. I was at Price Waterhouse in 1988 in the executive search practice, working globally. We would go to meet with boards of directors and CEOs because they needed to hire an executive and we'd ask them what's the job? They weren't clear. They couldn't answer what the work was, to quote your point. So that started a journey of discovery, including meeting Elliot back in the 88 eightyn period. And for me, actually one of the key points was when I brought together Elliot in my dining room with another gentleman, somewhat maybe known to somebody by the name of Stafford Beer. Stafford was working at Sheffield medals when Elliot was at Glacier medals. And I brought both of them together in my dining room for the first time in 40 years. To listen to the two of them talk about how their views and philosophies and just listen to the two of them talk about how that evolved was just so impactful. And it gave a level of structure to understanding work systems and the human capability into the work system.
Speaker B I'm Sheila dean. I worked in CRA after people like Steve Clement had started to make translate. And Elliot had called this field of organization development a conceptual swamp. And I found what's requisite organization had started to make sense and make meaning. And it's been a journey that I've been on ever since. And the more I think I know, the less I know as I move on.
Speaker A Hi folks, I'm Peter carLots. In the late eighty s in South Africa, it was a society in turmoil and society changing. Although the first three elections were only a 94, the society was already feeling it. And being in a middle management position at a time in a mining industry of all places, there were a lot of change that needed to be brought about. And we found that ideas helped us to first of all, put people into perspective and secondly, also to see where we must go with organizations. So although it was a secondhand based upon the understanding, based upon the processes like CPA and so on, we actually felt it was very useful where the term and then the sort of the rubber comes together. I'm Ron Cappell. I first came across Elliot's work in 1988 and it was through George Harding, as it's been mentioned previously. George told me about Elliot's work, told me about a general theory of bureaucracy. I picked up the book and read it. I read 60 pages. It was too dense. I put it down. But what happened was I started to use the ideas and I came back and reread it after maybe six or nine months. And it was the best book that I'd ever read. And it was very impactful in terms of the work that I did. And then Jerry Cranis and I met with Elliot around 1990 for a couple of days that we refer to as our boot camp. And that got us more in depth into it. And I was fortunate to continue with the relationship with Elliot from that. I am Ricardo Gutierrez, and as Ron, I came across Elliot Jack's works through a book, the form of Time, in year 88. Also. And I was very pleased to start understanding time has always been one of my great questions. In the second place, in the second moment I found Elliot Jack was during my work in the Wheelpool Company, where I have shared with Maurice Dutrisak some brandy wine courses and where I found the book of Mr. Clemens also he made with Elliot. My third moment came when I was invited to teach in the Buenos Aires Institute of Technology. And there I chose Elliot Jacks again. But my real, I would say stroke, came when I started translating the General Theory of Bureaucracy, which took me two years, but it was a two year pleasure tour because of the depth of his ideas and the generosity of his ideas. So since then I am teaching Ro in the Institute of Technology in Buenos Aires. Not without pains. I'm herb Koflowitz I just realized somewhere in the line it wasn't 88, it was 78 that George Harding recommended General Theory of Bureaucracy to me. And I thought I found it an interesting book, but I didn't know what to do with it. I hadn't a clue how to put it into practice. And in 1990 I met with Elliot to invite him to a conference on adult Cognitive development. And I thought it would be about a ten minute meeting in his office and it was 3 hours in his living room. And every question he asked me about what I did for a living, my answer embarrassed me. I was doing outdoor team building and democracy in the workplace. And the two things were one, I realized everything I was doing was a lie. I mean, seriously, I was not delivering what I said to my clients. I was delivering I knew I was fabricating. And the other thing was there was no conceptual integrity. And before psychology, my education was philosophy and science, philosophy and mathematics. And the lack of integrity just said I can't do this anymore. And fortunately, a few months later elliot came up with Jerry and a few other people and did training and I was able to put into place but that was the epiphany Glenn Meltredter. And I was taking a doctorate in training and training and Development and our instructor had us read through the Training and Development Handbook and there's a chapter in there of about 30 pages on the behavioral sciences and there was this three pages on Stratified system theory. So I read it and it's gee, this is kind of interesting. This explains some things that I needed to have explained. Now, all of the other gurus got about a paragraph, so I thought, that's interesting. So I went to the instructor, I said, what else do you know about this? This is quite interesting. And she said, It's not important. Well, I did a search in the educational literature and found nothing. Now, that was my fault for not doing a very good search, but I didn't find anything. Not long after that, I was with a gentleman at the center for Creative Leadership who had been at a conference with Elliott, and we talked. Around the same time, I found Executive Leadership in the library, and I called Elliot up. He was in Washington at the time. I went up and spoke with him. Now, over the years, I've learned how many of mes there were that were talking to Elliot at the same time, and it was amazing. So that's how I started.
