What a 1940s Manufacturing Company Can Teach School Leaders About Feedback
A conversation with my dad about a company most people have never heard of illustrated how feedback drives success.
In the spirit of Father's Day this weekend, I want to tell a story about my dad.
My father spent most of his career in sales with all the traveling and long work calls that entailed. My mother was a teacher and a principal, and now she is a member of her local board of education, so the professional conversations I have in my family usually happen between the two educators in the room. My brother is a business founder and entrepreneur, so he is the more likely partner to talk shop with my dad. My awareness of his work was mostly limited to the ever-present copies of Business Week scattered around the house, and the “Goody Box” filled with promotional products he gave away to clients, which kept us well supplied with pens, playing cards, and golf balls among other things.
This week, I visited my parents, and one morning my dad and I had an extended conversation about leadership. After a short stint at Texaco, my father spent the rest of his career at AMP Incorporated. I had always known he was proud of working for AMP, but I didn't really know the details. That morning he told me.
A Company Built Around Listening
AMP made electronic connectors, the small components that link wires and circuits inside almost every machine you can think of. From 1941 until 1999, the company dominated that market so completely that if you owned an electronic product anywhere in those decades, it almost certainly contained an AMP part, even though you never saw the company's name on anything you bought.
What caught my attention was not the dominance itself. It was how AMP got there. The company committed 10% of its gross revenue to research and development each year, which my dad described as unusual even by the standards of his industry. What he said next is what made me start taking notes. AMP directed most of that R&D budget, by some accounts as much as 75%, toward something the company called product engineering. That meant the engineers were not working in isolation on theoretical advances. They were responding directly to what production workers and sales representatives told them from the factory floor and the field.
A salesman who encountered a problem with a client's assembly line logged it as a technical issue, and an engineer addressed it. A machine operator who noticed a die wearing down faster than expected flagged it, and the next generation of equipment accounted for it. As the company expanded overseas, it built local engineering teams inside each subsidiary rather than routing every decision back through headquarters in Pennsylvania. A plant in Japan or Germany could solve a problem on its own timeline instead of waiting for an answer to travel around the world and back.
The Founder Understood Something About Trust
The company's founder, U.A. Whitaker, was an engineer who deliberately designed that structure and served as the company's leader until 1961. He was also, my dad told me, wary of unions organizing in his plants. How Whitaker responded to that concern feels like common sense, but unfortunately common sense isn't as common as it should be. He paid well. He invested in real professional development. He promoted from within whenever he could, and he built his plants in smaller communities where the company could become a genuine fixture of local life rather than a distant employer. Whitaker tried to make his employees’ wellbeing so evident that they would never feel the need to organize and demand it from him.
My experience has been that unions provide an essential function in the public-school sector, so it was interesting to me how a successful company took an approach to labor that obviated the need for them. But what intrigued me most about what my dad described at AMP wasn't the approach to labor so much as the way they relied on their workers to ensure quality. Whitaker built a system where the people closest to the work, on the floor and in the field, had a real channel to shape what the company did next, and he backed that channel with money and structure rather than slogans.
Why This Sounds Familiar
Educational leaders hear constantly about the importance of stakeholder feedback. We collect surveys, hold listening sessions, and report back to our boards that we engaged the community. Too often that process is performative. The session happens, the notes get filed, and the decision that follows looks exactly like the one that would have happened anyway.
AMP’s feedback loops worked because they were structural, not occasional. The sales loop and the factory floor loop ran continuously, funded at a serious level, and tied directly to product decisions that mattered. Nobody scheduled a feedback meeting once a year and called the obligation met. The system assumed that the people closest to the customer and the product knew things the engineers in the lab could not, and it built permanent infrastructure to capture that knowledge.
That is the system leaders should build for gathering feedback from teachers, principals, and families. A single listening session is not a feedback loop. A standing structure that consistently brings classroom information back into the decisions made at the central office, with real resources and real consequences attached, comes much closer to what Whitaker built at AMP.
What Happens When the System Disappears
In 1999, a conglomerate named Tyco acquired AMP in a hostile takeover. The new owners kept the products and the patents, but they prioritized efficiency and short-term revenue over the decentralized structure that had driven the company for six decades. The culture Whitaker built did not survive the transition.
My father took an early retirement package in 2001. He told me the company he had been proud to work for was no longer the one he had joined, and he no longer wanted to be part of what it had become.
I think about that ending often because it reminds me that the systems we build to elevate the voices closest to the work are fragile. They depend on leaders who continue to fund them, protect them, and treat them as essential rather than optional. The moment a new leader decides that listening is a cost to be cut rather than a structure to be sustained, the organization can look the same from the outside while becoming something entirely different on the inside. AMP's connectors kept the company's name on machines for years after Whitaker's system was gone. What disappeared first was the thing that had made the company worth working for.
Dr. Sean Bulson is a practitioner-scholar, professor of educational leadership, and the 2024 Maryland Superintendent of the Year. He served as superintendent of Harford County Public Schools from 2018 to 2026 and Wilson County Schools from 2011 to 2016. Subscribe for weekly posts on educational leadership, equity, and district transformation.
