DSF: Tell us about yourself.
CC: I was born and raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and I still have a lot of ties, including a house up there in the extreme West portion near the Wisconsin border. I went to school at Eastern Michigan University, and that’s where I got my degree and joined the Gamma Tau chapter.
DSF: Tell us about your time at Eastern, and what other activities you were involved in.
CC: While I was at Eastern, I was the chief justice of the student court, which is an elected campus-wide position that I really enjoyed. We were the student oversight of the different issues on campus, and in some ways that’s how I met my wife who is also an alumna of Eastern Michigan, and who I married in 1961. Being chief justice of the student court, I was also able to be the judge for the Homecoming Competition, and she was a contestant. She keeps asking me how I voted, but I keep dodging the question.
DSF: Talk a little bit about what you did when you got out of college.
CC: When I got out of college with my bachelor’s degree in Business with minors in Accounting and Economics, I had a job, because in the 60s, there were plenty of jobs available, it was just a matter of picking the right thing. I went to Muskegon, MI and painted houses for the summer after graduating, which I wasn’t very good at. From there, I got connected with what was then General Telephone, and was hired on there because of my science background and my business background. That company became GTE.
I started out there as an Engineer and went through a variety of different positions throughout my 34 years with the company.
DSF: Let’s continue with your career and what your first job as an Engineer was like, and where you went afterwards.
CC: I started out as an Engineer which suited my background and was a good way to get grounded into the working every day lifestyle. I went through a variety of positions and ended up with my first promotion after five years as a supervisor. I actually got demoted out of that experience because I wasn’t very good in that role. Fortunately though, I had enough supporters in the organization that I was able to stay on there. I made a very important career move, by moving to the field to become a Field Engineer, which allowed me to really learn things.
I was a new guy out of college and didn’t know much, especially about leadership, but I had to supervise a construction contract, so that’s where I learned about leadership. Out of a bad experience came a good thing, which was really the launch place for my career.
DSF: So after your career was really launched, what did you do?
CC: From there, I went out to Washington, DC and did some government liaison work for a while. That was our first move out of the Midwest, which was interesting. I learned about a new environment, which was good for my growth. We were there for three years and liked it a lot, but I also knew that I needed to get out of there. That’s when I came to Indiana for the first time, in 1971, and I was made a department head at a very young age, still in my late 20s. I did good work, but also got connected to the right people and had a good spirit about it. I believed that I was going to be successful.
I came to Fort Wayne, IN as a department head and did that work for about five years, and then became a division manager, which was a whole different level of responsibility. I went to the field and had a whole operation to manage, and I was still in my mid-30s, and I loved it. I found out that I was pretty good at leadership if I let people work. I learned that you’re not very good at leadership if you’re messing with people all the time, and that you just need to let them do their job.
DSF: You were able to find out you were good at leadership, talk a little about your experience with community volunteerism and what you did next.
CC: I did that for three years which was a great opportunity, and that was also when I really got into community volunteer work. When you have that division manager position, you become president-elect of the Chamber, which I was. I headed United Way drives, which is where you really start to value volunteer work and the value of that in your business career. You learn how to lead without being in charge.
Toward the end of my three years, I was asked to run for Congress in that district. I said, “Well, I’ll ask around at GTE and see if there are any jobs that would prevent me from running” because I didn’t want to say yes and then have them come back and say that they had me slotted to take a promotion somewhere else. I knew there was a vacancy out in the northwest in Seattle, and I asked around and they said that I wasn’t going to get that job. So, I said that I would run for Congress. I decided to run, and had all the newspaper headlines and all that, and we raised quite a bit of money. Two weeks after that, the job that I knew was vacant that I was told that I wasn’t going to get, because I had decided to take responsibility for my own life, they decided that I was suited for the job and I took it. The notion here is to take care of your own life. So they said they wanted me to be a VP.
So I went out there to the northwest as VP of Public and Governmental Affairs, and I had never had that as a functional responsibility or experience before. And here I was as a VP, in a state that’s on the edge of things out there, you begin to
learn more things than you do in other parts of the country. I was responsibile for five states, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Washington and small part of California doing Public Affairs and Governmental Affairs. That was a whole new experience, and it uplifted me in my role.
After seven years, I had the opportunity to come back to Indiana, and by this time the company was three times larger. I led the Public and Governmental Affairs for ten states and it was great. By that time, I knew what to do.
