Robert Severns lived with a quiet, unassuming
dignity, and passed away that way this June
17. Along the way, he built Sierra Chemical,
now a division of Scott, from a nascent startup
into a major corporation. He also conceived
or catalyzed several important foundations;
raised a fine son and daughter; and committed
many acts of personal charity and friendship
and good, honest business. Any one of those
things, nowadays, is too rare. In combination,
they're uncommon indeed.
The San Jose Mercury remembered him several
days later. The paper ran a 3-inch obituary
that must have suited him for its brevity
and understatement. (You can access it at
the following link on the web:
http://www.legacy.com/bayarea/LegacySubPage2.asp?Page=LifeStory&PersonId=1106594.)
Shakespeare wrote what Severns
himself would probably consider the appropriate
eulogy:
They say he summed his count and paid his
score;
That much I'll say of him; I'll say no more.
Nevertheless, and despite the fact that he
wouldn't want much more than that by way of
tribute, there's more that needs to be said
about Bob Severns.
He grew up in central-southern Illinois, somewhere
in between the Springfield home of Lincoln
and the birthplace of Ronald Reagan in Dixon.
The land is flat and the summers are hot;
I lived there. The people are common-sense;
helpful, but matter-of-fact. There is a Swiss
lack of pretense and show. Whether by accident
or by environmental influence, this is how
Severns wound up.
Graduating from the University of Illinois,
with a later postgraduate degree in engineering,
Severns, after serving in the U.S. Army --
where late in his stint at Redstone Arsenal,
he used his engingeering skill to help translate
some of the works of Werner Von Braun -- set
out as a corporate executive. He worked for
Corning and other companies, and moved with
his wife, Helen, to California in 1958.
About a decade later, in the late 1960s, Severns
got a call from Sierra Chemical. He went to
work managing production for Sierra, but was
soon offered the job of president and CEO.
A venture capital firm that was financing
and restructuring Sierra wanted to move the
company much more quickly than it had been
into a new line of fertilizers -- the osmocote
line of special, coated fertilizers that work
like a time-release vitamin for plants.
Moving new products and new ideas is never
easy, especially when you are selling to farmers,
so the old management can certainly be forgiven
if its first several years promoting the new
product mostly involved free samples. Nevertheless,
the investors were getting restless. They
wanted to start seeing sales soon, and a profit,
not too long after that.
"Can you put this in the black in a year
or two?," one of the VC investors --
the least sentimental and least patient class
of people this side of hedge fund managers
-- reportedly asked Severns.
"I think so," Severns answered.
The story may be apocryphal, but it sounds
like Bob Severns. Positive, but not promising
what he couldn't deliver -- and, of course,
short and to the point. "You need to
be able to explain your business in three
paragraphs, three sentences, and three words,"
he once told me.
Severns had a gentle voice and manner that
softened his size (I would guess 6-4, but
his son Dave tells me firmly that he was 6-1.
Sometimes people you respect seem larger.)
But he also had a glint in the eye and a hawkish
appearance that told you he was quiet not
because he had nothing to say, but because
he was a sharp listener. An acquiline nose,
and later in life two swoops of hair on each
side of a bald spot, reinforced the appearance
of a mind capable of pouncing to the right
conclusion like a Peregrine falcon, even if
his aw-shucks-I-don't-know personality was
that of an Illinois farmboy.
Severns did indeed put Sierra quickly in the
black. By 1971 the company's revenues eked
over the $1 million mark. Over the next 20
years, they grew virtually every year. By
the time he sold the firm to W.R. Grace in
1989 for a nine-figure price, Sierra employed
about 400 people, mostly in the U.S. but some
scattered around the globe, with annual revenues
exceeding $70 million at impressive margins
of about 20 percent.
He did it all without accounting gimmics or
strong-arming. Or rather, Severns led it all.
He was emphatic on the point that the success
of his company was a group effort. As Peter
Lynch put it, "most of my capital gets
in the elevator and goes home at night."
Whether he quoted it or not, that truism was
a Severns mantra.
Anyone who visisted the Sierra plant, as I
did in 1990, saw this at once. I didn't meet
a worker whom Severns didn't know by his first
name, nor one that didn't call him "Bob."
Most of them asked how his family was doing,
and he asked them about their wife and kids,
most of whom he could name.
"He was a team-builder," his long-time
colleague Cleon Johnson recalls. "That
was how he built the business."
