40 years of DAI

Agricultural engineer
Jim Wolf died of
cancer in June
2001. DAI’s Jim
Wolf Fellowship
honors his legacy
of mentorship and
learning, each year
providing two junior
or midlevel staff with
funding to expand
their professional
knowledge.
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ageable travel schedules and compensation
at or near the top of the profession. To make
these changes, DAI was forced to tighten up its
“corporate lifestyle,” reduce some benefits, sublet
unused office space, and limit the amount
of unbillable (overhead) time that home office
technical staff could incur.
As always, when the question “what next?” was
posed, the answer was “we must diversify.”
Starting in 1983, Mickelwait made a concerted
effort to open doors at the Asian Development
Bank (ADB). That effort eventually bogged
down, because DAI found that it could compete
successfully for short-term project preparation
assignments with the ADB itself, but the bigger
loan-funded contracts that followed were usually
out of reach due to questionable decision
making practices among government officials
in countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines,
and Pakistan. Several opportunities surfaced in
those countries that clashed with DAI’s values
and the dictates of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt
Practices Act, so the company had to walk
away from them.
More promising was a simultaneous effort to diversify
on the “adjacency principle,” by moving
into a technical area alongside DAI’s traditional
focus on smallholder agriculture. In this case,
DAI’s objective was not to reach a new client,
but instead to broaden its service offerings
to its principal client. At the time, most water
resources and irrigation development work was
controlled by a few universities in the western
United States. But Don Humpal, who lived
in Sacramento and had courted Jim Wolf, an
agricultural engineer working with a Californiabased
engineering firm, convinced management
that establishing a western office would provide
DAI with the credibility it needed to compete.
DAI gave Humpal and Wolf a green light, and
the two set up a “DAI West” office in Sacramento.
Before long, the two of them were teaming
with Peter Reiss, an anthropologist specializing
in water resources management, who had
joined DAI in 1980 to work in Egypt and later
returned to the home office. The trio fashioned a
distinctive approach. They emphasized the institutional
(“soft”) side of water resources management,
taking cultural and social systems as well
as engineering into account. Their work on an
irrigation research project in Pakistan particularly
impressed USAID technical specialists in the
water management field. With their home base
a continent away from headquarters, Wolf and
Humpal were able to focus on their strengths
and avoid many of the distractions of DAI’s daily
routine. Newly christened the Technical Services
Division, the team broke new ground for DAI,
demonstrating the firm’s capacity for adaptive
learning and responsiveness to client needs.