My Genesis of Career Values

I seeds for my career in destination marketing were planted during the first 33 months of the 1970s, while working my way through BYU in a windowless below-ground level nook of the administration building, situated next door to the dispatchers for campus police.

Universities are microcosms of communities, and I’ll explain later how this was also when the seeds were planted for me about the importance of community appearance including a passion for trees.

Back then we were a staff of two, then three, and later four or five of us who handled campus tours, administered the president’s box during football games and actively marketed the campus across the nation as a site for camps, workshops, summer youth conferences and events which included assisting their production.

My job title was conference coordinator.  The Office of Tours and Conferences back then fell under the director of University Relations, a division that fell under University Communications which had been headed until the year prior by the late Dr. Stephen R. Covey, then only 36 years old.

I quickly earned a supervisory role, and following a detour for law school, this experience would anchor what would become a 40-year career as a community-destination marketing executive for communities in Washington, Alaska and North Carolina.

The general idea of the then-Office of Tours and Conferences was to fuel demand for campus food services, housing and campus facilities to sustain year round employment and to engage professors and grad students during what were at the time very low volume summer school sessions.

Apparently the ground-work paid off because as I graduated it was spun off and today there is an entire three story visitor center (a tower of which is shown in this blog) located at the main campus entrance devoted to tours, public affairs, alumni affairs, guest relations, reunions, community relations and even a speakers bureau etc.

Up the hill north and east of Lavell Edwards Stadium is now a dedicated conference center where staff still in continuing education now coordinate and produce workshops, camps, special events and professional and association meetings.

It is a long ways from that basement hovel, but the most remarkable physical transformation since I graduated is the presence now of incredible landscaping and towering trees, part of a makeover that was initiated just as I left.

One of my last classes at BYU was a field botany class during the early summer session focused on trees.  BYU has always been a top undergraduate research university so my professor for the class taught us much more about the value of trees than just how to identify various species.

While I was growing up, BYU had undergone a tremendous building boom that had expanded the number of buildings from 6 to nearly 300 on a relatively flat plateau in the shadows of Y Mountain, a peak in the the Wasatch Range of the central Rocky Mountains.

The campus was manicured and grassed but found lacking at the time in overall landscaping, especially trees. This was not lost on two other people as I graduated in August of 1972 including Roy Peterman, a classmate, and fellow-Idaho native Jack Wheatley and his wife Mary Lois who as I graduated were just dropping off their eldest son for his first semester.

Peterman and I graduated from the same department, he in psychology and me in history but we each found our 40-year careers while working for the university part-time.  He worked in grounds keeping becoming director in 1978, I found my calling in community-destination marketing.  Both involve fostering and preserving sense of place including scenic character.

The Wheatley’s are more contemporary with our respective parents.  Jack was born in Pocatello, at the opposite end of the fault line of my youth.  He and his late wife built a business in Palo Alto, California in residential and then commercial real estate including construction of buildings on the campus of Stanford University there.

Neither had ties to BYU.  He graduated from West Point and she from arch-rival University of Utah.  But by the time they dropped their eldest son off to attend BYU, they had shaped a deep appreciation not just for buildings but the extraordinary value landscaping brings not only to both the built and natural environment but to human inspiration.

Wheatley’s are the name sakes for an incredible Institution housed in the same building as the visitors center at BYU.  In part, The Wheatley Institution’s purpose is to foster the teaching of ethical business behavior in universities.

They have also single-handedly donated thousands and thousands of trees to populate the 560+-acre BYU campus along with overall landscaping inspiration and design for waterways, walkways, outdoor art and natural areas that foster learning and creativity.

As a result, even though hundreds of additional buildings have been erected there since I graduated, the BYU campus has since become a spectacular example of the powerful force of biophilia on our lives.

The term was coined a decade after Jack and Mary Lois began to transform BYU’s campus with trees, art and gardens.  Biophia is now the well-proven concept that scenic preservation “optimizes productivity, healing time, learning functions and community cohesion” (Go Cougars!) as well as economic development.

