Rodgers Elected to the Board of Trustees: An In-Depth Interview With TJR

By Nathaniel E. Ward | Tuesday, June 1, 2004

Mere months after the alumni scuttled College plans to restrict their voting rights, they dealt their alma mater another blow, electing darkhorse candidate T. J. Rodgers '70 to the Board of Trustees. A write-in candidate, Dr. Rodgers beat out the three official candidates to win. A self-styled libertarian who favors freedom over any ideology, Rodgers is the CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, a successful Silicon Valley technology firms.

Courtesy T. J. Rodgers

— T. J. Rodgers '70 —

14,660 alumni—twenty-four percent of the total—cast their votes both online and by mail. Though the "multiple slate" system allows each alumnus to vote several times, confusing overall election results, Patricia Fisher-Harris '81 of the Alumni Leadership office said Dr. Rodgers was the "clear winner."

The Dartmouth Review caught up with Dr. Rodgers in a telephone conversation last week.

The Dartmouth Review: You are only the second ever candidate to win on a petition ballot after John Steele in 1980. What inspired you to make the attempt?

T. J. Rodgers: I was cruising along like about 75 percent of all alumni, living my life and ignoring the College when some alumni approached me and said that I should run for the Board of Trustees. My first reaction was "I'm an extremely busy guy, who serves on seven boards of directors, and I run a company in Silicon Valley. I couldn't do it." But they prevailed in shaming me—I think that's a reasonable phrase—into doing it. The argument was along the lines of, "Either you ought to take the time and do something or stop griping." I chose A, because I love the College.

TDR: What are your fondest memories of Dartmouth?

TJR: There are really two categories of memories that overwhelm the others.

One is the school itself, the teaching. At the time I was there I didn't know I was in Heaven, but later on when I went to Stanford I realized I had been in Heaven. I hadn't appreciated enough the small classes. I studied physics and chemistry. The typical class size after my freshman year was ten. The professor was the person who wrote the book, and the professor was in his office every afternoon. You didn't need to make an appointment: you just showed up. Personalized instructions from a faculty that cared about teaching and world-class faculty, that's what characterized Dartmouth. That, I think, is still alive and well at Dartmouth, and it needs to be preserved.

Second is the fellowship, the fraternity of students at Dartmouth. And by that I don't mean a fraternity in the sense of a Greek organization, but the fellowship of your mates, to use the Australian phrase. That, of course, is something I think everyone at Dartmouth takes away with them.

TDR: How does this compare to Dartmouth today?

TJR: Students still benefit from the two attributes I described. I believe that if you properly select courses today you can still get great teachers, personal attention and small classes. I believe—and this is only speculation—when you go through the experience you end up loving the school. I have seen data that classes since my time aren't giving as much money, aren't as committed to the College as classes before my time. We [the Class of 1970] were kind of a transition class.

The Vietnam upheaval was in full swing when I was there as was the transition from the old Dartmouth to the new Dartmouth. John Kemeny became president when I was a senior. With regard to the most important things I care about, they're there and need to be preserved. There are threats; preservation isn't something that's going to happen automatically.

What I think has changed—I'm trying to avoid using buzzwords. Let me back up. You guys [at the Review] are conservative, I believe the College is left-liberal, and I'm a libertarian, so I'd argue with both sides on certain issues. I tried to keep my candidacy away from the Left-Right struggle because I believe the Left-Right struggle is at the wrong level; it's below the plane of where the debate should be. I deal with issues of freedom that transcend Left-Right politics.

One thing that I believe is distinctly different at Dartmouth today is the degradation of freedom of speech and the freedom of assembly—I'm deliberately using First Amendment language there—at the College today, by a lot, compared to when I was there. To me, any time that you lose the ability to be with whom you want, or to say what you want, then other bad things can happen. They happen by edict in the dead of night; they happen without announcement. You're in a precarious state when the freedom of speech is not robust. Obviously at Dartmouth people can make statements, but I don't believe the freedom of speech is as good as it was when I was there. That is one thing I'm going to work on; that is a sine qua non of a good school. Dartmouth should be leading the country as opposed to arguing in court, as it has on occasions, that it's a private institution and therefore not subject to all the laws of the country.

TDR: What should a Dartmouth student take away from his four years in Hanover?

