Part IThe Story
Third Base
On a rainy April afternoon in 2013, a member of Case Western Reserve University's graduating class climbed the dozen steps to the door of Clapp Hall, home of the chemistry department, to sit for the last requirement standing between him and a bachelor's degree. The assignment was the senior capstone. The student had written 177 pages. For the next ninety minutes, three faculty members would probe his argument, press him on how it might apply in settings he hadn't considered, and decide whether it met the university's academic standard. The student was 91 years old. He had enrolled on this campus in 1939. He was, the university noted with some delight, the only member of the Class of 2013 whose name was already on one of its buildings.
The treatise was a book on leadership. It had been published a few months earlier by Jossey-Bass under the title It's All About Who You Hire, How They Lead...and Other Essential Advice from a Self-Made Leader, and by the time the committee finished questioning its author, it was already marked down on Amazon, a fact the author had pointed out to a Brandeis reporter with evident pleasure. Morton Leon Mandel did not need the credential. He had built Premier Industrial Corporation from a $900 auto-parts storefront into a $3 billion merger, had been named by Peter Drucker in the same breath as Jack Welch and Andy Grove, had been honored by Ronald Reagan at the White House, and had, with his brothers and his wife, given away something on the order of a billion dollars. What he needed was the sixteen credit hours in chemistry he had left on the table when he walked out of Adelbert College at nineteen.
"It's important for me to take this last step," he told a Cleveland television reporter. "It's like I stopped on third base and had a chance of going home. It's completing something that was slightly incomplete."
Slightly incomplete. It is a curious phrase from a man whose public record reads like an inventory of completions — 34 years of record earnings in 36 as a public company, a dozen-plus acquisitions that worked when most acquisitions don't, more than a dozen nonprofits founded, an annual-report life with no visible gaps. But the phrase is the more honest one. Mandel's career was organized around a single, nagging suspicion that something was always still missing: a part the customer couldn't find, a person who wasn't yet in the right seat, a candle not yet lit. He spent eight decades filling the gap, and then, at 91, went back to fill the oldest one.
The capstone he defended in Clapp Hall opens with a sentence that tries to compress everything he knew into the fewest possible words. "If you asked me to sum up everything I know in the fewest words," he wrote, "I would do it in just four: 'It's all about who.'" A few lines later, describing his conviction that every great institution is a factory for people, he lands on a phrase that a Cleveland boy who went to afternoon Hebrew school would have known the source of: All the rest is commentary.
That is Hillel's line — the sage who, asked to teach the whole Torah while standing on one foot, gave the summary and then said the rest was commentary, now go and study. Mandel borrowed the cadence for a management book. He also, at 91, went and studied.
By the Numbers
The Mandel Ledger
$900Combined savings the three Mandel brothers spent on their uncle's auto-parts shop in 1940
34 of 36Years of record earnings after Premier went public
$13MThe most debt Premier ever carried, despite more than a dozen acquisitions
$3BValue of the 1996 merger with Britain's Farnell Electronics
~$1BGiven away by the Mandel brothers, Barbara Mandel, and their foundations
74Years between first enrolling at Case Western's predecessor and earning his degree
400+Graduates of the Mandel School for Educational Leadership in Jerusalem
Suitcases and Cigar Boxes
There are at least three versions of how poor the Mandels were, and Morton Mandel told all of them.
In one, given to Brandeis Magazine, the word is used plainly: "We were poor. We had a place to live, we were never hungry, but I can't remember my mother buying me a toy." In another, given at 91 from the glass-walled living room of an oceanfront house in Palm Beach, it is refused outright: "I grew up in the Great Depression in a very high quality home. It never occurred to us to use the word poor." In the third, offered to Cleveland Clinic Magazine a few weeks before he died, he split the difference — "we weren't rich, but we weren't poor, either" — as though, at 98, he had finally negotiated a settlement between the two earlier witnesses.
None of the versions is a lie. They are the same facts viewed by a man who spent his life deciding which facts mattered. And the facts are hard ones. Simon Mandel left Nowy Sącz, in Galicia, in 1913, planning to establish himself in North America and send for his wife and three children. Then the First World War closed the door. Rose Mandel — born Nussbaum — and the children, Meriam, Jack, and Joseph, did not reach the United States until June 19, 1920, fleeing violence and antisemitism with help from the Red Cross. Seven years of separation. Fifteen months after the reunion, on September 19, 1921, Rose gave birth in Cleveland to the only one of her children born an American.
The parents ran a dry goods shop on St. Clair Avenue. The family moved more than once because it could not make the monthly rent. Morton shared a room with his two brothers and wore their clothes after they'd outgrown them. Then Simon developed multiple sclerosis. The disease moved slowly, then less slowly; Rose became his nurse, and when he was finally bedridden, she became the family's only income, selling clothing out of suitcases on the streets of Cleveland.
This is the image the rest of the life keeps returning to: a woman with a suitcase, on a sidewalk, making a sale.
And in that household — this is the part every Mandel account insists upon — there was always money to give away. Not much. A sandwich for a hungry man who showed up at the door. A few dollars to a neighbor so a child could have a dress. "Very small gifts," Mandel recalled, "but gifts that meant maybe my mother didn't buy herself a pair of shoes."
— Morton Mandel, on his mother, RoseShe taught me about life, courage and believing in myself that I can do great things, and if I do not succeed the first time, I'll try again. ... My mother helped me reach success. She kept on saying - I expect great things from you.
At thirteen, after his bar mitzvah, Morton went to work after school at Cleveland Municipal Stadium, hawking hot dogs, drinks, peanuts, and popcorn in the stands. It is the first of his jobs and, in a sense, the template for all of them: walk to where the customer is sitting, carry the thing he wants, and make the transaction easy. He did well at Glenville High School, where an English teacher named Laura V. Edwards installed in him what he later called an "uncompromising self-confidence." Her advice, as he remembered it, was a sentence with a strange and wonderful logic: "She convinced me I could do anything I was qualified for and if I wasn't, [to] go for it."
