The Corporate Mystic
An Interview with Gay Hendricks
Kay K. Runge
Gay
Hendricks is the president of the Hendricks Institute and author of The
Corporate Mystic. He addressed librarians at the PLA President’s
program at the ALA Annual Conference in San Francisco in June 2001. Hendricks
considered leadership in the twenty-first century and discussed what makes
America’s top business leaders successful, visionary, and intuitive.
Kay K. Runge, then president of PLA, interviewed Hendricks before the
program. The text of Hendricks’s speech may be read on the PLA Web
site, www.pla.org.
PL: Tell me a little about your background. How did you come to your present career?
GH: When I was working on my Ph.D. at Stanford about thirty years ago when I was a clinical and counseling psychologist, I had a client come in who was the vice president of an electronics firm. I worked with him on some problems related to back pain and his marriage, and he had some success with the techniques that we used. His back pain went away and his marriage got better. Then he asked if I could go into his business and do the same sort of thing with a whole company. In other words, he asked me to think of the whole corporation as my client and figure out what it is they were doing wrong and help them figure out how to fix it. So I went into the company and tried to figure out the simplest thing that could be done differently to make things work better. So I figured out two or three things they were doing wrong in the company that if they did a little bit differently they would have better success. And it worked. Over the years I’ve worked with eighty to one hundred different companies, always based on that same idea: what is the simplest thing they can do to make things work better? And out of that, I came up with about half a dozen principles that any organization can use, whether it’s a family of three people or the largest corporation I’ve worked with, which is a company with about 130,000 employees. And it doesn’t matter if you’re working for a nonprofit or whatever, all organizations work the same way. I came up with certain fundamental ideas and that’s the subject of what I want to be talking about today [in the PLA President’s program].
PL: So you started out in private practice?
GH: I had a little private practice, but mainly I was a university professor. I was a professor at the University of Colorado for twenty-one years in the counseling psychology department. I only taught classes three days a week, so two days a week I would do consulting or work with private clients.
PL: Were the principles that you have listed in The Corporate Mystic the same ones you started out with? Or have you refined them as time has passed?
GH: Actually, the principles in The Corporate Mystic are the result of many, many years of work. I didn’t start out with them. I started out with maybe two or three of them as general ideas based on what had helped people as individuals. Then gradually, over the years, I assembled the rest of the principles.
PL: Are there certain principles that have remained constant?
GH: There absolutely are. There’s one in particular that probably accounts for much of the problem in communication in relationships in general, whether it’s a family relationship or a relationship in a company. I call it “going to the source.” Most of us learned in our families not to go to the source. In other words, if I had a problem with you and I didn’t go to the source, I might tell somebody else about it—somebody who doesn’t even know you, or one of your friends. In companies, people who aren’t in the habit of going to the source complain and deal with problems in a roundabout manner and never deal with the person they actually have the problem with. It’s a habit that seems to only cost a little bit, but actually, if everybody in the company is doing it, it’s costing a huge amount in terms of wasted productivity.
PL: Have you found that there are significant differences in terms of gender roles?
GH: When I first started, I would say that there were more. In those days—thirty years ago—male authority figures were in positions of power, and people found them harder to approach. These days, the distinctions have blurred. I see it going all sorts of different ways, so I don’t see as much of a gender difference as I did thirty years ago.
PL: So do management positions play a bigger role than gender?
GH: I would say definitely so. Many of us in organizations have habits that we developed in our families of origin thirty or forty years ago. In my family, the patriarch was my grandfather and you just did not approach him directly. Everybody had their roundabout ways of dealing with him. I grew up in a family without a father and my grandfather was my father figure. So I learned some habits, early on, of communicating with him in a roundabout way. And later on, when I got into my university career, I found myself communicating with the dean of my program in the same way, without realizing it was just an old habit based on my family.
PL: In your thirty years of experience, have you found that these principles are still as applicable now as they were when you formulated them?
GH: Absolutely. In fact, I think they are relatively timeless. People seem to be making the same mistakes and needing to correct them in the same ways. Another one of the big principles that we discovered is what we call “eliminating the blame game.” What that means is if each person can take healthy responsibility for the situation they’re in rather than assigning blame to someone else, then they can operate from a position of power. Whereas, if you’re not claiming responsibility, you’re really claiming that you’re a victim of that situation. In an organization, that habit goes around like the flu. It spreads from one person to another, because if one person claims to be a victim, the other person claims to be a victim, because nobody wants to take responsibility. In many organizations we’ve had to go after it like we were going after the flu.
PL: Yesterday we heard Robert Putnam speak about Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. We’ve become more isolated from our communities since more Americans are living alone now than any other time in history, and there has been a real breakdown in our communication skills. Do you find that these problems occur earlier in organizations today than they did in the past? Is there a difference in companies primarily staffed by younger generations?
