In Memoriam

This past week, I lost a business mentor and good friend, Dr. Richard T. Crowder.

Dr. Crowder served as the Chief Agricultural Trade Negotiator in the office of The United States Trade Representative and as Undersecretary of Agriculture for International Affairs. More recently, Dr. Crowder was the C.G. Thornhill Professor of Agricultural Trade at Virginia Tech.

I first met Dick when he was the Corporate Risk Officer for the Pillsbury Company. I was hired to work on his team as an Agricultural Economist. My job was to build economic models to forecast agricultural commodity prices and use the results to make buying decisions.  Millions of dollars were at stake, and every decision had to be cleared through Dick. 

Every Thursday, Dick convened a meeting to review forecasts and purchasing strategies. He had the sharpest, quickest mind of anyone I had ever met. Furthermore, he was undeterred by conflict. In fact, I believe he reveled in it!  Dick’s relentless penetrating logic could take anyone down. Even Division Presidents steered clear of him when they could. 

Dick was a master of the Socratic management style. His approach was to grill you in front of your peers with questions designed to pick apart the fine nuances of your position. He was a genius at this. I remember fine-tuning my forecasts for weeks only to have Dick shoot them down with a couple of well-placed questions. More than once, I have seen graduate degreed economists and seasoned buyers with tears in their eyes as they attempted to stand up to Dick’s questioning. One of them was me! The best way to describe those meetings was being on the witness stand facing an expert prosecutor and knowing you were going to jail!

Dick was as hard as nails. Once, I traveled with him to Miami to make a strategy presentation to Burger King corporate management. Miami in July was unbearably hot. As I was heading back to my room after dinner the night before the meeting, Dick said, “I’ll see you in the lobby at 5 AM, Coats; we’re going for a run.” Dick was fifteen years my senior, and I relished the chance to give him a little payback by running him into the ground. 

The time and temperature sign read 5:00 AM—89 degrees when we exited the hotel lobby the next morning. I am certain the humidity was even higher. The sun wasn’t up yet when we took off into the streets of Miami. After about an hour, I could see my plan of running Dick into the ground had failed. Instead, I found myself struggling to keep going. Long story short, we ran ten miles that morning. I must have lost 5 pounds in perspiration. 

That was forty-five years ago. Those were different times—before it became in vogue to give everyone participation medals and exercise caution not to offend. Surviving my tour of duty with Dr. Crowder was much harder than earning a graduate degree and more valuable, too! Under Dick, you delivered excellence or didn’t survive. Dick didn’t hand out participation metals, and he most certainly didn’t suffer fools. But the story doesn’t end there. Every single person I know who worked under Dick’s tutelage ended up having a highly successful career. To a person, they attribute a large part of their success to the training and discipline Dick provided early in their careers. Senior executives, successful business owners, and a University President are among that group. 

Dick and I stayed in touch for over thirty years after he left Pillsbury. He read this blog and would occasionally call with comments. I last spoke with him a couple of weeks ago when he called to let me know he was in hospice care. We had a long, difficult conversation (because of heartfelt emotions). I reminded him of our sweltering run in Miami. He remembered it and closed the conversation with, “We had a good run together!”

Yes, we did! 

Rest peacefully, my friend!

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