TJR: I've been thinking about that a lot lately because I'm not an expert on the topic, but I am an expert "customer" of Dartmouth. I'm a hirer of college graduates from all over. We evaluate, train, and promote college graduates, so I know what skills they need to be productive. I don't claim to be an expert educator. Therefore, when I come back to Hanover, I won't walk into town and say, "We've got to do this, we've got to do that" with regards to curriculum.

My company and I look for people who are broadly educated in fundamental skills. They can do math, they can understand science, they can write—one of the prerequisites for writing is that they can think—they're logical, and they can express themselves well. To address one problem we have had with new graduates, we actually have a course in our company, a two-day course taught by a professor from Stanford on communications. Silicon is a very objective master and Silicon will wipe you out if things aren't exactly right. Therefore, communicating precisely and talking with people is extremely important.

What I just described is completely available at Dartmouth. I also think you could go through four years at Dartmouth and not get any of that.

TDR: Where do you see Dartmouth in ten years?

TJR: I'd rather answer that question about a year from today after I've seen how things work at the top.

If I have some success as a Trustee, in ten years, the communication between Dartmouth and its alumni will be much more open. There will be a lot of information flowing between the school and the alums. The alums will be closer to the administration in what they see as the correct vision for the College. I think the College will be a lot more well-coupled to its alumni body. The 62,000 of us do represent a very good sounding board and an incredible resource for the College that isn't being utilized right now.

Right now, when I talk to people, I infer that the alums are viewed as walking checkbooks, not intelligent human beings who have a lot to contribute to helping the College move to the next level.

On Student Freedoms

TDR: One area of particular concern to The Review is the College's insistence that students cannot deliver our publications in dormitories for an ever-changing slew of reasons. Other campus publications, even College-funded ones, are restricted just as The Review is. Does such a policy have any merits?

TJR: If a student signs up for a newspaper, they should have that newspaper delivered. A newspaper has the right to distribute its publication.

I thought that policy applied to [The Review] only. I'm a little relieved to find out that at least this bad policy is applied equally.

I think all newspapers should have the right to distribute. I believe that newspapers should be distributed freely at Dartmouth. I don't see why the administration feels the need to be involved at that nitty-gritty level of Dartmouth. That's command and control thinking and that's not appropriate for the College.

On the Fraternities

TDR: You were a member of a fraternity—Gamma Delta Chi—while at Dartmouth. What did that experience mean for you?

TJR: When I was a sophomore it was a very important thing for me to do. In 1966, the freshman social life was rather bleak. In my sophomore and junior years I enjoyed the fraternity life and standard fraternity stuff. As I understand it, the basics of fraternities haven't changed much, except that the College has pretty much put a wet blanket over everything.

I will talk directly and privately to fraternity members about their current environment. If they think their rights are being infringed upon, I will work with them. I believe the freedom of assembly is a right all Americans have.

At the very same time, I can tell you I got bored with my fraternity my senior year, and I quit Gamma Delta Chi. I didn't quit French Hall, the last dormitory down in the Wigwams. We had a fraternity down there, people who liked being in the furthest-away and ugliest building on campus.

TDR: As an alumnus and a fraternity member, what were your feelings when you first heard about the Student Life Initiative?

TJR: I've read about the Student Life Initiative, and I see it as an assault on the fraternities at Dartmouth, and I think it's abominable what's been done. If some of the stories I've heard are validated, some of the administration's tactics are a gross attack on rights of students, and I'm adamantly against it. I've read the attacks, I've read the political maneuvering that's been used to justify shutting them down. The concept that the school would demand that they be gender integrated…

TDR: The fraternities have resisted that at least, though it was implied in the wording of the original Initiative.

TJR: I've heard that you have to register a keg of beer to have it in a fraternity. I've heard that you need to have a College alcohol monitor at your parties. I don't like any of it. It sounds like I'm reading 1984; it smacks of Big Brother. I think they ought to be left alone.

Over the years I have given my direct input to President Wright. I wrote a letter to him about repression of fraternities in 1998. About everything I wanted and said was right has gone wrong. At least with him as president, I've had someone who has listened to me. I have high regard for respectful disagreement; I have low regard for ignoring people.

TDR: Do you feel that there are any positive aspects to the Initiative?

TJR: I do know that when I was in the fraternities and the parties got wild that we used to do some things that weren't necessarily good to remember the next day.

A positive aspect would be for the administration to criticize bad behavior and demand adult behavior. Now you're being treated as an adult, and you should act like one. The call for responsibility is a good one.

