ETL 54: Business Reengineering Guru Jim Champy on the Power of Staying Human in an AI World

Transcript:  Jim Champy and Bob Buday

Bob Buday: Great to talk to you, Jim. Let’s start with your memoir. What do you hope to achieve with it?

Jim Champy: I hesitated to even think about a memoir, frankly, never mind write it, because all the memoirs I had read by business people are dreadful books. Most of the time, they’re talking about taking their whole family to the Galapagos Islands, or chartering a yacht to go there, or that their three sons had all gone to Harvard and their daughter had gone to Stanford.

But nothing about them. So I was hesitant. I was being encouraged by a close friend up here in New Hampshire, who had taught writing at NYU and now University of New Hampshire. I had been visiting with her and describing some of the experiences I had, particularly with executives who were not well-behaved. She said, “Look, you should write a memoir.”

I went to Donna Carpenter Labaron (founder of publishing firms New Word City and Wordworks), and she said, “Look, just start to write.” And I did, and I was learning a lot about myself, quite frankly, and in doing it, I just started to enjoy it. But it forced me to go back in time and think about where my values came from.

What did I really respect? How did I behave? A memoir also requires you to write about what you are experiencing, what you were feeling as you had these experiences. It’s been a much, much deeper exploration, Bob, than I had ever expected, and I’m glad I’m doing it.

The structure is for me to tell a story about something I had experienced and how I experienced it, and then to write a short section about what I learned from it, and then a follow-up section that speaks to what I would do differently today. A reader can get a sense not only of what I was experiencing, but what I learned and how I reacted to it.

I’m not sure everything I did, and the way I did it, should be a model for people. But hopefully there’ll be some learning experience for them in reading this. One of the interesting things was some of the best sections are those that talked about my failures. There were some mistakes I made, some big and expensive mistakes. When I counted up the number of those, I said, “Boy, maybe I wasn’t a great manager, but I hope the good things I accomplished outweigh my mistakes.

Bob: Well, I would argue otherwise, whatever my opinion is worth, Jim. You were a great manager at Index until [the parent company, Computer Sciences Corp.] started interfering and making some of the wrong choices.

Jim: That’s right. Eventually I got pulled into another place [Perot Systems]. It isn’t that I was going to quit Index as much as I was being pulled at the time by Ross Perot, who had launched his new company. I found that intriguing.

Bob: Is your memoir going to be about your business career experiences or before you entered the business world and then after?

Jim: It actually begins very early in my life because I believe that an executive’s values begin with their childhood, what they learned from their environment, not just from their parents. In that period of growing up, what did they learn and take away from that? I go back to the days in which I was working for my father, who had a small construction company, and my experiences in that company, and what I learned about the people who did the real work, which was the construction work: the laborers, the painters, and so on.

These people loved their work and did great work. I deeply respected them, and I think that’s been true hopefully in all my career. As I was thinking about this and writing, I thought about some of the experiences I had with senior executives whom I would call bad actors, really bad actors. I remember one of those experiences. Our firm had been asked to come in by senior executives of a pharmaceutical company. They felt their pharmaceutical company was not keeping up with the technology and would eventually be harmed by that. They asked me and several of my partners at Index to come to their headquarters and do a presentation about technology and its importance in the pharmaceutical industry.

I put together a good team. Everybody prepared a presentation. We get to the conference room. The chief executive is not there. He had been traveling, and he was going to be a little late. Well, he shows up, sits down at the table, opens his briefcase and starts to read his mail. I’m thinking, “Where did this guy develop his sensibility and respect for his people? What did his childhood look like? Who taught him to behave with such disrespect that he dares do that?” By the way, I could not break through to this guy. He was not listening to me. He was not listening to Adam [Crescenzi, a senior Index executive].

To some of our really smart, experienced people, there was no way I could break through. There were times when I did have a bad actor and I could break through. But I wanted to write about those experiences and where my sensibilities came from — and my respect for work and people who do the work at all levels in an organization. I still believe that.

Greatest Lessons Learned

Bob: I realize this may change when you edit the book, but what do you think are the three biggest lessons you’ve learned about running businesses since you’ve been in the business world? These lessons may also apply to the world of academia, since you’ve been very close to MIT for many years.

Jim:  I think it’s important for an executive to be a humanist. This reflects on the importance of the people who are doing the real work. I also think it’s having an appetite for change. What is this person’s appetite for change? And thirdly, do they know how to execute it?

