Contents
Introduction: by Anne M. Mulcahy, Chairman and CEO of Xerox Corporation
Foreword
Chapter 1: Early Years
Chapter 2: Peggy
Chapter 3: The Thirties
Chapter 4: Years of Struggle
Chapter 5: Chet Carlson
Chapter 6: Battelle
Chapter 7: Contact—Just Barely
Chapter 8: Sol Linowitz
Chapter 9: Toward Xerox
Chapter 10: The University
Chapter 11: Worst of Times, Best of Times
Chapter 12: Joe Wilson
Chapter 13: IBM, RCA, and GE
Chapter 14: Gathering Strength in Finance
Chapter 15: Building the Organization
Chapter 16: Going International
Chapter 17: Going It Alone
Chapter 18: 5¢
Chapter 19: The 914
Chapter 20: Go!
Chapter 21: Getting on Message
Chapter 22: Xerox: Zoom-Zoom
Chapter 23: Fuji-Xerox
Chapter 24: Challenges of Success
Chapter 25: Minister Florence
Chapter 26: LIFE
Chapter 27: Public Service
Chapter 28: Winding Down
Chapter 29: No Longer CEO
Chapter 30: At the Rockefellers’
Afterword
Joe Wilson: In His Own Words
Acknowledgments
Index
Copyright © 2006 by Charles D. Ellis. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Ellis, Charles D.
Joe Wilson and the creation of Xerox / Charles D. Ellis.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-471-99835-8 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 0-471-99835-4 (cloth)
1. Wilson, Joseph C. (Joseph Chamberlain), 1909–1971. 2. Xerox Corporation—History. 3. Copying machine industry—United States—History. I. Title.
HD9802.3.U64X474 2006
338.7′68165092—dc22
2006007379
To those many mentors outside my family who disproportionately and favorably influenced my life by their guidance and examples: Marion Casey, Nellie Walsh at Gerry School, Al Gross in Boy Scouts, Dick Mayo-Smith at Exeter, Chris Argyris at Yale and beyond, the team at WYBC, John McArthur and Jay Light at HBS, Dick Dilworth at Rockefeller Brothers, Joe Lasser at Wertheim, Joe Reich and Dick Jenrette at DLJ, Bob Lindsay at NYU, Fred Mayer at Exeter, Ev Smith and Don Jacobs at Greenwich Associates, Peter Drucker in Claremont, and David Swensen at Yale.
INTRODUCTION
Stories about Joe Wilson abound in the Xerox culture—his vision, his values, his entrepreneurism, his risk-taking, his acumen, his intellect, his leadership. But the stories you hear the most are about the man.
Long after it was practical, Joe tried to know everyone in his company on a first-name basis. He was more apt to ask you how the family was than how the business was. Everyone who knew him—and that was just about everyone in the company—has a personal story to tell about Joe Wilson, a story about how he touched or inspired them personally. He was that kind of person.
When he died in 1971, he had a little card in his wallet. It was frayed, suggesting it had been there for years. Here’s what it said:
What a beautiful and succinct statement of a life’s goals—family, work, and community. And from everything I know about Joe Wilson, he achieved all three with stunning and remarkable success. His family, his company, and his community can all attest to the power and the endurance of his legacy.
Protecting and enhancing that legacy is very important to those of us at Xerox who carry his mantle. I believe it’s what galvanized Xerox people to turn the company around over the past few difficult years. Many of you will recall that when I was named President and later Chief Executive Officer of Xerox in 2001, the company had its back against the wall. We were teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Some wise analysts said we couldn’t save Xerox. The pundits were writing our obituary. Industry analysts wrote that time had passed us by. Many said that Xerox was doomed.
But this generation of Xerox people would not allow that to happen. They said, Not on our watch! Xerox cannot and will not fail. I hope the historians will record that Xerox people banded together and willed Xerox back to success because they believed in the company that Joe Wilson founded and the values he instilled.
Leading Xerox these past few years has been the opportunity of a lifetime. And in what may be the understatement of all time, I’ve learned a lot along the way:
- I’ve learned about the power of communications. You can’t do enough of it.
- I’ve learned about the power of culture. You need to change the bad and leverage the good.
- I’ve learned about the need to articulate a vision of where you are taking the company. Employees especially need to know what they are signing on for.
- I’ve learned a lot about the power of leadership. Bad leadership can ruin a company overnight. Good leadership can move mountains over time.
But mostly I learned three lessons from Joe Wilson.
Lesson 1: Invest in innovation even when you can’t afford it.
