OUR FOUNDER, James M. Kittleman

(1911-1995)

James M. Kittleman was the earliest pioneer in the field of nonprofit executive search. A lifelong Chicagoan and a Cornell University graduate in architecture, he worked several years as an architect and in business management. He joined the consulting firm of Booz, Allen & Hamilton in the early 1950s in their Chicago office. Time Magazine had called Booz Allen "the company doctors" and "the world's largest and most prestigious management consulting firm". Jim was part of the early studies to improve management at Harvard, The Cleveland Clinic, University of Chicago, the San Francisco Foundation and Carleton College. He also assisted in the merger of Chicago's Presbyterian and St. Luke's hospitals (now Rush University Medical Center).

Recognizing the need of nonprofit organizations to improve their leadership and management capabilities, and addressing his own passion for philanthropy, Jim left Booz, Allen in 1963 to establish his own company, James M. Kittleman & Associates, Inc., starting his enterprise in the historic Rookery Building on South LaSalle Street in Chicago. For a number of years he had observed that nonprofit management positions were ill-defined, that the functions of governance and management were often blurred and that few management training and educational opportunities existed for nonprofit executives. Jim understood the need for a leadership style characterized by participatory teamwork, consensus building and stewardship rather than by the more dispassionate and authoritarian approach of corporate America. He focused on these issues through the practice of executive search. Jim sought out executives who possessed a certain combination of specific qualities: vision, passion, energy, intellect, judgment and people skills. To Jim, when it came to recruiting a leader for a nonprofit, it mattered not whether the organization was a college or a foundation or a museum. These specific qualities defined the fundamental requirements for effective leadership and ultimately for the success of the nonprofit organization.

Kittleman & Associates quickly became recognized through Jim's earliest engagements with several prominent clients: the initial organization and recruitment of the first paid executive director of The Nature Conservancy; the reorganization and leadership recruitment for The Chicago Community Trust; the organization and establishment of the Brandywine River Museum and Conservancy in Chaddsford, Pennsylvania; and the first reorganization of the National Park Service to reinterpret its mission under the concept of "parks as public places", a theme that continues to this day. In 1987 Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, established the James M. Kittleman Scholarship Award which is given annually to two second-year graduate students majoring in Public/Nonprofit Management.

Jim worked into his early eighties. The company established an office for him in Salida, Colorado, his boyhood summer home, where he finally retired in 1993. One cannot think of Jim without remembering his sense of humor, quick wit, the sly tricks he played on his colleagues, always in the best taste, and his zest for life. But, above all, Jim Kittleman truly embodied all of those qualities he sought in the executives he recruited: Vision, Passion, Energy, Intellect, Judgment, and People Skills.