Teacher by Example

Thornton F. Bradshaw, who died Tuesday at age 7l, never stopped teaching, even after he left the Harvard Business School.

Fortunately for Southern California, his most effective teaching--during 17 years as the president of Arco--was by example. It is a better place for his having lived and worked here during those years before moving to New York City and new challenges.

His examples included major corporate donations to charity and the arts, and positions on social issues often at odds with his fellow chief executive officers. It did not take long for Bradshaw’s example to mean that the first phone call went to Arco when some civic problem required help from business.

Most discourses on the need for corporations to take greater responsibility for problems in the society in which they produce goods or services come from outside business. Bradshaw worked on corporate responsibility from the inside, eloquent without being preachy. “Those who believe as I do in the market system,” he wrote, “must develop a more humanistic, responsible form of capitalism.”

Bradshaw probably was the most relaxed dynamo in American business--equally comfortable producing mild shock among environmentalists by taking their side on an issue or stunning oil executives, as he did recently, by advocating higher gasoline taxes to support energy research and conservation. Bradshaw was also a manager at the cutting edge of corporate technique, but most Southern Californians will remember him for the example that he set.