CHAPTER 10
Openings and Convincement: The Quaker Way

There is urgent need in the world for a new religious movement, one that has the force and vigor that 17^thcentury Friends had in their day.¹

ROBERT GREENLEAF

During their first stay in Mount Kisco, the Greenleafs had planted roots within the local Quaker community. Their neighbor, Levi Hollingsworth Wood, was a lawyer who worked for peace, civil rights, and education for blacks and Quakers. Like John Haynes Holmes, he was one of the grand activists of the Reformist Era, a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Friends Service Committee, and the National Urban League.² When Bob first met him, Wood lived with his second wife, Martha, and his maiden sister, Carolena. Bob and Esther were especially taken with Carolena, whom Bob called “an extraordinary person.” Through her influence, they joined the Mt. Kisco Quaker Meeting (Quakers call their congregations “Meetings”) and became active in the larger Religious Society of Friends community.

A book could be written on the influence of Quaker thought and practice on Robert Greenleaf’s corporate work and servant writings. The Quakers had been organizational pioneers for three hundred years. They evolved the art of consensus decision-making, designed meetings for full participation by every member, and replaced professional clerics with lay leadership. From their earliest days, Quakers had seen themselves as “seekers,” even though they did not originate the term. They found God in silence, not creeds, believed in plain-spoken speech, honesty in business dealings, and personal integrity. Friends looked to the “Light within” each human as a source of authority—and mystery. All these connections to Bob’s psyche were heightened when he looked into the life of Quaker founder George Fox. “The traditions of Friends, mainly as framed in the work of the first generation, hold for me the great promise,” wrote Green-leaf.³ To better understand Robert Greenleaf’s mature philosophy and practices regarding religion, spirituality, and organizations, one must look back at that first generation of Quakers.

The Quakers emerged from the religious travails of seventeenth-century England, when politics and theology were intimately related. Even religious scholars need a scorecard to understand the complicated doctrines that were swirling through the country when George Fox (born in 1624) came of age in Drayton-in-the-Clay, Leicestershire.

Then there was George Fox, the son of a weaver, a young man who, like Bob Greenleaf, was a serious, plain-spoken person blessed with an upright father. He apprenticed to a shoemaker and also worked as a wool dealer. (William Penn wrote that Fox was especially well suited for his work with sheep “both for its innocency and solitude.”⁵) In Fox, Greenleaf found another person who craved time alone. 127

Just before he turned nineteen, Fox was horrified when several friends asked him to join them for beer. They professed to follow Christ but Fox believed their behavior betrayed them as selfish, pleasure-seeking hypocrites.⁶ So this intense boy, confused and often disgusted with the rigid, competing claims of ministers and mystics, priests and prelates, and the inconsistencies of those who practiced a shallow Christianity, walked away from home to search for truth and true religion. He broke relations with the church, opened himself to whatever revelations might come, and became a dedicated seeker. For four years, Fox spoke with all manner of people looking for final answers, but got conflicting reports. Some ministers told him to relax, smoke a little tobacco, and take pills for his low spirits.⁷ Nathaniel Stephens was one cleric who was impressed with the young man but broke with him because Fox preferred to take his Bible to the orchards on the Sabbath rather than attend church.⁸ And so it went.

Along the way, Fox began having little revelations, which he called “openings,” to higher truths. Then, in a crucible-like moment in 1637, he had his major revelation.

So it was that George Fox became a prophet and reformer with a key message: “every man is enlightened by the Divine Light of Christ.”¹⁰ This was not an abstract doctrine for Fox but something which he knew “experimentally.” Fox preached that direct revelation is available to all true seekers, Christian and non-Christian, without benefit of “steeple houses,” priests or rituals, and is presented to us through the “Inward Light” or the “Seed of Light.” That idea did not set well with many good followers of Christ. In 1672, Fox visited America and traveled to the Carolinas where he met a doctor who thought the Divine Light might exist, but certainly not in Indians. Fox acted to prove his point, not for himself but for 128 the occasion it would provide “for the opening of many things to the people concerning the Light and Spirit of God.”