TDR: Students often complain that the Initiative neglects their input. How would you combat this perception?

TJR: By talking to them!

On Changes to Education

TDR: The College recently combined the North American cultural distributive requirement with that for European culture. Do changes like this improve the quality of education here?

TJR: I know the angle you guys [at The Review] have on that topic, and I'm somewhat sympathetic toward it. I'm sympathetic toward the result you're trying to achieve. For me to sit here in Woodside, California, and pontificate about that change—I just don't feel competent to do that.

I think the concept that you're espousing is that a good education comes from the right courses, and that the right courses come partly from respecting and understanding the cultures that created us—the US democracy, and the European history that helped create that. If you study those cultures and their leaders, you will understand something valuable that is important for educated people to know. I would agree with that.

I just read the synopsis of a curriculum review at Harvard. It said some things I agree with. For example, you've got to add more science. This is a scientific world and people need to understand science to function. The other thing the Harvard study said which surprised me was that they were going in the opposite direction on the core curriculum: they want to lower core curriculum requirements, allowing more freedom of choice. This called into question my prior view, which is that a strong curriculum of the "right stuff" should be required as part of the education. My sense of freedom says that starting to specify what people have to take—taking away their freedom to choose the courses they want—may be going in the wrong direction.

If that's the case, then there is a corrolary: if people aren't required to master a core curriculum then everything they take ought to be pretty good and ought to be pretty valuable. You're faced with a conundrum: if you have a core curriculum that's excellent, then you can live with courses that aren't excellent; but if you shy away from a core curriculum because it encroaches on the freedom of students to study what they want, then you have the duty to ensure that everything is top-notch.

That's where my thinking is right now. I'm in my formative stages of grappling with a problem that I've never grappled with before. I've been doing some reading, and I've been talking with a lot of people. I have given you an open book on my current thinking. I will be much less naïve in one year.

I don't want to come off, because I'm not that way, as having a hard doctrine on the curriculum because I'm not an expert. I am an expert on free speech. So are most Americans; we live in a free society. I do intend to be a champion of free speech and the other articles of the Bill of Rights, while at Dartmouth. That I will vigorously pursue. But on education and curriculum I have got to learn before I can make leadership statements.

TDR: Some students have noted that their professors insert a lot of their opinions into their classes. One professor, Shelby Grantham, sees racism and sexism at every turn and even said, "Only white people can be racist." How would you respond to something like that?

TJR: I just finished reading about a week ago your issue on Shelby Grantham. I have mixed feelings about it, and I'll tell you both sides.

I teach courses at Stanford or other local colleges sometimes. I inject my libertarian principles into what I teach. I would, by the way, make one point: libertarian principles are along the lines of the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights—and this is a very important point—is about "negative" rights: it's the right not to have something done to you. "Congress shall make no law abridging the right of free speech," is one example of a right that can't be taken away. They can't take away your right to free speech. They can't confiscate your property. To me, standing for those rights is important, but nonetheless, they are statements of political philosophy. I do make them known—but never to the level attributed to Ms. Grantham in your reports. I typically couple what students are interested in working on free market concepts, so they might better deal with the "real world." I don't rant my political philosophy.

Consequently, if someone came down with a hard edict and said "We're only going to teach all facts from now on and political opinions are not for the classroom," I wouldn't like it. Looking at Ms. Grantham, I think she has the right to express her opinion—as long as she does her job teaching English composition with the excellence Dartmouth deserves.

By the way, I applaud you guys. You published a letter on Ms. Grantham from a couple of conservative students, who said, "Your attack on Ms. Grantham was overdone. We're right-of-center students, and she brings a lot of value to us." I applaud you guys for running that letter contrary to your opinions. One of the criticisms of your publication is that you guys are hard-line conservatives, and—I won't say you distort the truth—the truth that supports your doctrine is more prominently published than the truth that doesn't support your doctrine. When people I've talked to in the administration dismiss your newspaper, that's one of the arguments they use to justify the attack on free speech that your newspaper endures. I commend you for reporting both sides on that issue.

Back to Ms. Grantham, and a connection to a prior question. You have to believe that a Harvard curriculum study done once every 30 years has deep thinking behind it. If the top colleges do go in the direction of a minimal core curriculum, I believe that means every course has to be held to a higher standard, as I said earlier. If I take what The Review reported about Ms. Grantham at face value and accept it—and certainly part of the Dartmouth community does not—if I just accept what I've read, her teaching is not excellent, not at the level that I want for our College.

