After Hillsdale I attended UC Berkeley. I started out in Political Science and participated in an American Studies honors program, but then switched to Psychology. After Berkeley I helped run an early "growth center" (think Esalen Institute) in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I married the woman who was running the program and I managed the administrative side of the Center and helped with the program. However my first wife died quite suddenly.
A while later I left the mountains, remarried, and moved to Palo Alto. My new wife and I had a conglomerate family, which at one point consisted of five teenage kids. I worked for several years for an electronics company doing recruiting and management development. While there my boss was very involved in a program called Parent Effectiveness Training. I was discovering that my knowledge of psychology really did very little to equip me to be a parent, so I got involved in Parent Effectiveness first as a parent and then as an instructor. After while I got so involved that I became Northern California Coordinator of Parent Effectiveness Training, helping to get the program launched in Northern California. I also helped Tom Gordon, the founder of Parent Effectiveness Training, develop a training course called Leader Effectiveness Training. Tom later wrote a best-selling book based on that material.
I think went out on my own as a consultant -- at the ripe age of 27, what was I thinking! For a couple of years I did primarily organizational development work, but one of my clients approached me and asked if I could help them figure out how to run effective public meetings. They were required by new environmental laws to consult the public, and nobody quite understood what that meant. It's true that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king. I knew just enough to help them, and then began helping a number of federal and state agencies develop public participation processes. That was in 1972. My timing was fortunate and I was able to help develop this new field and am now considered a sort of "guru" in that field. Since then I've worked on hundreds of projects for numerous government agencies and utility companies.
I've written three books on public participation, and co-authored books related to social impact assessment and another on new ways of working (e.g. working in remote virtual teams). I've co-authored a popular market book on recovery from cancer (called Getting Well Again) and also a conflict book for couples called Don't Go Away Mad in hardback and How Loving Couples Fight in paperback. While promoting my books I appeared on more than 100 local, regional and national radio and television shows. Along the way I also completed a Ph.D. in Psychology through an external degree program. My wife and I live in Los Gatos. Most of the kinds live nearby (although one died), and we do our grandparenting thing. It sure beats parenthood! I'm still working full-time and will probably continue to do so. We were invested heavily in real estate before the recession, so we've got some recovering to do ourselves.
Hi to you all!
