Wolfe

Arthur Wolfe, 101, of College Station, Texas died Jan 31, 2019. Born to Catherine and Ernest Wolfe, he grew up in Coral Gables, Florida. B.A. Columbia University. M.A. University of Wisconsin. Ph.D. University of Chicago.

Appointed Course Grader by Professor Rexford Guy Tugwell (the principal architect of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Social Security Act, and a former Governor of Puerto Rico) for Tugwell’s University of Chicago graduate management course.

Asked what he was most proud of in his life, Wolfe would smile, as if it were not self-evident, and point to his unusually close, devoted 62-year marriage to Jane. A loving partnership of strong equals that raised three fine men – Brett, Kent, and Grant.

At their 50th wedding anniversary celebration, Wolfe told fellow celebrants that he was not like most older people. Their main concern, he said, is whether they will run out of health first or run out of money first. His main concern was when would he taper down from the attraction stage of early married life to the attachment stage of later married life. After only 50 years of married life he confessed that he was still stalled in the attraction stage. And, it never changed!

Most of Wolfe’s life he worked in industry in Human Resources – in charge of corporate HR departments for three companies and as a Management Consultant. Throughout, he was strongly performance-oriented, a vigorous believer in basing personnel decisions on the individual person’s merit, not on his seniority, his university loyalty, or being a member of a particular group – working with hiring officers to put together a race-gender-ethnic-blind work force able and willing to meet the needs of management.

Thus, one of the first (the early 50s) to fight openly for and cause the hiring and promotion of qualified blacks and women into jobs previously denied them. And, thus, one of the first to strongly oppose (to the extent practicable) politically correct “racial paternalism”, the term used by black U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for affirmative action and quotas for hiring and diversity.

An analytic innovator, Wolfe constructed and used relevant and objective personnel processes. Unlike many companies that screen candidates for their corporate executive and other management positions by “passing the candidate along from one company executive to the next company executive”, Wolfe screened corporate candidates with one- and two-day written and performance tests and open-ended interview.

For several companies he also screened and coached company managers in customized group assessment-training sessions, and, with supervising executives, made promotions and other personnel decisions.

As a Management-By-Objectives Consultant to such diverse organizations as paper manufacturing mills, industrial chemical plants, poultry companies, a fishery and a city fire department, Wolfe built consensus between top management and the department head or the manager to establish the “key result areas” of the manager to be measured, and a realistic, quantifiable “standard” for each level of performance on each “key result area”.

One company President said, “Doc has really upgraded our management team. I call him my ‘Manager Quality Control Man.’”

Chairman, American Management Association personnel seminars -- New York City, Atlanta, Dallas.

In 1969 Wolfe took a 12-year detour from full-time corporate employment, exchanging his Corporate Director of Employee Relations job with an oil and gas company in Corpus Christi for that of an Associate Professor of Management at Texas A&M University.

Bringing real-world, practical, corporate experience to academia, he was active at A&M outside the classroom: Management Consultant to the University’s Vice President-Finance on projects at Prairie View and Tarleton State, as well as A&M’s Main Campus Personnel Department.