Category: Memoir

At IRC, everyone mattered, and everyone felt that our mission mattered. We were all a team.

In the late 1960s, IRC got a five-year research support commitment from Chevron, DuPont, Exxon, General Electric, General Motors, Gulf Oil, Procter & Gamble, Westinghouse, Western Electric, and Standard Oil of Indiana.

During the early 1960s, it was revolutionary to see automobiles being assembled with very few human workers in sight on an assembly line.

In the 1950s, then-president Carroll E. French believed it would be good business to split the organization into a nonprofit that would retain the IRC name designator and a similar name for a company with the word “service” added to it.

It may be a surprise to some people that John D. Rockefeller Jr. was a champion of what we now know as the broad field of human resources. But Rockefeller was so much more than a petroleum industry heir or even an engaged philanthropist.

Among Rockefeller’s many actions was the establishment in 1926 of Industrial Relations Counselors, Inc.—renamed Innovation Resource Center for Human Resources (IRC4HR) in 2015 —as a nonprofit research and educational organization to “advance the knowledge and practice of human relations” in the workplace.

In my school years in New York City during the early 1930s, I was exposed to schoolmates from almost every background imaginable. My friends were from diverse religious beliefs, national backgrounds, race, and economic circumstances.

I was drafted into the Army shortly after my 18th birthday and, because of my interest and background in chemistry, the Army decided that Medical Corps basic training was a good fit with my interests. I was sent to Camp Grant, Illinois, and soon discovered that Medical Corps basic training was not for me.

I knew that at the end of my military service, I would need to find ways to learn to understand our world better than I did, and that my earlier focus on science was not the path to understanding.

I will never forget the lesson taught by the one-question final exam for one of my philosophy classes.