Since its earliest days, SRI has endeavored to bring innovation into the business world. A key innovation, from Stanford University, was decision analysis. In 1968, Carl and others formed a Decision Analysis Program in the Business Group. Eventually growing to 20 members, it successfully provided this problem-solving and planning discipline to SRI clients for 14 years. During this period, Carl focused on applying decision analysis to the intricate, sometimes entangled, world of strategic management.
Carl is also responsible for one innovation that truly changed the American financial landscape. In 1974, at the suggestion of Charles Anderson, Carl started a new program that would bring his analytical skills to the world of financial services. To learn the financial habits of the general public, he initiated a broad multiclient study of how the typical American family interacted with the available financial services. This study revealed a highly fractured, inertia-bound world that was clearly ripe for overhaul and simplification. Average affluent households dealt with as many as 20 different financial service vendors involving nearly twice that many products.
That clarity, unfolding in the latter part of the 1970s, together with insight that came from a careful reading of the banking laws of the day, convinced Carl and his group that all those products could be integrated under a single vendor, in this case, Merrill Lynch. Although Merrill Lynch strongly resisted such a sweeping and unsettling change, SRI convinced its president that they should offer such a one-stop financial service, called the Cash Management Account (CMA). For the first time an investor could deal with a single vendor and see a single, integrated financial statement. Banks challenged the approach around the country, but SRI’s work was sound and by the mid-1980s more than 1 million CMA customers used CMAs.
This Hall of Fame award is presented for Carl’s leadership in the growth of decision analysis at SRI, and for his key role in instigating a fundamental change in the U.S. financial service industry.