A Scientist’s Life: A Son’s Perspective

My father, Dr. Robert R. Carkhuff, is in his 50^th year of his “Discovery Voyage.” As a scientist, he is most ecstatic with his breakthrough thinking on “generativity.” For him, generativity is the brainpower to systematically generate new and more powerful initiatives in all areas of human endeavor—individually, organizationally, in communities, culturally and economically. In other words, generativity is the capacity to generate a new idea—often one never before seen on this planet.

My Dad has lived, learned, and worked empowered by these generativity systems for over 40 years. He is fond of saying, “I haven’t peaked yet!”

Keep rowing, Dad!

Currently, he is dedicated to a vision of “Saving America.” His theme is “The Generativity Solution” which is based upon two powerful sources of effect:

• Economic freedom which provides the conditions for generative breakthroughs;
• Generative entrepreneurs who are empowered to think “outside the box” and generate technological innovation.^[1]

Together, these forces account for nearly 100% of economic prosperity. If Dad is right, we win with the power of generativity and resume the role of global economic leadership.

If he is wrong, well…

It seems like Dad is always proactively attempting to save us from the effects of the mistakes we are about to make. Let me tell you briefly about some of these efforts to save us.

Saving Helping

My father neither began with these gigantic perspectives nor is he finished with these huge ambitions. He began 50 years ago in graduate school where he committed himself to “making psychology a true science.”

Upon graduation in 1963, he obtained an N.I.H. Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to study the core dimensions of all helping and human relationships. This study plunged him into a controversy which he now terms “Saving Helping.”

Basically, there was contradictory evidence on the effects of professional counseling and psychotherapy: professional helping appeared no more effective than casual relating.

Dad partnered with Dr. Charles B. Truax in answering the challenge that confronted the helping professions: “helping was for better or worse!” They had discovered that helpees or clients and patients of professional helpers improved or deteriorated on a variety of indices of process and outcome. Helpees of untrained helpers remained approximately the same.^{[2] [3]} In other words, the helpees of professional helpers had more variability than those of non-professional helpers.

The implications were profound:

• Helping really made a difference.
• Helpers needed systematic training to have high-level results.

During the years that followed, Dad dedicated himself to defining the operations of helping systematically in order to improve the effects of helping.^[4]

Dad found the two critical factors in helping:

• Responding accurately to the other persons’ frames of reference;
• Initiating concretely to achieve the others’ defined objectives.

He built his helping and human relating models around these factors.

Saving Communities

His “Voyage of Discovery” brought him to Springfield, Massachusetts, where he received an invitation “to save a dying city.”

Together with associates Dr. Bernard G. Berenson and Dr. Andrew H. Griffin, he generated a new vision of community development inductively from the bottom up: homes and neighbor­hoods, schools and training, colleges and technology, governance and services, business and industry. After defining the unique objectives of each, these scientists related the community components interdependently.

With repeated applications, they generated a deductive vision of community development from the top down:

• Business functions of marketplace positioning;
• Governance functions of the alignment of resources;
• College functions of empowering human processing;
• School functions of teaching information modeling;
• Home functions of tutoring mechanical tooling.
• Training the marginalized minority citizens in these designs, the partners were able to produce astounding results:^[5]
• The empowered minority citizens were able to demonstrate performance improvement outcomes and pay at or above the levels of majority citizens a mere ten years later.
• The empowered minority citizens were able to improve the productivity of the private corporations and community agencies in which they worked ten years later.
• The empowered minority citizens contributed to repositioning the city as transitioning from the Industrial Age into an Information Age community.

All of this was brought to the attention of the community-at-large and the reviewers proclaimed the city, “The Springfield Miracle.”^[6] Springfield had risen—like Pheonix out of the ashes—to define itself as a thriving “Information Center.”

Saving Cultures

The next series of crises were also brought to Dad—although there was no specific invitation. For most Americans, cultural degeneration was a phenomenon that “crept upon us.” We were made unaware of the culture changes that took place by the continuous and incremental reinforcement systems of the consumer-driven economy. This story needs a little telling from Dad’s perspective.

World War II had unleashed the awesome productivity of the American people. Indeed, as much as anything else, America’s soldiers were successful because of America’s accelerating manufacturing capacity which provided the armaments and logistical support to the fighting men. It was a tribute to this very same morale, motivation, and mentality that warranted the Bretton Woods I concession. It tapped into the work ethic and fighting spirit of American men and women, many of whom were first generation Americans.

