Transcript

And the fundamental reason was faculty development. We had to get faculty who weren't just Americans thinking American was the number one in the world. And this was one of the ways to do it. We thought it was such a difficult job, that this was such a pleasant place for so many of us with consulting, and teaching, and houses and schools, that unless we lifted people out of this environment fulltime, it wouldn't work. So we voted a program.

I then was asked to take over Exec Ed, and got responsibility dropped out of the sky to start this program. Virtually nothing had been done. No planning had been done. We hadn't picked where, or anything else. So the first job was to find out where. Our best ally there was a company called Nestle, and John McArthur knew a lot of Nestle people, and Nestle was located in Switzerland. And they did some Exec Ed, and so on and so forth. And so we got them to help us, and by process of elimination, we decided Switzerland was the obvious place to go. . . .

Lo and behold, there's our friend Nestle. There's McArthur and Chris Christensen consulting and sending summer faculty—sending temporary faculty over to a school called IMEDE, located in Lausanne.

So I parachuted into this thing at sort of the last minute in the spring of '72, I think it was. And the first question was: who are we going to get to go? Since the goal was research, I wanted to get people who would do case writing to develop teaching material, and to get research. And so I tried to get people, like my old friend Charlie Williams. Now Charlie wasn't young, and driving, and doing research in those days, and certainly not writing a lot of cases. But he could teach anything, and he had a great reputation. And so I thought if he would go, that would be a sign that a strong person wanted to go. And I got Milt Brown, who then was a classroom teacher. Not exactly a researcher, but interested in cases. And so on and so forth. And we put together a team. The goal was eventually to get on the ground, and then turn it into a research center, with faculty who would be researchers, and case writers, mostly case writers.

The trouble was that young people who wanted to be researchers, and still were driving in that area, were young. And they had kids going to college, and they were just getting promoted, and they were just getting consulting, and they didn't really want to go. And so we wound up with a first group on the field of people like Milt Brown, and Charlie Williams.

They hadn't really agreed to go, most of them. I can remember having lunch with Milt Brown and Charlie one day in the Faculty Club on the day they were going to Europe, that night. And Milt said to me, plaintively, "You know, Colyer, I haven't agreed to go yet, and I'm going tonight."