Warner P. Woodworth

Below is my attempt to show the stages of my career and highlight key elements of each stage, drawing on the theoretical model of my two former Organizational Behavior (OB) colleagues at BYU, Gene Dalton and Paul Thompson.

Stage 1: Apprentice

As a new Ph.D. in OB from the University of Michigan in the 1970s, I came to BYU without a clear career focus. I became a young assistant professor in the Master of Organizational Behavior (MOB) program. I had a wide range of passions for multiple issues: civil rights, women’s liberation, employee empowerment, leadership and management, quality of working life, and organizational change. I taught courses in these areas, did research and published articles, and served to foster these social agendas in various communities of practice. I created new, innovative courses at BYU, including the following: Leadership; Business Ethics and Social Responsibility; Quality of Working Life; and the first course at BYU on Women’s Studies (co-taught with a professional woman from the community).

With others from across campus, we created a committee to advise the university administration on women’s concerns, race and diversity. We launched a campus-wide women’s conference which, in those days, centered on women students, rather than the current event that primarily serves older LDS women from the region, not young female BYU students. Teams of my students designed and conducted service learning projects with immigrant workers, women’s advocacy groups, and I mentored several student projects that would help to change university policies. These included, for instance, how women are treated on campus, why and how the football program could begin to attract and retain African American athletes.

Some of my research added to a growing scholarly reputation. For instance, I drafted an innovative paper entitled “Consulting with Conflicting Parties” and submitted it to the National Academy of Management. It was not only accepted for presentation at the the Academy’s annual conference, but was also chosen as one of the “best” to be published in the Academy of Management Proceedings.

Stage 2: Expert

In the 1980s I began to focus my energies on key problems that were increasing in U.S. society: decline of the labor movement and growing trade union struggles, factory shutdowns and deindustrialization, increasingly bureaucratic organizational structures, unethical management, absentee-owned companies, and community economic disintegration. I also helped to design and implement new managerial interventions: Quality of Working Life (QWL) methods, TQM and quality circles, participative management, area labor-management committees, ESOPs, worker-owned cooperatives, European industrial democracy and co-determination. In this phase of my career, I greatly expanded my action research agenda by consulting with companies and unions jointly, collecting data, writing various articles, cases, and books. I had papers accepted at innovative conferences around the world including events in Asia, as well as the countries behind the Iron Curtain and Latin America.

I advised governments on how to democratize industry–from the Sandinistas in Nicaragua to Communists in East Germany and Poland, enjoying a growing degree of recognition and influence. Indeed, Dr. George Strauss, a prominent OB professor at Berkeley, told BYU officials that “No successful conference on worker-ownership could be held anyplace in the world without Warner Woodworth’s presenting a paper on his research.”

With support like this, I easily moved from assistant to associate professor during this period, receiving high course and teacher ratings in the classroom, giving strong professional and community service, as well as conducting considerable research and enjoying publication success. Treating many of my students as “colleagues,” not just dependent classroom conformists, we collaborated on various field projects, doing action research at Jamestown, New York and Rath Packing in Iowa (with academics at Cornell); studying worker co-operatives with colleagues at Harvard; becoming the lead consultant on famous worker buyouts like Hyatt Clark Industries, and advising Lee Iacocca’s board at Chrysler, etc.

With my students I established several nonprofit consulting entities: Action Research, Inc.; Organizational Resources, LLC; and the WMP (Worker-Managed Program) we created within the Marriott School. Later, with faculty associates from the MOB Department, Sociology and the College of Education, we established the Program on Economic Innovation and Revitalization (PEIR), to help communities across the nation combat corporate flight and plant closings. We also created a hands-on, financially-independent social enterprise at BYU, called Equitech, a worker/student/faculty-run industrial cooperative that manufactured products which were sold throughout campus.

All these programs became very successful efforts, enabling me as a professor to practice what I preached, or in today’s vernacular, mentor students and “walk the talk.” At the same time, such projects allowed students to get real-world experience through utilizing OB theories and tools. For instance, at Equitech, by actually setting up a firm, having to design the organizational structure, create accounting systems, manufacturing processes, marketing and sales, as well as learn management/worker problem-solving and decision making–students really learned critical skills in each relevant area, as well as entrepreneurship and democratic managerial tools.