Peter Drucker was a very close friend from whom I learned a lot. Drucker used to say to me, “Look, strategy and change management. You can think about and should think about very simply as, first, figuring out where you are, and second, where you want to go. Third is how you’re going to get there.”

And I still take that and say, “All right, at this company there’s a case for action. That’s an easy thing in many ways, as long as you’re willing to be honest with yourself about where you and your company are. Figuring out where you want to go is not always easy because of the condition of your business or the industry. How you’re going to get there is the hardest thing. I don’t think people and executives are prepared for it. Great managers, in one way or the other, follow those three.

By the way, when you read business books, they typically focus on one of those sets of actions. There’s no one who really lays it all out as simply as Drucker used to do. I’m not disregarding all business books. Most of them are worth reading the first chapter. But that’s all you need.

Bob:  Drucker was clearly brilliant, and he was also a wonderful writer. I have never come across a consultant who could write as well as he wrote, and I don’t think he had people writing for him or anything like that.

Jim:  No, he didn’t. He wrote for the Harvard Business Review and HBR Press, basically. He had a good editor. But these were his words. People often ask me what are the best management books I’ve read, and it was his simple book called “Management.”

The Rise of Index

Bob:  He’s just a legend. In the early days of Index, it was a software company. It sold to financial institutions. Then there were spin-offs: Applied Expert Systems and a software engineering company. But then the software company evolved to an IT management consulting firm, and then it evolved again into an operations consulting firm. So how did you guys and women know that that Index the software company could really be good in IT management consulting? And then how did you know that jumping into mainstream management consulting was going to be a good business? Index hadn’t been there, right?

Jim: That’s right. We got out of the software business, basically the systems business, because we were a one-product company. We were building very sophisticated trust management systems — systems that allowed you to price the value of a portfolio instantaneously. That was not possible many years ago, because there were so many data sources.

We figured out how to solve that problem, and we did. We sold that system and worked for multiple big banks, and we started to learn about how technology was working, or when it didn’t work, and what it would take. And then when we sold the business to a services company that needed our technology to serve and support trust management companies and banks.

When we sold it, I was fearful of whether we’d be able to replace that business. But within a year we did. That’s because we already knew about the use of technology in businesses. We made that move very easily. Then, because we’re in so many companies around the enablement of change through technology, we started to see all the challenges that large enterprise deal with [in making] that change. And we became good at that.

Then we started to see that, in spite of all the money spent on technology, there was very little progress in [corporate] profitability. We then recognized that it wasn’t just about the technology; it was about the processes. If the processes didn’t change, the value of technology investment was not going to be achieved. By the way, we had the support of some [MIT] Sloan School professors who were doing studies that had shown that. But we saw it and we learned then that you had to reinvent the processes. We didn’t know what to call it initially, but the processes that became reengineering.

Bob: I joined Index in 1987, and I think Tom Davenport joined Index in ’84, ’85, something like that. [My boss] Tom Waite rejoined Index around ’86. John Thompson [the head of marketing and sales back then] brought him back. But these were pre-reengineering days, which got going at Index around 1990 with Hammer’s article.

In 1990, the dominant consulting firms in operational improvement – the sector that Index entered with reengineering – were firms like AT Kearney, Andersen Consulting (later to become Accenture) and others. Have you ever wondered why the business reengineering concept happened at Index and not at Kearney, McKinsey, BCG, Anderson Consulting? Why did it happen at this little IT consulting firm at the time, and not at these much bigger consulting firms?

Jim:  I want to give credit to a few people. But Index had a lot of engineers, and engineers broadly are systems thinkers. The founders of Index were all engineers. I was a civil engineer. The rest of them were electrical engineers. But we all looked at work as a collection of connected processes. We were thinking about a business as a system. We were thinking about industries as a system, and we weren’t thinking about it initially as some mix of behavioral stuff.

Our question was: How do we get the system to work better and leverage the investments that are being made in this system? That was in our roots. We didn’t even necessarily talk that way. But it was in our roots to look at a problem and the connectedness of the whole thing, and so we were unique.

We didn’t come from the Harvard Business School. We were a group of engineers came from MIT. We had to expand our thinking when we started to consider launching the reengineering business. We quickly saw a huge behavioral component to this kind of change. So we expanded the capability with to include a lot of really fine behavioralists. Tony Athos, the master of this, you know Drucker, of course, as the master of change. We reached outside of index. We had the best collection of academicians who understood what we were doing and had an appetite for what we were doing. 

