Transcript

Well, you know, this is my first trip. I mean, the first time I had seen a business other than the sawmill where I worked.

There were five or six professors teaching this course, and so the one whose cases it was going to be had just recently come back from Washington, and he'd been in Eisenhower's government. He'd been in the treasury, in charge of the taxation program, Dan Throop Smith. And he was a pretty formal guy. And he said, "Before you leave, I want you to come in, and just chat before you go." So I came in, and he says, among other things, "Well, where's your hat?" And, I mean, I had a ski hat, or a baseball cap, or something, but I knew that isn't what he was talking about. So I said, "Well, I don't have one." And he said, "Well, on the way to the airport, I want you to stop in Filene's Basement and get a hat. You can't go out representing the School without a hat on." So I did that. And he said, "By the way," he said, "you're not to take any taxis." He said, "You go out to the airport. You can go downtown, and go to Filene's, and then go over to the airport." So I did that.

I didn't realize there were so many hats. In the Basement, they had all kinds of them. So anyway, he wore a homburg, so I thought, "Well, that must be what he wants me to wear." I looked like John Foster Dulles, or Dwight Eisenhower. I bought this homburg, and I got on the Northeast Yellow Bird, and I flew down, and I think to Philadelphia, and then drove up to Johnson & Johnson in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

And I got there. It was in, you know, it was early July. It was really hot. And I remember walking to this guy's office. Like he was the assistant assistant treasurer, or something. And so he said, "Well, we'll go to lunch together. Why don't you just leave your things?" So I took off my homburg, and he's staring at my forehead like this. And then he realized I was looking at him looking at me, and he said, "Oh," he said, "What happened to your forehead?" I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, you've got this red scar." I'd bought a hat that was probably two sizes too small, and in the hot summer weather it had seared this red stripe across my forehead.

Anyway, I spent, I think, three days there, and then Friday afternoon at lunch time, someone came in and said, "General Johnson wants to see you." And all of this for a cost accounting case. So I went in. And again, other than at Koerner's, I'd never met a CEO of anything. And so he was very nice, and he asked me about this case, and what was going on at the School. Like you, he asked me, "What's your plan?" Of course, I didn't have one. And so I didn't know what to say, so I commented on his campus, which was fantastic. It turned out it was, I think, old textile buildings that had been converted. But they had torn down a lot of buildings, and had a real campus.

So when he saw I was interested in that, then he took quite a bit of time, and explained his philosophy about where people work. The ambience really makes a big difference. And I remember he said, "You know, it's nothing I can prove, but that's what I believe, and so that's what I've done." Then he, you know, took me around and showed me what he'd started with, and what it had ended up as.