Recollections From A Life Of Teaching And Learning

It’s hard for me to even fathom being included in any group with Jack and Chuck, both of whom have passed on to their greater reward. Jack and Chuck were giants in finance and accounting, made much greater contributions to their fields of study than did I in mine and were legendary teachers at GSB for literally decades, with careers there that spanned 50 and 40 years, respectively. They were among the most honorable and venerated of what was an amazing collection of faculty at GSB for the short time that I was there. I was hired at Stanford’s GSB at age 26, and I was gone but just a short 12 years later.

In part due to the folly of youth and elements of my flamboyant persona – which a few of the vignettes about me in this book may well comment on – I did things at GSB that Jack and Chuck would not have done or likely condoned. I was a maverick and controversial. They were a part of the core backbone of GSB, I was not. I was once even the subject of a blunt internal GSB faculty memo written by professors in disciplines other than mine whose message to GSB junior faculty basically said, “Don’t be like Phillips.”

Way, Way Back

I was born and raised in Oklahoma. I was the son of a soldier. Mom was a homemaker. My Dad James fought in WWII and he was an infantryman in the famous 45th Infantry Division, a.k.a. the Thunderbirds and its 179th Tomahawk Regiment, comprised of mainly Native Americans from Oklahoma and surrounding states like Arkansas where my Dad was born. The Tomahawk’s motto was “In Omnia Paratus” (In All Things Prepared), which was something my Dad drilled into me throughout childhood and my many wonderful times with him. I carried that motto with me all during my life, something I’ll bet at least a few of the vignettes that were written about me by former students in this volume chose to comment on.

After returning from the War, my Dad served in the Military Police and he later left the Army to work in the construction business in Oklahoma, selling large dirt moving equipment, forklifts, supplies, etc. No one in our family ever met my Dad’s parents; he was raised by an Aunt, whom I also never met. My Dad, who had jet black hair and high cheekbones, had some features that looked Native American. But Mom was of Dutch descent and I look about as Native American as Elizabeth Warren, which isn’t saying much. I never bothered to take the 23andMe or multitude of other DNAs tests that assess ancestry.

I have an identical twin brother. His name is Layn, and I’m by far the least talented member of my family. He’s a former U.S. Attorney, Federal District Judge, and now a well-known mediator, handling the most complex settlements like the $765 million dollar settlement he helped to negotiate between the NFL and its players who can suffer from traumatic head injuries due to their sport. And his son Graham is an accomplished actor and singer, appearing on Broadway, a network TV Series called The Good Wife, several Hollywood movies, the recent live TV event on The Little Mermaid and making the downselect, though not winning, the role of the young Elvis Presley in the upcoming movie, Last Train to Memphis.

It’s too bad Graham wasn’t finally cast in that role since you could have then seen all the gyrating-hip Elvis dance moves I taught him. Sadly, that’s not even close to being true. The fact is that I never won a single role that I auditioned for in any of the plays or musicals that the schools I attended produced and I was even indignantly and unceremoniously kicked out of 7th grade choir by Mrs. Nichols at Buchanan Elementary in Oklahoma City who gave me a C minus in music, wisecracking that I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. I bet 23andMe would’ve put her somewhere in Simon Cowell’s ancestral family tree.

It’s too bad Graham wasn’t finally cast in that role since you could have then seen all the gyrating-hip Elvis dance moves I taught him. Sadly, that’s not even close to being true. The fact is that I never won a single role that I auditioned for in any of the plays or musicals that the schools I attended produced and I was even indignantly and unceremoniously kicked out of 7th grade choir by Mrs. Nichols at Buchanan Elementary in Oklahoma City who gave me a C minus in music, wisecracking that I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. I bet 23andMe would’ve put her somewhere in Simon Cowell’s ancestral family tree.

Oh yes, and being my identical twin, Layn was kicked out of choir too and for the exact same reason. But apparently we had some redeeming talents back then. Layn and I recently found an old article from the Oklahoma City Times about the two of us from 1965, when we were just 13, one that I’d barely even remembered. It was entitled “These Twins Are Too Busy For Mischief,” and it included a photo of Layn and me. Layn is on the left, I’m on the right. Our Mom obviously picked out the shirts. Let me read you a little more from that article, because it will set up for you some of the stories that I want to tell you.

Anyway, the caption reads: “The Phillips twins, Lynn and Layn, strike a solemn pose as they take a breather from their championship table tennis match against each other at Taft Junior High School. The match proved to be a sizzler.” Of course, all these years later, who can remember who won? Actually, I did. I crushed him in the final points of the final set and I slammed one to his forehand … sorry, as my Australian friends would say, I lost the plot.

It goes on to say: “Table tennis, baseball, swimming, track meets, tennis and building model cars – those Phillips twins don’t have time for getting into any sort of mischief!” This shows that journalists aren’t any more accurate today than they were in 1965. Talk about fake news! Just ask my older sister or brother if we were too busy for mischief and they’ll laugh out loud. Or ask former Stanford Business School Deans and still Professors Jim Patell and Chuck Holloway if I was too busy for mischief while at Stanford. Those are some of the stories that I’ll relate below, at least those that I can tell here anyway.

But Kirk and Spock do. After all, they’ve come from the future. And they know all about the legendary engineering genius of Scott and how he would someday unlock the equation for trans-warp beaming, among other breakthroughs. But Scotty is skeptical, to say the least. He doesn’t trust Kirk or Spock. He doesn’t believe anything that they’ve said. Why should he? Plus, Spock has pointed ears, a greenish complexion, and speaks in a droning monotone voice – kind of like a lot of business school professors.