Bob:  My perception of many other consulting firms did not have as many tight relationships with leading academics as Index did. Is that accurate?

Jim:  I think that’s very accurate. The secret there was having lots of research programs that were generating money for the firm. We could afford to have a relationship with every one of those academicians. This is probably an overstatement, but we owned. We weren’t thinking of that. But as I look back, we were their home outside of the institutions where they taught.

Bob: When I look at the PRISM research program [set up with Michael Hammer], from a thought leadership standpoint to me it was paid research and development, meaning your clients are paying for you to do R&D on new management concepts, and it’s not a huge expense item. I heard that PRISM, from index’s standpoint, was not terribly profitable. Is that right? But even though Mike took a lot from it, it was not unprofitable for Index, as I understand.

Jim: That’s right. It certainly paid for itself and a little bit more. By the way, we arguably spent more than we had to. But we were looking for when an executive came to one of our [off-site] meetings that their full experience represented a level of excellence. It wasn’t just about the ideas but also who we were, what food we served, the quality of the whole thing.

I remember one of the marketing people who was significant in building those would always say, “Never ask during a meeting, ‘How is the experience going?’ Wait until it’s over before we ask that question.

Bob: That was part of Ron Christman’s brilliance. Ron was a very unusual leader, with great things to emulate and not to emulate. But Ron was a visionary, and I didn’t see anybody who could run a corporate meeting as well as Ron.

Jim:  I agree. We had a unique talent there. By the way, I think we had a number of unique talents. I look at the work that you were doing, the work that Tom Waite was doing, John Thompson was there, and Ron. There are four of you who brought different in skills in marketing. But we had it all.

And we had money — money from paying members who sponsored these various programs.

Bob: A company called The Corporate Executive Board had a research model similar to PRISM. CEB was launched in the early 1980s by a guy named David Bradley, and they were a public company that reached almost a billion dollars by 2016, when they sold to Gartner for $2.5 billion. CEB also had a sister company, which was called The Advisory Board, and was also a publicly held company, also about a billion in revenue before they sold to Optum Health in the same year that CEB sold to Gartner, 2016.

Their research model was the same as the index PRISM model, which was get a bunch of companies to spend $30,000 to $50,000 or more a year on research, whether they’re people in sales or marketing or procurement or HR, interview the sponsors and other companies and find out what the best practices are. The same model that David Bradley built two almost $1 billion companies out of.

Jim:  But they had a different ambition. They were looking at scale. Yes, we were looking at quality ideas, and insights that we could create from those ideas. So I don’t just want to say we were smarter, but we had incredible intellectual quality at Index. When we came to work every day, it was absolutely exciting.

Bob: It was the best 10 years of my career, Jim. I have to tell you, it was the best by far of my 10 years. That’s saying a lot because I’ve had two companies since 1998.

Jim: We were a very, very special place. We were highly generative. We enjoyed our discussions. We enjoyed each other’s company. Now maybe I should criticize us because we never got to build scale that you cited we needed to build. We never got to do that, and maybe we should have just been better at execution so we could do that.

But we were a boutique. Maybe, Bob, that’s all we could have been, scale-wise. When I think about why didn’t we build the scale of an Accenture, it was because [all] we had the ideas. By the way, I remember spending some time with the then-CEO of [CSC], and it had just kind of been newly formed. He said our growth was all driven by our ideas, and we didn’t know how to execute what we had to get to scale.

Now I’m not sure we had. When I think back, we had the real appetite to do that, but we also didn’t succeed in creating a stream of other great ideas. I’m not sure how we would have. Maybe it was just expanding into other businesses, other kinds of work, other places, but be principal idea generators. But remember it was not only the reengineering book that had ideas. It was the book that [Michael] Tracy and [Fred] Wiersema, which was a good book.

Maybe we should have just focused on it. Maybe we should have just written more books. But we didn’t do it.

Bob: I look at that time and think, “The World Wide Web really starts going in the mid ’90s and Index begins to fall apart around when you left in 1996. Then a whole bunch of internet consulting firms formed — Viant and Scient and Mel Bergstein’s Diamond Technology Partners.” I think he had bought a firm and rebranded it, but they were an internet consulting firm.

Jim: Yes, that’s right.

Bob: They were not a systems integrator plus consulting firm like Accenture, where Mel had come from. But they were right there at this intersection of business and IT, and the web was the obviously the biggest thing happening. And boy, if we could have just moved into consulting about the web.