Severns was bemused by the rise of corporate
flash in the 1980s -- and surely sensed and
foresaw its inevitable by-product, the corporate
excess and crashes of the late 1990s. He told
me once how J. Peter Grace descended upon
the Sierra plant one afternoon during the
Grace buyout.
"Greg, he came in on a helicopter, not
a little one but a kind of big, military-style
one. Out jumped six or eight people in suits
-- a couple accountants, several lawyers,
and one or two little guys that just sort
of seemed to be his personal servants.
"It was like a visit by a prince, or
the king of England. You know, I sort of wondered
if they were going to make any money on the
place. I guess I figured, they're buying it,
so that's up to them now."
Grace re-organized and re-sold Sierra a couple
years later for a modest profit. Today, as
a part of Scott, it remains the leader in
its field. Time-release fertilizers that eke
out of their shell over a period of anywhere
from 10 weeks to 15 months pass out of its
doors all over the world, especially for high
value-crops, like Florida strawberries or
Arizona flowers, grown where the soil is sandy.
A lot of successful businessmen just retire
and live the high life; others engage in an
old-age splash of trendy and ostentatious
giving. Severns didn't fit into either category.
He started the Severns Family Foundation,
which aided area hosptitals, schools, and
the then-just-forming Alexis de Tocqueville
Institution in Redwood City. Along with Eugene
Ravizza, and the late Bruce Thompson -- two
other guys so different from Severns, yet
in some ways so much like him -- Severns formed
AdTI's first corporate board in 1989.
One of his early concerns was environmental
policy, where Severns couldn't understand
the lack of -- another Severns keyword --
"balance" in the discussion. Severns
couldn't see, for example, the logic of toxic
waste cleanup law. Under these laws, a business
that buys a piece of property, which had toxic
waste on it 50 years before it was bought,
is now liable to clean up the site -- whether
or not it knew anything about the waste in
the first place. Severns had one friend that
was essentially wiped out by this law. It
never ceased to bother him.
At the same time, Severns was not against
a clean environment. Indeed, his very business
promoted plant growth. He wanted reason. He
was a steady voice for sanity.
Thanks to his early sponsorship of their work,
such AdTI scholars as Becky Dunlop and Cesar
Conda (now the chief domestic aide to Vice
President Cheney) toiled away against bad
science and in favor of sanity and balance.
One result was a discussion of the need for
cost-benefit analysis of regulations in government.
If a 0.1 percent reduction in some effluent
triples the cost of filtering it, is it really
worth it? If a road material like phosphate
slag is estimated to kill one person in 100
million from cancer, what about the estimated
7 lives it saves in reduced highway deaths?
These were the kind of bottom-line questions
that Severns focused on when he thought of
public policy. In that sense, he is, to me,
a lot like the American people in general.
Just a regular, common-sense guy, who maybe
thought about things with a little extra care,
and turned them around to a few different
angles before making up his mind. That, my
guess is, is how he'd like to be remembered.
In 1994, Congress passed a cost-benefit provision
for environmental and other U.S. regulatory
provisions. The law not only did some modest
direct good, even under the Carol Browning
era at EPA -- it also gave state regulators
like Dunlop a handy tool for resisting some
of the more absurd incursions of the federal
government and state regulators and legislators.
In short, the effort did some good.
Severns then turned his considerable attention
to education issues. He never cared a lot
for the voucher debate, in large part, it
always seemed, because the people of the voucher
movement were sometimes overbearing, preachy,
and even (in a few cases) arrogant.
To be honest, I disagreed with Bob about this.
It seemed to me that the whole mix needs to
be shaken up, like the post office or AT &
T, before we will ever get The System, or
anyone in it with power, to listen to our
polite suggestions and respectful critiques.
But as anyone who ever disagreed with Bob
Severns knows, he was a pleasant man to do
it with.
First of all, he didn't pretend to agree with
you. He just calmly spelled out his differences.
Second, there wasn't a lot of thumping or
fluff. "I don't know, Greg -- do you
think that issue and those people can ever
win?"
During the 1990s, the typical education donor
in America was a mix of Tim Draper -- the
venture capitalist who dumped $20 million
into a voucher initiative in California several
years ago -- and Lew Gerstner, the high-profile
IBM leader who helped restore the company
to profitability by laying off workers, and
led flashy conferences of experts expatiating
on "education reform" -- whatever
that means.