Throughout this Stage 2 Expert period, it should be mentioned that a key partner during much of this was Christopher Meek, a Cornell Ph. D. then teaching at Boston College, who we later hired at BYU. Chris’ collaboration was central to expanding my own efforts and impacts. Together we consulted with unions and executives, expanded action research projects, co-authored books and a number of joint papers and articles. We organized major events at prestigious occasions like the Academy of Management’s “Showcase Symposium” with Joseph Vittoria, CEO of Avis in Washington, D.C. We also helped formulate U.S. legislation to promote ESOPs, worker co-ops, and other innovative approaches to save jobs and build community well-being, as well as socio-economic justice. We testified at congressional hearings to help create the National Cooperative Bank with $400 million in start-up funds to foster worker ownership.

I enjoyed considerable prestige by being invited to speak at Harvard, Yale, the U.S. Economic Administration, U.S. Labor Department, and so forth. My work was featured in the national media such as the New York Times, Business Week, Time, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and on national television, NPR radio, and so forth. By this time, I was being sought a great deal to provide policy suggestions, share my research, and give expert testimony in lawsuits, in congressional hearings, to aid radical environmentalists like N-RAG (the Northern Rockies Action Group) in Montana, and conservative groups such as the Catholic Church’s U.S. Conference of Bishops as they put together a position paper on the U.S. economy. I served academic and professional groups like the National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO) and the Association for Workplace Democracy, both of whom elected me to their boards, as well as other organizations.

Stage 3: Mentor

From the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, my career fully evolved into a new stage, that of mentoring students within and groups outside of the university. My OB corporate work that had focused primarily on U.S. and European organizational issues, shifted more to the Third World. I moved from the formal economy of big business, trade unions, and government to the informal economy of black-market, or underground, income-generating activity. Instead of labor-management cooperation, the emphasis was on emerging new markets and nations in transition.

In this stage, I began to mobilize and train students to go among the global poor, helping them to develop their local, indigenous economies, not from top-down, but rather, from the bottom-up. With a small team of students in 1988-89, for example, I organized a seminar on the Philippines’ economic and social plight. It ultimately led to our incorporating as a nongovernmental organization (NGO), eventually known as Enterprise Mentors International. Since that startup, EMI has given out over $9 million in microloans, and today has some 20 offices in 5 countries. It has 7 indigenous non-profit partners and annually trains over 30,000 poor people in basic microentrepreneurship. As a founder, board member, secretary/treasurer and eventually vice president, I’ve enjoyed mentoring poor Third World families, middle-class BYU students who interned with EMI, and wealthy U.S. executives who joined our board because they wanted to make a difference, but didn’t know how.

Nor was EMI the only such group that I co-founded. Together with students, community volunteers, church associates, and others, we developed two innovative streams for aiding the Third World. One was microcredit, a strategy that includes business skills training, microloans, and on-going consulting. Numerous new groups we collectively established also started to do microlending including Chasqui Humanitarian, Accion Contra la Pobreza, Humanitarian Link, and so on.

The other thrust was a broader humanitarian approach to development. This includes disaster aid during a crisis, equipment for digging wells so water can be accessed in drought-stricken regions, seed for family gardens, and so on. An example of my work here is that of being a board member, vice chair and eventually board chairman of the Ouelessebougou-Utah Alliance working in Mali, West Africa with over 70 impoverished villages.

As a mentor, I also helped form other boards of trustees for new NGOs, served as a volunteer corporate officer on several of them, designed and conducted training sessions on topics such as defining the mission, establishing or changing the organizational culture, altering the structure, conducting team building, planning fund-raising campaigns, doing performance assessments and so forth.

Stage 4: Sponsor

The fourth stage of my career has developed from the mid 1990s into the new 21st Century. By this point I had been an Apprentice (1976-83), an Expert (1984-89), and these stages were followed by becoming a Mentor (1990-96) to students, young faculty, and corporate colleagues as they sought to change the world. My career next evolved into becoming a Sponsor for accelerating innovative programs, new NGOs, and expanding global movements (1997-2005).

What is a Sponsor? It’s one who moves beyond details of a narrow specialty, or supporting a few individuals, and begins to leverage whole groups or organizations, helping them implement new visions, accelerate existing efforts, and have a wider and deeper impact for good. It may even lead to the creation of new social inventions and institutions in society.