Jim: You’re suggesting another error that we may have made, which is we very purposely didn’t want to focus on technology. We did not want to focus our market on the chief information officer. We wanted to focus on the chief executive officer or the head operational executives, because they were the ones who we knew had to orchestrate the changes. We felt we could really be helpful to them.

By the way, if you read the reengineering book, as I’m sure you have maybe a few times, we wrote that book to appeal to CEOs. We made it accessible to CEOs. We weren’t writing about the technology; we were writing about [business] processes. To change those processes, the senior executives had to be the drivers. Now, information technology was enabling a lot of that change. But our focus was on a different audience than the people who manage the technology within an enterprise.

I think if we were operating today, we would have a lot more focus on the technology, but that being artificial intelligence. AI won’t just change processes, it’s going to reinvent businesses. It requires a different understanding of how a technology can productively change what the enterprise does, and how much more intrusive it’s going to be, and how the enterprise operates.

So, if I [was running] Index today, that’s where we would focus.

Bob: You’re starting to see the term “business reengineering” now applied by a lot of these generative AI firms, and the consulting firms that are trying to capitalize on this generative AI market. They’re saying, “Well, we need to reengineer the business processes to get the maximum value AI.” Reengineering thinking has been revived.

Jim: Yes. But I think to really leverage AI, you’ve got to go beyond the business processes, and you’ve got to think about what’s going to change the nature of a business. AI turns out to be expensive, as we’re all hearing. How are we going to make AI pay off? Well, the only way I think is to really reinvent the business. If you’re good at that, then it will pay. We are at a similar point. But I think if we don’t become more aggressive about how we’re using this technology, we’ll lose something big.

Bob: You had you had said something to me in the interview for the documentary, something about Michael Hammer would not have become famous for reengineering without the help of CSC Index.

Jim: Yes.

Bob:  Do you also feel that CSC Index would not have become famous for reengineering without Michael Hammer’s involvement with the firm and the research?

Jim: Michael Hammer was a great spokesperson for reengineering. I don’t think we would have become quite as well known [without him]. We would have still been successful. But Michael had a unique voice, as you know, and I don’t think we would have. I have to give him a lot of credit for his contribution to what we did.

On the other hand, Michael and I had an agreement: He would be the spokesperson. I would be the implementer. That was our agreement. Now I felt I could also speak, fortunately, about what we were doing at that capability. Mike was such an entertainer, but he couldn’t do consulting.

Bob:  He didn’t want to, right?

Jim:  He didn’t want to. Mike could be so flip. There were times when a client would throw him out, basically Mike was just being too flip.

Bob: Here’s my larger question about that. It’s about today’s consulting firms that say, “Yeah, we need more partnerships with outsiders like academics, like the next Michael Hammer or the next Treacy.” And you know that Index partnered with [a Harvard Business School professor] Nitin Nohria and more than a dozen other leading academics at the time. [Nohria went on to become dean of the Harvard Business School.] The question is this: “How should a firm manage individuals who help that firm become famous for some big concept, and then who use that fame to demand more and more of the firm they partnered with?” How do you manage these gurus who help get you there, but some of whom become very demanding.

Jim:  First, you have to find people who are really willing to partner with you. There were many so-called gurus that I experienced who were not open to that. They were shockingly unwilling to share what they knew. I remember negotiations when we were trying to work with a guru, a big thinker who had written books. I said, “Look, we got to be able to share your ideas.” He basically says, “No, no, I own those ideas.”

We operated with the perspective that you share the ideas. You’re open about your ideas because we knew how to implement them. So don’t be afraid of sharing your ideas. A lot of the gurus were just in the business ideas. But they were too protective. So I think the answer to your question is to begin with thinkers who are really open.

I had one experience with someone who was a big part of the movement in the human potential area. He had written many successful books. This is supposedly a human potential guy. He calls me one day and said, “Jim, I’m writing a new book, and would you consider endorsing it?” And I said, “Sure, but I want to be able to come to you and ask you to endorse my next book.” He said to me, “I think we should end this conversation now, and hung up the phone.” I’m thinking, “Wow, wow! A lot of these people got too big.”

Bob: Your book was a bestseller. Why wouldn’t he do that?

Jim:  I don’t know.

Jim:  But Drucker was generous. He was the greatest management thinker. He was incredibly generous. He would answer the phone directly. There was no one between him and you know a person who called or a person who wanted his help. He was incredibly accessible. There were others who thought they were God and had people answering the phone.