He graduated in 1939, won a scholarship to Adelbert College, and enrolled in chemistry. He would describe himself, late in life, as "a composite of influences" — a phrase that sounds modest until you realize it is also a hiring philosophy. The mother taught him how to spend money. The teacher taught him how to make it. He went looking, for the rest of his life, for people who could teach him the next thing.
The Mandel brothers, for years after their parents were gone, had a shorthand for settling arguments about business and politics. One of them would say: You know, Mom wouldn't have liked that. "We started our foundation in 1953," Mandel said at 98. "To this day, I'm still trying to please my mother."
The Thingamajig Business
In the spring of 1940, Jacob Mandel, an uncle, decided to leave Cleveland for Chicago and offered his small auto-parts shop to his nephew Jack. Jack, the eldest brother, gathered the other two: Joe, who was selling soap, and Morton, the nineteen-year-old chemistry student who had been working in the shop after school. Between them they had $900 in savings. They spent all of it, on secondhand fixtures and furniture and the remnants of the uncle's inventory, and borrowed another $3,000 for stock from a second uncle, Conrad. On August 1, 1940, Premier Automotive Supply Company opened on Euclid Avenue.
That summer the brothers sold auto moulding clips on the streets of Cleveland for 69 cents apiece. One notes the method. Their mother was selling clothing from suitcases on the same streets.
Morton left school in his sophomore year. The Palm Beach paper's obituary would say he dropped out to help support his mother and his ailing father; the corporate histories say he dropped out to join the business; both are true, and in a family like that one, they were the same decision. Within the division of labor that formed almost immediately, the youngest brother gravitated toward administration while Jack and Joe honed their sales and marketing. It would be a lifelong arrangement — the older brothers out front with the product, the younger one behind the counter with the ledger and, eventually, with the org chart.
Then the war took two of them. Jack kept the store open.
When Morton and Joe came home — Joe from a war plant, Morton from an Army education we will come to — the brothers looked at what they had and didn't like it. They were selling popular parts that every other distributor in Cleveland also sold, at margins that were, in the delicate phrasing of one corporate history, "barely enough to live on." The insight that followed, in 1947, is the kind that looks obvious in retrospect and almost never gets acted upon in practice. They started asking customers a question: What can't you find?
For several months they just collected the answers. The list that emerged was a list of "hard to get" parts — and a disproportionate number of them were hard to get because they were hard to describe. A mechanic knows exactly what he needs and has no name for it. The Mandels began to call these objects "thingamajigs." They located suppliers, and then, rather than inventing a vocabulary, they skipped the problem of language altogether: they carried the parts around in cigar boxes so customers could look in and point.
From the suitcase to the cigar box. The containers got smaller as the margins got bigger.
The model compounded. Premier began working with suppliers to customize what it sold. It offered to take over a customer's entire inventory of fasteners — reorganize it, resupply it, provide the bins. Joe pushed the company to be among the first to plate its fasteners against rust, at a time when nuts, bolts, and screws came black and corroded quickly; plating became an industry standard. When cigar boxes proved too messy, the brothers sewed parts onto felt books, a display device that was, as one historian put it, "ingenious, if a little primitive by today's standards." The books got so heavy with samples that some salesmen attached wheels to them, which pushed the company toward its first illustrated catalog.
By the mid-1950s there were three divisions: Premier Fastener Co., which sold screws, nuts, bolts, washers, cotter pins, rivets, and specialty hardware; Premier Autoware, which sold brake parts, gaskets, fuel-pump apparatus, and transmission repair kits; and the Certanium Alloys and Research Co., which sold welding supplies. The company had been incorporated as Premier Autoware in 1946. The name was already too small.
Mandel reduced the whole thing, later, to a sentence of almost insolent simplicity: "If you find a need and fill it, you have something that will lead to growth." It is the kind of line that appears on motivational posters. In the Mandels' hands it was a research protocol, and it began with a question that most businesses are too proud to ask their customers.
Fifteen Sandwiches
Mandel was drafted into the war effort in 1943 and did not, in the conventional sense, go to war. A few months after he enlisted, the Army — fearful of a wartime shortage of engineers, and impressed by test scores that the Case Western newsroom later described as so high that the military rerouted him — sent him and thousands of others back to school. He spent two years as a student-soldier, first at Pomona College in Claremont, California, and then at the University of California, Berkeley. He came home a second lieutenant, sixteen credit hours short of a chemistry degree that he would not collect for another sixty-seven years.
Two things came back with him to Euclid Avenue. The first was a habit of mind. The Army, he said, had shown him "a systematic approach to every significant decision and an unrelenting focus on discipline," and he applied both to the company and to the organization of his own days — which, by the time he was 91, began at 3 a.m. with stretching and a session with a trainer.
The second was a story, and he told it for the rest of his life.
He was put in charge of moving fifteen wounded American soldiers from an Army hospital in Memphis to another hospital farther south. (Brandeis, recounting it, places the episode in Mississippi.) The group stopped for lunch. The restaurant would not serve the Black soldiers among them. It was, at the same time, serving German prisoners of war.
The detail does the work. A young Jewish officer, the son of refugees from pogroms, watches a Southern lunch counter extend hospitality to soldiers of the Reich and refuse it to wounded Americans. He took all fifteen men out of the restaurant. He bought them sandwiches from a street vendor. Because the meal vouchers the Army had issued were good only at the restaurant, he paid for the sandwiches out of his own pocket.
What he drew from it, when he set it down decades later, was not a moral meditation but a management principle — "managers who would be effective leaders must have principles and do the right thing" — which is either a profound flattening of the experience or a profound elevation of management, depending on how you feel about management. One suspects Mandel saw no contradiction. The episode is a sandwich bought for a hungry man, paid for at personal cost, by someone who could not easily afford it. He had watched his mother do the same thing at the door on St. Clair Avenue. He simply found a reason to do it with a rank on his collar.
The Man Who Moved Him
Ask Morton Mandel the three most important things people should know about him, a Brandeis reporter discovered in 2012, and his eyes twinkle and he shoots back: "Name, rank and serial number." Persist, and he will tell you about his mother, his brothers, and his wife. Persist further — this was the subject of the book, after all — and he will tell you about a man named Bob Warren.