When Joe Wilson saw that Haloid was in a declining market in a postwar economy, he bet money he didn’t have on the innovative idea of Chester Carlson. And when Xerox was on the ropes a few years ago, we invested money some said we could ill afford on creating innovative ideas to secure our future.
Even as we dramatically reduced our cost base, we maintained research and development spending in our core business. In fact, we didn’t take a single dollar out of R&D in our core business—not one. As a result, the last few years have been our biggest new product years in our history.
Joe Wilson taught us a lesson we will never forget: Creating customer value is the key to the success of Xerox and innovation is the key to creating customer value. It’s a lesson and a legacy that has become part of the DNA of Xerox: Invest in innovation or perish.
Lesson 2: Recognize the importance of values. Joe gave us a set of six. They are perhaps more ingrained in Xerox today than when he first promulgated them in the early 1960s. They form our North Star. Take any one away and Xerox would cease to be Xerox. They are:
- We succeed through satisfied customers.
- We value and empower our employees.
- We deliver quality and excellence in all we do.
- We require premium return on assets.
- We use technology to deliver market leadership.
- We behave responsibly as a corporate citizen.
During the decade of the sixties when Xerox came to prominence and was growing rapidly, the Rochester community—like so may others across the nation—was torn apart by race riots and the struggle for social justice. Corporate citizenship was in its infancy. There were no books to tell CEOs how to behave or what to do.
Joe Wilson didn’t need a book to tell him what to do. He understood that a healthy community was good for Xerox, that a corporation has a moral obligation to give back, and that no company can operate independent of the community in which its people live and work.
Through Joe’s leadership, Xerox did not turn its back on the problems of the midsixties. We embraced them by donating human and financial resources to the community, helping start organizations to spur economic growth in the inner city, providing job opportunities and training, and launching a diversity program within Xerox that is still a point of corporate pride.
Joe’s involvement in the civil rights struggles of the mid-sixties forever changed the face of Xerox and set us on a course of social involvement that has become part and parcel of the way we have done business ever since.
Lesson 3: Joe’s next lesson is perhaps the most profound: The genius of any organization resides in the hearts and minds of its people.
I keep an old videotape of Joe Wilson in my office. It captures him informally welcoming a new group of employees to Xerox in 1962. Here’s part of what he has to say:
Joe’s counsel was brought into sharp focus over the past few years as Xerox struggled to right its ship. When people ask me how we made so much progress in such a short period of time, I don’t have to think about the answer. I tell them you have to have a good strategy, but it can be roughly right. And you have to have a good implementation plan, but it too can be roughly right. The critical component is the alignment of a talented and motivated people around a common set of objectives.
Joe was a man of many paradoxes. He was as comfortable in the corridors of power as on the factory floor. He was an entrepreneur and risk-taker who felt a strong obligation to protect jobs and pay good wages. He was fascinated by the power of science and technology but insisted that it be harnessed to make us more human. And he was a leader who set high goals but was rooted in the art of the possible.
He was also an amazingly literate man who quoted Plato and Shakespeare with ease. One of his favorite verses was from Robert Browning:
That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it:
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.
That low man goes on adding one to one,
His hundred’s soon hit:
This high man, aiming at a million,
Misses by a unit.
Like everything about Joe Wilson, that strikes me as wise counsel. This generation of Xerox people is committed to reach for the stars. But we’re also committed to do so in a way that honors the legacy of our founder and our inspiration: the man I never met. After reading Charley Ellis’s wonderful ode, you’ll know why Joe Wilson is still with us in profound and important ways. Someone once said that few people leave footsteps in the sands of time. Joe Wilson is one of these few.
Anne M. Mulcahy
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Xerox Corporation
Stamford, Connecticut
FOREWORD
“Where have you gone, Joe Wilson?”
If Simon and Garfunkel had decided to write their signature song lyric about a business leader instead of a baseball player, they would have written about Joe Wilson. Just as DiMaggio elevated the game of baseball by infusing his values and character into the way he played the game, so Wilson elevated the profession of management by infusing his values and character into the way he led his company. As Charley Ellis’s wonderful biography shows, Joe Wilson valued many things: the promise of technology, the economic development of his community, the fair treatment of his workers, racial equality, and so on.
What Joe Wilson personally valued had an impact on how Joe Wilson led, and as a consequence, Joe Wilson’s legacy speaks to a profound anxiety that I, in my capacity as business school dean, observe among those who are in or entering the business world. This anxiety does not arise out of the difficulty of satisfying fickle, demanding consumers. It does not arise from the uncertainty that comes with competing in a fragile, complicated global economy. Nor does it arise out of the concern with mollifying shareholders who respond to extraordinary performance with ratcheted expectations of higher performance.