As I began to envision new possibilities for building self-reliance among poor families around the globe, I started to realign my teaching/research and outreach strategies. I moved farther away from traditional OB issues like management skills, teams and ESOPs in the U.S. and Europe because those efforts had begun to be widely practiced. The thrust of my work turned increasingly to the Third World–to international development, NGOs, microcredit, and social entrepreneurship. I began to develop and teach new college courses in these areas. They integrated theory with practice, as well as spiritual teachings and economic values.

I became an informal advisor to LDS Church welfare and humanitarian programs. I had lobbied long and hard for the creation of an LDS humanitarian fund, and it eventually began to be established. Next, I proposed a unique new entity in the Church, our own NGO. By 1996-97, Latter-day Saint Charities was formally organized as an LDS parallel to Catholic Charities and the Mennonite Third World economic development program. Over the past 15 years, the Church has given out some $643 million in assistance to those in need throughout 154 nations.

From the early 1990s, I also advocated the creation of a new program to help returned missionaries in developing nations, and I suggested that it be called the “Perpetual Education Fund,” modeled after the early Mormon pioneer “Perpetual Emigration Fund.” Several ex-mission presidents later began to promulgate this idea too, and they launched programs to achieve this, particularly Arturo De Hoyos in Mexico. Also, several NGOs we created began experimental education efforts, most notably in Brazil and Chile, but also the Alma Success Academy that trained returned missionaries in Guatemala.

Helping to advocate and sponsor these innovations in the Church was for me a great joy. These efforts also led to sponsorship of many more humanitarian NGOs in that people in Utah began to move beyond our national reputation for being a place that fostered lots of business startups. Instead, we began to achieve similar recognition for creating new nonprofit startups. Over time, I gradually became acquainted with numerous Utah business entrepreneurs who wanted to start using their talents to lift impoverished Third World families. They didn’t want to merely pay their taxes and hope that the U.S. government could fix global problems. Nor did they simply feel that if they donated to the Red Cross, the travails of the world would easily be eliminated. Rather, they felt that they, too, could actually do something on a concrete, personal level to really make a difference.

During this Stage 4 Sponsorship, I gave dozens of speeches annually to such groups as the Business Roundtable, the Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum, BYU alumni associations, Rotary Clubs, and so on. Individuals began to be inspired with the notion that while they couldn’t do everything, each of us can do something. People like Todd Manwaring read my book, Working Toward Zion, and felt inspired to give up his lucrative job selling computer systems to Boeing in Seattle, move to Utah, and become one my MOB students. Since then Todd has helped start several new NGOs including Humanitarian Link, and Action Against Poverty, two networks of like-minded people who seek to make a difference. Likewise, Denver entrepreneur, Steve Gibson, listened to me speak at an entrepreneurship conference. He followed that up with personal action, first donating to Enterprise Mentors International, then selling his business and moving to Utah to begin volunteering at the BYU Center for Entrepreneurship and joining EMI’s board. He became so struck by the plight of struggling returned Filipino LDS missionaries through EMI, that he and his wife Bette designed their own NGO, the Academy for Creating Enterprise (ACE), moved to the Philippines, to implement a successful program to bootstrap new business startups.

These examples suffice to illustrate my developing career role in the late 1990s as a Sponsor of innovative social institutions. Essentially, although I continued to mentor growing numbers of individuals, this new stage moved to my focus on establishing new organizations that I could guide, offer insights, and assist in board formation and fundraising. Instead of these just being my projects, they were “owned” by others who sought to alleviate poverty–in Latin America, Asia and Africa, among LDS communities, as well as Catholics, Protestants and Muslims.

The ripple effects of such initiatives gradually increased. From a half-dozen or so LDS-related programs in the mid 1990s, new NGO creation multiplied annually until there were perhaps 40-50 by 2000. Today the number has tripled to approximately 150 known groups working in nearly a hundred countries. They do microcredit, square foot gardening, women’s empowerment, adult literacy, orphanages, worker cooperatives, reforestation, access to water, small-scale family agriculture, computer skills, health care and sanitation, leadership development, child adoptions, community organizing, microenterprise training, HIV-AIDS prevention, crisis response, microentrepreneurial consulting, medical and dental excursions, new home construction, and rural health care. Together they utilize various tactics for accomplishing village development. In-depth descriptions of many of these programs can be found by clicking on Third World at the top of this web site.