Severns was almost the opposite of both. He
wanted to help kids read. And he wanted not
to be listed on plaques, given awards, in
a word, noticed. (Sorry, Bob, you are likely
to get a Tocqueville Statesmanship Award this
year. We've been holding off only because
we knew you would probably turn down any awards
while alive.)
His approach to problems like this was penetrating,
but basic. It frustrated him to know that
50 years ago, spending a fraction of what
we do today for pupil, kids generally learned
how to read. Today, spending on public education
has zoomed, much of the money goes into regulatory
bureaucracy -- and basic skills continue to
decline. Bob Severns kept asking the same
basic question: Why can't The System teach
kids to read? He patiently waited for an answer,
but he didn't just wait. He did something.
Through Tocqueville and later other work,
he often supported research on broader themes,
but he never lost his focus on the basic,
bottom-up facts. In the mid-1990s, he discovered
and took an interest in a series of gradually-stepped
readers -- small books each of which added
a new letter or sound to a student's vocabulary.
The readers not only incrementally built up
basic skills from a to z, as it were, but
allowed for measurement and verification --
Johnny is up to # 27 and has passed the test,
Julie is up to #31, and so on.
When one school, Cesar Chavez Elementary,
grudgingly implemented the program for a year,
reading scores improved from 15 percent of
students at grade level to more than 30 percent.
I asked Severns how he felt about that. He
told me he was disappointed. I said, "Bob,
15 to 30 is not bad." But Severns wanted
to do better. What would make you happy, Bob?
"I don't know, I guess 100 is unrealstic
but I'd like to see 70, 80 -- you'd think
something well over 50."
I still think Bob should have taken a little
more heart in taking something from 15 to
30. But it speaks to his Joe-Friday like persistence
that it bugged him so much it wasn't a 70
or an 80.
Severns thus not only had an engineer's and
businessman's affinity for figures and definite
measurements, but, one might suggest, an idealist's
inclination to aim high. His politics were
conservative, by today's lexicon, but of a
moderate sort. Bob Severns was practical more
than a preacher, an idea man but not an ideologue.
In recent years, Bob Severns was involved
in starting the Lexington Institute, an important
voice on a number of policy areas, especially
military and security issues, in Arlington,
VA. He became close friends with an old close
friend of mine, in fact my best man, Mac Carey
-- a bright and well-organized fellow who
helped give me my start in politics in 1982,
as I later gave him a start in the think tank
business in 1993. It was a pleasure to watch
the two of them become friends. I do not think
it was too much to say they loved one another.
Watching them on military junkets, one would
have thought they were a couple of fraternity
brothers.
There's a tendency to talk about someone as
if the most important things in their life
all involved you. Then again, you talk about
the things you know. These observations concern
events that took up maybe one percent or less
of Bob Severns's life. Yet I feel I knew him
well, and understood the man at the core.
I hope those who knew him the best feel this
is not an inaccurate or ungenerous portrait,
and I trust Bob himself will not accuse me
of "going a little overboard."
Some years ago, another good friend of mine
and Tocqueville's, Bruce Thompson passed away.
(Now there is only Gene Ravizza and me, from
a group that also included Severns, George
Champion, and others.) Bruce, more of a genius
and innovator than a manager, left a confused
tangle behind at his business, Pacific Western.
Like Sierra, it was a well-conceived operation,
owning properties in such then-low-priced
cities as Denver and Portland, but somehow,
it kept struggling to get liquid.
Severns was happy to jump in with Ravizza
and get the operation back on a stable footing.
It would be too much to say that it was a
major turnaround story. But it survived. How
many real estate trusts did that in the last
20 years? This was an act of charity as much
or more than an act of business. It said a
lot about the character of both these men,
and friends, that they were willing to take
on this task. I know that Bruce's wife Sue,
and their children, benefited greatly from
Bob's helping hand, and are deeply grateful.
It is said that the virtuous man is one who
does the right thing when he thinks no one
is watching. Bob Severns led his life that
way, doing the right thing, but not for display,
and in fact, generally, as silently and unobtrusively
as possible. He leaves behind a fine son and
daughter, and grandchildren; good friends,
good works, and good causes -- in short, a
lot more capital and wisdom and general good
feeling than he consumed, or than was here
when he started.
They say he summed his count and paid
his score;
That much I'll say of him; I'll say no more.
-- Gregory Fossedal
Chairman Emeritus
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