Rather, this new anxiety has its origins in the belief that the experience of business leadership is supposed to be something more than satisfying consumers, meeting strategic challenges, and creating shareholder value. The experience of leadership is supposed to be something more than a daily obsession with how to maximize profits. Yet, when I interact with current business leaders or when I talk with MBAs about their hopes and fears regarding future opportunities, both groups seem troubled in the way that The Graduate’s young Benjamin Braddock was troubled. Both business leaders and newly minted MBAs seem worried that a relentless focus on profits today simply leaves them “in the game” so that they can maintain that same exhausting focus tomorrow. They worry that the game—even when played skillfully—is just not as fulfilling as it was supposed to be.
The story of Joe Wilson is an inspiring story for those who are looking to believe that the experience of business leadership can be something more. Joe Wilson shows that for the truly great leader of a business enterprise, the commitment to the shareholder and the relentless demands of competition do not require the sacrifice of deeply held values or the suppression of self. On the contrary, the leader’s unwavering commitment to values can be one of the bedrocks of economic value creation; this unwavering commitment infuses an energy and passion that is essential if an organization is to rank among the highest performing.
Stated somewhat differently, Joe Wilson shows that successful leadership can be based on a strong connection between the positive values that define the leader’s self and the values that define the organization’s culture. A position of leadership is an opportunity to elevate those core values and, in the process, infuse meaning into the organization for which the leader is responsible.
Of course, it has been 25 years since Joe Wilson’s death. One might wonder why it is necessary to look back so far to make this important point. Aren’t there any Joe Wilsons today? Of course there are; there are many: BP’s John Browne, Costco’s Jim Senegal, eBay’s Meg Whitman, FedEx’s Fred Smith, Goldman Sachs’s John Whitehead, and Xerox’s Anne Mulcahy are among others known and not yet known. We don’t see them as often as we should; their stories are often lost amid the newspaper articles focused on ethical violations or compensation contracts that allow CEOs to be rewarded in a way that is completely incommensurate with their performance. But even if there are modern-day Joe Wilsons, there is value in looking to history. The passing of time affords a perspective that allows for the careful and patient reconstruction of the connection between the details of a leader’s life and the indelible impression that the leader leaves on an organization.
In undertaking this careful and patient reconstruction, Charley Ellis gives us the opportunity to think about leadership in a different way. Rather than think about leadership as a formula that someone else has discovered and that the rest of us must follow, one can instead begin to think about leadership as the paving of the connections from what is deeply personal to what is highly professional. So, as you read this book, enjoy and reflect on that connection.
Joel Podolny
Dean, Yale School of Management
CHAPTER 1
EARLY YEARS
Rochester is a river town, founded on the Genesee River where the falls drop 90 feet, providing power for the grain mills that were the first real business of the Flour City. Milling brought prosperity to Rochester in the early 19th century as the Erie Canal—on an ingeniously designed aqueduct bridge—crossed over the Genesee River. With the canal’s waterway crossroads established in 1824, Rochester’s population multiplied a hundredfold in just 10 years.
Before this surge, development had been slow, and for good reason. Ebenezer “Indian” Allen, the first settler in the mosquito-infested swamps south of Lake Ontario, where the insects caused what was called “Genesee Fever,” made a treaty with the Seneca Indians and built a mill in 1789. Then in 1803, Colonel Nathaniel Rochester and two partners in Maryland invested $17.50 in 100 acres they later described as “a god forsaken place, inhabited by muskrats, visited only by struggling trappers, and through which neither man nor beast could go without fear of starvation or fever or ague.” Hamlet Scranton was the first log cabin resident: He came in 1812. During the next dozen years, water power and grain milling supported a small town.
With the Erie Canal crossing over the Genesee River and creating a “water crossroads,” the small town became a small city. As water power lost prominence, Rochester’s climate, moderated by the Great Lakes, made the region ideal for growing hardy plants. In a few years, the Flour City became the Flower City, as more than 100 parks of various sizes attracted 200,000 visitors each May, who flocked to the area to see 540 different varieties of lilacs in bloom.
Half a century later, technology transformed Rochester when George Eastman popularized amateur photography by making it easy: “You push the button and we do the rest!” On the steady profits that flowed from one of the great consumer businesses of all time, he built the largest corporation in the Empire State: Eastman Kodak. Still known reverently as Mr. Eastman, he financed the Eastman School of Music, which holds 500 concerts annually, and joined with John D. Rockefeller to build the original University of Rochester.
