Making good ideas useful
Beginning with building the Peace Corps

Sally Bowles ’56

Sally Bowles has lived her remarkable professional life at the intersection of big, bold ideas that would affect millions of people, and the challenge of implementation. She has focused on making change happen. She was a member of the small team that worked with Sargent Shriver to develop the Peace Corps. She worked with John Lindsay to decentralize New York City public schools. She was the director of Medicaid and then in charge of welfare programs for the state of Connecticut. Sally left the public sector in 1990 to assist the president of the Rockefeller Foundation on a major initiative with Nelson Mandela in South Africa and later served as a consultant to the Rockefeller Foundation on its $45 million program to build international leadership concerning the global environment and sustainable development. She now is a director of the Charles & Helen Schwab Foundation and a consultant to several national nonprofits. Prior to that, she was president of the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation. The Tremaine Foundation initiated the Coordinated Campaign for Learning Disabilities, the first national public-education campaign to inform Americans about learning disabilities. Sally has prolonged and enriched the legacy of public service established by her family.

“When I entered Milton, we had been living in India for two years; my father (Chester Bowles) was President Truman’s ambassador to India, right after Indian independence. Living there at that time was a pivotal experience. My father had left the business world in his mid-thirties to take up public service; so for me, it was public sector all the way.

“He was governor of Connecticut when I was 10, ambassador when I was 12, and he went on to serve in Congress.
I decided early on against running for elected office;
I thought that what you had to do to get elected sort of distracted you from the things you cared about getting done.

“I have always been most gratified working at the junction of vision and implementation. There are lots of great ideas lining the shelves. My strong suit has been not so much developing or researching more ideas as taking some of the good ones off the shelf and making them useful for people. I particularly like start-ups, when all of the big, basic questions have to be asked and answered—clarifying goals, picking plausible strategies, determining how the organization will be structured, financed and staffed.

“Six people began building the Peace Corps, and there were many huge choices that were made by brilliant people, talking to one another about volunteers’ roles, and selection, and training—so many other things. Watching that organization grow was a fabulous education. Then Kennedy died, and I was looking around for the next ‘new frontier.’

I thought it had to be John Lindsay in New York City.
“That was hardly a start-up, but decentralizing the schools was a huge change in a large-scale operation. It was an entirely new experience to work with an established, highly regulated bureaucracy with lots of history [New York City school system, Connecticut Medicaid, then Connecticut AFDC]. You had to ask the question: ‘How do you change without starting over?’ That’s a whole different set of challenges. I gravitate to the early stages of implementing an important, big idea.

“I’ve sometimes thought that the period when I’m at my best is when I know the least. That’s when you ask dumb questions, but they’re often good questions, because you’re not inhibited by what you know.

“I think lots of people underestimate the power of their generic capacities; they shortchange their own native abilities, their intuition, their gut, their questions. I’ve said to them, ‘Now hold on, vision doesn’t spring from a spreadsheet; analysis only gets you so far.’ You need judgment, good antennae—to know why something is important, who cares about making a change, and who cares about the status quo. And you need to get into the shoes of other people without losing your own grounding. That’s not manipulative; it informs the process.

“It’s too bad when the emphasis on higher degrees and specialization overshadows the importance of basic liberal arts. That process of how you grow at school is so mysterious—which inherent capacities you brought and which were cultivated once you got there.

“I decided to leave government in 1990 (I’d been there since 1960), to see how it would be in a less regulated environment. I thought about foundations, where you could stand back, identify and seize opportunities to be the bridge, to fill the gap between an idea and its implementation. I realized that I am not fussy about subject matter—education, health care, another field—as long as it squares with my values, is large in scope, and is important. All along, I found I thrived on new situations, new environments, new relationships, and on learning an entirely new field.

“My friend Peter Goldmark, who also worked with John Lindsay and had led such large governmental organizations as the welfare department in Massachusetts and the New York/New Jersey Port Authority, was then head of the Rockefeller Foundation. Lots of people can’t see the wider applicability of government experience or that the challenges are as tough as any in the private sector. It was fortunate that he did, and that he invited me to help him in South Africa.

“The foundation world enables important change but can be pretty far removed from implementation. I have to watch out, because many times I’d rather be the grantee, making change happen, working where the tough and interesting decisions have to be made.

“I figured out when I was a child that the person who had the most influence in my father’s daily work was his secretary. I didn’t care about title. I wanted four things: to work with strong people I respect, to be engaged with big ideas, to have influence, and to have fun. For my first job out of college, I decided to work for a congressman rather than a senator, because the office would be smaller, and I’d be exposed to the whole thing. That began a pattern of working with the whole picture.”


Cathleen Everett

 

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