But here’s the thing. If Mister Spock had materialized before Layn and me back in 1965, right after our table-tennis match that no one remembers the score of in the final game that I won – okay, it was 21–17, what a squeaker – Spock could’ve given us a similar speech. He could have told each of us where we would be, by this day, in June of 2020. That conversation with Spock might’ve gone something like this:

Spock would have then turned to my twin and said: “Layn, you will not become a commercial artist.” As you can imagine, Layn would find this quite crushing at age 13. But curiosity would impel him to listen to the rest of Spock’s prediction: “Instead you’ll become a lawyer, a United States Attorney and will later be appointed as a United States Federal District Judge by the leader of the free world on the planet Earth.”

I can just imagine Layn asking in that smart alecky, steely-eyed cross-examination tone manner that he was later to master, “And, just who might that be?” “Why, Ronald Reagan, of course,” says Spock. To which Layn and I would’ve died laughing and said, “Ronald Reagan?! The guy from ‘Death Valley Days’ on TV, that we watch on Saturday nights? Are you saying he becomes President of the United States?”

Then Spock would’ve turned to me and told me: “Lynn, you will not become a construction-equipment salesman. Rather, you will go on to become a professor of business administration and will teach your ideas and philosophies around the world.” Now I’m thinking, that can’t be right, since I have a hard time even making accurate change for Mr. Morrissey when he gives me $10 for mowing his lawn. And at that point, just coming off of a fresh round of straight Cs in 7th grade – thank you very much – I’d have “pulled a Scotty” and told Spock what I thought of his prognostication, which wouldn’t have been much.

But Spock then brings the story full circle: “In 2020,” he says, “you will even be asked to contribute to a volume commemorating some the greatest business minds in the history of the 20th and 21st century.” “Who’s that?” I ask. “Why, the Stanford Graduate School of Business Class of 1985.” At which point, I’d have probably asked at age 13, “So, just what and where is Stanford?” After all, I’d never left Oklahoma at that point. (In fact, when I first visited California in 1978 to interview for a job at Stanford GSB, I’d only been in two states, Oklahoma and Illinois – the latter where I went to grad school. But more on that later.)

And with that, Spock would have likely held up his hand in one of his split-finger Vulcan-type salutes, and just before he vanished said: “Live long and prosper!” So, that’s what I’ve tried to do, as best as I could. But there is a timeless principle at work here. In the New Testament, Hebrews 10:24 teaches us, “And let us consider how we may spur one another on towards love and good deeds.” After all, Serena Williams had Venus. Batman had Robin. McCain had Palin. Obama had Biden, Trump has Pence…uh, scratch those last three. Anyway, you get the idea. I had Layn, he had me, and we spurred each other on and have continued to do so throughout life even to this very day, as you will read more about below.

At Northwestern

As it turned out, and to both me and my parents’ utter surprise, I reversed my course of poor grades in elementary and high school and graduated first in my class at the University of Tulsa where I majored in business economics – Layn graduated second, but who cares or even remembers these things?

By now I’d jettisoned my dream of going into the construction business and applied to law school. But after not getting a scholarship to go to law school – an absolute prerequisite given my needy economic situation – one of my professors suggested that I apply for a scholarship to Northwestern University’s School of Management (now Kellogg) to enter their PhD program, which I did. I even went there to visit the campus in the spring of ’74 and meet the faculty in the Marketing Department where I wanted to study. They had five scholarships to give out, lots of applicants and it seems they’d already narrowed down the candidates to a list of top grads from top schools (i.e., not from Oklahoma) that I wasn’t on.

Then destiny cast its eye my way. Two faculty I met there were big tennis players and had noted on my resume that I’d played some college tennis – Layn had too and was an All American and conference champion, and he was offered a full scholarship to law school, provided he agreed to be assistant coach in tennis. These faculty invited me to play with them that day. I did, and lo and behold when a candidate that they’d offered a scholarship to subsequently decided to go to another school, they had to choose a candidate to bring in off of their wait list. I was told some years later that they chose me thinking that I’d improve their tennis games! So, in the fall I began what would be five years on the shores of Lake Michigan.

 I’ll never forget my first day of classes there. Everyone told me that I had to take a class in Experimental and Quasi-experimental Design from Donald T. Campbell, one of the most famous social scientists of his era, as it was rumored he’d not teach the class again since he was nearing retirement. His specialty was research methodology, and I’m thinking, “Why am I in a class like this? Why did I need a course on research methodology?” I thought business school profs taught case studies on business and took the summers off, at least that’s why I’d signed up. Clearly, I was clueless. I’d chosen a path where publish or perish was the name of the game, preferably in highly quantitative, abstract and blind refereed journals.

The assignment for the first day of class was to read Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research that Campbell co-authored with Julian Stanley, another pioneer in the field. It was just a short 84 pages, but it was dense. I remember marking up almost the entire book in yellow highlights, something I did when I didn’t understand the material, so this meant I grasped the book’s content about as well as I understand a Stephen Hawking book on physics today. Campbell and Stanley used X’s to indicate treatment conditions, O’s to represent observations, solid lines (__) to indicate random assignment of subjects to treatment conditions and dotted lines (-) to indicate non-random assignment of subjects.

On the first day of the first class that I took at Northwestern, Campbell comes in and says he isn’t going to lecture, but only take questions and there would be a test on the book at the end of the week. Then came a flurry of questions from the much more advanced 2nd and 3rd year PhD students who made up most of the class, like: “Why are you recommending the Box-Jenkins test statistic for your Interrupted Time Series Design with non-equivalent control groups to test for treatment effects? Wouldn’t a better test statistic be…” etc. – along with a lot of other arcane questions I didn’t understand. My heart sank as I realized I was in way over my head, not only with respect to the subject, but the students in the class.

I distinctly remember first looking at the X’s and O’s and diagrams in the book and thinking that they looked like football plays diagrammed on a chalk board from my time in Oklahoma playing that sport. Campbell’s interrupted time series design sure looked like a wingback tackle trap at zero to me! I called my Mom and told her that I’d likely be coming home at Christmas for good, that this place didn’t seem suited for me, and I’d misjudged teaching as a career, not understanding how important research was.

