Gift benefits Business School, honors Narver

Even in this age of technology titans, Chuck Lillis’ achievement last year was remarkable - selling MediaOne Group, the Denver-based cable powerhouse he created, to mighty AT&T.

But even while celebrating his $62.5 billion megadeal, Lillis was thinking about how to honor the UW professor who’d helped launch him on the path to success, a mentor who’d offered a second chance way back when Lillis had looked like a high-risk investment indeed.

John Narver

Lillis formally honored his former professor last month, when he and his wife Gwen donated $1 million to create an endowed chair in the name John Narver, who retired last year after 33 years as a fixture at the UW Business School.

Lillis, the first in his family to attend college at all, had flunked out of the UW in 1961. He was a self-described “immature” 19-year-old more involved in his stimulating newfound social milieu than the classroom.

Only after a three-year Army stint and some community college work did he win reinstatement to the University - on academic probation.

This reformed slacker went on to earn not only his bachelor’s degree, but also an MBA, largely under the wing of Narver.

“Sometimes professors make a difference,” Lillis said, “by helping us find something in ourselves we didn’t know existed.”

What Narver imprinted on Lillis were concepts, the business tycoon says, which were strongly generalizable to business and life.

And at Narver’s urging, Lillis stayed in academia even after the usually terminal MBA degree. He earned a doctorate at the University of Oregon, then taught business for several years at Washington State University before becoming business dean at the University of Colorado. Yet throughout his academic career, Lillis was consulting for corporations such as General Electric, helping them solve business problems. He was seduced away from academia for good when he went to work for US West in 1985.

The rest is business history. In 1995 he founded MediaOne as the cable and wireless arm of US WEST, and built a data-carrying cable network that became immensely valuable and led the Wall Street Journal to call Lillis a “broadband visionary.”

Now the buyout is leading Lillis to a new phase that includes residence in Seattle and service on the advisory board of his alma mater. It helps that he has known UW Business Dean Yash Gupta since their mutual days in Colorado, and relishes helping Gupta to refocus the Business School on new technology to match the region’s eminence in the field.

Lillis and Narver remained friends over the years. An economist trained at the University of California at Berkeley, Narver had joined the UW in 1966 as an assistant professor of marketing. He became a favorite of generations of future business leaders, chairing the department for five years and honored as MBA Professor of the Year in 1993.

Narver’s research largely has involved creating a customer-focused organization, organizational learning, and analysis of market orientation and performance.

“John encouraged me to start thinking about how the economy works in a structural sense,” Lillis said. “John made an enormous difference to me.” ¶

Steven Goldsmith, News & Information