Jack Wheately’s understanding of the importance of natural and scenic aesthetics is unique among engineers, builders and real estate developers.  He served during the Korean War with the US Army Corp of Engineers before achieving extraordinary financial success in commercial office building and leasing including R & D facilities in Silicon Valley.

Much of this occurred in the ten years before he turned his attention to scenic preservation on BYU’s campus in the early 1970s.

Maybe in part it was the influence of his wife, an art major.  Maybe it came from studying the evolution of the beautiful Stanford campus, or maybe it was from meeting the needs of tech entrepreneurs who seem sensitive to the tie between creativity, innovation and natural environment.

Regardless, if we could only clone Jack and infuse all commercial developers with his humility, understanding and commitment to biophilia, maybe community’s would no longer need to seek establish minimum requirements in order to protect their sense of place and environments.

The Long View Imperative for Leadership

When my daughter was very young she briefly thought I was a fireman after overhearing me describe to a reporter over the telephone that a significant amount of my time as a community-destination marketing executive involved “putting out fires.”

It is an unfortunate condition of executive management that far too much time is diverted to problem-solving, but as noted in an address earlier this year for The Wheatley Institution, a think tank founded by another Idaho native, that seeks to strengthen society’s core institutions, Dr. Roger B. Porter, IBM Professor of Business and Government for the Harvard Kennedy School noted that leadership is more than just problem-solving or hyper list-checking.

I’m not so sure myself, but during my now-concluded 40-year career as an exec in community economic development, some flatteringly claimed that I stood out as strategic while critics, including a couple of friends, cautioned that personally and organizationally I took on too much.

For today’s community-destination marketing execs, taking what Porter calls “the long view” is de rigueur as anyone leading an organization that has been truly accredited knows.

As Porter, who graduated from Brigham Young University a year ahead of Mitt Romney and two years ahead of me, explains, a problem-solver is reactive while a strategic or long-view leader is proactive, viewing each problem and solution through a “prism” of “overarching goals and objectives.”

Those who thought I was strategic during my career perceived that I was always using such a prism.  Those who feared that I took on too much in defense of the identities of the communities for which I fought during my career didn’t realize that I was equally determined to filter all tactical, day-to-day actions, including “putting out fires, through that prism.

Use of a long view prism is also what distinguishes some who are able to see through “special interests” from the many who front for them instead, basing decisions on “who’s asking.”

As Porter eloquently notes in an essay adapted this month from his remarks at Wheatley, “long view leaders” are “searching the horizon not for problems that need solutions [or I might add, problems to fit preconceived pet solutions or beliefs] but for the surest and most efficient path to the overarching goals they have established.”

Today, organizations can no longer afford leadership at any level including elected office that doesn’t take the long view, or to adapt the words of Dr. Helen Fisher, a researcher in behavioral anthropology at Rutgers University who blogs at www.chemistry.com from an essay published last week by US News about the “genetics of politics” (which applies just as well to management,) leaders need a little less testosterone and a lot more estrogen with a constant supply of dopamine.

According to recent biographies of two of America’s greatest and most beloved Presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, a trait that made both uniquely successful was their willingness to surround themselves with aides and advisors representing a wide range of dissenting viewpoints, a trait that frustrates many advocates as well as detractors of President Barack Obama.

As Washington and Lincoln each addressed seemingly insurmountable challenges, this trait enabled them to take the long view, always being aware of historical precedent, forgiving in victory, willing to adapt ideas even from their enemies while, even in the midst of crisis, never losing sight of the overarching importance of infrastructure and the indispensible role of debt, even as each struggled to balance their personal check books.

These Presidents had no patience for partisan bickering or lock-step ideologues or favor-seeking lobbyists or anything that short changed the common good and upward mobility such as today’s no-tax pledge.  They were moderate realists.

As Porter concludes about great leaders of every stripe: “They are not diverted by the seemingly urgent…[they] concentrate on the important and eschew the less important.”

Just as importantly, according to Porter, great leaders “are more concerned with investing in the future than in immediate gratification, and they value dynamism, change, and innovation over security and stability.”

To me, these observations and lessons are as applicable to small community organizations as they are world leaders and central to any job description today for management or leadership, appointed or elected.