On June 28, Wayne Broehl, the Benjamin Ames Kimball Professor of the Science of Administration Emeritus, died peacefully in his sleep at his home in the Kendal retirement community in Hanover after a period of declining health. He was 83 years old and had remained active in his research until the last days of his life.
Born in Peoria, Illinois, and educated at the universities of Illinois (BS), Chicago (MBA), and Indiana (DBA), he had served in the military during WW II, joined the labor-relations staff at Western Electric, and was running his family's business while teaching part-time at Bradley University when Dean Karl Hill recruited him to Tuck in 1954. In anticipation of a wave of faculty retirements, Hill was looking to reconfigure the school—a goal Broehl helped to fulfill by creating seminal courses in business ethics and agribusiness that grew out of his endless curiosity about individuals in the larger world.
"Wayne was always exploring, searching for patterns, delving into areas where even the questions were not entirely clear," says his close friend and Tuck Dean Emeritus John Hennessey. "He wanted to get to the root of things." In addition to maintaining a full teaching load and a raft of civic responsibilities, Broehl authored 14 books on such varied subjects as the machine-tool industry in Springfield, Vermont, and the British Raj at the time of the Sepoy rebellion (based on a cache of old letters he'd purchased in India to enrich his stamp collection).
His experience at Western Electric spurred his interest in labor relations, which in turn led to his book on the Molly Maguires, the vigilante organization that sought to avenge management abuses in the Pennsylvania coal fields. That book, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 and inspired a movie starring Sean Connery, also fed his interest in business ethics, which in turn fostered his explorations into the special challenges of world food production.
"Wayne was a son of the Midwest," says H.J. Markley T'74, president of the agricultural division of Deere & Company. "He could stand in the middle of a field and understand what it meant." But he also understood that "this business of grain, livestock, and fiber," as Lee Arbuckle T'81, who owns the Arbuckle Ranch in Billings, Montana, puts it, had evolved over time. Broehl recognized that farms and ranches are no longer major food production sites, says Arbuckle, and that agriculture's downstream activities of processing, marketing, and finance have a major impact on the worldwide economy.
Keith Harrison T'72
These concerns led to a research effort for the Ford Foundation to promote entrepreneurship in rural villages in India, resulting in his book The Village Entrepreneur, which was published by Harvard University Press in 1978. "Wayne asked us to devise a marketing campaign to sell Indian men on the idea of using a prophylactic for birth control—not what you'd expect to be doing on a given day at Tuck," says Markley. "We flailed around until we realized that we had to appeal to Indian men's sense of pride." Broehl was making the point, he says, that you have to understand a culture to achieve business success.
Broehl's focus on global food production culminated in his classic histories of John Deere and Cargill, books that set the gold standard for business histories. (He was at work on the third volume of the Cargill series at the time of his death.) But perhaps it was his required course on Business Environments that had the most lasting impact. "He wanted us to understand how our daily actions in the business world affected other people," says Keith Harrison T'72, whose company grows naval oranges in Fresno, California. "He wanted to make sure that we never sacrificed our honor or integrity in the battle to get ahead and to ask ourselves what getting ahead even meant. He wanted to elevate our character, and he did it not only from the lectern but through the sheer weight of his own goodness. He was a very kind man."