But I still prepared for that first test by memorizing the entire 84 pages and I remember being scared to death when I took the test at the end of that first week. Campbell was a fan of using multiple methods to assess students’ understanding, and as a result, his tests were full of all kinds of multiple choice, true or false, ordering, fill in the blank, matching and open ended questions, etc. I never had an exam like it, before or since. I completed the exam and went home to my small apartment, having no clue how I did.

The next week Campbell came in and started announcing names and handing out the completed exam blue books, a practice he followed to take up time so he didn’t have to lecture. He had an impenetrable curved grading system, where the top score might be a plus 5 and bottom score might be a minus 200. After a while, he calls out the name “Phillips!” and hands me the blue book and it says minus 187 as the grade on the front page. I sat there in stunned silence and started going through the pages in the book to see what I had missed, when suddenly I realized this wasn’t my handwriting and I literally stood up in class and shrieked “This isn’t my exam!” It was the exam of a Tom Phillips who wasn’t in class that day.

Campbell looked at me sort of funny and he took back the blue book of the other Phillips and about five minutes later he says “Lynn Phillips!” and I raised my hand and he gives me back my exam and he says, “Well done.” I had made a plus 4, the second highest grade in the class. Of course, I was the only one who knew the truth, that I was equally if not more ready to believe that I had made the minus 187 score. As it turned out, I later came to really love and understand this material. Both Campbell and Stanley became mentors to me and I used much of what I learned from them to teach about field test markets and pilots in the market research classes I taught at GSB. But the main lesson that I took away from this class with Campbell is that students can master any subject, even those which are initially foreign or totally lacking in interest to them, and ultimately even come to have a love for learning about them, provided they respect the instructor and are motivated to learn, with a dash of being just a little bit scared tossed in.

I can see in my mind’s eye a few of you that are my former students who are reading this, smiling and thinking, “So that’s where Phillips got his teaching style from!” You’d be right. I later went well beyond Campbell in perfecting that style, with Hugh Mackworth’s Wheel of Misfortune, but that’s a few years on.

While at Northwestern I was blessed with many great teachers and mentors from all kinds of disciplines beyond Campbell and Stanley in social psychology and research methodology, including an array of professors in Marketing like Bobby Calder, John Hauser, Philip Kotler, Sidney Levy, Louis Stern, Brian Sternthal, Alice Tybout – and in Economics like John Roberts, Frederick Scherer – and in Econometrics and Measurement like Richard Bagozzi, Claes Fornell, Haskel Benishay – the list goes on and on like Celine Dion and is too long to mention here. Northwestern is also where I experimented with a style of teaching that included extensive use of video and video case studies to support the content I taught.

By ’78, some four years later, I’d learned the ropes of being a professor, or so I thought, and I was ready to graduate and seek a job teaching in a business school. I had already published a number of articles and I’d even taught in the business school my last two years there as one of the instructors for first year Marketing. I also taught in Northwestern’s night program in Chicago where the students were part-time and even older than the full time MBAs. And I’d also participated in several large research-oriented marketing consulting projects. I felt like I’d won my spurs in teaching and research. I felt I was ready.

But my advisors weren’t so sure. I was receiving invitations to meet with faculty from leading business schools for preliminary screening interviews at an upcoming conference. My mentors at Northwestern counseled me to not try to get a faculty position at places like Stanford, Harvard, Wharton, etc., saying that I was too young and inexperienced at 26 and that these schools (at that time) normally hired faculty in their mid-to-late ’30s after they’d built up a track record at another university. They told me to set my sights on places like the University of Illinois or others which were feeder schools to these top places.

But I’ve always listened to the beat of a different drummer, and I went against the counsel of my advisors and took the initial interviews. I was even more surprised than they were when I was asked back to visit the schools and interview with their faculty on campus and give a presentation on my dissertation research. The first swing of interviews was West Coast – at UCLA, Stanford, and UC Berkeley. I’d never been to California and when I got there, after a string of five cold winters in Evanston where the mayor had been fired for not getting the snow off the streets, I thought, “Wow, if I get a job anywhere here, I’m taking it.”

The very next week I was on the East Coast completing an interview swing that included Columbia and other schools, and just after the Columbia interview finished, I got a call from Dean James Van Horne at Stanford offering me a job. I was stunned and so were my advisors. True to my word, I cancelled the rest of my interviews, and although I had also received offers at UCLA, Berkeley, and Columbia, it was always Stanford for me, almost from the first moment I saw the place and talked to the people there.

At Stanford

I arrived at Stanford in the fall of ’79, and I used my time there to finish and defend my dissertation at Northwestern, which I did by Christmas, returning back to Stanford to begin teaching in January of ’80. Within the first five minutes of the very first class on the very first day that I walked into a GSB classroom, one which included later-to-become-famous students like Rich Fairbank of Capital One and Mukesh Ambani of Reliance, another student named George (Jay) Stewart interrupted me in my opening remarks and asked me the first question that I ever fielded in a Stanford classroom, “Professor Phillips, could you please tell us what your qualifications are to teach this marketing class?” Welcome to Stanford GSB, pal!

Anyway, I thought Jay’s question was legit if not a little bit funny, since I was now 27, which was four or five years younger than Jay and I hardly looked like one of GSB’s seasoned faculty chock full of the wisdom that comes from years of experience, which teachers like Jack and Chuck and others like Jim Porterfield possessed in spades – as the only photo of me I have from that era shows. But I handled Jay’s question and we became friends for 40 years. The rest of 1980 was a breeze after that opening!