When I said I see both sides of the issue, that's what I meant. I don't think we ought to prevent faculty members from connecting their teaching to the real world; the real world certainly includes political-philosophical views. On the other hand, if it's done to an extreme level that damages the course, then it is a problem.

I should say here again, just so I don't see a letter written about the man who's coming in to manipulate the curriculum at Dartmouth: that's not what I want to do. Trustees should deal at the level of vision and mission, not day-to-day management. It's not my job. As a Trustee, I see my job is to watch the process of how things are done, not to micromanage the details of some class that people don't like.

I don't intend to be, and I'm not qualified to be, John Wayne walking into town, looking for the bad guy, because that's not what I'm about.

On admissions

TDR: You wrote in your candidate statement that you supported student diversity at Dartmouth, yet you implied that you favored a different system from that used now. How would you change the College's admissions policies?

TJR: The most straightforward answer is I don't know.

Admission should be on merit only; that would give us the best students. The second point, which I made in my letter [to the Daily Dartmouth] is that admission on merit only can provide very high levels of diversity. I know that because I run an organization that's like that. The problem is—again, I'm speculating, since I haven't gotten the facts yet—I believe the College makes exceptions for athletes and I believe the College makes exceptions for the children of alumni. Thus, if there's a policy at the College to admit people on something other than merit, admission policies designed to ensure diversity are reasonable.

You can't say whether you would you turn merit-only without looking at all the non-merit-only categories. The only one that gets written up and gets a lot of press is the minority issue. My vote would be merit-only, and that would be the end of it. It would include everybody. The football team would be however good the football team could be given that they could only matriculate students that met Dartmouth's standards fully.

An anecdote there, from my personal life. I was recruited to Dartmouth by a football coach. I was sitting in a study hall in Oshkosh High School in Wisconsin when Coach Earl Hamilton walked in and said he was a football coach from Dartmouth. I asked him where Dartmouth was. That's how I ended up applying to Dartmouth.

In those days there were no athletic scholarships and you had to meet all the academic requirements to get into the school. There were no set-asides for athletes at that time. That's an example of one form of diversity. The College desired to have athletes, however the College had a merit-only policy. Therefore, if the athletic department wanted more athletes they'd have to go out and find them and recruit them. That's exactly what they did with me. I was a product of a "diversity program," if you want to call it that—an athlete, recruited under a merit-only administrative framework.

...What I'm trying to provide—I've been very open with you—is the way I think about stuff, not a hard position on the topic. The minute you take something that should be a matter for free speech and open debate and turn it into an issue, you have polarized positions on the issue. The brain turns off and there are no discussions you can have very well. I'm not coming in with a hard position on the admissions issue; I'm coming in saying, "Let's have intelligent discussion on this issue." I don't believe we should let the "screamers" on the extremes of any issue prevent us from having a meaningful dialogue. That is also an insidious mechanism of repressing free speech at Dartmouth. People who express opinions on taboo issues such as admissions are often tarred as bigots or racists, as was I by a history professor.

On the College budget

TDR: In recent years the College has seen some rough financial times. As a businessman, what do you see as the solution?

TJR: There's a newspaper in Vermont, the Valley News. One of their reporters is an ex-Brown trustee, a CFO type person. He's an expert on money and he's an expert on how colleges handle their money. His criticism of the College is that they overspent during the boom in 2000 and they got a hangover in 2001. I'd like to pontificate about how that's bad, but my company did the exact same thing. The difference between a company and a college is that a company is deigned to move quickly and react fast. Sometimes we lose money. For a college that's bad. A college needs to have the 100-year vision and the 40-year view of its operation; it cannot, to use Alan Greenspan's words, be "irrationally exuberant" during good times. There was a tactical financial mistake the College made during the dot-com boom of 2000. If the management process that caused that problem has been fixed, then it's over, the problem is gone, never to return. The concern I've got is that it hasn't been fixed.

My style is to put me and my company's failures on the cover of the annual report—literally—to go into depth about what I did wrong, and how I'm going to fix it. There's a saying that, when followed, is a big credibility builder: say what you will do, and then do what you said. We act that way. Cypress was number 11 out of 1600 Wall Street Journal Index companies in share price appreciation in 2003. A lot of that share price growth happened because we took responsibility for the problems we suffered during the dot-com bust, and then we fixed them.