Kodak was based on a technology and an innovative marketing concept that were just as new in the late 1800s as xerography and charging by the copy would be in the 1960s. Eastman Kodak headquarters remained in Rochester and Kodak was Rochester’s largest employer. Kodak was the major corporate citizen, and George Eastman was the major individual citizen of Rochester, providing a bar by which Joe Wilson could measure himself and his company.
Social activism became a celebrated tradition in Rochester. In addition to the philanthropy of Eastman, it was the home of former slave Frederick Douglass and the Abolitionist movement and is where Susan B. Anthony began the Women’s Suffrage movement. This may explain why taking responsibility for social improvement would have such special meaning for Joe Wilson.
The Wilsons came to Rochester in stages. Joe Wilson’s great-great-grandfather, William Wilson, emigrated from England to Binghamton, New York, in the early 1800s. His great grandparents, Harry and Ann Wilson, grew up in New York City and soon after their marriage moved to Syracuse where their son, Joseph C. “JC” Wilson was born in 1854. A muskrat trapper along the Chenango River as a boy, JC Wilson left school after the eighth grade, apprenticed to a jeweler, and soon became his leading traveling salesman. In 1878, JC Wilson moved to Rochester to become the partner of a pawnbroker-jeweler. He married Alice Hutton of Syracuse in 1881, and they had two daughters and one son. In 1885, JC acquired full ownership of the pawnshop and renamed it JC Wilson & Company. Later, he invested in a used clothes retailer, Acme Sales Company, and became the equivalent of a community banker by lending moderate amounts to help finance local businesses. In addition to earning good profits on his loans (and on street railway contracts), JC Wilson developed a network of grateful friends and the sort of influence that would fit well with his increasing interest in politics.
JC Wilson’s son, Joseph Robert Wilson, was born in 1882 and graduated from the University of Rochester in 1903. Since the affable father was always known as “JC”, the son—who was known as Dick to his family and friends—was often called “JR.” The nickname stuck, and later in life he became Mr. JR. While assisting his father in the pawnshop, JR Wilson met Katharine M. Upton, the daughter of a railroad engineer, when she came to pick up the gold watch her father had left for repair. They married in 1903.
The year 1906 was significant—just by coincidence—for each of four very different business beginnings in very different regions that would be important to Joe Wilson’s life for very different reasons. In 1906, Chester Carlson, the future inventor of xerography, was born in Seattle. In 1906, George Beidler started the Rectigraph Company in Oklahoma City to produce copies without requiring a photographic negative. And in 1906, John Gordon Battelle gambled successfully on a newly patented process for upgrading low-grade zinc ore mined from properties owned by his family in Joplin, Missouri, and made the fortune with which he would endow a great industrial research organization: Battelle Memorial Institute.
Also in 1906, JC Wilson and three partners incorporated in Rochester the tiny Haloid Corporation. Most of Haloid’s employees had been working for the M.H. Kuhn Company, a small paper coating shop located in an eighth-floor loft of the CP Ford Shoe Company building on Commercial Street at the upper falls of the Genesee River. M.H. Kuhn had been started in 1902 by the son of a German immigrant emulsion maker and a few others who had worked at Eastman Kodak. JC Wilson had arranged for JR Wilson to join M.H. Kuhn after graduating from the University of Rochester in 1903. But before he could get started with Kuhn, young Wilson suffered a serious kidney ailment that kept him out of work for two years. By then, M.H. Kuhn had failed. JC Wilson, believing his son’s best prospects were to grow with a small business, provided most of the start-up financing for Haloid. The new little company hired most of Kuhn’s employees and set up shop in the same eighth floor loft, enabling JR Wilson to join Haloid. He would later joke, “We started at the top!”
The scrappy little start-up enterprise certainly did not use sophisticated technology: The “air conditioning” needed to set the emulsions was provided by huge cakes of ice, with fans blowing the cooled air over the coated paper. Haloid’s coating alley was so short that the sensitized paper had to go down one side of the loft, make a U-turn, and go back up the other side. Primitive as it was, the small company developed a modest business making photographic paper that was sold directly to commercial photographers at a lower price than Kodak’s. Product irregularities had hurt the Kuhn Company badly, so Haloid recruited a skilled emulsions expert, Homer H. Reichenbach, who strongly recommended building a new plant where conditions could be controlled (he also suggested the name Haloid would suit a business based on Halogen salts).1
In 1907, Haloid and its 12 employees were ready to move out of the loft and into a new plant. But to make the move it needed money—a lot of money for such a small business—$50,000 (or nearly $1 million in current dollars). Finding that much equity capital for a small business was hard. No institutional investors made venture capital investments in those days, so the money would have had to come from wealthy individuals. JR Wilson turned to Gilbert E. Mosher, an acquaintance who was a successful Rochester businessman who had recently become wealthy when his company, Century Camera Company, sold out to Eastman Kodak. As JR Wilson had surmised, Mosher was looking for opportunities to invest.