Mandel hired Warren in 1955. He did not, he admitted, fully know what he was getting. "What I didn't know at the time was that Bob was the ultimate professional in how you operate a business," he wrote. "He taught us by example, moving me away from a more intuitive management style to a more thoughtful, systematic approach. I quickly came to see the impact an A player could have on an organization. Bob's impact was absolutely magical. From then on, my standards for the people we hired were much higher."
This is the hinge of the life, and it is worth noticing how unusual it is. Most founders' origin myths concern an insight about the market. Mandel's concerns an insight about a subordinate — specifically, the discovery that a hire could be better than the person who hired him and could, by example, change the founder's own habits. Warren would become president of Premier (Mandel dated it to 1962; other accounts to 1972). He became, more importantly, the proof of concept for everything Mandel later believed.
The other great instructor arrived by appointment. As Premier grew, Mandel began meeting with Peter Drucker on a monthly basis. The Drucker Archives at Claremont, which hold the correspondence, preserve the texture of these sessions with an almost bureaucratic intimacy. On February 9, 1970, Mandel — the archive lists him as the creator of the document — wrote up five pages of notes from a meeting with Drucker and Warren that used Sears, Roebuck as a case study. The notes enumerate thirty-four points: management appraisal and development programs, projecting management needs by age group, strengthening the first-line supervisor layer with young managers, treating zone managers as personnel men, the danger of employees taking on too many areas at once. Six months later, on August 14, 1970, another meeting, this time with Warren and a W. Hamilton: labor shortages in Europe and how to structure jobs for young people, the hazard of building too many organizational links, proper communication with subordinates, and the use of educational psychologists in the private sector.
Educational psychologists. In a fastener company. In 1970.
There is something wonderful in the image — the man who sold thingamajigs out of cigar boxes, now taking numbered notes while the most celebrated management thinker in the world walks him through the personnel architecture of Sears. Mandel did not need Drucker to tell him what to sell. He needed Drucker for the problem he considered actually hard: who would run the divisions, and how they would be grown, appraised, and replaced. Even the letters between them have that quality of two men checking on each other's staffing. On September 15, 1975, Drucker wrote back to Mandel, apparently in reply to an inquiry about retirement, to assure him that he had not retired and had no intention of doing so; he was still consulting, lecturing, and teaching, had cut back only on his writing, and was starting an executive management program at Claremont Graduate School.
Drucker, for his part, delivered a verdict on his client that Mandel's own website now displays at the top of the page.
— Peter Drucker, on Morton MandelThere are three things about Mort that always stick with me. The first is the absolute integrity of the man. Secondly, he's the only person who knows how to do an acquisition successfully. Ninety percent of acquisitions misfire, but 90 percent of Mort's work in acquisitions has been successful. The third thing is that he has been exceedingly successful with his nonprofit work.
Note the order. Integrity first. Acquisitions second. Nonprofits third. It is very nearly the order in which Mandel himself ranked the qualities he looked for in people — and in that ranking, as we will see, the thing most companies consider first came dead last.
A Company That Would Not Borrow
In May 1960, the company became Premier Industrial Corporation, and Mandel took it public, with the brothers keeping 70 percent of the stock. In 1964 it listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The currency of a public share bought more than a dozen companies over the following decades, the most consequential of which was Newark Electronics, acquired in 1968, which pulled Premier decisively into electronic components. Through the 1960s the company moved into fire-fighting equipment, lubricants, and coatings. During the 1970s electrical specialty parts grew steadily until, in 1981, electronics became the primary profit center. By 1984 there were eighteen divisions and $465 million in sales, half of it electronics, with $48 million in net profit. By the 1990s, 70 percent of revenue and operating profit came from electronics distribution. The company opened in Europe in the 1970s and had a corporate research and development center by 1977, which tailored products to customers' specifications — the cigar-box principle, institutionalized.
What did not change is the part that makes Premier's balance sheet read like a character reference.
Despite more than a dozen acquisitions, Premier Industrial was never more than $13 million in debt. In the early 1990s the balance sheet held 30 percent cash. The company's filing for the fiscal year ended May 31, 1995 — its last full year before the Farnell merger — shows sales of $818.2 million, net income of $108.1 million, and interest expense of $344,000. Three hundred and forty-four thousand dollars, against eight hundred million in sales. Long-term borrowings sat at $6.5 million. Cash and marketable securities came to roughly $160 million. Net income ran at better than 13 percent of sales, and over Mandel's 36 years as chairman, the company cleared 10 percent net in 30 of them, while setting earnings records in 34 of the 36 years after its listing.
A distribution business is a business of thin margins, heavy inventory, and the constant temptation to finance both with somebody else's money. Premier declined the temptation for half a century. The family that once moved because it couldn't make the rent built a public company that never had to ask anyone for anything.
"We defined rich as follows," Mandel said, recalling the Depression: "no unpaid bills and a balance of money in the bank I didn't need tomorrow." It is the most precise definition of a corporate treasury policy ever smuggled into a childhood memory.
The service ethic ran just as hot. The brothers ran the company on slogans that sound, out of context, like the overheated mottos of a sales conference: "Killing Yourself for Your Customer." "Always Trying to Raise the Bar." "A Focus on Our People." In context they were operating procedures. Premier hired an engineer whose job was to understand customers' technical needs. It built a customer service department that ran twenty-four hours a day, weekends and holidays included. When a ride at Walt Disney World broke down on a Saturday, Premier had the replacement part shipped within hours, the same day. More than 100,000 customers in North America and Western Europe were on the books by the late 1960s.
And then there was the business Premier did not take. Mandel told the story in his book: after considerable effort to win an important account, the company discovered that the client expected an intermediary to be paid. Premier walked away. Decades later, in Palm Beach, Mandel met Bernard Madoff at the Palm Beach Country Club. Most of his advisors favored investing in Madoff's fund. Mandel declined, because Madoff would not show him how the returns were made. It is the most famous no in his biography, and it was, characteristically, a no about transparency rather than about returns — the same reflex that kept his own balance sheet so legible that a stranger could read it in an afternoon.