Speaker B My name is Cynthia Kranus. Elliot was actually part of my courtship. I did not have a normal new relationship with a guy named Jerry Kranus. So I was getting sort of double teamed down two courtship paths, one towards marriage and one down this body of knowledge that was so extraordinary. And Jerry was trying to seduce me, not just to marriage, but away from science and this job I had, which was making vaccines for children. And I thought, how could anything ever be as meaningful as that in my life? Especially consulting. And being a management consultant did not have a lot of credibility worth businesses I'd been working in. So I thought, I don't know if I can do this. And I met Elliot first on his 75th birthday, and I thought, God, this is a pretty interesting guy. So as we went down this courtship path, I came to that same course Herb made reference to. And the only image I could have at the end of that was so profound. It was like seven days of both heaven and hell because you're learning something new, and you're chipping away the whole time at what you thought you understood. You're trying to put a language, and now you're getting a language to the things you thought you understood. And I remember walking out of the hotel that last morning and the sun was shining, and I felt like I'd emerged from some enclosed little thing called an egg. And I was finally seeing life. And it was a profound moment. And so it's been a privilege to do this work.
Speaker A I'm going to stand over here. I've just come out of a wedding reception at two this morning, so I'm not sure if I have a hangover. I'm still drunk, but I'm Marie Stutrazak and I first met Elliot, and it was Steve Lament that was the culprit. Steve had introduced Elliot Jakes to Whirlpool, and Whirlpool was having their first world conference in Montreal Palace overlooking Lake Geneva in Montreux, and he was doing half day sessions. There was a whole bunch of gurus there. And I walked in there and I saw this old fat guy with a volatile sandals. I can say that because I'm now old and fat and ugly, so I can say that. But he proceeded, and I guess I got to portray him as a curmudgeon of a man. He proceeded to insult the Whirlpool people by saying they were not Requisite. And he got all the Americans upset. And there was a new guy called Rich Keller. He was their chief information officer, just joined Whirlpool. And he said, Elliot, I agree with you, whirlpool is antirequisite. So that started a fight. Ed Dunn, the VP of HR, started screaming at Rich Keller. And that's how I remember him. So it was very onerous.
Speaker B We all remember.
Speaker A Hello. My name is Paul Holmstrom. This take place early 90s. I've been a consultant a few years. The same consultants here as Michael. And we have this new guy, Rolf Lundgren, who joined us. And Rolf was a psychologist, CPA trained, and he started training us in basics about Requisite organization. Very interesting. But the turning point is an organizational review that Rolf and I were doing together in a very large organization. We'd been interviewing and we started a Monday morning preparing the report, what people said, what were our conclusions, and I felt very confident about this because I'd been a manager and quite large, Swedish and multinational for about 16 years. I knew everything about corporate issues and about everything I said. Rolf deconstructed picked into bits and told me why I was wrong and built up the framework using Requisites to explain what was right. And I had to cave in. It was the most exasperating experience I've been through. And when we were finished about 03:00 in the night, I was converted. But it could have also been that. We could have turned out to been enemies after this course. It was sort of devastating for everything I knew up to then. Hi, I'm Michael Brander. I was introduced by Rolf in the beginning of 92, I think it was. I was so interested and as Paul said, it was completely new knowledge to me. And I thought I could working as a management consultant for five years, I got the same experience as you. What value had I really added to the clients I've been working with? I went to BIOS 92 and was trained as a CPA practitioner. And then I tried to read all of Elio Chuck's work. And I can't say I understand it, or ever and ever will, but I'm really excited about this conference when we can share our knowledge about our methods and working. My name is Don Folk. In 1993 I was a management consultant. And I'd been in the practice in Canada and the US for a very long time. And I'd been specializing in organization and I'd been trained at MIT. And I was used to trying to think about these things very rigorously and I puzzled over organization for a very long time and found that there really wasn't very much in the field that had the rigor I was looking for. And I came to the conclusion basically that this was mostly art, there really wasn't any science here and I actually figured I was pretty good at it. And one day in the spring of 1993 I was having lunch at the York Club in Toronto with Mark Van Cleef and he said do you know anything about stratum strata and time spin? And I said no. And so he explained how this worked and I thought this is nuts, this can't be right, this can't be right. He said well look into it. And I did and I tried it out and it fit the bill and it actually sorted out a lot of situations, practical situations for me. So I've been working with it ever since.
