President Henry B. Eyring: New leaders voice joy, humility over callings

"I went from there to the United States Air Force and somehow decided that physics would not be my life's work. I thought I needed something else for education, so I tried a place I had heard of called the Harvard Graduate School of Business. I was so naive I didn't know it might be hard to be admitted. I know now that it was a miracle that I was accepted....

"I didn't know what a balance sheet was. I didn't know what a pro-forma cash flow looked like. I was a physics student about to be lost in the Harvard Business School."

After graduation with a doctorate from the prestigious institution, he took a faculty position at Stanford University, where he married his wife, Kathleen Johnson. He recalled that "her first adventures in cooking for us were to find some morning menu that I could keep down on my nervous stomach as I went off to meet those apparently confident Stanford students. I wondered how I could teach them, until I found out that they were scared, too."

While at Stanford, he held teaching and administrative assignments in production management, operations and systems analysis, organizational behavior and management of the total enterprise. He also served as a visiting fellow for a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was founder, director or officer of at least two companies in Sunnyvale, Calif.

A consultant to a wide range of private and public enterprises, he was called by the First Presidency to serve as president of Ricks College (now BYU-Idaho) in 1971, where he served for six years before becoming deputy commissioner of church education. He was later named commissioner, where he served until being sustained as first counselor in the Presiding Bishopric in 1985, then a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy in 1992, and then as an apostle on April 1, 1995, at age 61.

Decision-making

When asked Saturday about how his educational background as a Harvard MBA and Ph.D. would impact his work in the First Presidency, President Eyring found himself emotional again when relating his observation of decision-making at the top levels of church leadership.

As the new president of Ricks College, sitting in the first meeting he had ever observed with the church's Board of Education, he watched as an academic with a research background in group decision-making. He initially viewed their discussion as "the strangest encounter."

"Here you have the prophets of God, and they are disagreeing in a way you never see in business," when participants most often defer to the chairman. "I thought revelation would come to them all and they would all see things in the same way. It was not like anything I had ever seen in studying small groups in business."