In 1996, with sixteen divisions and a value of nearly $3 billion, Premier Industrial merged with Farnell Electronics PLC of Britain to form Premier Farnell, one of the largest industrial and electronic components suppliers in the world. Mandel served as deputy chairman until 2002. The thingamajig business became a multinational, and the youngest brother — the administrator, the one who had stayed behind the counter — stepped back to the work he had, by then, been doing for a third of his waking hours for decades.
Running a Foundation Like a Distributor
The foundation predates the fortune. That is the fact the Mandel story most depends upon and most often buries.
In 1953, when Premier was still a regional supplier of fasteners and gaskets, the brothers established the Premier Autoware Company Charitable & Educational Foundation. They had begun making charitable gifts in the late 1940s. They made their first gift to Brandeis University in 1953, five years after that school's founding, at a moment when giving to a five-year-old university was an act of faith rather than prestige. A year earlier, in 1952, Morton — just past thirty — had become president of the Jewish Community Center of Cleveland, a post he held until 1957. He was running the community center while he was running the company.
He did not, in other words, retire into philanthropy. He grew up into it, in parallel, and the two careers fed each other for the rest of his life. Even as chairman and CEO of a New York Stock Exchange company for more than three decades, he spent as much as a third of his time in the social sector.
The structure evolved the way Premier's divisions did — by accretion and specialization. In 1963 each brother established a private family foundation. In 1982 three supporting foundations of the Jewish Community Federation were created, known collectively as the Mandel Associated Foundations. In 2012 the whole apparatus was formally renamed the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation. Its mission statement, written down at some point along the way, is a single sentence: "To invest in people with the values, ability and passion to change the world." The verb is invest. The object is people.
Cleveland was the first laboratory. In 1973 Mandel co-founded the Ten Plus Club, which recruited business leaders who agreed to raise their annual contributions to $10,000 — a fundraising device that is, structurally, a sales quota. He was president of the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland beginning in 1974, president of United Way Services from 1977 to 1979 and chairman of its board from 1979 to 1981; the brothers gave more than $1 million to United Way's human services campaign. In 1979 he left the boards of Central National Bank and Cleveland Electric Illuminating to concentrate on civic work. He founded the City of Cleveland's Project MOVE, a volunteerism initiative, in 1981; co-founded Clean-Land, Ohio — later Park Works — the same year; co-founded and chaired MidTown Cleveland, the district surrounding Premier's own Euclid Avenue headquarters, from 1982; and in 1984 co-founded the Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Case Western Reserve, an institution devoted, with some poetic consistency, to teaching nonprofits to be managed.
In 1988 the foundation made a $3 million gift to Case Western's School of Applied Social Sciences — at the time the largest in the school's history — and the school took the Mandel name. That same year it joined the Cleveland Foundation, the George Gund Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and others to create Cleveland Neighborhood Progress, which Mandel chaired. And that same year, at a ceremony at the White House, Ronald Reagan presented Premier Industrial Corporation with the President's Award for private-sector social initiatives.
Albert Ratner, who ran Forest City and knew the family for decades, later reached for a Cleveland saying to describe them: "Don't be proud of your city, make your city proud of you."
What distinguished the Mandel approach was not the volume but the method. Mandel said, with a nod to Andrew Carnegie, that giving money away thoughtfully is hard work, and he ran it like the business he knew. "We've tried to run our foundation and our charitable efforts the same way we ran our business," he said. Premier had fifteen divisions when the family got out of it. "Most things we tried succeeded, but many things didn't. That's called trial and error." In philanthropy, he said, "you're responding to an infinite list of needs, so there are areas that we specialize in and there are areas we just can't get into." For significant gifts, the foundation wanted to know not only how the money would be used, but — "in six months or six years, whatever makes sense" — how it had worked out. An evaluation. A report card.
This is distribution logic. Premier didn't stock every part; it stocked the ones nobody else could find, and it tracked whether they moved. The foundation didn't fund every cause; it narrowed, eventually, to five — leadership development, nonprofit management, the humanities, Jewish life, and urban engagement — and it checked the results.
Jerusalem and the Shortage of Leaders
In 1967, after the Six-Day War, Mort and Barbara Mandel visited Israel for the first time. By the account of the Mandel Foundation in Israel, he became, from that trip on, "not only a proud Jew, but also a proud Zionist," and he returned hundreds of times. He loved Jerusalem particularly. More than half a billion dollars of the Mandel family's giving, by Brandeis's count, would go to Israel.
The Israeli work began, as so much of Mandel's work began, with a diagnosis about personnel. From 1984 to 1988 he chaired the Jewish Agency's Jewish Education Committee. In 1988 he convened and chaired the Commission on Jewish Education in North America, a body of American, Canadian, and Israeli community leaders, foundation heads, educators, scholars, and representatives of the Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Reform movements — which is to say, people who did not often agree about anything. Its report, published in November 1990, was titled A Time to Act. Its central recommendation was not a curriculum. It was a profession: strengthen the field of Jewish education by building up the people who practiced it, and mobilize community support behind them. The Council for Initiatives in Jewish Education was created to implement it, with Stephen Hoffman — later president of the Jewish Federation of Cleveland and, eventually, chairman of the Mandel Foundation itself — as interim executive director.
In 1990 the foundation opened a branch in Jerusalem, Mandel Foundation-Israel, with Seymour Fox, who had worked on the Commission, as its president. Fox convened scholars, researchers, and planners from education and social leadership. In 1992 came the Mandel Leadership Institute in Jerusalem, which trained prospective social leaders across several programs, including an Educational Leadership School and an education development program for the Israel Defense Forces. By its director's count it produced "a corps of more than 400 change agents." In 2004 came the Mandel Center for Leadership in the Negev, which worked with local authorities, nonprofits, and activists in the south and pressed specifically to improve relations between the region's Jewish and Bedouin communities. At Ben-Gurion University, the foundation funded an MBA in social leadership intended to produce Israeli leaders who combined business method with social commitment — Mandel's own biography, rendered as a degree program. In 2014 the foundation committed $13 million for a new building and programs for the Mandel Institute for Social Leadership on the Ben-Gurion campus.