At least the local authorities did not throw Fox into jail, as the English were wont to do throughout his ministry. Fox and his followers did not help matters by some of the ways they behaved and spread their message. They often attended churches, waited quietly until the services ended, then stood up and testified to their revealed Truth, which frequently conflicted with the theology of the priests or ministers. Mob scenes were not unusual. Early Friends would not take an oath to man or king, tip their hats, wear fancy clothes or speak fancy language, drink alcohol, swear, celebrate holidays, go to theaters or sports games, wear wigs or jewelry, or support war—all practices the authorities considered suspicious.¹² Fox was hauled before courts and magistrates sixty times, imprisoned eight times for a total of about six years, and suffered terrible, unspeakable pri-vations.¹³ Other Friends endured arrest, torture, persecution, and even martyrdom.

In one account, the term “Quaker” was first used by Justice Gervase Bennett in 1650 to describe Friends who literally shook, or quaked, with emotion in their meetings.¹⁴ Another version has it that Fox told the judge he should “tremble at the word of the Lord,” and the jurist responded by cynically calling Fox a “Quaker.”¹⁵ The phrase “Society of Friends” came into general usage around 1665, during the great organizing period of the movement. Well before George Fox began his public ministry, a loosely-knit group of people with similar interests had popped up in England and Holland. In England they were called “Seekers.” These people found no satisfactory pattern of worship, so they gathered to wait in silence, prayer, and openness for power from on high to lead them forward. The Puritan revolutionary Oliver Cromwell called Seekers “the best sect next to a Finder, and such shall every faithful, humble seeker be at the end.”¹⁶ Many Seekers (those who did not become Ranters, members of another sect) joined the Quakers but liked their old name, so Quakers also became 129 known as Seekers, even though the two movements were not identical. Today the group is known as the Religious Society of Friends.

The Methodists of Bob Greenleaf’s youth would have agreed that God could directly touch humans outside church structures, but they were not so radical in their individualism, retaining clergy and the rites of baptism and communion from their Episcopal roots. When Greenleaf proclaimed in The Servant as Leader that “everything begins with the individual,” he was stating a secular version of a very old thought in Protestant history. Individuals do not sustain movements, however; organizations do. In fact, Greenleaf claimed that organizations were “how you get things done.” He was enormously interested in how the Quakers reflected their scripture-based but anti-clerical ideas in the Society of Friends organization. After all, clerics are the leaders of faith communities. What do you do after you kick them out?

You make everyone a leader. Each Friend deserves to be a leader, because God is equally available to each as the Light within. Like the Seekers, early Quakers sat in silence at their Meetings, with no singing or prearranged rituals that could get in the way of His Spirit. This form of Friends worship has persisted to modern times. “Anyone, old or young, man or woman, learned or unlearned may, by the touch of the Lord’s Spirit, be bidden to speak,” wrote historian Elizabeth Braithwaite Emmott. “Without this call, none should venture to break the silence, but anyone who refuses to obey such a call is hindering God’s purpose in that meeting.”¹⁷ Naturally, certain people arose as elders and ministers, but they were not ordained as ministers by any Meeting. Their role was simply “recorded” in the minutes.

That process worked well for spiritual matters, but what about organizational and business decisions? In those early years, a version of Roberts Rules of Order was not available to dictate the form of the meeting. Even if it had been, the Quakers would not have used it, because a vote would have silenced contributions from Friends who were acting in response to the Inner Light. To put it another way, Roberts is simply not as radically democratic as the Gospel, at least as Fox understood it. So, through hundreds of years, the Religious Society of Friends developed a way of handling decisions based on consensus rather than votes. “I have been in a few meetings where people got mad and called each other names,” said Greenleaf, “But they never voted. That seems very solid in the tradition.”¹⁸ 130

Consensus is not unanimity. It is a position everyone can accept, even if it is not what was originally wanted or proposed. Underneath the consensus is an even larger issue, at least for Quakers: the will of God. “In all our meetings for church affairs we need to listen together to the Holy Spirit” says the Quaker Faith & Practice of the Britain Yearly Meeting. “We do not seek consensus; we are seeking the will of God. The unity of the meeting lies more in the unity of the search than in the decision which is reached. We must not be distressed if our listening involves waiting, perhaps in confusion, until we feel clear what it is God wants done.”¹⁹

In the Quaker practice of consensus, Greenleaf found a proven way of making decisions that honored all voices and used some of his favorite strategies: silence, listening, and a reliance on spirit as expressed through individual insight. He also learned about the critical role of the chair— called the Clerk by Quakers—who makes consensus work. A Clerk is a situational leader, no better or worse than anyone else. He or she is a primus inter pares—a first among equals—not a final arbiter. Greenleaf observed Clerks closely, then tried out the role himself and developed an understanding of what it requires.