By the way, I answer the phone myself now. I learned that from Drucker. I don’t have an assistant working for me. But I always was prepared to be helpful, and wanting to be helpful because I was learning. Being accessible and being willing to freely share your ideas give you a lot of competitive advantage.

Being accessible and being willing to freely share your ideas give you a lot of competitive advantage.

Finding the right partners who are open and willing to do that is part of the secret. And if they’re arrogant, if they’re not accessible, if they think someone who’s talking to them is speaking to God, I wouldn’t waste my time.

Pioneers of Thought Leadership

Bob: Index was certainly a pioneer of reengineering. But I also look at our years there and believe that Index was a pioneer of what is now regarded as thought leadership:  how to run a thought leadership group, how to do the research and do the marketing, including the events, event marketing, and the mailings. Of course, there was no web back then in the late ’80s and early ’90s; that would come later, so we didn’t have the web to take advantage of, or social media. But I looked at ourselves as pioneers of thought leadership, which is again not a term used back then.

Jim:  That’s right. We were pioneers in trying new things that I think most consulting firms would never have done: in doing multiclient-funded research, doing the other events and doing the books.

Bob:  Boy, we were innovators in how consulting firms marketed themselves.

Jim: Absolutely. We had a lot of marketing talent to promote our innovations. But Bob, I think a lot about what should have we done next. I really do believe we were looking. What we may have missed is that we had started to build a behavioral practice. We had acquired a couple of small firms with very good people. I think if we had focused on that more, we would have come up with a some new and powerful ideas.

I have no doubt that behaviors drive the ability for companies to change. You have to know how to read those behaviors, how to change those behaviors, and when the behaviors are such that there will be no change in an enterprise.

I had mentioned Tony Athos’s name earlier. Athos was the finest behavioralist I knew, in part because he was also a clinician. He was trained as a clinician, not a psychiatrist, but at least as a psychologist. He really knew how the human brain worked and human behavior — what you know, where it came from. He had the sensibilities to do it. If we could have captured some of that and made it replicable in some ways, that would have been a big breakthrough.

But I remember one of Tony’s faults when I took him in to see a client who I knew was having behavioral problems. When Tony came out of those meetings, there were times when he’d say to me, “Jim, this company will never change. I’m not going back to this company. It would be a waste of my time.”

He had that depth of perception. If we could have found ways to see it at a clinical level … I think we could have changed the business world.

Bob:  Tony felt he could detect that with one interview of the CEO?

Jim: Yes, he could. Remember, we had a belief. I still have it very strongly. It’s that culture is driven top-down. Time after time, when I’ve gone into a company and I think, “Where did this come from?” It’s top-down.

Experiences at Perot Systems and Dell

Jim: At Perot Systems, the culture and behavior of that company came from Ross. There were times when Ross got in the way of change, because he had beliefs that were problematic and not with the times, if you will. Ross believed that women couldn’t wear pants. He was amazing but also amusing. But those beliefs could be problematic.

Bob:  Yes, certainly today.

Jim: I enjoyed working with him very much. He was a unique character. But the culture of Perot Systems came from Ross.

Bob:  You there when Perot sold to Perot Systems was sold to Dell, right?

Jim: I was there. That was my last full-time paying job. I knew that Ross Jr. didn’t love the business, and that we would most likely sell it because they had sold EDS [Electronic Data Systems, Ross Perot’s first company, which he sold to General Motors in 1984]. We were a public company by that time, but the Perot interests controlled it.

I knew that would happen, and it’s an amusing story because it was just Ross Jr. and Michael Dell having dinner. There were no bankers. Michael Dell says to Ross Jr., “Ross, I need a services company to go with my hardware company. Is Perot Systems for sale?” And Ross said, “Yes, we would consider selling.” And Michael Dell said, “How much?” And Ross Jr. said to Michael Dell, “$4 billion cash.” Michael said, “I’ll take it.”

That was it. Within months, the company had been sold. We were a clean company, by the way. There was no problem with our books. We were who we were. It was very visible, so the transaction could happen very quickly. Ross Jr. was a very good executive. I liked him a lot. We worked a lot together. He loved the real estate development business. He loved gas and oil, just what you’d expect of a person who had grown up in the Dallas environment.

Bob:  At Dell, did you report to Michael Dell or to somebody below Michael?