The pattern rhymes with Premier so closely that it almost seems scripted. Mandel looked at Jewish education and saw what he had seen in the auto-parts trade in 1947: a market saturated with the common item and starved of the thing that was hard to find. The hard-to-find thing, in this case, was an excellent principal. A first-rate school superintendent. An officer who could teach. "I'm convinced that it's not a crazy idea to think you can change the world by changing the leaders," he said shortly before his death. "The fact is: You can." In Israel the staff had a shorter version of it, which they attributed to him as a habitual saying: "One excellent person can change the world."
There was a second strand, and it came later, and it was in some ways the more surprising one: the humanities.
Mandel was a chemistry student who sold fasteners. Yet in his eighties he became one of the most consequential private funders of the humanities in two countries. In 2007 the foundation gave $22.5 million to Brandeis for what became the Mandel Center for the Humanities. In 2012 it gave $18 million to Hebrew University of Jerusalem for the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, plus $2.5 million a year in program support. It gave $25 million toward a new Jerusalem campus for the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in 2013 and $12 million for the Mandel Wing for Jewish Art and Life at the Israel Museum in 2010.
His argument for it was civic, not aesthetic, and it was delivered — the Brandeis reporter noticed — "in the language of business." Only six or seven percent of undergraduates were humanities majors, he said, down from about seventeen percent when he was in school. In Israel it was worse: "you can get a degree in your specialty — medicine, law, engineering, anything you want — and take zero hours in the humanities." So when the Hebrew University grant was being negotiated, Mandel and Jehuda Reinharz — the former Brandeis president who had become president of the Mandel Foundation — persuaded the university to require its students to take at least two humanities courses. The donor attached a distribution requirement.
— Morton Mandel, to BrandeisNOW, 2012I think people should not consider themselves college graduates unless they have the intellectual tools to function responsibly as citizens in a free society. There aren't just opportunities for college graduates, there are obligations.
A few months after he said that, he climbed the steps of Clapp Hall to become a college graduate himself.
A Force of Nature
He met her, depending on who is telling it, on a blind date set up by a friend in February 1949 — though their son Thom said his father always insisted that "he knew who she was but had never met her." It is the most Mandel-like possible romantic detail: the man had already done the background check.
Barbara Abrams was born in Cleveland on December 13, 1925. Her father died when she was very young; her mother, Lilian, remarried a man named Leonard Abrams, who adopted her. She graduated from Shaker Heights High School, attended Radcliffe College at Harvard, and took her degree from Flora Stone Mather College of what became Case Western Reserve. Her mother liked to tell a story about her: in second grade, around 1930 or 1932, the teacher left the room, the class collapsed into chaos, and by the time an adult arrived, seven-year-old Barbara had every child in his seat and quiet. "She had this thing going on inside her," Thom Mandel said, "that no matter what she did, she had to be the best."
They married at Wade Park Manor on February 27, 1949. They would be married seventy years.
It would be a mistake, and a common one, to treat Barbara Mandel as the philanthropist's wife. She was twice elected national president of the National Council of Jewish Women, the oldest Jewish women's organization in the country. She was inducted into the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame in 1985, the same class as Nikki Giovanni. She was president of American Friends of the Hebrew University, deputy chair and later vice chair of Hebrew University's Board of Governors, a Brandeis trustee from 2005 and eventually vice chair of that board, chair of the board of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and vice chair of the Mandel Foundation itself. Hebrew University gave her an honorary doctorate in 1996, seven years after Brandeis honored her husband. Ramie Targoff, who directs the Brandeis humanities center the couple funded, called her "a formidable woman of great honesty, integrity, and generosity" who "fought passionately for the things she cared about." The auditorium in that center bears her name.
Mort had his A-player test, and he married someone who would have passed it in the second grade.
The marriage also produced the collection, which is its own small Mandel parable. Across their lives the couple acquired twentieth- and twenty-first-century art — Picasso at one end, Donald Judd at the other — with what Sotheby's described as a dedication "to selecting only great works." In May 2018 they sold it. The evening sale, held on May 16 ahead of Sotheby's Contemporary Art Evening Auction, carried a title that the Mandels' company had carried as a slogan for decades: Raising The Bar. The proceeds went into the foundation's capital. The art was converted, in the end, into people — into fellowships and institutes and leaders not yet hired.
More Candles Unlit Than Lit
Meriam died first, on June 10, 2010, nine days short of her 101st birthday. Jack died on May 12, 2011, at 99. Joe died on March 22, 2016, at 102. The family's longevity was almost comic in its excess; Mort, at 98, would be the baby of the four to the end.
After his brothers were gone he made it his mission to sustain and extend the foundation they had built, and he worked like a man who believed in that mission literally. At 91 he was still chairman and CEO of Parkwood Corporation, the family's private investment company, and of the foundation. His day started at 3 a.m. He worked from the home office in Palm Beach, from the apartment in New York, from the business office in Cleveland, and traveled to Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and London. Through Parkwood he had established Israel Equity Limited in 2003 to buy and improve Israeli industrial companies — Tadbik Group, Bikur Rofe, Phoenicia Glass Works — employing more than 800 people between them. He was among the first investors in Pontifax, the life-sciences fund, in 2011. He did not slow down so much as redistribute himself.
He had a metaphor for why. Asked about retirement in 2013, he talked about candles. "I've already lit 'x' candles," he said. "I think there are more candles unlit than lit. There are huge unmet needs." Eliminating hunger, he estimated, would take at least five million candles. If he could light one or two more, he could see no reason to stop.