Bob immediately saw applications for consensus decision making at AT&T. From his earliest days as a Quaker until the day he retired, he used the consensus approach until it became part of his natural strategy. He did not feel a need to write an internal memo explaining what he was doing, to become a consensus evangelist, or even to inform his colleagues they were involved in a consensus process—unless they asked. He just did it. 131

Besides the fine art of consensus, Greenleaf learned a deeper meaning of persuasion from the Quakers—specifically, from one remarkable American Friend named John Woolman (1720–1772), whom Greenleaf cited in The Servant as Leader as a vivid example of a servant-leader. John Wool-man’s Journal—a spiritual autobiography—is a classic in American literature. In it, he tells how, in 1743, his employer sold a slave to a Quaker Friend and asked Woolman to write out a bill of sale. Woolman did so but was “so afflicted in my mind, that I said before my master and the Friend that I believed slave-keeping to be a practice inconsistent with the Christian religion. This, in some degree, abated my uneasiness; yet as often as I reflected seriously upon it I thought I should have been clearer if I had desired to be excused from it, as a thing against my conscience; for such it was.”²² One must use the imagination to understand the casual acceptance of slavery’s contradictions in Woolman’s time by otherwise good and ethical people.

Quakers were widely respected for their honesty in business dealings, humility, and simplicity, so their example as slaveholders was a powerful 132 negative model. If any bothered to think about it, they might say, “Even the Friends hold slaves, so it must be proper.”

After his sensitivities were awakened to the evils of slavery (“a dark gloominess hanging over the land”), Woolman was recorded as a Friends minister and began three decades of travel up and down the Colonies, persuading Friends to free their slaves and provide for them a new life.²⁴ He made his living as a tailor, although he also had experience as a surveyor, baker, merchant, scrivener, and planter. After one of his first journeys, he reaffirmed a key learning: “We were taught by renewed experience to labor for an inward stillness; at no time to seek for words, but to live in the spirit of truth, and utter that to the people which truth opened in us.”²⁵ Be still; access inner wisdom; speak only when you have something to say. It is a good description of the way Robert Greenleaf approached life in his later years after absorbing the wisdom of Quakers.

But it was Woolman’s technique for persuasion that most interested Greenleaf.

Woolman’s Socratic approach was strengthened by his congruent behavior. Even though writing wills and bills of sale for slaves was profitable work, more than once he refused to write wills for men who held slaves or planned of disposing of them by selling them. It was common at the time for Friends to feed and lodge itinerant ministers for free, but Woolman remembered the words from Exodus 23, 8: “Thou shalt not receive any gift; for a gift blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous.” Woolman wrote in his journal that “Receiving a gift, considered as a gift, brings the receiver under obligations to the benefactor and has a natural tendency to draw the obliged into a party with the giver.”²⁷ (It was an insight Bob Greenleaf would pass along to nonprofit foundations in his later 133 years.) Woolman did not wish to collude with slaveholders in any way that indicated he might approve of their behavior, but he sometimes felt a duty to reciprocate.

Woolman’s technique of asking questions, reinforced by his personal ethos and behavior, was a powerful tool in leading slaveholders to their own conclusions about the institution of slavery. Woolman did not believe he personally persuaded; he saw himself as a channel for others to become convinced in their own hearts, and for their own reasons. His approach was an extension of Quaker tradition; those who joined the Religious Society of Friends did so by “convincement,” a word that means one becomes convinced of the truth of the Quaker way through inward reflection and mature commitment. Still, Woolman always ran the risk of being seen as judgmental, which would have hindered his work. He was saved from that trap through his consistent acceptance of slaveholders as persons of worth and honor. “What is most essential to remark is how, hating the evil and loving the slave, he never ceased to embrace the evildoer, the slaveowner, in his love,” said historian Frederick Tolles.²⁹ This was how George Greenleaf treated his political enemies in Terre Haute, and what Bob Greenleaf meant when he wrote, “The servant as leader always empathizes, always accepts the person but sometimes refuses to accept some of the person’s effort or performance as good enough.”³⁰

Greenleaf cast a critical eye on the Quakers’ ability to create an organization that could sustain Fox’s original vision and wondered if the Friends’ difficulty in doing so was not the result of a blind spot in the vision itself. Prudence had dictated some internal organization for early Quakers, mostly based on geography. Local gatherings held in homes were called Preparative Meetings. These participants joined together in 134 increasingly larger numbers for Monthly, Quarterly, and Annual Meetings, where business was conducted. Through the years, Quakers quarreled over various theological issues, resulting in four branches of the movement by the early twentieth century. They became a diverse denomination but, as Greenleaf the institutional watcher saw it, not a coherent one.