Speaker B Hi, my name is Linda Glow. In 1993 I was a business unit manager for a Fortune 500 company and I found myself in a compressed state. I had a manager who had been over promoted, I had subordinates that I inherited and I was pretty much dysfunctional trying to do everybody's job. At that point I met someone whom you'll meet tomorrow, ken Wright, who is a consultant and he was helping us with our dysfunctionality. But at the time he also talked to us about Elliot Jackson, said have you read any of his books? I hadn't. So he said well while you're trying to fix this company or this unit, why don't you see what you can read? So I went out and bought every book I could find in print of Elliot's and I have a lot of them today and I attempted to read them over the course of time. I then changed to another organization and at that point I was introduced to Nancy Lee who actually helped us make requisite organization real in our corporation. I'm Charlote Bygrave and I first met Elliot in 1993. Wasn't crazy, that stuff was real and there was work to be done here and also an opportunity for HR to play a strategic role in the corporation. Fortunately for me after that one day seminar then I went off to the seven day seminar and when I presented it to the firm the only thing that I was able to sell the boss on 45 minutes.
Speaker A I'm Harold Solat. Last night I was talking with George Riley about Douglas McGregor and I remember that back in the was so gripped by McGregor's ideas and about what he stated about the needs for bringing science into management and about his, could you say positive view about human nature that making good sound healthful work situations was possible. And I can relate very well to what Herb said about feeling unsubstantial about one does with one's clients because I still think. McGregor's intentions and ideas were very sound, but it was not clear at all how to bring this into practice. So in 1995, I got a phone call from a friend who said, say, Harold, there was an ad in the paper asking for consultants. Why don't you see what it is this was about to expire? So I phoned the recruiter. Jerry Cranes had hired Argentina for his project there. And that was how I joined the Levinson Institute in 1995. And I was exposed to Jerry's great teaching skills and above all, inexhaustible drive. So that's why I'm here. 1995. That's when I got connected. Because I thought, well, this is it. This is what I've been longing for for all these years. This really makes sense. With this, I know what to do. And then another important moment was in 1997 when I was invited by Aldo Schlemenson to join in a project in the government in which Elliot acted as a consultant. And working with Elliot, I realized that I still had some way to go to understand what Ro Three was. So I was fascinated by this, but at the same time a little worried because there's a great deal of criticism and skepticisms around about the work of Eller Jacks. But the tragical thing, it seemed to me, is that this is all a big misunderstanding, because all the criticism is directed at something that is not a road theory, really. So when I came here last night, I was surprised and delighted by the reaction of many people about an article I wrote. There's a saying in Spanish nobody's a prophet in his own land. And that's a feeling I had. I wrote this paper because my concern was we have to do something about this awful misunderstanding about our theory that is so widely spread and held even by intellectually honest people and bright people. After this, this project with Elliot Jacks ended in 1997. He came to Buenos Aires some five, six times, and I made the best use possible of every opportunity of exchange with him. And after this, we kept contact over the mail for many years. And of course, we met again in 1999 right here in Toronto. And, well, ever since, everything I do, both in consulting and in teaching, is centered on the work of Elliot Jackson.
Speaker B Well, I am Maria Raquel Popovich from Argentina, and in 1996, I have a big problem because I finished my MBA and any theory explained my questions. I'm wondering what is relationship between CEO and corporate governance? What is the relationship with CEOs and Word? I was starting my PhD, and any theory is useful. You know, I met a document in praise of hierarchy, and this document was very important for me. I understand immediately, but our encounter is not about documents or writers or our encounter is about the help I needed. And I wanted what is the network I encountered to Hector Luna, Harold Solas, aldos lemonson, Kenneth Kradock, Ken Shepherd, all these people in the network helped me to understand the theory and to complete the PhD. And, well, that's all for me. Okay.