Jim:  Michael had a person he wanted expected to run the [services] business. I was reported to him. But they asked me to stay for a year during the transition. They called me once. They were paying me well. They called me once because they wanted help with a client, who never called. I realized that when you’re gone, you’re gone, and just to accept that. Whether you’re fired or whether you quit, when you’re gone, you’re gone. The enterprise doesn’t need you anymore. Hopefully, they don’t need you anymore.

I was gone …. [But] that turned out to be a great thing for me. I then spent a good bit of the last 20 years of my career as the lead director in a major chip company [Analog Devices Inc.]. That was exciting. It was a whole new experience, but it was exciting.

I wrote a book with [former Harvard Business School dean] Nitin Nohria called “The Arc of Ambition,” where we looked at good ambitions and how ambition really drove what a great manager was. I said to [my ghostwriter], “Donna, if I look back at my career, I had ambition very early in life. But then I had no specific ambition. In any of my moves, I wasn’t saying,”This is what I want to be, this is what I want to do next.”

So what was wrong with me? I didn’t have this kind of driving ambition. Maybe she was being too respectful. But Donna said, “What you did do when a door opened, you were willing to take the risk and walk through it.” That’s what happened with CSC. That’s what happened with Perot. That’s what happened when I became a director at Analog Devices. All different kind of industries and places and locations and people. But I was willing to do that. I don’t know whether I was good at it all, frankly. I was willing to do that.

Pondering His Legacy

Bob: What do you want to be known for? In 30 years, when both you and I are long gone, and people are writing about you and this era, what do you want people to remember?

Jim: As you might expect, I’ve been asked that question before. The first time I was asked it, I had never thought about it. But now I have thought about it. My first response is I want to be thought as about as simply a good person. And part of that comes from the fact that there aren’t many people who give a damn about you after you’re gone. Your family does, friends do, but who else thinks about you?

Unless you’re a very, very famous person, who else remembers you? Some people with whom you’ve had relationships will remember me. But I just want to be thought about as a good person who worked hard and treated my colleagues and others well. That’s it.

Now I’ve talked to some dear close friends, who say, “Look, that’s not the question for you to answer. The real question is ‘Who do you want to be?’ Because we can control that while we’re alive.

Bob: At any stage of our lives, right?

Jim:  That’s right. By the way, it will change through our lives as our work changes, as opportunities change. But I think it’s important to keep in mind that no matter where you are in your career, [you should think about] who you want to be, or what you want to be. That’s the question to keep asking yourself.

Bob:  Do you have an answer to that question for yourself right now, or is this something you’re still thinking about?

Jim: I’m not sure what I want to be. It’s a good question. I haven’t spent frankly enough time on that, and I probably want to experience who I am first a bit more. [In writing] my memoirs, I am experiencing more of who I am. That may lead to more clarity about who I want to be over time.

By the way, writing memoir causes you to think deeply. You’re describing your response to situations that you’ve been involved in. There were times when I realized where and why I was wrong. It’s a very revealing process, and you’ve got to speak and write frankly to make it real. That’s part of the. I think the examination of who I was will lead to more thinking about who I want to be for the rest of my life.

Bob:  Well, Jim, I hope I could speak on behalf of the Index people I knew — several hundred people when you were running the firm, some of whom are gone, some of whom are still living, some of whom I kept in touch. I think everyone I know would say they loved working for you and you were a great boss.

Jim: Thank you, thank you. I also think giving credit to all the people who worked for the firm, that they loved the firm itself and their colleagues so much that if I said let’s go start Index again, they would all be in the room.

Advice for Younger Leaders

Bob: So if you were 30-35 years old, would you enjoy running one of these new consulting firms that are surrounded by AI and other great things that businesses can do now?

Jim: That’s a very good question. The “youngsters” today think about themselves and who they want to be in a very different way, and I don’t find it all that attractive. I don’t think they’re generous enough. It wasn’t just me. There were other people [at Index] who were highly generous, not about just about giving away their ideas, but how they cared for each other.

I remember every time someone was sick or someone wasn’t doing the job very well, and they really had to move on to another firm or another place. We paid a lot of attention to those people in the transition and took care of them. I think I would have to look hard at the sensibilities of the people we might hire, understand them, and whether I would enjoy [them]. That may sound selfish, but I would be more cautious now about where and how I spend my time, and whether I would just start another firm today.

Bob: You don’t know how much of a pleasure it is to come back and talk to you about the wonderful old day.

Jim:  They were. Thank you for your interest.