The Campaign for Sustained Leadership

Visiting Ed Shils in his Center City Philadelphia high-rise office, you can tell he's a macher, which is Yiddish for a guy of influence. There are photos of Shils with former astronaut and airline exec Frank Borman and banker Walter Wriston and former Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker. There are degrees, earned and honorary, flanking the windows that have a gorgeous panorama of the Philadelphia skyline and the Delaware River.

But along with being a macher, you can also tell that Shils is a mentsch, which is Yiddish for a respected man. At 87, he has young people coming to him for advice, which he dispenses freely and for free. Some of those young people vie to work for him in his consulting business and more than 100 of them take his courses in leadership every year at Wharton.

And now, 65 years after his first Penn degree – his first of six at the University – Shils recently endowed the Edward B. Shils and Shirley R. Shils Term Professorship in Entrepreneurial Management at Wharton.

"I wanted to give back something to the school that got me started," says Shils, outfitted in suspenders and a fashionable blue suit, ready for the train to Washington and a meeting at the National Institutes of Health later that day for one of his clients, the Dental Manufacturers of America. "It taught me to keep busy and stay close to young people and ideas. I never have stopped doing that."

The son of a cigar maker from 18th and Marvine Streets in Philadelphia, Shils came to Penn from Simon Gratz High School in 1933, the worst year of the Depression. He was a baseball star there, but had to give up the sporting dream when he started floundering in school.

"A professor said, 'Shils, you're either going to get an A or flunk my course'," says Shils. "I knew he meant I had good ideas but wasn't applying myself. It was time to drop baseball and get serious about school."

He got three Penn degrees during the Depression – adding an MA and a PhD in Political Science to the Wharton undergrad degree – and after some time in the Army and in research came back to Wharton as a teacher and administrator full-time in 1955. He chaired the Industry Department from 1960-63 with legendary professor George Taylor and was the chairman of the Management Department from 1968-76.

But Shils considers his real baby the Wharton Entrepreneurial Center (today named the Sol C.Snider Center), which he founded in 1973. Having his own consulting business for years while teaching, he was frustrated that Wharton was teaching straight business practices, but not showing students how to be innovative and entrepreneurial. He got seed money from friends in the business world and used the Center to bring in speakers and teachers who proved, he says,that doing well, even in the corporate world, means being different than the norm.

"You have to allow people the latitude to fail," says Shils. "You have to hire people with a tolerance for ambiguity. You don't just have rules. You have people who interpret the rules for success. Jack Welch, Ted Turner, all these men we admire had that tolerance for ambiguity. They formed borderless cultures within the corporate world."

Shelf after shelf in Shils' office is lined with the studies he has done on a consulting basis ver the years. In 1983, he did the first study for Philadelphia showing that it was imperative to build new stadiums for the Eagles and Phillies to keep the teams, and their substantial income flow, in the city. Other studies helped create Philadelphia Community College, kept the textile manufacturers alive in Philadelphia long after they left other cities, promoted the building of the Pennsylvania Convention Center and showed the value of negotiating school board contracts without contentiousness.

But if there was one turning point in his life, Shils indicated it was when he decided to go back to law school at the age of 68. Though colleagues his age were retiring, he knew he had far more to offer.

"I suppose it was a mixture of pride and showing people I could do it," says Shils. He started out part-time, just to see if he would like it, but he soon went into the full-time program, jousting with professors half his age and students even younger than that. "It was great. The professor would go right down the line. He'd call on some scared young guy and then go to me, an emeritus professor. It was exhilarating."

Shils took the Pennsylvania bar ("That's a long time to sit and write for an old guy," he kids) and then went back to Penn for two advanced legal degrees, the LLM in 1990 and the SJD in 1997. In addition to his new bequest, Shils has also created a professorship in the law school in arbitration and alternative dispute resolution.

"They tell me six Penn degrees is a record," he says. "But my wife may break it." Shirley Shils has a BA in religious studies and Mideast politics and an MS in social gerontology. Ed Shils has a number of honorary degrees as well, among them those from Philadelphia University and Tel Aviv University.

What seems to energize Shils more than anything are his duties as advisor to management students at Wharton. "I don't just tell them about classes, but about business and life," he says. "And they help me. I may start the day with a headache, but some young person comes in and we talk and it's all better. You can't beat that.Keeping young is what it's about."