Mosher was in a strong negotiating position; Wilson was not. So Mosher drove a hard bargain and insisted on being in charge of business operations and having, with his associate J. Millner Walmsley, effective ownership control through a voting trust that would hold the stock of JC Wilson and others. In addition to providing the needed capital, Mosher was a capable and experienced executive with good judgment who wanted to apply his management capabilities. “He might drive a hard bargain, but he gave you a dollar’s worth of value for every dollar you paid. What he was offering the Haloid Company was executive ability, financial astuteness, and strong leadership. Any company in Rochester would have welcomed this man’s help.”2 Mosher took a disciplined approach to business that differed considerably from Wilson’s.
JR Wilson liked to play the mandolin and the piano, and he liked to play loudly. At the company, he developed a reputation for being gregarious with customers and outside visitors, but having an explosive temper in the office, scolding employees he felt made mistakes and frowning sternly while muttering to himself. JR was often out late at night drinking with the boys and then back at work early the next morning, being just as hard as nails on the very same men. At home, JR’s grumbling about his frustrations at the company and his bragging about what he would have done or could have said—usually to Gilbert Mosher—so dominated family dinnertime that his young son quietly promised himself never to let that sort of thing happen when he was grown up and had his own family.
Joseph Chamberlain Wilson—always known as Joe Wilson—was born on December 13, 1909. He and his brother Dick, who was six years younger, were never particularly close. Nor was Joe emotionally close to his parents. Joe’s mother, Kate, was reserved and formal—certainly not “cuddly”—but invariably gracious and polite to others, a characteristic she passed on to her devoted and conscientious son. Recognizing his particular interest in books, she helped Joe learn to read and write at an early age. Despite his poor eyesight, he often spent time in bed reading with a flashlight under the blanket he had pulled up over his head, alone in his own private world of adventures and ideas.
As a boy, Joe often played alone in his room, constructing little buildings with ceramic poker chips. He had schoolboy friends, but was always quite shy, never good at sports, and something of a loner. When the Wilson family moved to Rugby Street, Joe changed elementary schools from No. 7 to No. 16, where he enrolled in a special program for gifted children. Changing schools changed his circle of friends and must have added to a feeling that he was on his own. He went to special classes for gifted students at Madison Junior High for two years and then on to West High School where, given his poor eyesight, he chose to be assistant manager of the basketball team and then, as a senior, became manager. Joe liked school, studied hard, earned good grades, enjoyed discussing books and ideas, and developed a lifelong appetite for knowledge and understanding. He began to realize that he could make his life more interesting, more useful to others, and more personally rewarding.
As a teenager, he also did conventionally unconventional things. He marked the racy passages of library books such as the Canterbury Tales, Don Juan, and Don Quixote. Readily accepted as the leader among his circle of friends, he assigned different days to each of his pals and gave explicit directions on how to approach the shelves holding the selected books indirectly and casually so they could all read the racy sections at the library without crowding together in ways that might attract the librarian’s attention.
Before completing high school, Joe paid a few surreptitious visits to the burlesque shows at Corinthian Hall located near Rattlesnake Pete’s Saloon. He also did his first back flip off the diving board at Keuka Lake and served as a counselor at the YMCA’s Camp Cory. He became skilled at shooting pool, learned the batting averages of all the great baseball players, and developed a major crush on Marilyn Miller, the Broadway star.3
Joe’s shy manner and intellectual inclinations made it hard for him to feel comfortable with his father, a volatile man who had strong convictions and was often gruff. Joe was much closer to his affable, knowledgeable, and patient grandfather, with whom he developed a special one-on-one relationship. This established a recurring, lifelong pattern of developing close counseling relationships with different men. Over the years, three individuals served as his principal personal advisors. With each, he discussed a wide range of topics to gain their perspectives and independent views, as well as to enjoy the pleasures of close friendship and trust: first, his grandfather, JC Wilson; then his classmate, Jack Hartnett; and later, his business colleague, Sol Linowitz.