I spent the academic year of 1981 and ’82 as a Visiting Professor at Harvard Business School. I worked hard at HBS, doing research in the computer lab with my intern and friend of 40 years, now Professor Dae Chang of Yonsei University. Dae and other co-authors we worked with like Bob Buzzell published some of the early articles that began to question whether the then-popular 5 Forces model that depicted the customer as a force capable of bargaining away a company’s profitability explained variations in rates of return observed across industries or whether customer experience factors were more dominant.

I loved Boston. I’d even lived there doing part of my dissertation work at MIT’s Sloan school before I’d finished at Kellogg. Ted Levitt, HBS’s famous marketing professor befriended me as did young faculty like Hiro Takeuchi. I marveled at the teaching preparation faculty did, drawing up board plans for each case, with classes on how to teach the case method by legendary HBS profs, all lessons I never forgot. HBS wanted me to stay, but I’d left my heart at Stanford and returned in ’82, bringing an unexpected gift.

My friend and fellow faculty at HBS John Quelch, who later served as the Dean of the London Business School, was a Brit with whom I shared an office in Gallatin Hall. One day he said to me after seeing my tennis racquets in a carry bag in my office, “So, Lynn, have you ever played the British racquet sport, squash?” Of course, being from Oklahoma and having never heard of the sport, I thought he must be talking about a sport that involved a vegetable. John took me to the Harvard squash courts and my life was changed forever.

I brought my squash back with me to Stanford and over the years I got to play with a bevy of MBAs who had played squash in college. It’s a long list and they were all my tutors – Jim Ketcham from Princeton, Andy Mathieson from Yale, Geoff Yang from Princeton, Bob Horne from Harvard, Ned Mandell and Bill Banks from Dartmouth, Roberto Koifman from Chile, Jon Staenberg from Stanford, Stuart Evans from SRI, another Brit, the list goes on. I also played with Dean Jim Patell and finance faculty member Gene Flood. I even played intramural squash with Ketcham and we won the tournament, but who remembers these things?

No doubt all those above will remember me as an unorthodox player with strokes more akin to tennis and table tennis than squash, but over time I got better and I learned. On one consulting assignment in Australia, one of my clients and great friends Peter Edwards told me upon landing in Brisbane, “Hey, I’ve got a colleague who will give you a good workout to get over your jet lag so that you’ll be ready for tomorrow’s session with my top team.” I said sure, albeit blithering incoherently with jet lag, and a car picked me up just 30 minutes later and took me to home of Rodney Eyles, the former world champion.

Needless to say, playing Rod that day was an eye-opening experience that my friend and client Peter Edwards got a great laugh out of. Rod and I and his family have remained fast friends to this day and my son Cole and I have trained at his squash academy on the Gold Coast with him and his son Ethan, who is now the Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian champion – and with whom I wouldn’t dare step on a court to play a serious match any more than Rod, who celebrated his 50th birthday by running in a 50 mile race!

The Class of 1985

By the time 1983 rolled around and the Class of ’85 had entered, I had adopted a teaching style that I thought was tailor made for GSB and for my subject, Marketing. There was really was no pressure on GSB students to work hard to get good grades at the school other than their personal motivation, since job recruiters were not allowed to ask about grades and everyone at least got what was referred to as a Dean Jim Van Horne “gentleman’s P” or Pass. I was concerned that since Marketing was not what GSB was especially famous for, unlike as it was at Northwestern, students who wanted to pursue, say, investment banking and finance careers might not take it as seriously as subjects they most wanted to learn about.

So I adopted the practice of inviting executives from the case studies I was using in class to come to Stanford to participate in the discussions, figuring that while some students who were more interested in other disciplines might not be especially motivated to prepare for my class, their level of preparation and study might change if they weren’t just asked to present to me, but instead to the executives that were the subject of the case study. I started implementing this with the Class of ’85 and continued to do so throughout my tenure at Stanford. I invited the founders of companies like Southwest Airlines and ROLM to attend the class, and the CEOs of Canon, Xerox, P&G, FedEx, British Airways, and a host of others, many traveling long distances, even from out of the country, to join us in Room 66. And it worked.

And it was also funny at times. On the day that I taught the Southwest Airlines case to the Class of ’85, I had invited Rollin King to attend the class, who was the legendary founder of that airline. Rollin never received the credit for Southwest’s success that his attorney Herb Kelleher did, who later became CEO. But it was Rollin who invented the Southwest business model that disrupted the industry. He was the first CEO and Chairman and later flew the line for 17 years as Chief Pilot. Rollin was quite a character. I got to know him well and we later traveled to Australia and the UK, telling executives at large incumbent airlines that “Winter is Coming,” and that it wouldn’t be long before Southwest offspring hit their shores.

The day Rollin came to Stanford in ’84 was to be the first of many visits he made to my classes, and on that day he brought his wife Mary Ella. They sat down in the class and I introduced them to the class as my “future in-laws” – a bald faced lie – so that no one would suspect or question who they actually were. (So much for “this twin is too busy for mischief.”) The class then gave a polite round of applause to my mystery guests and fake future in-laws. In the front row center of Room 66 sat the study group of Mark Conroe, TJ Heyman, Willie Langston, and Hugh Mackworth. They were dressed like cowboys with hats and boots, feigning good-old boy Texas accents as I called on them to present their solution to the case.

To make a long story short, Mark et al. totally blew it and they didn’t even come close to the creative solution that Rollin and his team implemented, which saved the company when it was just 30 days from running out of cash. With 30 minutes to go, I said, “Let’s debrief this case and to lead the discussion, I’d like to invite Rollin King, founder and former CEO and Chairman of Southwest to come to the front of the class, who is sadly not my future in-law.” Rollin stepped into the center ring of the class and walked up to Mark Conroe’s stunned study group of four, pointed his finger at them and said, “First and foremost, you are all fired!” He then proceeded to debrief the case which has timeless lessons even still today.