So he kept lighting. The $5 million gift for the public library in West Palm Beach. The $5 million for a Jewish Community Center in Palm Beach Gardens. The $10 million to Cooper Hewitt. The $16 million matching commitment to The Temple-Tifereth Israel, where Barbara had been confirmed. A $100,000 endowment, in 2016, for an annual award honoring outstanding faculty in Case Western's chemistry department — his department, now that he finally had one — whose first recipient was Blanton Tolbert, a researcher working out the molecular architecture of HIV. And in July 2019, three months before he died, $23 million to Cleveland Clinic to build the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Global Leadership and Learning Institute, for preparing the healthcare leaders of the future.
The interview Cleveland Clinic's magazine conducted with him a few weeks before his death is one of the last records of his voice, and it is almost entirely about hiring. He explained the five criteria. He explained that experience came fifth. When the interviewer asked about Vince Lombardi's claim that leaders aren't born but made, Mandel corrected the coach with a precision that is hard to improve on: "They have to be born, then made."
In August 2019, the Carnegie Corporation named him one of nine recipients of that year's Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy. The citation quoted Andrew Carnegie, writing in 1908: "It is the leaders who do the new things that count." The medal was to be presented at a formal ceremony in New York City on October 16.
He died that day, at home in Palm Beach.
The memorial service was held in Cleveland on Sunday, October 20, at The Temple-Tifereth Israel, with visitation afterward at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences on Bellflower Road. A second memorial was held in Jerusalem. Barbara, 93 and frail, flew to Israel for it, and stayed to attend a board meeting at Hebrew University. Her son said she traveled against her doctors' orders. She returned on November 12, greatly weakened, and died at the Palm Beach house on November 21, a month and five days after him.
There are buildings now with the Mandel name in Cleveland and Waltham and Jerusalem and Be'er Sheva, on Euclid Avenue and at the Metroparks Zoo and on Mount Scopus. The name is, as one Cleveland reporter wrote, literally all over the city. But the first gift in the ledger was never recorded anywhere. It was made in a rented apartment off St. Clair Avenue, during the Depression, by a woman who sold clothes from suitcases on the sidewalk and who had, that season, just enough money left over for a sandwich at the door — or for a new pair of shoes for herself.
She chose the sandwich. She kept the old shoes.
Part IIThe Playbook
Morton Mandel was not a visionary in the conventional sense. He did not invent a product, open a market, or predict a technology. What he did, for eighty years, was run a small number of disciplined practices with extraordinary consistency across two very different worlds — a public distribution company and a sprawling philanthropic enterprise — and let the results compound. The principles below are drawn from that record. Several of them cut against received wisdom; most of them are cheap to adopt and expensive to sustain.
The principles
- 1.Ask customers what they can't find.
- 2.Rank experience last.
- 3.Fear the B player more than the C.
- 4.Hire the person who will change your habits.
- 5.Buy a standing appointment with a better mind.
- 6.Keep a balance sheet a stranger could read.
- 7.Over-serve where the industry under-serves.
- 8.Make your no's about transparency, not returns.
- 9.Give like a distributor: specialize, then audit.
- 10.Fund the scarce input, which is usually a person.
- 11.Build the second career in parallel, not in sequence.
- 12.Go back for the unfinished thing.
Principle 1
Ask customers what they can't find
Premier's turn in 1947 did not come from a strategy offsite. It came from several months of asking customers a question most businesses never ask because the answer is embarrassing: What do you need that we don't have? The brothers were selling the same common parts as every other distributor in Cleveland, at margins barely enough to live on. The answer — a list of "hard to get" parts — told them exactly where the margin lived.
The deeper insight was why those parts were hard to get. Many were hard to describe. The customer knew the object and lacked the word. So the Mandels built the solution around the gap in language: cigar boxes, then felt books, then catalogs, then a research and development center that customized parts to order. A problem that cannot be searched for cannot be competed for. The "thingamajig" was a moat made of vocabulary.
The same instinct governed the philanthropy. When Mandel looked at Jewish education, the abundant item was programs; the hard-to-find item was excellent educators. A Time to Act was, functionally, a list of hard-to-get parts.
Tactic: Ask your ten best customers which problem they've stopped trying to solve because nobody sells the answer — and pay special attention to the ones they struggle to put into words.
Principle 2
Rank experience last
Mandel's promotion criteria had five elements, and the ordering was the argument. "First would be — are you sitting down? — values," he said. Then intellectual firepower, passion, and work ethic. Experience came fifth. "For me, experience isn't the first consideration — it's fifth."
The values test was concrete, almost tactile: Would I let this person hold my wallet? If the answer was no, nothing else on the list mattered. This is a filter rather than a weight — a gate that must be passed before scoring begins. Most hiring processes do the opposite: they screen on résumé and treat character as a tiebreaker. Mandel reasoned that experience can be acquired and character largely cannot, so you should screen hardest on the thing you can't fix later.
M
The Mandel Promotion Criteria
Five criteria, in Mandel's stated order of priority.
| Rank | Criterion | How Mandel framed it | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Values | Integrity, honesty, decency, respect, trust. "Would I let this person hold my wallet?" | Gate |
| 2 | Intellectual firepower | Raw capability; the "born" half of "born, then made." | Innate |
| 3 | Passion | "Passionate about everything he does — otherwise he just doesn't bother." | Innate |
| 4 | Work ethic | The 3 a.m. standard; discipline learned in the Army. | Habit |
| 5 | Experience | "It's a mistake to stare too hard at someone's résumé before you consider those other attributes." | Acquirable |
Tactic: Rewrite your interview scorecard so that values function as a pass/fail gate scored before anyone reads the résumé, and move experience to the bottom of the rubric.
Principle 3
Fear the B player more than the C
The most distinctive thing in Mandel's hiring philosophy is not the admiration for A players — every management book has that — but the specific contempt for B players. "The C players generally get fired or quit because they can't meet the standards," he wrote. "But the B players hang on. They bat .270, don't make many errors in the field, but they can't help you win the pennant."
The danger of the B player is invisibility. A C player produces visible failure, which triggers correction. A B player produces adequate results, which triggers nothing — and occupies a seat an A player could have filled. "Even worse, you probably won't know what you've failed to achieve," Mandel wrote, "all because you had a B player with whom you were comfortable." The cost is an opportunity cost, and opportunity costs never show up on a variance report.