Bob had an answer:

Greenleaf’s ideas about how Quaker processes could apply to other faith traditions, and his ability to use them effectively at AT&T, shows how he was able to integrate religious-based learnings without insisting on rigid doctrine. At AT&T, he simply acted for persuasion and consensus as he understood it, made time for reflection so the “Light within” could provide inspiration in the moment, and felt no need to be a Friends missionary. His example would be witness to his beliefs. This approach is markedly different from the approaches of people who believe 135 effectiveness depends upon publicity, personal recognition, and acceptance of the latest “system.” It is also different from the approaches of those who believe witness to faith means witness to a particular doctrine of religious belief.

By continually testing theory—and theology—in the real world, Bob was also applying the philosophy of education he espoused to Dr. Cowling: learning is transformative—to the learner and others—when it is experiential. This was an operating assumption throughout Bob’s life, from the algebra classes he taught in Cleveland, to his training and development activities at AT&T and his later consultancies with schools, businesses, and foundations.

Bob’s Quaker contacts would soon enable him to meet a new circle of impressive leaders, including Eleanor Roosevelt. First, however, there was an urgent family matter to attend to: the birth of another child. In 1939, Esther paid a third visit to the hospital’s maternity ward. This time the delivery went well, and Providence gave them a daughter, whom they named Anne. Esther fed Anne, dreamed her daughter’s dreams, and established that mystical bond which it is only given to mothers to know.

All was not well with the infant, however. She soon contracted an infection all too common in hospital nurseries of that time, one for which there was no treatment in those pre-antibiotic days.³³ Doctors told the Greenleafs they would have their daughter no longer than a week.

While she still could, Esther cuddled, cooed, and held Anne Green-leaf. Bob brought his twin-lens reflex camera into the hospital, rolled Anne’s crib into the light streaming through a large window and parked it next to a warm, old-fashioned radiator. A vase of congratulatory flowers sat on the windowsill, slowly wilting. Bob frantically took one snapshot after another of his daughter, seeking to preserve some piece of her short gift of life. One can only guess how he felt when the pictures slowly emerged in his home darkroom developer tray, illuminated by an eerie red safe light.

Loving their daughter was not enough to save her. As predicted, Anne was gone within a week and only the pictures remained. Once again, Bob and Esther were crushed by the death of a child, but Esther was devastated. After the funeral, she went home to take care of New-comb and face her raw grief. Bob returned to his demanding work at AT&T, where he could at least stay busy and productive. 136

Bob, in fact, had a new project to occupy him. In early 1939, a seventy-two-year-old man named John Lovejoy Elliot took a train from New York to Philadelphia to meet with Clarence Picket, Executive Secretary of the Friends Service Committee. Elliot was active in a movement called the New York Society for Ethical Culture. Years earlier, he had started the Hudson Guild Neighborhood House, helped people on New York’s West Side organize to help themselves, established the League of Mothers’ Club among the settlements, and founded the School for Printers’ Apprentices. In 1938, Elliot negotiated with the Nazis to secure the release of two leaders of the Vienna Ethical Society from prison, and now he was back home to start the Good Neighbor Committee, which would help European refugees resettle in America with language instruction, work training, and economic assistance.³⁴

Elliot asked Mr. Pickett, “Is there a live Quaker in New York who would work with me on this Committee? I know plenty of dead Quakers who are alive in the flesh, but I don’t want any of them.” Pickett told him about a young AT&T man named Robert Greenleaf who was “bound to be a little more alive than some of those old Quakers.”³⁵

Soon thereafter, John L. Elliot appeared at Greenleaf’s AT&T office and introduced himself. He had come to 195 Broadway to ask Bob to be an incorporator and first treasurer of the Good Neighbor Committee. John was the President, Eleanor Roosevelt was the Chairman, and Clarence Pickett had told him that “the Quaker should be treasurer because people trusted Quakers more than other people.” Bob gulped and said, “Sure.” ³⁶

