Chapter 02: Education and Work Experience

Chapter 02: Education and Work Experience

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Dr. Leach begins this segment with a brief overview of his modest family beginnings in Port Norris, New Jersey, where his father worked as an oyster fisherman. (He tells an anecdote about owning his own boat at the age of twelve.) He then shifts to the educational and professional path. He begins with his long relationship with The Prudential Insurance Company of America (1963 – 1973) where he began working while earning his Associates Degree from Cumberland County College in New Jersey (conferred 1969). Dr. Leach explains that he didn’t have the money to go to college, so he worked full time at Prudential (with claims) and attended class at night for virtually all of his schooling, including his undergraduate work at Rutgers University (B.S. 1973) and his studies for his M.B.A. at Widener University (1976). Once he received his MBA, he was fast-tracked at Prudential, leading to an opportunity to serve as Vice President of Marketing in Nashville, Tennessee.

Identifier

LeachL_01_20121115_ C02

Publication Date

11-5-2012

City

Houston, Texas

Topics Covered

The Interview Subject's Story - Professional Path; Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents; Personal Background; Professional Path; The Administrator; Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents; Evolution of Career; Professional Practice; The Professional at Work; Faith, Values, Beliefs

Transcript

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah, that’s very true. Let’s go back and pick up that, because I was really interested when I was looking at your background and that shift between moving from the setting up of HMOs to slowly moving into more of the health delivery side. That seemed like a really interesting change in your own career path. Let me just ask you some other background questions and then kind of get to that part of your own development. First, for the record, where were you born and when?

Leon Leach, MBA, PhD :

I was born in Bridgeton, New Jersey, Bridgeton Hospital, in 1948.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

And did you grow up in New Jersey?

Leon Leach, MBA, PhD :

Yes.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

And in that same town? What’s the name of that town again? Leon Leach, MBA, PhD Well, no. Where I grew up is a little town called Port Norris, and if you can imagine Cape May, the cape coming out, it’s right there in what us locals would call the armpit of the cape, right as the cape comes out. Bridgeton was the county seat. Port Norris was a port town, maybe 1,000 people or so.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

And that’s Richton, R-I-C-H-T-O-N?

Leon Leach, MBA, PhD :

Bridge.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Bridgeton, okay.

Leon Leach, MBA, PhD :

Bridge, B-R-I-D-G-E.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Okay, I’m glad I asked.

Leon Leach, MBA, PhD :

Southern New Jersey. It’s the county seat of Cumberland County.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

And tell me a bit about your family and what you feel in your family background kind of tracked you into leadership.

Leon Leach, MBA, PhD :

Well, my father was an oysterman on the Delaware Bay. He had his own boat. I grew up on the water. I’ve always been partial to boating and do a lot of it. Well, I don’t do as much as I’d like. I’ve got to work too. He was a quiet man. He worked outdoors. The months in which you harvest oysters are months that have Rs in them, so you’re in the Delaware Bay anywhere from September through April. That’s not the nicest time to be in the Delaware Bay.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

That’s hard work.

Leon Leach, MBA, PhD :

And then when the oyster season was over, we’d go crabbing or fishing or whatever. There was a lot on the water. Neither of my parents is still alive. My mother lived to be ninety-two, and she was the spiritual backbone of the family. It’s not that Dad wasn’t, but it was very important to her that we all grow up in the church, and we had five of us. I was the oldest, and I had four sisters.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

What was the denomination you were raised in?

Leon Leach, MBA, PhD :

Baptist. I had a very Ozzie and Harriet type of family. It was blue collar. My dad—and by the time I was twelve, I was helping him on the boat, but it was a great life. It was a good town to grow up in. It was fun being on the water. I was never micromanaged by my parents. My mother was always skittish but my father—I had a boat when I was twelve and he had told me—it was like a dinghy only it was wood. It was about that size, and I had a 3.6-horsepower Scott-Atwater outboard motor. These are antiques today, and in the Delaware Bay if you go out of the river, the Maurice River, into the bay and the tide is flowing out, 3.6 horsepower isn’t enough to get you back in. He had told me—he’d be down working on the boats on Saturday or Sunday, and I’d go out on the river and play around on my boat, and he would tell me, “Don’t go out into the bay.” Of course, we used to go out all the time in his boat. He never explained to me why I shouldn’t go out in the bay, so this one day I couldn’t resist. I went out in the bay and I pretty quickly found out—there was an island where the river split, and instead of getting washed out I was able to get up behind the island, but I couldn’t get back in until the tide changed, which was probably a couple of hours. I came back in, and I wasn’t going to say anything to Dad. I figured out why I wasn’t supposed to go out in the bay now because of the tide, so I tied the boat up and went over, and he’s working on the engine. He’s changing the oil or something, and he didn’t even look up. He just said, “So how was the bay?” I said, “Well, I figured out why you don’t want me to go out there.” He says, “Yeah. Let’s not tell your mom about this, okay?” He was very enabling, and I had a lot of fun, a lot of great adventures. I went to this one men’s retreat when I lived out in California, and it was one of these things where folks would talk about their childhood and all that, and I was shocked at some of the adversity that some of these adult men grew up with. It was one of those kumbaya things where they’re expecting you to share, and I’m sorry, but I had a very normal childhood. It was Ozzie and Harriet.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Call me boring.