As these strategies have been designed and implemented, my role as a Sponsor has led to making one or more types of contributions: to help legitimize new start-ups, to get them funds and donors, to suggest potential board members, to critique their progress, to be a sounding board, and to enable them to learn about the work and results of similar groups. My growing numbers of books, papers, cases, and training materials provide technical assistance. I also often sponsor such efforts by soliciting trained students/alumni who can give fledgling NGOs more intense, in-depth consulting, by drawing on their OB, OD, MBA, and MPA competencies. To my mind, a number of these young people are becoming “social entrepreneurs,” a relatively new term for societal change agents. I’m currently spending a lot of my time and energy on developing models and tools to help embed social entrepreneurial skills in a whole new generation of such individuals.

A final illustration of my role as a Sponsor has taken place within BYU itself. During the earlier Apprentice, Expert and Mentor phases, I focused on creating new courses, as well as advising students on Honors, OB, and Kennedy Center theses. During the present Sponsor stage, I’ve worked more intensely to remake the Marriott School into an incubator for social enterprise. Other faculty have gradually joined this effort, teaching, for instance, a microcredit module in their courses, or starting a research project with an NGO. For example, Dr. Kristie Seawright has begun taking students to Asia on business excursions for which they get academic credit. She has guided several individuals in doing field research while there, and then returning to write academic papers afterward. Dr. Gary Woller, who I enlisted into the microcredit movement in 1997, has developed a strong interest for doing research in this area. Since then he’s published dozens of papers on microcredit, was co-founder with me as editors of the new Journal of Microfinance, and has begun doing considerable consulting with microfinance institutions during the past two years.

Dr. Don Adolphson, Professor Woller and I created the Marriott School Committee to Alleviate Poverty. We organized the First Annual Microenterprise Conference at BYU in 1998, and over the years it has brought thousands of interested individuals to campus to learn about the movement, become involved, give financial support, read articles, network with others, and in some cases, become inspired to start their own family foundations or NGOs.

In late 1998 after Hurricane Mitch destroyed Central America, I launched the sponsorship of a new BYU-affiliated project now called HELP International. A new course was created and organized Winter Semester 1999. A massive response to aid Mitch’s victims in Honduras led to 79 students taking the course, 46 of whom went to Central America as BYU volunteers for 2-4 months throughout the summer. We raised $116,000, capitalized 97 village banks, shoveled mud out of schools so they could reopen, delivered babies in rural health clinics, and so forth. With my ongoing sponsorship, and the involvement of others since then, that little project has grown into a student-centered NGO that has provided humanitarian and economic development assistance to additional Latin American nations by sending over 300 trained volunteers to assist effective NGOs already in existence, as well as to start up innovative new projects. HELP International today is a thriving, off-campus NGO with its own staff, board, and finances. In some ways, HELP has become a kind of short-term Mormon Peace Corps experience, enhancing BYU’s reputation, changing students’ lives, and blessing the global poor, one family at a time.

Eventually, many of these BYU-affiliated projects and programs began to converge into a single new Marriott School entity. It is the culmination of a dream I’ve had for 12-15 years, that we could become a business school with a conscience. I had always felt that we should not only train future public and private sector leaders to be effective managers, but we should channel some of our skills and expertise to addressing global poverty. New courses, a willing and trained cadre of students, an annual conference, an innovative microfinance journal, growing faculty interests and research–all these could be leveraged by establishing a new entity at BYU.

Thus, over the past two years, the idea of a Center for Economic Self-Reliance (CESR) has been negotiated and approved by BYU administrators and the board of trustees. An extremely generous $3 million donation from my friends, Bob and Lynette Gay, has made this dream of mine become a reality. With faculty and outside advisory boards and the capable talents of the Center’s managing director, CESR now is a major institutional mechanism that is starting to fuel many of our earlier and somewhat disparate programs.

It is the embodiment of a long-term dream for me. I hope to be able to help bring in another $7 million over the next several years so that CESR is fully endowed for the long haul, regardless of Marriott School leadership changes or unpredictable university decisions in the future. Thus, my Sponsor work is evolving to be not just about course design and classroom teaching, nor only doing research and publishing the results. Also, it’s not only collaborating with and mentoring individual students or outside professionals. Indeed, the new center becomes an enduring institutional legacy for expanding our capacity to change the world. For me and my long-term career, it becomes the final steps of life’s journey as a professor of Organizational Behavior. It also shows that real change can be achieved by anyone regardless of official resistance and/or bureaucratic barriers.

Fences are made for those who cannot fly.

Elbert Hubbard, American Writer