General Management
“If business comes with no moral sympathy, or honorable code of behavior, God help us all.”
— Anita Roddick, Founder of the Body Shop
“The Pete Suazo Business Center as a Model High Impact Minority Small Business Development & Resource Center,” United States Association of Small Business and Entrepreneurship, USASBE International Conference Proceedings, Washington, DC, June 2010.
“Religion and Work Symposium: “Mormonism, Work, and Labor Relations,” Perspectives on Work, pp. 46-48, Summer/Fall 2008.
Managing by the Numbers. New York: Addison-Wesley, Pub., 1988 (book, 293 pages, with C. Meek and W. G. Dyer).
“Entrepreneurship at the Bottom-of-the Pyramid Among the Disadvantaged Poor,” USASBE, Dallas, Texas, 2014.
“Technical Training & Enterprise: Mondragon’s Educational System & its Implications for other Cooperatives,” (with Christopher Meek) Economic and Industrial Democracy, 1990, Vol.11, pp. 505-528.
“Paper Entrepreneurs and Absentee Owners”. Exchange, Spring 1988, pp. 8-12 (interview).
“Beating the Odds”. Exchange, Winter 1987, pp. 34-36.
“Information in Latin American Organizations: Some Cautions”. Management International Review, Vol. 20, No. 2, 1980, pp. 61-70.
“The Female Takeover: Threat or Opportunity?” The Personnel Administrator, Vol. 24, No. 1, January 1979, pp. 19-28.
Long-term professional business management consulting I have done include the following clients:
Rensis Likert Associates, Inc.–Consultant in management firm working with a variety of clients, having primary responsibility for research design, survey feedback, and ongoing organizational development work with General Motors Division of Fisher Body, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Arthur D. Little, Inc.–Consulting and interview methodology in researching the viability of corporate decentralization for Microlite, S.A. headquartered in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I also engaged in managerial problems at different plant sites in Guarulhos and Recife, Brazil to institute systems of performance evaluation, career development, and succession planning.
VSI Corporation— Consultant to CEO and top management operating committee in Pasadena, California, on problems of strategic planning, management development, career planning, and administrative restructuring corporate-wide.
DME Co.–Consulting activity dealing with organizational structure and participative management approaches at plants in New Jersey, California, and Illinois.
Clark Equipment Co.–Organizational research and consultant to labor/management quality of work project in Michigan of the International Truck Division with company management and the Allied Industrial Workers of America, Local No. 939.
Hyatt Clark Industries–Consulting with management and UAW Local 736 leaders in the process of purchasing a bearing plant from General Motors, creating improved productivity and a democratic approach to decision-making from the shop floor to the boardroom. This strategy saved over a thousand autoworker jobs and stabilized the Clark, New Jersey area’s economy, becoming a prototype for other successful worker takeovers such as Weirton Steel in West Virginia.
U.S. Airlines–Ongoing consulting with various corporations over a dozen years: Southwest, People Express, Delta, United, and Northwest Airlines to design new strategies, change corporate cultures, manage conflicts, and improve customer service.
“Nothing endures but change.”
— Heraclitus
Below are a number of professional management/academic positions I’ve held over the years:
Adjunct Professor–Institute of Management and Administration, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Managing Editor–Exchange Magazine.
Member–National Coordinating Council, Association for Self-Management, Washington, D.C.
Adjunct Faculty–New School for Democratic Management, San Francisco, California.
Visiting Faculty–Labor Studies Center, University of Michigan.
Research Projects Evaluator, National Science Foundation. Board Member–Action Resources, Inc., Salt Lake City, Utah.
Board of Directors–National Center for Employee Ownership, Arlington, Virginia.
Consultant–Participation Associates, Amherst, Massachusetts.
Research Associate–Women’s Research Institute, Brigham Young University.
U.S. Steel/Geneva Works–Community Advisory Board, Utah County.
Board of Directors–Hyatt Clark Industries, New Jersey.
Executive Director–Small Business Development Center, Provo, Utah.
Advisory Committee–Governor’s Office of Planning and Economic Development, State of Hawaii.
“Our [Utah] merchants have hearts that are too elastic, entirely too elastic; they are so elastic that they do not ask what they can afford to sell an article for, but what they can ask the people to pay; and as much as the people will pay, so much will the merchants take–a hundred, or a thousand per cent, if they can get it, and then thank God for their success. They put me in mind of some men I have seen who, when they had a chance to buy a widow’s cow for ten cents on the dollar of her real value in cash, would then make the purchase, and then thank the Lord that he had so blessed them. Such men belong to the class of Christians referred to on one occasion by Charles Gunn; and, if you will excuse me, I will tell you what he said about them. He said that ‘hell is full of such Christians.'”
— Brigham Young
Business Management Links
“Half the harm that’s done in this world is due to people who want to feel important.”
— T. S. Eliot, British poet
There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves
There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who prey upon them with IBM eyes
And sell their hearts and guts for martinis at noon.
There are men too gentle for a savage world
Who dream instead of snow and children and Halloween
And wonder if the leaves will change their color soon.
There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who anoint them for burial with greedy claws
And murder them for a merchant’s profit and gain.
There are men too gentle for a corporate world
Who dream instead of candied apples and ferris wheels
And pause to hear the distant whistle of a train.
There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who devour them with eager appetite and search
For other men to prey upon and suck their childhood dry.
There are men too gentle for an accountant’s world
Who dream instead of Easter eggs and fragrant grass
And search for beauty in the mystery of the sky.
There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who toss them like a lost and wounded dove.
Such gentle men are lonely in a merchant’s world,
Unless they have a gentle one to love.
— James Kavanaugh
The Manager’s Electronic Resource Center
University of Michigan Business School
Society for Human Resource Management
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Group and Organization Management Journal
Marriott School of Business, BYU
“Whoever commands the trade of the world, commands the riches of the world, and hence, the world itself.”
— Sir Walter Raleigh