After that, everyone expected that any older executive sitting in my class was a representative of the company under discussion that day in my class. At least until your classmate Mark Breier came along with a harebrained scheme that damn near got me fired. He approached me saying something like, “Lynn, this class is way too intimidating and stressful on folks. We need to break the ice, tone things down, have some fun for a change…” He proposed that in an upcoming case on a disguised company (Computer Devices) that I was about to teach, we bring in comedians to impersonate the executives in the case and use the case discussion to slaughter every sacred cow that was being taught at GSB.

I still can’t believe it to this day, but I agreed. On the day the case was to be taught, the two comedians came in and sat down and one of them opens up the back of his briefcase and it’s lined with lots of small bottles of liquor, a fact that doesn’t go unnoticed by more than just a few students and that rumor swept around the room. One of the comedians feigned a twitch when I’d call on him to explain something and he reminded me of a wild-eyed Will Ferrell, Jon Lovitz, or Adam Sandler type-character from Saturday Night Live. And they both proceeded through their comments to do as they’d promised, and slaughtered every sacred cow taught in GSB, from 5 Forces to the Capital Asset Pricing Model, Black-Scholes, etc.

I think they even said something like Michael Porter was a crack addict and a member of the Cali cartel. But the weird and scary thing to me was that a few students in the class were furiously taking notes on what these guys said, while others were looking visibly uncomfortable at what was transpiring, but not challenging who these actors were. So, with 30 minutes to go, the comedian with the twitch gets up and starts the debrief, telling the class his solution to establishing the worldwide network for distribution that the case study was about. He writes it down on the chalkboard at the very front of the class, line by line.

He starts out saying “So, we set up our regional warehouse for APAC in Tokyo, established our sales force out of Hong Kong, put our call center in Istanbul, and regional management was headquartered in Singapore, …” all the while becoming more frenetic and crazy in his movements and speech until he’d finished writing on the blackboard, saying that they’d sourced their marketing talent from Ethiopia! None of it made any sense. At this point, the comedian turned to the class and said in a high pitched frenzied voice, “Can anyone please tell me what all of this really means?” Of course, the words he’d written on the blackboard with the underlines under the first letter in each location, like I’ve shown above, spelled out “THIS IS A JOKE,” and right about then one student in the back row says out loud “This is a Joke?”

And then all hell broke loose. A large part of the class thought it was funny and the icebreaker Mark Breier had intended, whereas others felt they’d been duped, deceived, victimized, hadn’t gotten their money’s worth, etc., with some marching straight to the Dean’s office, and so some 30 minutes later I received a message from the office, calling me on the carpet asking me to explain my conduct.

Sitting in the Dean’s office in a tight circle of chairs before me were Associate Deans Jim Patell, Chuck Holloway, and Gene Webb. The conversation went something like this as I recall, with Jim I believe speaking first, saying, “We have had reports that you invited in comedians to impersonate executives in a case study that you taught today and that they derided and critiqued major parts of the curriculum at GSB,” to which I said, “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.” Jim and Chuck didn’t look happy, then Gene spoke.

“Wait a minute, let me get this straight, these comedians came into the class and you armed them with content to slaughter the sacred cows being taught at GSB?” It was at this stage I thought about saying, it was all Mark Breier’s idea! But instead I replied again, “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.” To which Gene then laughed and said something like that was the funniest thing that he’d ever heard that happened at this place. That broke the ice in the room, and after my promising to never pull a stunt like that ever again, I left the room with my job still intact. Again, so much for “this twin is too busy for mischief!”

In closing off my reminiscences about the Class of ’85, it wouldn’t be complete without an honorable mention from me going out to Hugh Mackworth. Hugh helped me create and implement what became known as the “Wheel of Misfortune.” It used a desktop computer, first an Apple 3 and then later more advanced machines, to project the list of the names of the 15 or so study groups in each of my classes onto the front screen of class. The “Wheel” would start cycling rapidly through the list of all the names, highlighting each one as it scrolled through them rapidly, and then would slow down, finally coming to the name of the group selected, enlarging it to the size of the screen with that name blinking on and off.

It created a Roman coliseum gladiator-esque type moment at the start of each class, with groups urging the “Wheel” to bypass them and groaning loudly as it was slowing down and appearing to be landing on or very close to where their group’s name appeared. The class accused me of rigging the “Wheel” when one group out of the 15 groups was chosen twice in a row. I professed total innocence to that charge, and, if you believe that, then you must be among those who believed “this twin is too busy for mischief.”

The Last Years at GSB

In my last 4 years at GSB, I began teaching a class entitled Building Market Focused Organizations, or BMFO as it was known – you can just imagine what other words students gave to the BMFO acronym! I developed and taught this course with my soon to be business partner who had just stepped away from McKinsey. The content of this course went well beyond marketing and focused on identifying the best and emerging “next” practices that leaders and multifunctional business teams should follow in order to choose customer value propositions (CVPs), and then architect and systematically execute the designed value delivery systems (VDSs) to profitably provide and communicate the chosen CVP lineup.

The methodologies and tools that we developed and taught were aimed at helping business teams to “become” their targeted customer and partner communities by “spending a day in their life,” thereby gaining an imaginative understanding of their unmet needs, one that transcended what customers and partners can imagine on their own. We called this Day-In-The-Life-Of-Customers or “DITLOC” research methodology, and it is now deployed by countless leading-edge companies and practitioners pursuing global new business-expansion and keep-sold growth opportunities. This and the other frameworks and concepts noted above form the basis of my executive education and global consulting practice at my firm Reinventures, and in my view represent the mindset used by the world’s most valuable tech companies.