I don't see any message that clear cut from the College. I don't see the sense of accountability that I think should be there. An organization that only gives you the happy-face version of events undermines its own credibility.

TDR: One frequent criticism of the College is that it keeps its budget secret. Why is this bad?

TJR: I've heard that Susan Dentzer, the retiring Chairman of the Board of Trustees, was quoted along the lines of "T.J. will be assimilated by the Board." One thing that I will say is that I'm a fairly indigestible person. I think that openness leads to credibility, and that the College today has a credibility problem with the alumni body—and the faculty, assuming the views in Professor Iverson's open letter on budget credibility are widely held.

Back to the idea of the alum as a walking checkbook, the 75 percent of alums that don't bother to participate anymore should be brought back in. The alums have not been treated well—except the ones that get wined and dined for the big check. I know I haven't been treated well. As just another alum, I only wanted to be able to give my opinion and at least be listened to.

Now, I will review the budget as a Trustee. I have no idea what those meetings are going to be like. I expect to be called naïve, but I've raised $1.6 billion in cash for an enterprise worth $2.6 billion—I know how to review budgets.

TDR: With respect to cutting costs, what do you think of programs like the Office for Pluralism and Leadership, which employs over a dozen people?

TJR: My objective is to ensure that organizations are being managed correctly. The spending in this area has grown at twice the rate of overall college spending. I would ask pointed questions about how much we were spending, where the money was going and what benefit it brought to the College—as compared to other places where investments could be made.

On the other hand, I'm trying to avoid the John Wayne syndrome, so that would most likely come up in a budget discussion. At that point a director should be able to understand where that money went and make a decision from there.

On leadership

TDR: Dr. Rodgers, your leadership at Cypress Semiconductor has created one of he most successful companies in the nation. What have you learned in your 22 years there?

TJR: I am a learning human being. It is part of my DNA to need to learn. I don't feel good if a day goes by and I haven't learned anything.

...One would think that the person who's got the title of CEO somehow has grand power in his organization. Obviously, I have the power to hire and fire or to change the size of your paycheck, so nominally the CEO does have power. But you soon find that the use of power to control doesn't work in a company or any other organization. There's a classic paper on that topic published in the Harvard Business Review in 1967. The title of the paper—which I give out to my executive staff about once every five years to remind them of this fact—is, "One more time: How do you motivate employees?" KITA—the externally imposed attempt by management to "install a generator" in the employee—has been demonstrated to be a total failure." KITA stands for "kick in the ass." Basically, KITA refers not only to penalties, but also to rewards that are supposed to stimulate performance.

In the last ten years, what I've learned is that control and order don't work. If you don't have their hearts and minds, you'll at best have government-like performance, where they go to work and they don't like it, and their output quality looks like what you get with the government. Though my title has remained the same for 22 years, if you look at what I do my job has changed every two or three years, radically. I am now concerned about quality, I want to make sure things are excellent. The reason I read all the journals...is one, I want to read on my business since I'd be a fool not to, and two, I want my employees to understand that the "old man" still reads his journals. They'd better do likewise, or be embarrassed. It's a leadership example as well as my truly wanting to stay technically proficient. I love Silicon Valley. It's fun to work every day of my career on integrated circuits, my hobby when I was a physics and chemistry student at Dartmouth.

...I work on communications. We have only about 4,000 employees, about 1,200 in our headquarters site in San Jose. You would think communications in a close-knit company would be easy. It started shocking me about ten years ago that I knew things that techies in one building would know and techies in another building wouldn't know. Despite the Internet, despite all our instant communications, people don't communicate that much. We actually have a practice in the company, when we do an important project that requires different disciplines and people involved—for example, the chemist that makes wafers, the physicist that understands transistor physics, my background, and the electrical engineers—we force them to co-locate, we jam them into a building and make them sit next to each other. It's amazing. If you have two teams one building apart, they lose half the communications they would lose were they two time zones apart. Being able to interrupt someone at ten o'clock in the morning and ask them a "dumb" question that wouldn't get asked if you were just in the next building and had to phone someone—that's a big deal.