Leon Leach, MBA, PhD :

I don’t have any good stories to tell you.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

That’s funny. What did you major in when you went to college, and how did you track into your career?

Leon Leach, MBA, PhD :

Business? I could not say I was driven to be a business person. I kind of looked at the choices, and I took some accounting courses in high school, and it was easy for me. I got it. I understood the theory. It’s kind of a natural thing and I actually took enough—I needed three more credits to have a dual degree in accounting, and when I tell people that they’re like, “Why didn’t you do that?” The only good it would do me is if I wanted to sit for the CPA, but back then, and still very similar to today, you had to work in an auditing shop and audit, and that’s not what I wanted to do. It was the business side that appealed to me.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

What did you see yourself—what was it that you visualized when you saw yourself thinking about that business side?

Leon Leach, MBA, PhD :

A generalist. I didn’t have—I knew the financials. Understanding the numbers was important, because that’s what makes businesses differ. It’s the bottom line. I knew that that came natural to me. I had a good feel for that. But I never really saw myself being an accountant. I never really saw myself being a CFO. I saw myself as being a business person. It was more general, broader, and in my career at one point in time I was an assembly language programmer. You tell anyone that, and that’s almost before anyone in the computer age knew—

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

I’ve never even heard the term.

Leon Leach, MBA, PhD :

It’s a very arcane language. It’s very close to machine language. It’s very close to turning the bits and bytes off and on. It’s a tedious language to write in. I did that for a while. It was kind of a process of, okay, that’s not what I want to do. But it was all within the business structure, and most of it has been in healthcare. I spent three years as a CFO in Prudential’s real estate subsidiary, but other than that, it was all healthcare. And your comment earlier about going to the delivery side, it’s interesting, because when you track my career, that’s what I did, but when we were starting HMOs, I saw myself as being part of a delivery system. These were health maintenance organizations. We primarily did group model HMOs where you—it’s like Kaiser. Kaiser is actually a group model where the delivery side is very much connected to the insurance side. We call them integrated health plans today. That’s a little bit broader. That includes the hospital and all. I was on the business side of those transactions, but we actually developed medical groups that we worked with. Miller Medical Group in Nashville was Prudential’s second HMO. The first one was in the building that we imploded. I came down here to set up their financial systems.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Okay.

Leon Leach, MBA, PhD :

The big, distinct change was coming here, because that did get me more out of the commercial world and into a different environment.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Into an academic world. Now, you got your BS in ’73 from Rutgers, and then your MBA was 1976 from Widener University. Am I pronouncing that correctly?

Leon Leach, MBA, PhD :

Yes.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

And where is Widener?

Leon Leach, MBA, PhD :

Widener is Chester, Pennsylvania, just south of Philadelphia. It was freshly named Widener University. It had been Pennsylvania Military College, PMC. But during the Vietnam era, they ran into funding difficulties. The Widener family is a well-known, mainline Philadelphia family that donated a lot of money, and basically the school chose to change their name.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Interesting. Now, as I was looking at your background, you had a very long relationship with the Prudential Insurance Company.

Leon Leach, MBA, PhD :

Twenty-five years.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah, 1967 to 1993, so ’67, that’s even before you graduated from college. Tell me about that because I remember when I was reading some of the background materials—and actually, there was a letter that John Mendelsohn wrote to the faculty when you were going to come to the institution. He mentioned the long relationship with Prudential. Could you tell me about what you did for them? And part of the reason I’m asking is because obviously your long relationship with medically related insurance was part of the reason that you were so perfect for the position here. I’m interested in the development of that perspective and looking down the road to what you were bringing to MD Anderson.

Leon Leach, MBA, PhD :

I actually—like I mentioned, we were a blue-collar family. There was an oyster blight in the Delaware Bay that basically killed off the oysters. They came back as I was a young man, so we didn’t have a lot of finances for me to go to school. I worked, and I went to Cumberland County College and have an associate’s degree from Cumberland County College, a two-year school, and then I transferred to Rutgers. I did one year—I had enough money to do one year full time at Cumberland County College, but all the rest of my schooling has been at night or part time. I went to Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. They have a branch there, and one of the things I discovered is I had some daytime professors, but it was mostly nighttime. The vast majority was evening school, and they had adjunct faculty for the evening school, and these are people that are out recruiting HR or information systems or they’re the finance people, and they come in and teach the finance course or the human relations course. I found that the daytime teachers, it was a lot of theory, which was good. But the nighttime teachers had made it work. They put it into practice, and I thought I got a very good education, because it was primarily people that had done it. And then I went on for an MBA at Widener, and that was in the evenings. That was over the bridge from Southern New Jersey. It was all working during the day and then driving to school and driving back. It was roughly about a forty-mile trip for both Rutgers and Widener. When I first started at Widener, the choice was either a ferry to cross the Delaware River, or you had to go through Wilmington, Delaware, and come up, which added about a half a dozen miles to the trip. But my favorite story as my—we have three sons—as our sons were growing up I would tell them that I had to drive through three states to get my degree. (laughs) Well, three states is like from here to Katy.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

True dedication. Of course it was.