DSF: You had an amazing business career. Tell us about what you are doing now, and how you decided to get into consulting work.
CC: It was in the mid-late 80s, when the communications industry was undergoing a lot of change, we were transforming and reinventing ourselves. That’s when I became interested in this work, because we were consolidating balance sheets and income statements, and getting productivity down to where it needed to be, but no one was paying attention to the human impact of all of that change. We had no experience with that because we were in some ways like the post office in that no one ever got fired, and all of sudden we were imploding. I and some other colleagues came to the notion that we needed to be looking at the impact that all of the change was having on the employees, so that at the end of the day when you have a business strategy, the human beings in the organization ought to be connected to it.
That was the foundation for me becoming a consultant was out of that experience. It was where I found my life’s work after having spent a lifetime doing other kinds of work preparing myself for it. It’s where I really found out what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, doing strategic planning for organizations and engaging the leadership team at a human level before doing the strategic plan.
DSF: What do you think makes a good leader?
CC: You have to have the intention to be a good leader, and you have to believe that you don’t know everything there is to know about leadership, which is sometimes hard. Most of all, is that you need to know yourself. Oftentimes, people pretend that they know themselves, but the really don’t, that there’s a greater dimension to who they are as a human being. Somehow they think that when they’re in charge of something, they have to show up differently instead of being their authentic self. The key to effective leadership to know your authentic self, and then lead out of that. It’s actually serving others, and servants actually make the best leaders. If you say “I’m a great leader” it’s ego-driven. If it’s out of service then it’s about the other person. That’s the real key is serving the other person. You also have to be good at what you do.
DSF: Why did you decide to get involved in the community like you did with your chairmanships of the United Way drives and your Chamber presidency?
CC: Leaders have a civic responsibility. You just can’t go to your office and pretend the rest of the world isn’t there because you then isolate yourself. There’s so much to learn from the rest of the world, and you never know who your teacher is going to be, so part of the community service is giving back, and the other part is learning. It helps round out your role as a leader. You learn something from that other perspective. You get a sensitivity, an understanding, a broadening and that’s what leaders need to give out. Whatever you thought leadership was yesterday, it is different tomorrow.
DSF: Talk a little bit about your unique hobbies.
CC: I climbed my first mountain when I was 40 and that was in the Northwest. Then, after I joined GTE, I looked at myself and said that I needed to get in shape. I went back to working out, and I said “what am I going to do with this?” I said maybe I’ll start mountain climbing with my oldest son. I called him and he said he was up for it.
Our target was to climb Mount Ranier, and you have no idea what it’s like until you do it. I got involved in that, and so we went out and made an unsuccessful attempt to summit Mount Ranier. It was the first one of the season in May, the snow was deep, and the guide service could not get everyone up. So we didn’t summit it, but I wanted to get that under my belt to say that I summited Mount Ranier.
I wanted to get one under my belt that season, so we went down to Mount Hood, and we summited it, which is in some ways steeper than Mount Ranier. When I was still at GTE, I had engaged a guy named John Roskelley to speak to my staff. He is a world class and world famous mountain climber who has climbed K2 twice, and at one time had summited more Himalayan mountains than any other American climber. He invited me to climb Mount Ranier with him. So he and I, and a woman rancher from Montana climbed Mount Ranier together. We summited Ranier, and we wanted to get one more under our belt, so Judy and I hired John to take us to South America, and we went to climb in the Andes, which were just like Mount Ranier, only another 6,000 feet. That’s when I was 55.
So part of it was if I am going to challenge people in organizations to extend themselves, then I wasn’t going to limit myself. I wanted to be able to demonstrate to myself and others that there are other possibilities. So that’s one of the reasons that I did the mountain climbing, which was a nice part of my life.
DSF: What is a piece of advice that you would give to our undergrads and alumni?
CC: Believe in yourself. You have to believe that whatever is out there is for you and that you can be successful at it. Declare that intention that you are going to be successful, and don’t have doubt about it, even when there is reason for doubt. If you reflect and say that you are going to be successful, you are. Always believe in yourself no matter what happens, because you will find that other people believe in you.
You have been given a divine gift when you are put on this earth, and it’s a large gift. Our job in our lives is to fulfill that divine gift that we’ve been given. There’s nothing about that divine gift where the intention is to be small. The intention is to be large, so be that largeness.
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