During Joe’s formative years, the widely admired, respected, and well-liked JC Wilson was the greatest single influence on the development of his namesake grandson. They spent many hours talking about every subject under the sun. Joe was indelibly impressed with the self-control and willpower of his grandfather, whose motto was “Never make a promise you cannot keep and say nothing rather than something if you are in doubt.” Joe and his grandfather often discussed the City Manager movement, which was gaining momentum with the support of George Eastman. In the spring of 1927, this was the subject of Joe’s valedictory oration at West High School’s graduation.
Growing up in Rochester, Joe Wilson looked forward to becoming part of the community and, eventually, a leader within the city. Rochester, which would always be central in Joe’s world, was very clearly separated from such major centers of government, finance, culture, and recreation as New York, Boston, and Chicago, especially in winter when snowdrifts were deep. The minimum travel time to reach New York City was nine hours by train or twelve hours by automobile. There was no way to fly. Rochestarians may not have considered themselves isolated, but clearly their city was “geographically independent.”
At the same time, Rochester enjoyed many local strengths: The University of Rochester had the Eastman School of Music; the region had easy access to many types of outdoor recreation; and the greater Rochester community provided a good climate for raising families. In addition, Rochester was blessed by the absence of most of the problems that plagued America’s big cities: traffic congestion, slums, and divisive politics. Rochester was a peaceful place to grow up, and the Wilsons had become part of Rochester’s establishment. In Rochester, Joe enjoyed a strong and secure sense of place.
While Joe was growing up, Haloid was also progressing under the strict direction of Gilbert Mosher, who became general manager and then, taking over from JC Wilson, became president in 1917. He substantially expanded the sales organization and opened new sales offices. Mosher’s strength was finance and he dressed the part of a big-time financier: he wore spats, a homburg, and gloves—with a flower in his buttonhole—and carried a cane. Mosher lived in style, riding in a chauffeured Cadillac limousine, wintering in Boca Raton, and summering at a fishing camp in the Catskills. In business management, Mosher was from the old school. He expected employees to stand up when he entered the Haloid office and barely tolerated such follies as a coffee break. A stickler for neatness, Mosher liked to make unexpected visits to the plant, where he would check for dust in corners and on high shelves and then berate employees—including JR Wilson—for any discovered negligence. In his office, there were no chairs for visitors and smoking was not allowed. Mosher once ordered a subordinate to clear off the benches near the employee parking lot and to “fire the damned malingerers” who were lounging on them. They might get a 10-minute break, but “many of those lazy good-for-nothings had been goofing off for a full 20 minutes!” Mosher was right on the 20 minutes, but what he didn’t know was that the men were not stretching a 10-minute break, they’d come 20 minutes ahead of the start of the second shift. (Joe Wilson’s thoughtful discipline included choices of what not to do as well as what to do. He surely learned selective lessons about behaviors to avoid from both his father and Mr. Mosher.)
As John Dessauer, who led research at Wilson’s company for many years and produced a book about the company (My Years at Xerox), reported: “Mosher did not marry until he was well on in middle age, and during this bachelorhood he had an incredibly lengthy succession of housekeepers. If no one remained in his service very long, it was because he pursued the same tests in his house: He would conceal a match or a slip of paper on top of a cupboard. If it was still there a few days later, the housekeeper would icily be charged with negligence.” For many years he lived as a bachelor. Then, after his mother’s death, he married Miss Helen Halloran, a Catholic whose picture he had kept on his filing cabinet for many years, but did not marry until the death of his Baptist mother.
Since Haloid could not compete in research and development with Eastman Kodak, General Aniline & Film, or DuPont, its strategy was to have a resourceful group of direct salesmen ferreting out small niche markets where brand names and a consumer franchise didn’t much matter, but where selling, service, and lower prices could develop a meaningful comparative advantage. Sales and business expansion had JR Wilson on the road a good deal of the time, as sales offices were established in New York, Chicago, and Boston. Production space was doubled in 1923. But even with that expansion, demand was so strong that employees were working overtime within six months. (Haloid expanded facilities again in 1926, but for the next 20 years, sales would not surpass the 1923 record.)
Joe Wilson went to the University of Rochester. His father and uncle were both graduates of the University. His father had served as a member of the board of managers, and his beloved grandfather had been active in the major capital campaign that helped finance the University’s move to its new River campus. So, with all of his best friends staying home in Rochester and going to the U of R, it was not hard for Joe to set aside his thoughts of an Eastern college and accept his father’s offer of a new Buick Cabrolet roadster if he would stay home and enroll with the 114 other students in his class at the University. Joe pledged DKE, his father’s fraternity, where he later served as treasurer. He also managed the football team, wore a raccoon skin coat, was junior prom chairman, and served on the Y council. In his junior year, he received another Buick roadster from his father. Always very studious, he was observed by his classmates to be the one who was the most self-disciplined, who asked the most questions, and who was always the most thoroughly prepared.4 This set another lifelong pattern of deliberately planned behavior.