GH: I think it is somewhat different now because many people have caught onto some of these principles earlier. For example, last Friday I spent all day with [an Internet] start-up. They are working on implementing these principles from the very beginning of the organization so they don’t develop the bad habits that some older organizations have. Sometimes we’ve gone into organizations where the behavior patterns have been so entrenched that it’s very difficult to uproot them, especially if people at the top of the organization aren’t open to listening to feedback and aren’t flexible with how they want the organization to operate.
PL: How do these companies come in contact with you?
GH: Typically someone at the top of the organization reads my book, and then they may look at my Web site, Hendricks.com, or they may talk to someone who has worked with me. I would say the number one thing is that people read the book. I recently had the great privilege of going into an organization where the CEO had read the book, had become a big fan, and bought 150 copies for all of his top executives and told them, “You must read this book.” And that’s the best thing that an author could hear, because then, when I came in and worked with them for three days, everybody was familiar with the general ideas.
PL: And that’s what we hope happens with your talk this afternoon: that librarians will come in contact with your ideas and be able to bring them back to their own library.
GH: That’s great, because I love libraries and I am going to say a lot of flattering things about libraries today, but I know that they have exactly the same kinds of problems that any other organization does.
PL: And your mother was on the board of trustees at her local library?
GH: Yes. She’s passed away now, but in her life she was an enthusiastic member of the library board where she lived in Florida and was also instrumental in building the library in Leesburg, Florida, many years ago.
PL: Talk about your educational background.
GH: I got my undergraduate degree at Rollins College in Central Florida. It is a real nice liberal arts school with about 1,500 students. Then I got my master’s degree from the University of New Hampshire and my doctorate from Stanford.
PL: And you’ve been in California ever since?
GH: That’s right. I fell in love with a California girl twenty-one years ago and we got married, so after I retired from the University of Colorado, she and I moved back out here.
PL: Talk a little bit about your colleague Kate Ludeman.
GH: Kate Ludeman is one of the best business consultants in the country. She was instrumental in bringing me into a high-tech corporation that she was the human resources director of back in the eighties. We became fast friends and have been good friends and colleagues ever since. On a weekly basis, I spend more time talking to her than I do any other colleague. She and her partner Eddie and my wife Katie and I also live about a mile from each other.
PL: What book are you working on currently?
GH: I’m working on a new book about aging and how to age gracefully. It’s called Achieving Vibrance. Random House will be publishing it in January 2002.
PL: What are some of the tips that the book outlines?
GH: The book lays out a seven-minute-a-day program that makes you feel better after fifty than you’ve ever felt in your life. It’ll make you feel better than you did as a teenager. And one of the keys to it is to do something different with your mind every day. Simple things. If you always brush your teeth with your right hand, start brushing your teeth with your left hand every other day. If you always sleep on one side of the bed, sleep on the other side of the bed once a week. Just do something a little bit different. It doesn’t have to be a complicated thing. If you always drive to work the same way, go out of the way even though it might take you two minutes longer, just to see some new scenery along the way. It’s important to do, think, and feel things differently every day. That’s one thing I learned from interviewing successful aging people. By the way, I got the research done for this book by finding the most vibrant people over fifty that I could possibly find and then asking them how they did it.
PL: Did you call my ninety-two-year-old mother? She’s still racing around.
GH: She’s still racing around! Well I bet she does some of these things that I’m talking about. One thing that successful elders do is find some way to flex their spines every day. They keep their spines limber, either by walking, stretching, moving, or doing yoga. The oldest person that I worked with in my study was eighty-seven, now she’s eighty-eight years old, and she does an hour of yoga and stretching every single day of her life. Also on the day I last interviewed her she had purchased a trumpet over the Internet and she was going to teach herself how to play the trumpet for the first time at age eighty-seven. These people are inspiring to be around.
PL: What other projects are you working on?
GH: Right now I’m involved in a lot of different interesting projects. I’m part owner of a movie production company that makes movies with psychological and social significance to them. I don’t know if you saw the Robin Williams film, What Dreams May Come. That was one of our films. So we’re very involved in media kinds of things—lots of different, unusual projects like that.
PL: So is your goal to have a film in production at all times?
GH: I would say at least once a year, but not all the time. All the time would probably eat up a lot more of my energies than I could handle. I like to write a book every year, and that takes up a lot of my time, but making a movie all the time would be a bit much.
PL: Is there anything else you would like to tell the readers of Public Libraries?
GH: One of my favorite quotes that I’ve told my students many, many times is about libraries: “Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.” Libraries have been my best friend throughout my life. I’ll mention today in my talk the first time I ever went into a library and what it did to me. I think that librarians are doing a sacred task, and I wish them well with it.