Bob traveled up to Hyde Park to meet the First Lady, then served on the committee with her and John Elliot through the life of the project. Years later, he reflected on the experience. “This was a very interesting occupation for a short number of years. This [Committee] didn’t perform very long; ultimately all the refugees made whatever adjustments they were going to be able to make. But in the course of it, I got very well acquainted with John Elliot and his history, and what had led him to be the kind of ‘cause man’ that he was—the starter of useful work. This left a very deep impression on me.”³⁷

Bob only knew Elliot for several years—he died in 1941—but they shared an impulse to be a seeker in the present, rather than an unthinking follower of past tradition and revelation. In 1926, Elliot had written, “Profound as the respect and reverence of any man must be for the religions of the past, I cannot stand in awe before them. But I am filled with the sense 137 of wonder and awe in the presence of the spiritual nature as it manifests itself in the daily lives of men and women.”³⁸

The exposure to Elliot got Bob and Esther interested in the Ethical Culture movement, which was founded in 1876 by Felix Adler. It defines itself as not a secular humanist, but an ethical humanist, movement. From the beginning, Ethical Culture stressed “deed over creed.” The proof of one’s efficacy was in behavior, not theology. Adler wrote that “the creed is a formula, something that can be recited, a profession of faith, and experience shows only too clearly that the profession may be on the lips or even in the mind and yet remain without effect in practice. Deed then, not creed, [means] the effect on actual conduct to be the test of any philosophy of life.” Years later, Bob would incorporate a similar pragmatic standard in his “best test” of a servant-leader, a test that was graded by outcomes, not motives, right theology, or personal theories.³⁹

Adler admitted to a motivating religious impulse in founding the Ethical Movement but claimed no exclusive revelation. Like Buddhism, the Movement was not theistic. God was to be found in perfect divine life that undergirded all existence, not a divine being. For Adler, “the essential life of the universe is perfect and therefore divine. The two words perfect and divine are synonymous.”⁴⁰ It was not a mainstream Christian religion, but then Bob and Esther were never very traditional in their religious choices, and for some years they attended both the Ethical Culture Movement and Quaker Meetings.

Esther became pregnant again in June 1940. In August, Bob began a personal journal that he called “the record of a search for a more effective life—a life that is continually useful in some constructive contribution to the common good, a life of richer experience with my family, my friends, my community, my business associates, the trades people, the man who cuts my lawn for me, and with my inner self. This, I expect to be the record of a search without end.”⁴¹ In the first entry, Bob was reflective in a way that was more joyful than in many of his later entries. Perhaps he was anticipating the birth of his child or simply feeling the youthful juice of being alive.

After the death of two children in hospitals, Esther was wary of the standard medical care of the day. Besides, she grew up in a family where it was normal to explore alternative medical treatments. She decided she wanted her next child born at home, where there were no hospital nursery infections, and found an obstetrician in Manhattan who would accommodate her wishes. So the Greenleafs packed once again and moved back to New York City. Elizabeth (Lisa) was born at home, 1435 Lexington Avenue, New York City, on March 28, 1941. She survived, and thrived, to become a brilliant artist like her mother.

With two children, it was time for the Greenleaf family to look for a home of their own. In late summer, 1941, they found it—for $7,000—at 27 Woodcrest Avenue in Short Hills, New Jersey, a suburb on the Lack-awanna Railroad line. The timing was right and Bob knew it, because he expected a war. Sure enough, after Pearl Harbor, housing became tight and they would have had a rough time finding a house.⁴³

By moving to Short Hills, Bob had made an unusual choice, one which the self-proclaimed “insider/outside” later explained to Newcomb. “He said they deliberately moved to New Jersey because all the AT&T top brass executives lived up in Westchester. If he had lived in Westchester, he 139 would have been expected to join that country club crowd, even at his level in the company. He definitely did not want to do that. ‘Country club’ was a swear word in our family. Yet, Short Hills became a country club town later on, after their move there. It was hard on us growing up in a family that regarded country clubs as terrible, terrible institutions in a town where the social life was centered on country clubs.”⁴⁵

Bob, Esther, and the children—including one to come—would live in the Short Hills home for twenty-eight years. There they would plant a magnificent organic garden in the back yard. Bob would put on his bib overalls and frolic with the children of visitors. Esther would continue her artwork, and Bob would eventually join her in artistic creation, expanding his earlier views on what was “proper” in art. By the time of their next move, Bob would be on the verge of his most important triumph. But that was all in the future. First, there was a war to endure.