Joe demonstrated a keen appetite for knowledge and a thirst not only to understand what he was reading, but also to know what was behind everything he read.5 This pursuit of understanding in what he read was matched by his keen interest in understanding other people as individuals and knowing what they were doing and why. Majoring in economics, Joe earned high grades (with the one glaring exception of physical education), was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude. Wilson was also learning a major life lesson: He had considerable talent, and with concentrated, disciplined effort, he realized he could achieve results that were important to him and to his community.
Even more important for his life in leadership, he would become deeply engaged, through books, in a rich intellectual life that would enhance his private time while informing and empowering him during his years at the company and in public service. He developed an appreciation for the interrelationship of capitalism and democracy. Through Shakespeare, he learned lessons that he applied when formulating company policies for retired workers. As an adult, Wilson made time to read two or three serious books a week, searching for ideas and insights to integrate into his own thinking, which he could easily and regularly reference in his many speeches. The books he read—and carefully marked and annotated—were kept in his extensive library at home. His love of continuous study and learning was not only unusual for a business executive it was, in an unusually warm and close marriage, one of the few interests not shared by his wife.
CHAPTER 2
PEGGY
Joe Wilson met Peggy Curran when both were doing a good deed for a friend. Lincoln Burrows, Joe’s classmate and fraternity brother, had caught pneumonia and was in bed for several weeks. Joe and Peggy both happened to call on him during the same afternoon. They came separately, but Joe gave Peggy a ride home in his new Buick. A few days later, Peggy went to a fraternity party with Joe and that night reported: “Mom, I’ve met the man I’m going to marry.”
Both knew they were very different from one another when they started dating. Joe was Establishment and well-off. Peggy’s father was a local hotel manager and clearly not well off. Joe was a conscientious student, considering an academic career; Peggy did not plan to go to college. Peggy was the eldest of eight children; Joe had only one brother. She was a devout Catholic with a sister who was a nun; he was a “lapsed” Presbyterian. Their religious differences were, for Joe, particular cause for concern and became the topic of several thoughtful discussions with his friends. But Peggy and Joe enjoyed each other greatly and felt comfortable together, and Joe always preferred very few, really close relationships. His increasingly special romantic relationship with Peggy harmonized with Joe’s warm relationship with his grandfather, which continued to be particularly important to his sense of self and his place in Rochester.
A high-ranking 32nd degree Mason, JC Wilson began his political career in 1895 as an insurgent candidate for alderman with the support of the Good Government Club. When he won decisively, he was quickly brought into the regular Republican organization by George W. Aldridge, the master of the GOP in Monroe County. For 34 years, JC Wilson was a political leader who “loved to distribute patronage and extend many helping hands.”1 As the Republican leader of the 19th Ward, with a population of 60,000, JC Wilson rose steadily up the ranks in Rochester’s political offices. Over more than three decades, he served continuously and sequentially as Alderman (1895–1900); City Assessor (1900–1917); Treasurer (1917–1919); and Comptroller (1919–1928).
In 1928, during a battle to adopt the City Manager form of municipal government—which JC had endorsed in 1925 and which had strong support in his 19th Ward—Wilson split with the regular GOP organization. He joined the Citizens’ Republican Committee, ran for councilman-at-large, and won the largest vote. With the change to the City Manager structure of government, the position of Mayor of Rochester became just a ceremonial job of presiding at routine meetings and signing routine papers. Political leaders saw a match: JC Wilson was popular and gregarious; he had served Rochester for 35 years in public offices; he knew everyone, and he was familiar with both financial and organizational details of the city. Because they believed his well-established reputation in financial circles would enhance the city’s creditworthiness, JC Wilson was the unanimous choice of the councilmen to fill the ceremonial office of Mayor.
Then in his mid-seventies, JC Wilson took to his new job as Mayor of Rochester with enthusiasm, never minding its having been stripped of any real power and being clearly subordinated to the role of City Manager. Neither did he mind that the impressive suite of offices formerly used by the Mayor had been taken over by the City Manager nor that the new Mayor’s office was consigned to just one part of what had been the old Mayor’s anteroom. Wilson loved being Mayor and performed his role with enthusiasm.
