Look Who's Truckin' at Tuck!

Fred Webster, PhD '64, thinks he's got the best of both worlds. For 30 years, he has made his home in rural New Hampshire, where community means something and where kids have a chance to be kids. At the same time, Webster, the C.H. Jones Third Century Professor of Management at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, has become known for his insights into corporate marketing.

Raised in rural upstate New York, Webster already was used to severe winters when he attended Dartmouth and then Tuck. With time out to get his PhD at Stanford and teach a year at Columbia, Webster, his wife, and their three children moved back to Hanover in 1965, then settled in nearby Etna, where downtown means the general store and the post office.

Webster has raised sheep and chickens. For fun, he drives trucks -- the big ones -- hauling wood chips north or Vermont spring water south. Webster wears another hat -- that of the Etna Volunteer Fire Department, a division of the Hanover force. "I can't think of a more interesting place to be a firefighter," he says, citing airplane, train, and highway crashes; search and rescue missions; rural fires (the bring-your-own-water kind); urban high-rise fires; and a hospital, with its radiation threat.

Webster weaves a full professional life into this setting. Tuck professors know that if the school is to stay a world-class institution, they have to get out. Webster has taught in South Africa and Switzerland and at Harvard, Northwestern, and Stanford. He publishes frequently. A 1992 article won the Journal of Marketing award as best in its field; Market-Driven Management (1994) has been very well received; and he's about to publish findings on research in five countries on the relationships between corporate culture, customer orientation, and performance. He consults, as much for the stimulation as for anything else.

On the flight home from a consulting assignment in New York City, Webster bumped into two men who might be called financial market heavyweights. During the summer, their families left New York for the north woods and the men caught up for long weekends if they could. "Well, I had breakfast at home, spent a full day in New York, and I'll eat dinner at home. You tell me," said Webster to them, no doubt smiling, "who's got the better deal?"

-- Kelly Teevan, MBA '82

Stanford Business School Magazine
(ISSN 0883-265X)
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