Well, yeah, of course I mean you have an hour to respond. What the place
is and always been is it's attracted interesting people, I think. Very
interesting people. I'm going to be seeing one this afternoon and that's
Jodi Taylor who is still there until the end of the year. She's leaving.
And Jodi is one of these rare psychologists who is an
Page 28entrepreneur who is driven to achieve excellence and driven
to build and do it in a way in which not for her own glory but the
greater good. And there aren't many people at all in our profession like
Jodi Taylor. She's one of a kind. And it's working with people like that
and just as we would do, when she worked for me, she reported to me for
a few years, we would just get together in a room and just start
dreaming dreams. And the amazing thing was that as outrageous and
ambitious as these dreams might be, if I could find the resources for
her, she would achieve them time after time after time. It was just
phenomenal. She would turn these dreams into reality and out of that
came the Center For Creative Leadership in Colorado Springs in its
current form. So there's a person. There are also people who I grew up
with there in the research function – Morgan McCall, Ann Morrison, Mike
Lombardo, Bob Kaplan – there's a whole set of them who have always done
what outstanding researchers do which is ask the tough questions, ask
the questions to which there are no obvious answers, ask questions which
we really don't even know how to get the answers to. But not be afraid
of the question. Not to allow your current methods to dictate your
questions because then what will happen is the questions will get
narrow. In our field, the industrial psychology field, it has been
terribly conservative in that sense. You want to speak about Southern
conservatives, there's a whole profession that's extremely conservative.
In fact, the Center became in the profession, through its research group
particular, we became the outrageous fringe group within IO psychology.
It was wonderful. We'd go to these annual conferences and scare the
bejeezes out of people. And the amazing thing is they'd come and listen
to us and even clap at the end of the two hours and come back next year
for more. Those folks are just I'll never forget the conversations with
those. And not only conversations, but the research projects that came
out of that. Those are times that when you look back over a career,
those are absolute highlights. I think of people like Bill Friday and
his wisdom about the place and his wisdom about how to gently move
aboard in the direction of supporting what seemed at times like some
crazy ideas and wild-eyed young folks. And he did a huge amount in his
own wonderfully quiet and powerful way, of bridging our world with that
of the Richardson family. And he did it year after year after year. And
I know he had conversations that to him must have felt like the broken
record with the family year after year. But he did it with a kind of
dedication and patience. And these are the kind of conversations that
very few people know about. These are the quiet, behind the scenes
conversations that make a huge difference. And that's a form of
leadership that I really learned to respect and Bill taught me a lot
about that leadership. You know, there's the David Campbell
Page 29stories. David is larger than life in the whole field of
psychology. He remains larger than life and he came to the Center at a
time—David made it possible for the Center to still be here today. It
had gone through a hugely traumatic experience. The Board didn't know
what to do with it and he was willing to give a shot at leading it. And
his approach which was managerially a limited approach, but exactly what
was needed was just to say, "I'm not going to manage this place to
death. I'm just going to find the right people out there and bring them
in and let them do their thing. And then I'm going to demand some
accountability." And that's what he did. And more importantly, he also
modeled for us all creativity day in an day out. So David, if we were
worried about doing outrageous things, we didn't have to worry long,
because whenever we would go into meetings with David, he would beat us
to the punch. He would do even more outrageous things, some of which
cannot be put in any kind of record.