I spend a lot of my time writing to and talking with employees, to communicate to them. Right now, I'm in the process of writing about a 60-page travel report about my recent round-the-world trip visiting Cypress sites. I'm writing a semi-technical, semi-human piece—in a word, the Cypress family—saying here's what your co-employees do in Bangalor at ten o'clock in the morning. It's got a lot of personal color to it. I'm trying to remind everyone they need to talk to each other, to communicate. Obviously, if we're seeing problems in 4,000 people, you can only imagine what that problem would be like in a group the size of the Dartmouth community.

Quality, communications and values. After a while, no matter how smart you are and how much you work—and I still work a lot, I still work 60-hour weeks because I like to—you can't run the company. I realized I couldn't run my own company when we had $250 million in revenue, and that was 15 years ago. I realized that the military sort of oganization, with a president, the vice president, the directors, etcetera, doesn't work. Even in a place where I'm a real technical expert, and I really can add value to most discussion in the country, if the decision still drove to me, by the time they get there they're either obsolete or they're so synopsized we're incapable of understanding the decision we need to make, let alone making the right one.

After I realized 15 years ago I couldn't run the show myself, I turned it loose then went into a period of uncertainty. Now that everyone's doing their own thing, how am I going to keep the lid on this thing? So, I went into a period of review and learning and understnding—more learning—to understand how our managers were running their businesses. I didn't ask them to tell me the details—why they made a particular transistor, for example—I asked them a more important question: What was the thinking process that went into making the transistor? Who were they trying to serve? What were they trying to optimize? What technical skills did they bring to bear to do the optimization? Did they achieve the economic purpose that they targeted? If not, why not? What would they do differently the next time? I started reviewing people and watching how they worked more than what they did.

That brings us to an important point, made in a famous business book called Built to Last, written by two Stanford professors, Collins and Porras. They chronicle the histories of what they believe are the 13 greatest corporations in history and they explain in 300 pages why those companies became great. At the highest level of abstraction, those companies—Boeing, Motorola, Sony, IBM, Nordstrom, some are technology companies, some are different—they have fundamental, core values that are shared. Not top-down, "here are your orders," not the Ten Commandments, but shared values that are widely held across the corporation that are truly believed in. For example, on every floor of every building at our 20 sites around the world, our core values are listed. They fit on one page of paper. There's a section about people. In it, it says "we're honest, we're smart, we work hard," things like that that: plain English phrases that truly reflect the way people work.

In the last result, instead of nose-diving into some technical problem and solving it myself or heading a task force to solve it, I'm the keeper of the values. I watch the process by which people solve their problems and run their business. Cypress now has eight businesses that comprise the public profit and loss statement. Those eight businesses are run by people who do run their own show, but I do review them. I criticize if I think they're not running the show right and I really criticize if I don't think they're holding the values of the corporation.

I don't think it's a job of a member of a board of directors—I analogize the Board of Trustees with directors—to directly meddle in the affairs of the organization. But it is the job of a Trustee to ensure that there is a set of values somewhere written down that you can believe and understand, that is a widely shared value, that everybody agrees is what we're going toward. As people make decisions day-in and day-out—what to order, who to hire and fire, where to spend money—that set of values, that mission statement, is up on the wall, and decisions are made consistent with that mission statement.

So that's the highest level: who are we, what do we stand for and where do we want to go? I think Dartmouth's Board of Trustees should take another look at the big picture. When I read the mission statements on the website, I don't run up the Dartmouth flag; it's not inspiring. The one thing a mission statement and a statement of core values has to do is inspire. People have to say, "Yes, I believe in that. That's right, I stand for that." I'd like to work to help improve that.

Second, the Board of Trustees should simply watch over the operation and ensure that things are being done consistently with the core values and the mission statement. It's truly a high-level function. In a company, a good board of directors says, "Show me what you stand for, where you're going and who you are. Then I'm going to come to town every 90 days and listen to your stories about what you've done and where you're going. My job is to give you honest critique as to whether or not you're really following the objectives you've set for yourself."

That view, I hope, is non-threatening. It's much less non-threatening, or should be, than a guy who walks into town and likes to micromanage.

Since I've learned that top-down control doesn't work in a company of 4,000 people, it obviously cannot work in a community with, say, 80,000 people including 60,000 alums. It can't work in a community with the size and diversity and dispersion of Dartmouth.

If you wanted to boil it down to a two-word dichotomy: the job is leadership, not management. Part of leadership is making sure that management manages consistently with the long-term objectives of the organization.

Rodgers Elected to the Board of Trustees: An In-Depth Interview With TJR

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