Speaker A I'm Ken Kraddock and I came upon L. A. Jackson's work in 1996. I had been the teaching assistant for Dr. W. Edwards Deming at Columbia for the last two years of his life, and he died in 1993. And one of the key elements that I was focusing on in my study of his stuff, which continued after he died, was why was it not better accepted? And he had identified what he called the deadly diseases, and there were seven deadly diseases of management, et cetera. And so I decided to go onto a literature search, go into the literature and find seven consultants, seven writers, seven academics, whoever, each of them could knock one down. And I couldn't find anybody that didn't also conflict with some other major concept of qualities except for one, and that was Elliot Jacks. And he didn't eliminate any of them, but he reduced all seven. So it was the horse I had to ride with. So I called Kaisen Hall, and I said, how do I get in contact with him? And they said, he's not here right now. He'll call you back tomorrow. So that's how I made contact with him. But it took a number of years for me to finally eliminate the various concepts as being in conflict or not in conflict with quality. And it took a four hour session with Rebecca Casey, not Elliot, because I couldn't argue with Elliot, as most of us have run into. But Rebecca finally convinced me that Elliot understood quality well enough so that he did not conflict with it. And so finally, that was sort of the two theories. One going horizontal, the other vertical are quite complementary. Yes, there are some points of conflict, but they are sort of like you have to figure out from the actual context of the company which one to go with. The theory is the level at which I've been working on. That's how I got involved.
Speaker B I'm Michelle Malay Carter, and I spent ten years in the business world before becoming an independent consultant. During that ten years, I worked for three different companies. I had ten different job titles and seven different managers. And in retrospect, I can say that two of the ten jobs fit my capability. None of my seven managers ever did. So therefore, I had a very tumultuous time. I was fired out of my first job out of college. I had a history of six months of fabulous performance. My first year of performance appraisals were just, way to go, girl. And then all of a sudden, the personality clash just started. The manager and I weren't getting along, and I was told I had character flaws. I was impatient, I was impetuous. I had an attitude, and I couldn't understand how I was working. So hard and getting the job done, but yet I was representing the fact that I kept being told to fix myself. So after about ten years of that, I had had enough. And my last role was I was a regional training manager for Kodak. So I said I've got to go work for myself because obviously I can't get along with others. And I left, went back to school, started my own business and Glenn Meltredter came in and was a guest speaker in one of my courses. And when he started drawing boxes and circles, once again it was like the clouds opened up, the light came down. And I thought to myself, okay, I'm not a freak. I may have been a misfit, but I'm not a freak. And it was as if I mean, really, the moment for me was as if a scarlet letter A was being washed off of me. And it wasn't adulterous, it was attitude. Because that's what I had been told for ten years that I was an attitude problem and I needed to fix my attitude and I couldn't figure out how to do it. I think the best thing about requisite organization is it focuses on not fixing people, but fixing the system. And the attitude is washed away. Good morning, I'm Sandy Cardillo and I was first introduced to this work in 2000 when I joined First National Bank and met Linda and Nancy. And actually training and development is my third career. In my first career I was a family consumer scientist, traveling jewelry buyer. So understand, lots of profit. And what was always interesting to me when I would travel the world was how people work together. And that's how I really did wander into training and development. I got there because I articulated what I would value in a job and the person said, well, that's what we want our training and development person to do. Or actually they used another word and I said what is that? So the teacher in me came back to being able to go into the classroom in a manufacturing environment. I am convinced that in a past life I was probably an anthropologist. And I tell people if money was no object, I would have been Margaret Mead. And so what I decided is two things about Elliot's work. The first one is the sanity of it all because I'm a farm girl and things are very pragmatic to me. And thank God someone finally explained to me what's goofy about organization. The second part is I am fascinated as I begin to read backwards because the first thing that Linda and Nancy handed me was requisite organization. And I said what is this? But they said read it two pages at a time. One is visual, one is verbal. Okay, I can do know. So then we started going backwards to social power and the CEO and now I'm actually opening up general theory. But what is fascinating to me is the way Elliot did his research, because I am a grounded theorist. I had a fabulous, fabulous professor work with me in my master's program. She was actually a positive reductionist chemical scientist, but she allowed me to do fieldwork and observation when I did my work. And I am fascinated by the methodology and how Elliot developed what he was thinking and kept continuing to develop his thinking as he went through, which to me is like the perfect use of grounded theory. I was honored in 2001 was it? We went to Austin to finally meet the man, the Oracle, and watch him in a room, as all of you have described.