His corollary was blunt: "Retaining underperforming senior executives keeps the A's out." Senior seats are the scarcest, and a comfortable incumbent in one of them blocks the entire pipeline beneath.
Tactic: List every senior role in your organization and ask, for each, whether you would enthusiastically rehire the incumbent today — then treat every "probably" as a vacancy you haven't admitted to.
Principle 4
Hire the person who will change your habits
Bob Warren, hired in 1955, did not merely execute Mandel's strategy. He changed Mandel — "moving me away from a more intuitive management style to a more thoughtful, systematic approach." That is an unusual thing for a founder to admit and an even more unusual thing to have sought. Most founders hire people who extend their instincts. Mandel, by accident first and then by design, learned to value people who corrected them.
The Warren hire also reset the bar for everyone who came after. "From then on, my standards for the people we hired were much higher." One exceptional hire functioned as a calibration instrument for the whole organization — a living example of what A looked like. Mandel carried the lesson into the habit, noted by one reviewer of his book, of hiring exceptional talent even when no position was open: the A player is rarer than the vacancy.
Tactic: For your next senior hire, write down one specific habit of your own that you want the candidate to be capable of changing, and screen explicitly for it.
Principle 5
Buy a standing appointment with a better mind
Mandel met with Peter Drucker monthly. The cadence matters as much as the counselor. A consultant engaged for a project solves a problem; an advisor seen every month shapes how you think about problems before they arrive. The surviving notes in the Drucker Archives show that the sessions were not about pricing or product lines. They used Sears, Roebuck as a case study for management appraisal, for projecting leadership needs by age cohort, for strengthening first-line supervisors with young managers. They raised the idea of educational psychologists in the private sector in 1970.
In other words, Mandel spent his scarcest outside resource on his hardest internal problem: people. And he brought his top lieutenant into the room — Warren appears in the meeting notes — so that the learning compounded across the leadership team rather than residing in one head. Drucker's verdict, that Mandel was "the only person who knows how to do an acquisition successfully," was earned partly in these sessions; acquisitions, after all, are mostly a problem of who stays, who goes, and who runs the thing afterward.
Tactic: Schedule a recurring monthly session with the sharpest outside thinker you can access, bring your second-in-command, and devote the agenda to people questions rather than operational ones.
Principle 6
Keep a balance sheet a stranger could read
Premier made more than a dozen acquisitions and never carried more than $13 million in debt. In fiscal 1995, on $818.2 million in sales, it paid $344,000 in interest. The company held roughly 30 percent of its balance sheet in cash in the early 1990s. For a distribution business — a model built on inventory and receivables, which practically begs for leverage — this was a deliberate act of restraint sustained over decades.
The financial benefit is obvious: Premier could not be squeezed by lenders, could buy when others had to sell, and could survive bad years without drama. The less obvious benefit was cultural. A company that does not borrow cannot paper over mistakes; every acquisition has to work on its own cash. The discipline forced the 90 percent acquisition success rate Drucker admired. Mandel's Depression-era definition of wealth — "no unpaid bills and a balance of money in the bank I didn't need tomorrow" — was not nostalgia. It was the operating policy.
Tactic: Set a hard internal debt ceiling well below what lenders would offer you, and require every acquisition to be justified on the assumption that it must pay for itself without new borrowing.
Principle 7
Over-serve where the industry under-serves
"Killing Yourself for Your Customer" sounds like a slogan, but at Premier it had line items: an engineer hired specifically to understand customer needs, a service department staffed twenty-four hours a day including weekends and holidays, a willingness to reorganize a customer's entire fastener inventory down to the bins. The Disney World episode — a broken ride on a Saturday, a part shipped within hours — is the kind of story that wins a customer for twenty years.
The key is that Premier over-served precisely where distributors traditionally under-served: urgency, obscurity, and inconvenience. Anyone could deliver a common part on a Tuesday. Premier's premium pricing on hard-to-find parts was defensible because its service was also hard to find. Service and product niche reinforced each other — the high margins funded the 24-hour desk, and the 24-hour desk justified the high margins.
Tactic: Identify the single moment when your customer is most desperate — the Saturday breakdown — and build a capability to serve that moment better than anyone else, even if it looks uneconomic in isolation.
Principle 8
Make your no's about transparency, not returns
Mandel's two most instructive refusals share a structure. Premier walked away from a hard-won piece of business when it learned the client expected an intermediary to be paid. Decades later, Mandel declined to invest with Bernard Madoff, over the objections of most of his own advisors, because Madoff would not explain how his returns were generated.
In neither case was the deciding question "Is this profitable?" It was "Can I see clearly what is happening here?" This is a more robust filter than ethical intuition alone, because it doesn't require you to detect wrongdoing — only opacity. Fraud and corruption both depend on something hidden. A rule that declines anything you cannot inspect will screen out a large share of disasters before you have to diagnose them. Mandel's wallet test for people and his transparency test for deals are the same instrument pointed in different directions.
Tactic: Adopt a standing rule that any deal or investment whose economics cannot be explained to you in full is declined by default, regardless of who recommends it.
Principle 9
Give like a distributor: specialize, then audit
"We've tried to run our foundation and our charitable efforts the same way we ran our business," Mandel said. That meant two things. First, specialization: faced with "an infinite list of needs," the foundation eventually narrowed to five areas — leadership development, nonprofit management, humanities, Jewish life, and urban engagement — and declined most else. Second, accountability: for significant gifts, the foundation asked for an evaluation "in six months or six years — whatever makes sense."
Most philanthropy fails on one or both counts. Donors scatter gifts across every worthy cause, and they rarely ask what happened afterward because asking feels ungracious. Mandel treated both habits as the nonprofit equivalent of stocking every common part and never checking inventory turns. He also founded the Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Case Western in 1984 to professionalize the sector's management — investing not just in causes but in the competence of the organizations pursuing them.
F
From Corporate Gift Fund to Global Foundation
The Mandel philanthropic structure evolved by accretion, like Premier's divisions.