Leon Leach, MBA, PhD :

Fortunately they had just opened—I think it was the Betsey Ross Bridge the second semester I was going to Widener, and that made the commute a lot easier. But when I got the bachelor’s degree, I was working with Prudential, and I was working in their Medicaid and Medicare office in Millville, New Jersey, which is where I went to high school. I thought, “Ah, a college graduate. I’ll go find myself a good job.” I went out and interviewed and stuff, and I found that I was further along in my career with Prudential than I would be just coming out of college, and Prudential had been good about moving me ahead. When I got the MBA I thought, “My ticket to Wall Street.” They promoted me to manager of the Medicaid claim operation, and I was significantly ahead of what I would be doing as a freshly minted MBA—perhaps not if it was a premier degree, Harvard or something like that—so I wound up staying with Prudential. I only really tested the waters a couple of times, and when I got the bachelor’s degree, they had put me on this kind of fast-track program for high-potential people. They would move you every two to three years so you’ll see—I don’t know how detailed the resume was that they sent you, but basically every two to three years I was doing something different, and it was great development for me.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

What were some of the lessons that you learned there? How did that develop your skill set?

Leon Leach, MBA, PhD :

Well, I think it made me a much broader person. I’ll give you an example. I guess I was still in my twenties. I was probably twenty-eight or twenty-nine. I was just about thirty, and I was working in the corporate office in Newark, New Jersey, and I was a similar language programmer, but I did a lot of systems design work. I did our first online system where you used the cathode ray tube that Prudential had. I was on this fast-track program, and I was literally just down the hall from the senior vice president of the group department, one of maybe twenty people that ran the company. The program was every so often he’d call you in, and it would be more like three to six months, how are you doing, are you happy, what are you working on, that kind of thing. At twenty-nine at one of these discussions, I said, “I think I’m being stereotyped. I think people were thinking that I’m just an IS guy and that I enjoy it.” I didn’t want to be stereotyped. I’m only twenty-nine years old. It was more my imagination than anything else, I think, so he asked me, “What would you like to do?” I said, “I really don’t know. I mean, you know the company. I want to be a generalist.” By now, the vision was coming more into focus. I didn’t want to be the techie. I didn’t want to be the one putting the numbers on, the debits on the left and the credits on the right, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, and businessman was too nebulous. I said, “You know the company better than I do. You know me. You know what my talents are and what my limitations are. What do you think I should do?” And of course, this flies in the face of never asking a question with a question, and also, the corporate America structure back then was very much the idea of looking for people that—I want to be a—you know. He said, “Well, let me give it some thought,” and we left it at that. Two weeks later on a Friday he walks into my cubbyhole. He would have closed the door if there was a door to close, I’m sure, and he said, “How would you like to be the vice president of marketing in our new HMO in Nashville, Tennessee?” And I got a look on my face. It must have been a shocked look because he watched my body language, and the next thing he said—I didn’t say anything. The next thing he said was, “You said you wanted something different. This is about as different as I could find.” I thought about it over the weekend, and I came back in on Monday and told him, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” Someone who grew up in Southern New Jersey finally made it to Newark, New Jersey, of all places. This is where Prudential’s headquarters were. I’m going to Nashville. What I was doing—I’d done two things, basically. I was in charge of the financials for approved care, but we had one HMO right here. Our first one was right here in Houston, and I’d flown down here and set up the books and that kind of thing, and I’d done some of the systems work, or they were done under my design. Now I’m going to be the VP of marketing. Really? Of HMO? They sent me to—it was called—the acronym was GROC, the GROC place. It was Group Rep Orientation Course. One of my classmates is now one of the four executive vice presidents at Prudential. Another one—she wasn’t really a classmate. She was a lawyer, but she is off that genre. We were kind of in the same program at Prudential. She’s now their general counsel. It was a good training, a good group, and that’s an example of how it broadened me as the boy who grew up on the Maurice River running around in a dinghy to somebody who had more experience.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Well, it took a little—I don’t know—courage or throwing caution to the wind—

Leon Leach, MBA, PhD :

Courage or stupidity, one or the other.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

—to ask the question, to kind of go against traditional corporate wisdom and ask the question. But it ended up being a great opportunity.

Leon Leach, MBA, PhD :

Yeah, it did. It opened the doors. It’s almost one begets another. One opportunity leads to the next.

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Chapter 02: Education and Work Experience

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