Tribute to Professor Lynn Phillips

Jim Lussier

I suspect that I’m like many of us. As we reflect back on our lives, think about who influenced us the most, shaped our view of the world, engaged us, and encouraged us to expand our horizons and excel, our thoughts turn to our teachers. Certainly mine do. Seems like there’s one teacher in each era of my life who stands out. There was the fourth-grade teacher who managed to get a group of rambunctious nine and ten-year-old boys interested in science by allowing us to read books about UFOs, and excitedly discuss and debate the mystery of whether they were real. There was the high school teacher who created such a stimulating learning environment that calculus became a fascinating subject. That calculus class mattered so much to me in my senior year, a time when many of my friends and I would skip school from time to time (okay, only a couple times) and go the lake or wherever. On one of those “skip days,” I missed all my other classes, but came back to school just for that calculus class. It was not to be missed.

During my time at the GSB, while there were many great teachers, the one who stands out the most for me after all these years is Professor Lynn Phillips. I had him twice, taking Business 240, Marketing Management, in the winter of 1984 and Business 340, Marketing Planning and Implementation, in the fall of that year. Both courses were popular and highly coveted and we all faced choices on where to spend our “points” to get the professors we wanted. I went all in twice on Professor Phillips and felt fortunate to get him both times.

My strongest memories of Professor Phillips involve how much he cared, and how much he prepared for his classes with the goal of making each class and the course overall an outstanding educational experience. In those days, our professors used acetate slides with cardboard borders (remember those?) Professor Phillips’ acetates were always thoughtfully prepared and dense with content. But one couldn’t help noticing that on every acetate, the entire cardboard edge was completely filled with handwritten notes in his flowing and very neat handwriting, with reminders of the key points he wanted to make on each slide. You could tell how much work went into each slide and it showed when he presented them. In addition to the case materials, Professor Phillips wrote lengthy and content rich pieces on topics such as customer analysis, frameworks for competitive analysis, market research, creative strategy, and a host of other topics. There was no textbook, just the cases and Professor Phillips’ thought pieces and handouts. So much work went into all this.

He created a classroom environment where you felt not only that you had to be sharp and on your toes, you wanted to be. He encouraged us to form study groups of no more than five students. One group was picked at random to lead the discussion of the case, and you never knew when your number would come up, so everyone prepared thoroughly. My study group with Joni Harris (Minault), Mauricio Valencia and John Boyle in Marketing 340 was one of my most memorable study group experiences. We worked hard, produced good work, and also had lots of laughs and teased one another mercilessly, the content of which shall remain within the group. I still have my syllabi, notes, and exams from these classes and reviewing them brings back a flood of memories. Who can doubt our dedication when we agreed to meet at eight p.m. on a Sunday night at FastGas to go over our case preparation for the GE Clock and Timer case?

Of course we all were used to preparing case studies on various companies such as Federal Express, Southwest Airlines, ROLM, GE, EMI, Rainbow Systems and Autodraft as well as the structural analysis we did of the chain saw industry. But Professor Phillips found ways to take it to another level. For example, for the IBM Sales force case, he managed to bring the actual executives who were in the case to the classroom and we were able to role play with them. And for the worldwide copier industry case, he was able to arrange for the CEO of Canon, one of Japan’s largest companies, to come and give a presentation after the class for interested students. Talk about going all out to make the class interesting and relevant!

Professor Phillips’ classes were not only interesting and relevant, but also intellectually challenging and stimulating. Sometimes the volume of material and number of conceptual frameworks to be understood and applied was truly intimidating. My sense is that at times many students could relate to the thoughts expressed in a handout Professor Phillips distributed entitled “The Mike McTeigue Memorial Leadoff Response,” which read as follows:

“We have not succeeded in answering all your problems. Indeed we feel we have not completely answered any of them. The answers we have found only serve to raise a whole new set of questions. In some ways, we feel we are as confused as ever, but we believe we are confused on a higher plane and about more important things.”

And who can forget the discussion of the concept devices case, where Professor Phillips sought to bring to life in the classroom environment the kind of anti-MBA bias that was and still is prevalent in some quarters of business? Unbeknownst to most of the students, the “executives” he brought in from Concept Devices were not executives at all, but imposters who had been coached to provide negative, anti-MBA responses to legitimate questions from the class. Also unbeknownst to most of the class, Professor Phillips recruited Laird Cagan, Mark Breier, Kathy Dewenter, and Bruce Golden as “plants” to further heighten the tension and therefore the learning opportunity, or so he hoped. As it turns out many students walked out and were upset by what transpired in class and so did not hear Professor Phillips’ debrief to those who remained about the lessons to be learned. He addressed this further in one of the many memos he distributed along the way about where we were in the class, what we had been learning, how to apply it, traps to watch out for, and how to handle them. In this case he had hoped the class would be less serious and more humorous than it turned out to be. He ended his recap of the class with this note from another by now famous faculty memo which read:

“Bringing new ideas and materials into the classroom is a risky investment. Some of the ideas and materials will fail some of the time (especially first times). So be it. Chances should and will be taken.”

Given all the effort that Professor Phillips put into his classes and the talent he had for bringing classroom discussions alive, it’s not surprising that Professor Phillips was a popular instructor. At the same time the climate in academia in general and at the GSB in those days, encouraged professors to “publish or perish,” with teaching being important but secondary. I was reminded that it was our class that raised the issue of teaching quality with the faculty, and pushed to create a Distinguished Teaching Award. While there was some resistance to the idea among certain quarters of the faculty, it was agreed that such an award could be bestowed based on a vote of the students. And it is no surprise who won the first Distinguished Teaching Award at the GSB: Professor Lynn Phillips. Well deserved.

I was able to stay in touch with Professor Phillips for a time after the GSB. One fond moment is captured here when Jeff Brown, Anne McCarthy, Chuck Yort, Jon Staenberg and I were able to meet with Professor Phillips in Tokyo as we were taking our obligatory post MBA trips to places near and far to dispense with our signing bonuses or whatever remaining funds or credit limit we had.

Thank you, Professor Phillips, for all you did to shape and enrich our experience at the GSB!