Walter Paul Blass

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Walter Paul Blass (born March 31, 1930) is a Holocaust survivor, business executive, educator and former civil servant in the fields of strategic planning, cross-cultural relations and mentoring.

Early life and education

Walter Blass was born in 1930 in Dinslaken, Germany. His Austrian father, Richard Blass, was an engineer at Humboldt-Deutz-Motoren in Düsseldorf, and later a patent attorney.

The family fled to Belgium in 1935 as Hitler banned Jews from the practice of law, medicine and government. Five years later, when Walter was 10, World War II broke out, and the family became refugees in France. Richard obtained American visas with the help of the Quakers in Marseille, and by May 1941, succeeded in emigrating to New York. Walter went to sixth grade in New York City, junior high school in West Hartford, Connecticut, The Choate School for three years, and then Swarthmore College where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics with Honors in 1951. He went on to graduate school at Princeton University and Columbia University, where he obtained his M.A. in International Economics in 1953.

Career

In 1954, Blass was commissioned as an Ensign in the U.S. Navy and served as Commissary and Disbursing officer on the USS Orion (AS-18) for 18 months. On promotion to Lieutenant (junior grade) he was assigned to the USS Joyce, a Destroyer Radar vessel in the North Atlantic, as Supply Officer. In 1957, following his active service, he became Assistant Desk Officer for Laos in Washington in the Foreign Aid Program. In late 1958 he moved to New Jersey to take over his father's place in the consulting firm because of the latter's Amtrak train accident. In 1961, he was hired as one of the first three economists in the Bell System and was mentored by Robert K. Greenleaf. In 1966 he took a leave of absence to serve as Country Director for the Peace Corps in Afghanistan.

On his return in 1968, he moved to the New York Telephone subsidiary of AT&T where he served for 12 years as Director-Strategic Planning. Blass returned to AT&T in 1982 following the breakup of AT&T by the Department of Justice. He retired from AT&T in 1985 when he was appointed Executive-in-residence at Fordham University's MBA program to teach the capstone course, but also to teach in their undergraduate program. In 1990, he became a Visiting Professor in the Grenoble Graduate School of Business in France where he also taught in Moscow, Mexico City, Belgrade, Singapore and Munich. He concurrently started a consulting practice with clients such as AT&T International in Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, as well as McKinsey, McDonnell Douglas and the CIA's Program on Nuclear Non-Proliferation. He was asked by the American Management Association to conduct classes in Strategic Planning and gave lectures on the topic throughout the world. Princeton University asked him to interview prospective students from 2002 to 2018. Since 1972 he has been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, lecturing at 13 colleges and universities such as Earlham, Meredith, Lawrence University, Oklahoma Baptist, University of North Georgia, Wheaton (IL) and Brevard College. He was asked to join the Board of Trustees at Guilford College in 1975 and was given Trustee Emeritus status after 43 years' service. He is listed in Google Scholar, in American Men and Women in Science and in Who's Who in America currently.

Personal life

Blass married Janice Minott of Portland, ME, in 1954 and had three children: Kathryn, Christopher and Gregory. They were divorced in 1984.

Bibliography

• "How Small Business can succeed Abroad," Business Horizons, pp. 103–110, Winter 1961
• "Steel Mills for Developing Economies," Social and Economic Studies, Vol II, No 2, June 1962, University of the West indies
• "Devalue the Dollar?," Wall Street Journal, Sept 21,1962
• "The Common Market and U.S. Electronics," Signal 17, 14–16, July 1963
• "Economic Planning: European-Style," Harvard Business Review, Sept 1963
• "Corporate Governance: What's Ahead," Planning Review, North American Society for Corporate Planning, NY, NY, Dec l974
• "Corporate Planning and Psychotherapy: Bringing Your Company to Self-Knowledge," Managerial Planning, July '80
• "Optimizing the Corporate Planning Function" Chapter 6, The Strategic Management Handbook, (McGraw Hill, 1982)
• "Ten Years of Business Planning" in Long Range Planning, Pergamon Press, London, March 1983
• "DPers must readjust Career Ideas . . . Walter P. Blass, Director Strategic Planning at AT&T told the Association of Women in Computing," Computerworld, March 14, 1983
• "Organizing for Strategic Planning," in Chapter 3,The Handbook of Strategic Planning (Wiley & Sons, NY 1985)
• "The Inevitable AT&T Break-up: An Interview with Walter Blass," New Management (Univ. of Southern California., Spring l986)
• "The Strategic Choices that Face Jim Olson (AT&T)," Chief Executive, Jan/Feb 1988
• "The Bridgestone Tire Company; A Case Study of the Implementation of Total Quality Control," (Fordham Univ. Faculty Working Papers, 1988)
• "The Swiss Watch Industry (A) 1970–1980. A case study of an industry under competitive threat by Japanese and Hong Kong low cost manufacturing, responding with a Porter and Gilbert-type competitive analysis." Copyright 1988 Angelo Zapalla and Walter P. Blass
• "NEC Cellular Telephone Manufacturing in Oregon: A Case study of Globalization, Total Quality Control and Employee Relations in a Japanese company subsidiary." Written for the XXVth World Management Congress, N.Y.C. l989. Reprinted in James E. Hennessy & Suki Robbins, Managing Toward the Millennium (Fordham University Press, New York 1991)
• The Impact of New Telecommunications Technologies on Urban Areas; read at Colloquium: Les Nouvelles Technologies de Communication dans la Ville, Ecole Nationale des Travaux Publics de l'Etat, Lyon, France, April 18, 1990
• "The Takeover of Norton Company – 1998" A Case study of a foreign takeover of a major U.S. manufacturer." Published by American Management Association (NY,1982)
• "The Failed VOLVO-RENAULT Merger – 1993, A Case study of how the restructuring of the 23rd and 8th largest European carmakers failed due to CEO arrogance, nationalism, poor timing, and corporate cultures." Copyright Walter P. Blass 1994
• "Key Success Factors in Small College Planning" by Walter P. Blass and Betty R. Turner (Guilford College working papers, 1996)
• "Teaching Case Method in France" by John Sadowsky and Walter Blass, read at World Case Research Colloquium, Lund, Sweden, pp 117–124, June 2001, (WACRA.org)

References

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