1953
Brothers establish the Premier Autoware Company Charitable & Educational Foundation; first gift to Brandeis.
1963
Each brother establishes a private family foundation.
1973
Mort co-founds Cleveland's Ten Plus Club to raise business leaders' giving to $10,000.
1982
Three supporting foundations of the Jewish Community Federation are created — the Mandel Associated Foundations.
1984
Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations co-founded at Case Western Reserve.
1988
Commission on Jewish Education in North America convened; $3M naming gift to CWRU's social work school.
1990
A Time to Act published; Mandel Foundation-Israel opens in Jerusalem under Seymour Fox.
1992
Mandel Leadership Institute founded in Jerusalem.
2012
Foundation formally renamed the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation.
2019
$23M to Cleveland Clinic for the Mandel Global Leadership and Learning Institute.
Tactic: Cap your giving to a short, explicit list of focus areas, and attach a dated evaluation request to every gift above a meaningful threshold.
Principle 10
Fund the scarce input, which is usually a person
The Mandel name is on a great many buildings, and it would be easy to read the philanthropy as an edifice complex. The more accurate reading is that the buildings housed programs designed to produce people: the Mandel Leadership Institute's 400-plus graduates in Israel, the social-leadership MBA at Ben-Gurion, the Cleveland Clinic's leadership institute, the profession-building agenda of A Time to Act. The foundation's mission sentence makes the target explicit: "to invest in people."
This is the Premier insight transposed. In any system, one input is scarcest, and that input sets the ceiling on everything else. For a distributor, it was the hard-to-find part. For a school system, a hospital, or a city, Mandel concluded, it was the excellent leader. "The quality of Cleveland Clinic or almost any institution is, to a great extent, a function of the quality of the people at the top." Even his humanities giving was framed as leadership development — producing graduates with "the intellectual tools to function responsibly as citizens." When he negotiated the Hebrew University grant, he used his leverage to change who students would become, by requiring humanities coursework.
P
The Same Playbook, Two Sectors
How Premier's operating logic reappeared in the foundation.
| At Premier Industrial | At the Mandel Foundation |
|---|---|
| Ask customers which parts are hard to find. | Identify the scarce input — excellent educators and leaders. |
| Specialize in high-margin niches, not commodity parts. | Narrow to five focus areas; decline the rest. |
| A players over B players in every key seat. | "Invest in people with the values, ability and passion to change the world." |
| Track results; 34 of 36 years of record earnings. | Require evaluations "in six months or six years." |
| Monthly sessions with Drucker on management development. | Leadership institutes in Jerusalem, the Negev, and Cleveland. |
Tactic: Before your next major investment of money or time, identify the single scarcest human input in the system you're trying to improve, and direct the resources there first.
Principle 11
Build the second career in parallel, not in sequence
The standard arc of American wealth is earn, then give. Mandel ran both at once. He became president of Cleveland's Jewish Community Center in 1952, at 30, while Premier was still a regional fastener business. The brothers founded their foundation in 1953, seven years before the IPO. As CEO of a public company for more than three decades, he spent as much as a third of his time in the social sector.
The parallel structure made both careers better. Civic leadership gave him a network across Cleveland's institutions and a laboratory for management ideas outside the pressure of quarterly earnings. Business gave his nonprofit work a discipline — evaluation, specialization, hiring standards — that the sector often lacked. And because the philanthropy was a habit built over decades rather than a project launched at retirement, it scaled smoothly when the fortune did. He didn't have to learn how to give at 75; he had been practicing since his twenties.
Tactic: Commit a fixed percentage of your working time to a civic or nonprofit role now, while the stakes in your primary career are still high, rather than deferring it to a later chapter.
Principle 12
Go back for the unfinished thing
At 91, Mandel sat for a ninety-minute capstone defense to collect a chemistry degree he was sixteen hours short of in 1946. It had no economic value. It had enormous signaling value — to himself, more than anyone. "It's completing something that was slightly incomplete."
The habit of going back is of a piece with everything else. Premier went back to customers to ask what was missing. The foundation went back to grantees to ask what had worked. Mandel went back to his own record and found a gap he had carried for seven decades. He also wrote the book, at friends' urging, after a lifetime of "doing and not a whole lot of time reflecting." Leaders who never audit their own unfinished business tend to project the same blind spot onto their organizations — they stop asking what's missing because they've stopped looking.
Tactic: Write down the one commitment you abandoned years ago that still bothers you, and decide this quarter whether to finish it or formally release it.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Morton Mandel, It's All About Who (2012)If you asked me to sum up everything I know in the fewest words, I would do it in just four: "It's all about who."
— Morton Mandel, on B playersThey bat .270, don't make many errors in the field, but they can't help you win the pennant. They cheat you from achieving all that you could become.
— Morton Mandel, to The Brandeis Hoot, 2013We defined rich as follows: no unpaid bills and a balance of money in the bank I didn't need tomorrow.
— Morton Mandel, on retirement, 2013I've already lit 'x' candles. I think there are more candles unlit than lit. There are huge unmet needs.
— Morton Mandel, to Cleveland Clinic Magazine, 2019They have to be born, then made. Many people are born with the right qualities, but they don't get on the right track to become leaders.
Maxims
- Ask what's missing. The most profitable product is usually the one your customer can't find and can't name.
- Values are a gate, not a weight. If you wouldn't let someone hold your wallet, nothing else on the résumé matters.
- Experience comes fifth. It is the only criterion that can be acquired on the job, so screen hardest on the others.
- The B player is the expensive one. Mediocrity that doesn't fail visibly occupies the seat an A player should have.
- Hire the person who corrects you. One great hire can recalibrate a founder's instincts and an organization's standards at once.
- Borrow little, explain everything. A balance sheet a stranger can read is a company that can't be squeezed.
- Decline what you cannot see. Opacity is the common ingredient of fraud, corruption, and most expensive mistakes.
- Run the giving like the business. Specialize, measure, and ask what happened six months or six years later.
- Invest in the scarce input. In almost every institution, that input is a leader.
- Finish the incomplete thing. Third base is not home, even at 91.
