40 years of DAI

Democracy and Discontented Smokers
Don Mickelwait was serious about health—his own
and that of his employees. To this day, DAI staff enjoy
company-subsidized gym memberships and sponsored
athletic activities. Mickelwait was also, in his own words,
“an early adopter,” whether buying personal computers or
waging war on secondhand smoke.
In the early 1980s, nearly a decade before the issue
became mainstream, Mickelwait imposed a smoking ban
at DAI. “I decided that having to breathe someone else’s
cigarette smoke was simply not what we should have to
do in an office.” It was, of course, more complicated than
that. DAI was home to few smokers but to many fervent
believers in individual rights, and at the time, smoking
bans were still considered infringements of the rights of
smokers. Mickelwait soon received a petition signed by
22 DAI employees, few of whom were smokers. Although
the President and chief shareholder of DAI valued employee
involvement more than most, in this instance he
was willing to hold the line against democracy at work.
The ban held, and in time the general public—like Mickelwait
at the time—would more commonly uphold the rights
of nonsmokers over those of smokers.
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Yet the process of bringing professional management to
DAI had been a fitful one. The company’s veterans, after all,
viewed themselves more as development professionals than
business managers, and they did not take to management
roles easily. As one veteran put it, “In the home office, a divisional
manager was usually a person who was between overseas
assignments and couldn’t wait to get back into the field,
where the real work was done.” Under those circumstances,
DAI saw no alternative but to bring in trained managers and
administrators; the “none of us knows how” blank check
that Barclay had received from Mickelwait no longer applied.
Ben Stauss, who came in as controller in 1980, succeeded
John Buck as Vice President of Finance and standardized
accounting practices and financial reporting. But many of the
veterans found the new systems and the people implementing
them quite mysterious. Gary Kilmer recalls management
at headquarters “looking very earnest about things I didn’t
understand.”
DAI, with its ambivalence about business orthodoxy, wasn’t
the ideal place for every breed of development professional.
Some of this awkwardness was inevitable, because DAI
expected a more personally engaged type of management
than was taught in business school, but some of it was due to
the peculiar culture where, very often, respect could only be
earned through long service overseas. Even old-timers harbored
an “us versus them” mentality, pulling for the company
when at headquarters and chafing at its restrictions when in
the field.
The difficulties in developing a new generation of professionals
were in part a result of changing expectations among
its clients. Ten or 15 years earlier, when the development
consulting profession was itself very new, a start-up firm such
as DAI could hire young, generalist doctoral graduates with
Peace Corps backgrounds, and they could quickly earn their