Harvard Business Review produced a feature film on these customer experience (or CX) engineering concepts, and they are the foundation for numerous other business strategy and execution frameworks now taught by other business thought-leaders worldwide, including such luminaries as Professors Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School and Philip Kotler of Northwestern. They are employed by numerous advertising and digital marketing agencies, consulting companies, market research, and product-development advisory firms, many of whom I’ve worked with directly. So, at least in my final years at Stanford, I helped to light a few fires, some of which still burn 30 years later.

My Journey After Stanford

After my departure from Stanford, I also held part-time adjunct faculty appointments at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business for several years, teaching in their night MBA program in San Francisco. And for one semester I commuted from the Bay Area to Houston weekly to teach at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business. One of my close friends who was on the faculty there asked me to do so while he spent time with his wife who was battling and would ultimately survive an aggressive form of breast cancer. For a time, I also was an adjunct faculty for the executive education programs at Duke Corporate Education, IE Madrid Business School, Melbourne Business School, and Monash University Business School. All the above schools took up only a fraction of my time in any year, so I devoted the rest of my time to my executive education and consulting practice, which I still continue to do to this day.

After my departure from Stanford, I also held part-time adjunct faculty appointments at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business for several years, teaching in their night MBA program in San Francisco. And for one semester I commuted from the Bay Area to Houston weekly to teach at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business. One of my close friends who was on the faculty there asked me to do so while he spent time with his wife who was battling and would ultimately survive an aggressive form of breast cancer. For a time, I also was an adjunct faculty for the executive education programs at Duke Corporate Education, IE Madrid Business School, Melbourne Business School, and Monash University Business School. All the above schools took up only a fraction of my time in any year, so I devoted the rest of my time to my executive education and consulting practice, which I still continue to do to this day.

Over the years, I delivered executive-education workshops and advised on choosing and delivering winning customer value propositions in more than 40 countries worldwide, working with companies that spanned virtually every industry sector. And it was and still is an absolute blast. The Stanford GSB connection was never lost even during all these years away from the school. I ended up doing work for people like David Levin, Bill Hooper, Kevin Keough, Mike McCaffery, even reconnecting with Mukesh Ambani and his firm Reliance based out of Mumbai. Had I known Mukesh was going to be in the top 10 richest people in the world, I’d have given him better grades at Stanford! That’s not true, I graded everything myself and did it blind, and Mukesh was a star who had to drop out after the first year to help his father run Reliance Industries.

On a personal front, I married late in life, in 1996, and had two beautiful children, Anja and Cole, with my wife Anjali. Sadly, we separated in 2005, a result of me being gone far too often for far too long and too far away. But we’ve remained best friends to this day and cherish our children, Anja who just finished up college at USC and Cole who is just entering USC this fall. Jim Lussier of the class of ’85, whom I’ve managed to reconnect with a few times over the years, will enjoy this story about my daughter Anja.

I introduced Jim to a CEO of a startup I was working with out of Vienna, Austria, named Gilbert Hoedl who had been a student in one of the executive programs I taught when I was at Stanford and he has been a client of mine ever since for each successive startup that he’s launched. Gil’s son Stefan met Anja at my house when they were both three, and today they are living together in Vienna, weathering the pandemic. I’d say that my Anja looks in pretty firm control of that relationship at three years old, don’t you think?

In the ’90s after leaving Stanford, I also developed another love that still endures to this day, Africa. I first visited Africa in ’93 when I went on a 21 day safari through Tanzania ending in Zimbabwe, and I have returned well over a dozen times since then, taking my family, and going with Layn’s family to other countries and locales, including Botswana, Mt. Meru in Kenya just outside Kilimanjaro, Namibia, South Africa, and Mozambique. I ended up doing lots of business on the Continent, and we return every chance we can.

In the ’90s after leaving Stanford, I also developed another love that still endures to this day, Africa. I first visited Africa in ’93 when I went on a 21 day safari through Tanzania ending in Zimbabwe, and I have returned well over a dozen times since then, taking my family, and going with Layn’s family to other countries and locales, including Botswana, Mt. Meru in Kenya just outside Kilimanjaro, Namibia, South Africa, and Mozambique. I ended up doing lots of business on the Continent, and we return every chance we can.

A Different Kind of Learning Journey

In 2006, despite personal setbacks, my practice was booming, my health was great and I was going to try to qualify for the U.S. Nationals in squash in my age group, having twice defeated in matches earlier that year one of my closest friends who had won it the year before. I had just come back from Namibia on safari with my two kids to my new residence in Newport Beach, and I returned them both home to Anjali before I had to leave on my next multi-stop, three week business trip to Australia, Singapore, and onward to Tokyo. But before I left on the trip, I went in to my doctor’s office to get the physical I needed to get into the tournament, and then I raced for the airport to jump on the plane to Sydney.

On arrival, I had a call from my Doc in the U.S. who said that there was something wrong, that my white cell count was low and I needed to come in for further tests to find out why. I told him I felt fine and it was probably a fluke from the training I was doing, which can lower your white cell count. I blew off his recommendation to come home immediately and didn’t return to the U.S. from Tokyo until three weeks later. The day after I got back, my Doc called again and asked me if I’d gone to see that hematologist to get my cell count tested. I told him no and he insisted I go in that day, and so I drove over to Hoag Hospital.

The doctor there looked at me and said, “C’mon, I don’t see what your Doc is worried about. You say you don’t have any symptoms and you look like you could run through walls. But I’ve got the ability to take your white cell count quickly and put your Doc’s concerns to rest.” So, he did, and not very long later he came back into the room with an ashen look on his face and said, “Hey, you barely have any white cell count at all, you shouldn’t be walking around!” (Normal white cell counts for males are between 5 to 10 thousand; mine was ~500.) He said he had to do a bone marrow biopsy then and there, a procedure where they punch the equivalent of a corkscrew into your hip and pull out a piece of marrow for testing.

