Originally published by Tom Monahan on LinkedIn: Bringing "Jerry Sorkin U" to Life
If you spend any time with me, you’ll hear me talk often about “limited sample sets.” (Yes, I am that horrible to spend time with). I’m usually trying to figure out whether I have enough data to draw a conclusion on some issue — important or otherwise — and I’m acutely aware that I’m prone to reason off smaller data sets than is advisable. Just last week, I announced to my family that — having attended an event at an embassy in Washington that it was “probably the most beautiful embassy in town.” Or, more accurately, the more beautiful of the two I’d actually been inside. So this habit of checking the robustness of my data set is probably healthy.
After nearly 3 decades in and around business, I feel I've amassed the sample set necessary to make the following statement -- world-class business minds are not always found inside of world-class human beings. I'm not saying that these attributes are necessarily negatively correlated, but they certainly aren't positively correlated either. Which is what made Jerry Sorkin such a special case. Jerry was a senior leader at CEB for more than two decades (we started, quite literally, on the same day) until his passing last autumn, and was an instrumental part of our growth and profit across that period -- launching and leading many of our businesses, developing distinctive skills and capabilities across the company, and teaching and mentoring generations of CEB, now Gartner leaders. He was also a world-class human being who routinely had huge impact on our customers, colleagues, and communities -- and pretty much anyone else he came into contact with.
His last "run" at the company was focused on building out our "CEB in the Community" platform, an innovative set of programs that linked our resources, people, and capabilities to the social sector in the communities where we worked. A cornerstone of this effort was a program he developed to give seasoned and rising senior leaders the tools to contribute to nonprofit organizations as effective board members. It was unsurprising that his efforts in this vector focused intensely on people and their development -- for all of his gifts as a business person, his ability to coach and mentor his colleagues -- and the business community as a whole -- is legendary. My LinkedIn dashboard tells me I have about 4,000 connections -- my guess is that at least half of them are, like me, proud graduates of Jerry Sorkin University.