Two years later at the age of 78, JC Wilson was convalescing from an illness. He expressed a desire to retire, but was persuaded to run again for the post of councilman-at-large. The regular Republicans, confident they could bring Wilson around to their side after the election, also nominated him. This obliged the City Manager League either to reject Wilson or to endorse a Republican. Although confined to bed and unable to campaign, he was hailed in the newspapers as “the most popular office holder in the last two generations,” and after 35 years of service to Rochester, JC Wilson was re-elected. Too weak to put on the clothes lain out for him, he was unable to attend the organizational meeting held downtown after the election. He would live only a few weeks longer.
When his beloved grandfather died in 1930, Joe was deeply upset and needed to talk.2 Riding in his new car, Joe and Peggy talked together for several hours. In the weeks that followed, their already comfortable relationship grew stronger. They continued dating through his senior year at the university and at the invitation of Joe’s parents, Peggy made several visits to the Wilson’s summer cottage at Point Pleasant on Lake Ontario.
Then, following a major argument, they broke up. Almost simultaneously, Peggy’s family moved away to Buffalo where Mr. Curran would manage the Ford Hotel and work as a local builder. In addition to those emotional and geographic separations, their personal directions were also diverging. For Joe, it was time to decide what he would do after graduation.
Joe was uncertain about his career, particularly given the Depression. He decided against studying at Julliard to become a concert pianist. An academic life still had some appeal, but since he was determined to earn more money than a professor could, he was considering a career in business or banking. (In one of his courses, each student had been asked what he or she planned to do. Joe Wilson’s direct answer, “Make a million dollars,” while glib, was a clear signal that he intended to accomplish something in business that was significant.) One of his professors suggested that two years at Harvard Business School would not only help prepare him for any career he might choose, but would also give him the time and detachment to ponder his alternatives. Even though he was both shy and quiet, the Harvard Business School’s lively, give-and-take case discussion method of instruction and learning suited Joe well; he graduated near the top of his class with High Distinction.
The deepening Depression, which caused one-fifth of the class to drop out of the business school after their first year, made getting a job the major concern for most students.3 Fortunately, Joe always had Haloid. He worked at Haloid’s New York City sales office in the summer between his first and second years at Harvard, and even better, had an assured position waiting for him after graduation. Following an interview with Gilbert Mosher, Joe’s job was agreed upon: He would be paid $20 a week, begin as an assistant in bookkeeping and serve as a management apprentice—with his father providing most of the instruction. (Politics provided a basis for Joe to show his independence: Attracted by the substance of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential campaign, Joe had several heated arguments with his father, a traditionally staunch Republican and a strong Hoover man. These arguments were repeated in 1936, and in that election, Joe broke from family custom and voted Democratic for FDR.)
Seriously shy and all too conscious of his getting a job largely because Haloid was his family’s company, Joe was quite deferential to other workers, particularly to those who were older—and older employees apparently agreed that he should defer to them. Striving to be helpful, Joe made some suggestions based on his business school studies, but his suggestions were quickly labeled presumptuous, so he pulled back. As time passed, however, Mr. JR began to recognize Joe’s talent and the benefits of his formal training, so he more and more often deferred to Joe’s analysis and judgment—including evaluations that increasingly differed from Gilbert Mosher’s.
Joe would make even better progress in romance. Visiting Foran’s Saloon, the speakeasy on Spring Street he and Peggy had frequented with their college friends, he was promptly escorted to a back room where Jack Foran bluntly asked him where was his wonderful girl. Foran had advice to give—and he gave it in what Wilson later recalled as “an hour’s harsh talk.” Blow-ups were opportunities for make-ups. Buffalo was not all that far. Besides, rumor had it that she was being courted by a Buffalonian, so Joe had better get with it, or he was going to lose a real prize!
Joe drove to Buffalo to call on Peggy. She too had grown in the two years he’d been away at Harvard. She saw herself as more independent and self-sufficient; Joe saw her as more attractive than ever and, with both a strong will and a sense of social responsibility, even more interesting. After that first visit, Joe drove to Buffalo every weekend and soon declared his commitment to Peggy—but she held back for several months.
Luckily, the Curran family moved back to Rochester in late 1934. By the following spring, Joe’s prospects at Haloid were accelerating and his relationship with Peggy was again strong. For one of Joe’s trips to New York City, Peggy and a friend took Joe to the railroad station. As the train pulled away from the station, Joe turned to wave goodbye from the open doorway. He could hear Peggy call out as the train pulled away, “Yes! I’ll marry you!”
By agreeing in writing that their children would be raised as Catholics, Joe got approval from Father John B. Sullivan, the Rector of St. John the Evangelist Church, to marry Peggy Curran in a ceremony performed right after the early morning mass on October 12, 1935. Marriage was one of several changes in Joe Wilson’s relationships during the thirties.