He said he’d have the results for me that night and to not leave as I might have to enter the hospital the next day depending upon the results. I said I had a class to teach the next two days at Sandia Labs in the Bay Area and left for the airport against his advice. After landing in SFO, he called me as I was walking through the airport and told me to sit down while he relayed the news I had been diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia, or AML, a deadly cancer of the blood that at the time killed about 85% of those who contracted it in three years. Today, despite improvements, the five year survival rate is only about 25%.

I told the doctor I’d return after I finished teaching the class at Sandia, which I did. In the meantime, my twin Layn had researched the best hospitals for leukemia, and the number one hospital in California that ranked close to Stanford as one of the best in the nation was City of Hope in SoCal where I now lived. As it turned out, Layn’s law firm, Irell and Manella, had recently won a $500M dollar lawsuit for City of Hope against Genentech for failure to pay license royalties on IP that City of Hope helped Genentech to develop. Irell took the case on pro bono and after winning it, generously donated all of its share of the settlement to the hospital. So, when Layn called City of Hope’s CEO, I got the Red Carpet treatment.

The CEO greeted me at the door and introduced me to one of their most experienced doctors who was a leukemia expert and had also been with City of Hope for 20 years, Dr. Eileen Smith. I checked into my room, got into my hospital gown, shaved head and all, ready for the first rounds of chemotherapy to come and Dr. Smith came into my room with a mask on and sat down and asked me this question: “So, Lynn, how would you like me to handle my treatment of you? Would you like me to tell you everything that I’m thinking or just treat you and keep you posted on how you are doing without all of the details?”

I told her to not pull any punches and tell me exactly what she was thinking, that I wanted to be involved at every step of the way and in every decision. I said I’d already read everything I could find out about the disease and I knew about the survival rates, the treatment regimens of chemo and radiation, and so on. She told me that leukemia was not an hereditary disease, that no one in my family was in danger of getting it; it was a random mutation of genes for which the cause had not been traced, although in one of the subtypes of leukemia it had been traced to a viral cause. She speculated that I might have picked it up in Africa where the fields I’d traipsed around in since ’93 had been heavily sprayed with chemicals.

But who knew? Then true to her word, she told me exactly what she thought, and it was not good news. She thought I was a high-risk patient and my odds of surviving this were closer to 5%. She predicted tests would show I had a precondition called myelodysplasia which explained why I had been able to be active so long without succumbing to an infection. She said this precondition, which had killed the 1992 presidential candidate Paul Tsongas at 55, put me into a high risk category, with a survival rate of 5% or less. I looked at her and said “Doc, I’ve never finished out of the top 5% of anything I ever tried to do in life, we’ve probably got a 2% cushion.” She laughed and said I was going to be an interesting patient.

That sounds like bravado coming from someone who, for those who remember me as confident, may be thinking “that sounds like Phillips.” But it wasn’t. One thing GSB and Silicon Valley teaches us is to embrace uncertainty, don’t be afraid as you allow it to lead you to places that challenge your will, mind, and heart. More importantly, I was bolstered by Faith. Looking at back on my leukemia journey through the lens of a decade of hindsight, what I most recall is how from the moment I entered the hospital until I left it seven months later is that I never felt anxious, worried or afraid. It was as if the Peace of Christ, which transcends all human understanding, had been gifted to me, guarding me “all times and in every way.”

Doc Smith then went on to say that the only way to beat these odds was with a bone-marrow transplant from a donor, and I said: “So, things look fairly good then, right Doc? Layn is my identical twin and thus a perfect match as a donor. I’ve got spare parts and we can give this disease a run for its money.” The doctor then gave me more sobering news: Since Layn and I were born in the 1950s – long before more accurate diagnostic tests became available – she thought that Layn and I were actually fraternal twins whose sacs had merged in the womb, as was the case for a large percentage of twins born in that era.

She said, “I’ve met your twin, and I’ve talked with him. He doesn’t look like you, he doesn’t talk like you, and you have completely different personalities.” I wanted to add that I was way better looking than him but modesty held me back from saying so. She went on to say that if we were only fraternal twins, the odds of him being a match for me were 25% at best and even if he were a match, the odds of success for a bone-marrow transplant – and thus my survival – would plummet, since sibling donor transplants often have all kinds of nasty complications like post-bone marrow transplant graft failure, among others.

After all, Layn and I certainly looked “less than identical” as you might have surmised from some of the pictures I’ve shown you, and so, sadly, she had made a very compelling case. But I still suspected that Doc Smith might have got it all wrong and here’s why: Layn and I actually had grown to look a lot alike for a time, until I suffered a devastating injury in football, a compound fracture of both bones in my right leg my freshman year. I was in a cast for six months and I never recovered the ability to walk or run for over a year and that changed our looks and growth trajectories forever. Heck, back in the day there was even a time that Layn and I looked so much alike that we could exchange dates for school parties and no one ever knew the difference. (Once again, so much for “these twins are too busy for mischief!”)

Some two weeks later, after a series of 17 cytogenetic tests, Dr. Smith brought me some good news for a change and she expressed it this way: “We should both go to Las Vegas and whatever I bet on, you should bet on the exact opposite. I was wrong on both my guesses.” She went on to relay that Layn was in fact my identical twin and that we should proceed with the bone marrow transplant. She also told me I was not a high risk patient, but a low risk patient, and that I had a chromosome inversion (16) that only a small 5% of the population has, one known to be associated with successful recovery from AML.

She went on to say that if I wanted to – and this was a choice she posed to me – I could even transplant myself with my own cells and still have an 85% chance of survival. She noted, however, that if I went with Layn’s cells, I would recover much faster from a transplant, assuming there were no complications vs. going instead with my own cells, which would take much longer to recover having been bombarded off and on for seven months by chemotherapy and radiation. There were other tradeoffs too long to explain here. I told that her I’d dance with those that I came into the world with, saying “Give me Layn’s cells.”