Indeed, it defined and reinforced a producer-driven economy that out-produced the world, not just in goods and services but in creativity and solutions. The producer-driven economy led the market on an elevating and escalating curve of growth. The people prospered and, indeed, flourished in generating their own unique American culture exemplified by the following conditions factored out by Dad’s research with Rob Owen and Hernan Oyarzabal:^[7]

• Cultural relating transformed America from a “boiling cauldron” to a “melting pot” and provided the human capital support for “The Production Machine.”
• Participative governance transformed Americans from the dependent minions of autocratic Anglophiles to the enlightened citizens of a transparent and accountable government.
• Free enterprise economics transformed Americans from extensions of their own industrial machinery to entrepreneurial capitalists in a generative economy of their own making.

Dad did extensive research relating these operationally-defined measures to global prosperity: those cultures and countries that were rated high on these conditions prospered; those countries that were rated low were impoverished. With correlations around .7, he concluded the following:

Saving Economies

The American system was a “groove” for the producer mentality. Working with John T. Kelly, Emeritus Director, Advanced Systems Development, IBM, Dad found that companies like IBM exemplified “The Golden Age of Industry” with “The GIC System”:^[8]

• Generators made “breakthroughs” at The Watson Center.
• Innovators made “applications” at Advanced Systems Development.
• Commercializers made profits with their ubiquitous marketing arms.

The Generators, Innovators, and Commercializers related together interdependently in “The GIC System.” Each component had its own unique functions. Yet all components were committed to integrating their individual contributions into the company mission. Their motto was “THINK!” Recognizing that all stood together or all fell apart, Dad felt privileged to be a part of “The Golden Age of Business for America.”

Dad has gone on to design the Generativity Positioning System™ or GPS™as follows:

• Generative–Innovator-driven Positioning Economic Functions;
• Entrepreneurial Enterprise-driven Cultural Components;
• New Capital Development-driven Community processes.

The GPS™ empowers us to generate any positioning in the marketplace and enables us to design the architecture and define the operations to implement the positioning.

These dimensions converge in an operational definition of “The Generative Entrepreneur:”

• Generativity Functions,
• Entrepreneurial Components,
• New Capital Processes.

Verbally, Entrepreneurship is defined as follows:

Generativity functions are accomplished by Entrepreneurial components empowered by New Capital processes.

The Generativity Prototype

All of this may seem like the life of a cultural relator, an enlightened citizen, a true “do-gooder.” This is indeed the case.

But more than anything else, Dad was the prototype for his entrepreneurial message. Indeed, the man was the message: “The Generative Entrepreneur.”

In the process of generating goods and services, and solutions and perspectives, Dad was also generating wealth for the benefit of us all. We may view his milestones in Human Capital Development (HCD) developmentally and cumulatively:

• Dad began with texts that are still considered classics in the late 1960s: Helping and Human Relations (HR) (1969) and The Development of Human Resources (HRD) (1971) and The Art of Helping (1972) which generated more than $20 million.
• Founded in 1970, HRD Press, Inc. sold nearly $150 million worth of books over the next 40 years.
• Established in 1980, Human Technology, Inc. or HTI grossed more than $350 million of business in human technology designs over the next 30 years.
• With his contributions of Human Relations and Human Generativity, Dad drove the HRD field into its next phase of development with his trademark, “HCD—Human Capital Development^Ô.” It is a market now valued at more than $1,000,000,000,000.

His two entrepreneurial companies, HRD, Inc. and HTI, have grossed one-half billion dollars and, he adds, “simply by generating the future!”

This is a culminating demonstration of the prepotent power of “The Generative Entrepreneur:”

He and his associates are now working on the generation of the next trillion dollar market, “OCD—Organizational Capital Development™.”

Saving America

All of this brings me back to the passion of Dad’s life: “Saving America.”

Dad addresses this topic in “The Generativity Solution.”

His databases tell him that the two constructs—Economic Freedom and the Generative Entrepreneur—converge to account for nearly all of Prosperity.

Economic freedom in synergy (‹-›) with generative entrepreneurs generates all forms of wealth and prosperity.

Dad believes freedom and generativity are synergistic processing partners: the entrepreneurs generate under the conditions of freedom; freedom is generated by the successful initiatives of the entrepreneurs.

My father believes, as only a scientist can, that we are being taken in the other direction—away from freedom, away from generativity, toward socialistic controls. This destroys the American spirit of ingenuity and self-determination. It is the wrong direction for America!

I know that Mark Twain found his father to have grown wiser over the years. I have, too!

Maybe we made a mistake skipping over “The Competent Generation” in favor of “The Boomers” and now the “X’ers!”

When our fathers speak, we might want to listen! They lived in an “Age of Ingenuity,” the spirit of which we need to reinvigorate.

Keep rowing, Dad!

Robert W. Carkhuff, Editor
Human Resource Development Press
Amherst, Massachusetts
January 1, 2010