The Encounter with Elliott Jacques

Speaker A You're. Jerry Cranus. I'm the CEO of the Levinson Institute and have been since 1990. When I took over from Harry Levinson, who founded the Institute in the mid 1960, my route towards getting to know Elliot Jackson and his work was somewhat circuitous, although in hindsight, I think it was probably faded. My interest has always been in systems. As an undergraduate at Oberlin College, I was an organic chemistry major because of the wonderful symmetry between structure and function and process. And while I had intended to go to medical school anyway, when I was applying, I looked around and found that Case Western Reserve Medical School in Cleveland was the only medical school that had rewritten the curriculum to teach medicine from a system's point of view. And while I was a third year medical student there, I spent a summer in Nicaragua doing public health work under the leadership of chief resident who was Nicaraguan, and began to really learn about public health systems. And I think those things together led to my doing some work in the Public Health Service, taking a straight medical internship in one of the best public health programs in the country, and then coming to Harvard to do my psychiatric residency because they were affiliated with the School of Public Health. And I was able, when I completed my residency, to get a certification in community mental health. And that's where the plot thickens, because one of my professors at the Laboratory of Community Psychiatry, which was run by Gerald Kaplan, who was a contemporary of Harry Levinson's, was Ralph Hershowitz. And Ralph Hershowitz was a South African emigrate who was really my mentor during my fellowship in community mental health. And a couple of years after I completed my time in the Public Health Service and served as a medical director for Mental Health Center in New Hampshire, ralph asked me if I would meet with Harry Levinson to consider becoming one of the instructors on leadership program. And as preparation for that, in 1979, Harry Levinson asked me to come and observe a seminar he taught with Elliot Jacks called Modern Organization. And it was through that initial contact when Elliot Jacks had a great deal of theory but had not developed an integrated approach to designing and implementing leadership systems, that I became intrigued, but had very little contact with Elliot. Until ten years later, in 1990, when Harry Levinson had asked me if I would consider closing my private practice of psychiatry in New Hampshire, moving back to Boston, taking over the Levinson Institute. And it was in the context of doing that due diligence that I went out with Harry and Elliot for three days with the CEO of Olincorp and his executive team to hear them give an updated version of Modern Organization, but really to hear Elliot Jacks for my first time develop his entire system of requisite organization. And what was particularly exciting for me in that three day event in 1990 is that he and the Army Research Institute had just broken the code on their research to essentially validate that their system for directly assessing someone's mental process correlated nearly one to one with the judgments managers made of people's current potential. And it was on that three day seminar that I had the most profound transformation in my life in which I decided to take up Gary Levinson's offer to take over the Levinson Institute but to refocus its energies less on the psychology of leadership and more on the leadership system. So that's how I've come to be acquainted in the circle of influence of Elliot Jacks.

Speaker B Could you talk a little bit more about you said you had a transformative experience there that it really could you talk about the nature of that and what appealed or shocked or maybe displaced some of the previous beliefs or assumptions you'd been making?

Speaker A Harry Levinson presented the only model I knew about leadership for the ten years before this second encounter with L H. And that conception was basically the translation of clinical concepts to better understand the motivation of people in the world of work and the relationship between managers and their subordinates in the workplace. And it was and remains a useful model for increasing a manager's radar about people and to enhance their skilled knowledge in communicating with people. But I recognized very early that there was no system of leadership in what Harry Levinson had written about and how he consulted. And with the opportunity to take over the Levinson Institute if it were just to essentially practice another version of psychiatric counseling to executives I really had no interest in that. But with that three day program and Elliot Jacks, having, over the decade of the 80s, pulled together a dozen disparate components of what eventually he called requisite organization into a unified field theory, intellectually, I found that enormously stimulating. And in terms of my basic bias and interest in trying to understand the whole system, I was very much committed to primary public health prevention when I was the medical director of a mental health center. While the organization wanted my presence to provide the psychiatric expertise my interest was in transforming the organization into being a better public health firm or agent. With Elliot Jack's model I saw the potential to have the most powerful public health model in the place where human beings are both most vulnerable and where the opportunity for them to become most capable are the greatest. I had since come to think of leadership in the general sense as being synonymous with leverage because that's what leadership is. It's about leveraging the potential of many more people than yourself to accomplish things that you might be able to envision but you couldn't complete on your own. And with the emergence of a leadership system that, just as I studied the human being in medical school, begins with the conception of an anatomy that is aligned with the function that's required anatomy that supports the processes necessary. For the functioning and translating that structure into a model that allows us to find the right people for the right roles and then discerning what the requisite leadership practices must be in any managerial system in order to best leverage the potential of those people. I finally had the model that I'd been looking for that would allow me to apply my public health values in the world of work. And it's my contention, as it was Elliot's, that that is the place that can do the most harm and the most good. And by applying these principles, applications and practices. I believe in the last 1516 years I've been able to have an impact, substantial impact on the lives of many hundreds of thousands of people, which I never would have been able to have as a practicing psychiatrist or even someone who was a medical director of a mental health center. So it was the simple elegance of a model that demonstrated all of the components of a true system. Unlike Peter Senge's work, who has written about, sometimes eloquently about the importance of viewing the workplace as a system, he really doesn't have anything to back that up other than a notion of causal loops and the interrelationship between functions. But he has no real model that begins with the anatomy physiology, translating that into the requirements, translating that into the capabilities, and finally with a discrete and replicable model of leadership practices. So that's what just got me extremely excited. I had not seen the book Requisite Organization, which had just been published about three months earlier and got a copy of that book that night, or the night that I finished, went back home and took off the next two days and read it with four different color highlighters. And I remember it was actually frightening. At one point, about 36 hours into the book, I had my first and only Hypomanic episode where I felt I could see the core of the universe and it flash of insight about this unified field theory and it was just quite striking. And so the rest, as they say, is history. Thank you.