Spring
1998
Soundings is a publication of the School of Humanities and Social Science at MIT
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Pathbreakers
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Graduates of the School of Humanities and Social Science are making a difference in a multitude of arenas. With distinction, courage, and often with panáche, they are taking risks and shaping the course of events — as inventors and entrepreneurs, teachers and writers, developers of national policy and creators of new social agendas. We profile some of the School's illustrious alumni and their stellar achievements. |
Call to Action:
Dana Mead, '67
"I had the best of all possible worlds," recalls Dana Mead of his academic life at West Point in the 1970s. "I was a tenured professor. I had just started as chairman of the athletic committee and I was on the academic board. I had a big house on the river and great seats at the football stadium. And I loved teaching cadets." With all that going for him, Mead — now CEO of Tenneco, a global manufacturer of packaging and automotive parts — turned his sights elsewhere. "I was afraid I would become stagnant, that my horizons would narrow. For me, the adrenaline was going out of the process."
The flow of adrenaline — and the attendant call to action — is a driving force for Mead, pushing him to the frontlines of business, public service, and academia. A former colonel with a BS in engineering ('57) from West Point and a PhD in political science and economics ('67) from MIT, Mead has pursued action since his early years. In the 1970s, he went "towards the sound of the guns," as he puts it, first authoring four volumes of the Pentagon Papers and later at the White House, serving President Nixon as a staff assistant, White House Fellow, and eventually deputy director of the Domestic Council. After his teaching stint at West Point, he made another major transition. Jumping into the high-octane business world, Mead first went to International Paper Company, where he was executive vice president, and then to Tenneco, where he has been responsible for reorganizing the near-bankrupt conglomerate into a now-thriving firm with $7.2 billion in sales.
A self-admitted action junky, Mead sees action as central to leadership, which itself is "the catalyst for things to happen." He points, for example, to a deficit of action as a key problem with many US businesses: "They spend too much time on the inputs — strategy, planning, endless seminars and meetings — and don't act aggressively enough on things that produce results. One of my managerial mantras is valuing action more than contemplation. Action creates opportunity."
Driven by the mantra and infused by a quiet command presence, Mead deftly maneuvers in the arenas of power and public policy — at the White House, Capitol Hill, and the Federal Reserve Board, among others. Considered a leading business statesmen nationally, he recently participated in a breakfast meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and later that day, in a supper get-together with Argentine President Carlos Saul Menem. His appointment book is studded with lunch dates with the power elite, including President Clinton, Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, and Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, with whom Mead has discussed the benefits of pushing the economic growth rate to more than 3% without triggering inflation.
Asked in 1994 to become chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers, the nation's principal trade organization for manufacturing, Mead said he would be interested, but only in an election year — "when the action is greatest." He accepted the post in 1995, and with that platform, as well as the 1997 co-chairmanship of the TransAtlantic Business Dialogue (TABD), a forum of chief executives from 100 firms in Europe and the US, Mead has been on the policy forefront to abolish barriers to international trade.
The willingness to engage on the frontlines has been a Mead signature for decades. At MIT, his leadership proclivities did not go unnoticed. As his thesis advisor, Professor Emeritus William Kaufman, recalls: "Dana had a Napoleonic baton in his knapsack." For Mead, his MIT experience was memorable for other qualities it added to his knapsack. "There's a huge amount of intellectual sinew and discipline in the MIT community. The standards are extremely high and the competition is intense. MIT taught me how to think a lot better. I ran into people who wouldn't accept a faulty premise." In addition, he says, a graduate education "adds a bit to one's self confidence, and that, frankly, is good for leadership."
For Mead, however, the value of leadership goes beyond running a global company efficiently and well. "Anybody who thinks they're going to be eulogized for leaving ‘a great company' [is deluded], because that great company could be gone in three or 10 years." A more valuable legacy, he says, involves the more humble virtue of being a good role model. "I think people who work for me have always taken away something that helped them in their lives. In the larger scheme of things, that's about all you can ask for."
Copyright © 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology