Arthur Gutenberg; Consultant Headed USC Minority Program

Arthur W. Gutenberg, management consultant and business educator at USC who helped members of minorities, including Pakistani students, work into the mainstream economy, has died. He was 80.

Gutenberg, who taught management and organization at the USC Marshall School of Business for 25 years, died Saturday in Pasadena of congestive heart failure, a USC spokesman said.

In the 1960s, Gutenberg headed Project Pakistan for USC and the federal Agency for International Development, developing textbooks, teachers and middle management.

“The nation has had to build its political and economic structure at once,” Gutenberg told The Times in 1965 when he worked with the University of Karachi, directing American experts who worked in Pakistan and Pakistani students who studied at USC. “We have had to inject cohesive management training in personnel problems, labor training and relations, finance, economics, accounting, product management, modern marketing and development of a good business library.”

Closer to home, Gutenberg also directed USC’s Consortium for Graduate Study for Minorities and helped develop an internship for his students with Los Angeles County.

Head of his own management consulting firm since 1960, Gutenberg was founding director of the Business Research Bureau at Arizona State University. At USC, following the Pakistan and minority projects, he spent 1980-88 as consultant and instructor for the School of Cinema-Television’s Peter Stark Producing Program.

An arbitrator for labor and commercial disputes, Gutenberg served in the Executive Service Corps of Southern California, headed the Los Angeles Quality and Productivity Commission from 1982 to 1984, and remained a member until his death.

The author of five books and myriad articles, Gutenberg became a popular speaker in the USC Emeriti College and earned its Leibovitz Award for Distinguished Service to Seniors.

Born in Germany, the management expert was the son of Beno Gutenberg, a geophysics professor who co-developed the Richter Scale used to measure earthquakes. Arthur Gutenberg grew up in America and earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in engineering and business at UC Berkeley and a doctorate in business at Stanford.

During World War II, he served in the Army’s Corps of Engineers and military intelligence. Making use of his ease with German, French and Italian, he interrogated German prisoners and served as town censor in Cassino, Italy.

Gutenberg is survived by his wife of 28 years, Barbara; five children from a previous marriage including twin sons, twin daughters and one other son; and one sister.

Services will be at 1:30 p.m. today at Wee Kirk O’ the Heather Church, Forest Lawn, Glendale.

The family has asked that, instead of flowers, memorial donations be sent either to the USC Emeriti College or to the American Heart Fund.