So, seven months later after staggered rounds of chemotherapy, that’s exactly what we did. But in those seven months a lot of things happened I’d like to mention, or if you will, witness on here. Each round of chemo that they gave me up to the transplant was harsher, or so they said. Before the nurses put chemo into the IV drip that went straight into the port in my chest, they’d say things like “this is one of the worst of all of the chemotherapies; a lot of patients develop painful sores all up and down their esophagus and have to go on a morphine drip for the pain.” They’d come check on me frequently for any bad reaction.

And the amazing thing is that I never had any reaction to any of the chemo. They might as well have been giving me Kool-Aid. I never felt a thing. But when it came time for the bone marrow transplant, we hit a huge stumbling block. Layn as the donor had to donate cells just before the transplant. Nowadays the process for donors is easy, analogous to a blood transfusion. Donors are hooked up to a machine that in several hours harvests the needed bone marrow cells which can then be delivered by IV to the recipient. Dr. Smith ideally wanted to get five million cells from Layn as the donor to do the procedure.

After Day 1 of donating cells, Layn was only able to donate 750,000 cells. Doc Smith said his cells were “sticky,” and they were having a hard time harvesting them. He had to come in a second day to donate and then he was only able to contribute 500,000 more, with Doc saying further attempts to get more would be futile. They’d got all they could get. I had a choice, go with Layn’s cells, which were 3.5 million short of ideal or go with my own cells nuked by chemo for seven months and now topped off with radiation? At this time, they’d already prepared me for the transplant and taken my cell counts down close to zero, near death, as they do just before you’re to receive new marrow. The decision had to be made immediately.

I said once again, “I’ll dance with those I came in with, give me Layn’s cells.” So, then and there they gave me Layn’s seemingly small and outnumbered army of cells, and the flight of nurses that watched over me like ministering angels monitored me closely over the next 72 hours, worrying it wasn’t enough cells to make the transplant successful. Then the most amazing thing in my entire journey happened.

Most patients stay in the hospital anywhere from 30 days to three months or more following a bone marrow transplant. They won’t let you leave the hospital until your white cell counts go over 2,000, sometimes not even then depending upon any other complications. I’d met patients that stayed for months on the hospital grounds in dorm-like rooms even after three months of being in their hospital bed post-transplant. On the fourth day my white cell counts started to come back. The doctors and nurses were stunned. They said that it must be a fluke. Yet on day 5 my counts hit 1,500 and on day 6 they broke the 2,000 barrier.

Even still, Dr. Smith was reluctant to release me, but I gave her the John Wayne line (and grin) saying if they didn’t let me out on day 7, “I’m walking out on my own.” So, on day 7, I was released, which they later told me was the fastest release ever from a bone marrow transplant at the City of Hope since they had been doing them, dating all the way back to 1976. Dr. Smith called my twin’s small band of cells I’d received in the transplant “The Super Cells,” a fact Layn lords over me to this day. By 2009 I was back to work, and here is a pic of Layn and me at his daughter’s wedding in 2009, one year after the transplant.

Oh, and BTW I forgot to mention I contracted what turned out to be SARS in late 2002 while working in China, before that pandemic was officially announced. So, I’ve been nominated by the Grim Reaper more than once, but thankfully not elected. Apparently I’m harder to kill than Bruce Willis in Die Hard.

Close

Thank you yet again for including me in this volume as someone who had an impact as a teacher and allowing me to contribute to this book’s content. No faculty member could fail to be deeply moved by a tribute such as this, coming from a university and a school and a place that I loved so much and where I spent the best years of my life. It stirs in me a range of emotions that are hard to express and put into words: pride, humility, joy, laughter, but more than any, admiration for the astonishingly talented group of individuals I met and interacted with over more than a decade through the toil of hundreds of classes.

They came from one end of the earth to another and their intellect and actions changed the world for both the better and for good. That I was there to witness first-hand the enduring spirit, drive, zeal, and imagination of those who sought to train themselves in the crucible and epicenter of disruptive thinking that is the hallmark of GSB and Silicon Valley is only but one of the many debts that I can never repay.

My time at GSB spanned just 12 years, far shorter than Jack’s or Chuck’s, one year of which I spent at the Harvard Business School as a Visiting Professor because of my role in an unspeakable tragedy that happened at GSB in the summer of 1981. It was only through the Grace of God and kindness of then GSB Dean Rene McPherson and faculty like Gene Webb and Peter Wright that I was able to return to Stanford. Rene served a short tenure of two years as Dean due to injuries he’d suffered in a terrible auto accident. When he called and asked if I’d like to return to GSB, I remember crying. I was coming home.

And now, in the sunset twilight of my career, everything has changed yet again as we pass through what is just the early stages of the digitization that is altering the way that we live, work, and interact with each other, transforming humankind and the economics of every sector. The long line of graduates from GSB has never failed in the mission to change the world for the better and won’t again as we yet again embrace uncertainty, allowing it to lead us to and challenge us with new opportunities and threats.

The shadows over my memories of the days that I spent at Stanford GSB in the ’80s and ’90s are darkening for me now, and I apologize if I got any aspect of the GSB stories herein wrong. But in the still bright corners of memory, I can hear again the screams of torture and delight wrought by Hugh Mackworth’s Wheel of Misfortune that echoed in the crucible of what was GSB classroom 66 and the back and forth intellectual exchanges that took place in that room. I will forever miss that time and that place and all of you. It was all – and still is – very, very special to me.

This missive, for those of you who took the time to read it all the way through or even partially so, marks my final “session” with you. But I want you to know that there is not a day that goes by for me in which some fraction of my conscious thoughts doesn’t take me back to Stanford GSB and my many friends from all Classes. I bid you hail and farewell and God bless. As Spock would say, “Live long and prosper!”