When Mr. Jones Went to Washington

Aug. 20, 2013

A reminiscence of corporate statesmanship of the past, and the corporate statesman, Reginald H. Jones, chairman and CEO of General Electric Co. from 1972 until 1981. And a challenge to identify the statesman and stateswoman of today.

John McClenahen

He was admired for his “intelligence, integrity, and interest in those around him.”

In the politically, socially, and economically turbulent 1970s, he worked “to find common ground,” meeting directly with members of Congress and advising three U.S. presidents.

In 1980, in a Wall Street Journal/Gallup survey, he was named the most respected U.S. business executive.

He was Reginald H. Jones, chairman and CEO of General Electric Co. from 1972 until 1981, a person whom current GE chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt has described as “a great statesman for the entire business community.”

Now, nearly 40 years later, who are the business statesmen and stateswomen? The leaders in manufacturing and other business sectors who are widely respected and admired both inside and outside business? Leaders who genuinely encourage wide-ranging discussion, particularly when it has the potential to challenge established interests.

No names leap to mind.

Have the times and the nature of business both in the U.S. and abroad so changed that business statesmen and stateswomen are not needed or welcomed? Have technological advances, a 24-hour news cycle, and social media made them irrelevant? Or might business statesmen and stateswomen be needed now more than ever before?

In addition to these business-related questions, there are broader questions that deserve to be asked: What has happened to respect? What has happened to discussion? What is the greater interest—and is it really so different from self-interest?

In their times, GE’s Reg Jones and DuPont & Co. Chairman and CEO Irving Shapiro were admired and respected for their thoughts, for their actions, and for the ways they conducted themselves. Those remain good criteria for judging the statesmanship of today’s managers in manufacturing—and not only the statesmanship of chief executive officers, chief operating officers, chief financial officers, chief information officers, and chief research officers.

“What will be expected of managers in the future?” GE’s Reg Jones once asked rhetorically. “Intellectual breadth, strategic capability, social sensitivity, political sophistication, world-mindedness, and, above all, a capacity to keep their poise amid the crosscurrents of change,” he said.

That is a definition of statesmanship that stands the tests of time and circumstance.

This is another of a series of occasional essays by John S. McClenahen, who retired from IndustryWeek in 2006 and remains an interested observer of global manufacturing.

About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.

      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).

      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.

      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”

      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.

      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.