Jim Champy is a leading expert on management issues involving business engineering, a topic for which he wrote a New York Times best-selling book that has sold more than two million copies.
In addition to being the co-author of Reengineering the Corporation, Jim was most recently chairman emeritus of consulting for Dell Services. Before that, he was chairman of consulting and head of strategy for Perot Systems.
In this episode, Jim shares how his college education prepared him to launch his first business, Index, a consulting practice he founded with a few hundred dollars with his classmates from MIT. Today, Jim continues to consult with business executives of major companies seeking to improve business performance. He also gives back as a philanthropist and as a mentor, including to Ball State students.
Jim also shares the story of how his long-standing engagement with Ball State began with one business student seeking his advice—and his reasons for why he chooses to remain involved in influencing the lives of so many more of our students.
Jim Champy is a leading expert on management issues involving business engineering, a topic for which he wrote a New York Times best-selling book that has sold more than two million copies.
In addition to being the co-author of Reengineering the Corporation, Jim was most recently chairman emeritus of consulting for Dell Services. Before that, he was chairman of consulting and head of strategy for Perot Systems.
In this episode, Jim shares how his college education prepared him to launch his first business, Index, a consulting practice he founded with a few hundred dollars with his classmates from MIT. Today, Jim continues to consult with business executives of major companies seeking to improve business performance. He also gives back as a philanthropist and as a mentor, including to Ball State students.
Jim also shares the story of how his long-standing engagement with Ball State began with one business student seeking his advice—and his reasons for why he chooses to remain involved in influencing the lives of so many more of our students.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
Hello, I'm Geoff Mearns, and I have the good fortune to serve as the president of Ball State University. My next guest on my podcast is Jim Champy. He's an author, a philanthropist and a world renowned expert on business re-engineering. And that's a topic we'll learn more about in today's episode of my podcast. Jim has an interesting story to tell about his relationship to Ball State, and we'll get to that story during our conversation.
But first, let me tell you a little bit more about Jim. In the 1960s, Jim earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees from MIT in Boston before earning a law degree from Boston College. As a young professional, Jim was one of the original founders of Index, a $200 million consulting practice. He later became the chairman of the consulting arm of Dell Perot Systems.
In addition to his successful career in business, Jim is the bestselling author of Multiple Business books, including Re-engineering the Corporation. This is a book that dominated the New York Times bestseller list in the early 1990s and has sold millions of copies all around the world. Presently, Jim is retired, or at least partially so, and he continues to give back of his time, his talents, and his treasure to the causes that mean the most to him, including higher education.
So, Jim, thank you for joining me for this podcast and appreciate you taking some time to have the conversation today.
[JIM CHAMPY]
Pleased to do it, Geoff. Pleased to be with you.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
Good. So why don't we begin with where you grew up. Before you dedicated your career to business consulting, you grew up in Massachusetts, outside of Boston, as the son of an Italian-American tradesman. Tell me about your family.
[JIM CHAMPY]
It was an interesting family. You know, my grandparents on both sides, my mother's side and father's side, had come from Italy in the early part of the last century, where a lot of Italians were just … just leaving Italy because things were so hard there, just financially and otherwise so hard. And they came to, you know, to the states and to places where there was work. And the city of Lawrence was one of those places. In fact, there were multiple cities in that area that were major manufacturing cities at the time. And they all came to secure work and a better living and a better place. And it's interesting, my name is not spelled as it was in Italy, which should have been C-I-A-M-P-I. It was Champy. And nobody applied for a name change in those days. It's just the way that the people at the border spelled your name. It was just the way it sounded. And so our family name became Champy.
My father worked very hard in the small construction company. Interestingly, he wanted to go to college. He was actually accepted at Dartmouth. He was a good basketball player, but his family couldn't afford to let him go. He had to work in the family business. My mother was a schoolteacher and went to what was called teachers college in those days. And they were two of the few members of my family that that went to college.
But, you know, I'd learned a lot about the Italian culture. Like my grandfather, I have this image of him sitting under a grape arbor and he had a real great arobe and they made their own wine. And I remember him sitting there, just watching him sitting there, and he spoke no English. Neither did my grandmother. But they had children who would translate for me.
And what I really appreciated, Geoff, was the nature of work. Started to appreciate the dignity of work. I got to know a lot of the laborers, the bricklayers, the stonemasons who worked for my father. I got to know their lives. And my father always said to me, You don't have to be afraid of a depression or a recession, Jim, if you learn to work with your hands. Because that's what he did. He worked with his hands. And by the way, I still believe that. He taught me trades. And I always knew if I ever was out of a job, you know, working for a major corporation or doing something, I could build stone walls. And I have. I have. But I think the most important thing out of all of that experience was learning about the people who did real work, real physical work, and how wonderful they were. And I learned to appreciate them. And I think that's been the basis of a lot of my thinking about work. You've got to respect everybody, have to try to create good opportunities for them. And it was a great upbringing. You know, we had no wealth, but it was a great upbringing.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
Yeah. And you were considering going into that kind of labor and but you chose to attend MIT, an outstanding institution in Boston. And as I said in the introduction, you earned your Bachelor of Science in 1963, and then two years later, your master's in civil engineering. What prompted you to attend MIT and tell us about your experience at that institution?
[JIM CHAMPY]
You know, I had decided that I wanted to go to MIT, I think as many people in those days did, having found a catalog about M.I.T. and my ambition at that time was actually to become an architect. I was planning to work for my father's business, but not running the construction company, I wanted to design. I wanted to become an architect. So I went to M.I.T., expecting to become an architect. But I was intimidated by the Department of Architecture there. At the time, there were these great architects who were very subjective in judging the performance of their students. And I came to MIT very, very poorly prepared. It was a public high school. I had gone to a safe public high school.
My roommate had come from the Bronx High School of Science. And if you know that place, it's an extraordinary place with great preparation. I came from a public school and I was frightened, frankly. And so I said, I can't risk my career at M.I.T. by trying to be an architect under all this subjective stuff. So I literally walked down the hall and registered at the Civil Engineering Department because that was the closest thing to what I was going to do.
I was going to build buildings and I just walked there and it was a very receptive place at the time. And I loved my classmates. I loved the young professors, and I loved the chairman of the department who was very aggressive about changing the nature of engineering and—
[GEOFF MEARNS]
And I was going to say, one of your professors also introduced you to what was, you know, just an emerging field of information technology—of IT—which was emerging and pretty revolutionary at that time.
[JIM CHAMPY]
Absolutely. You know, particularly in some industries, including the one I was interested in, you know, the construction industry, you know, had no or little automation at the time. Everything was done basically by hand or by, you know, by a blueprint that was produced by hand. But it was the time when information technology was becoming recognized and that it could do something to really help businesses perform and could change the nature of work.
And at MIT, one of the great things was we had funding, we had research funding, and my department chair was really good at getting money for us and giving us jobs. I wasn't expecting to stay for a master's degree, but he could give us jobs and I was given a job as a teaching assistant. And the work we were doing was really fun. We were doing optimization techniques. We were learning how to design buildings with technology. I remember my first project was with a professor to improve the sewerage system in San Francisco. I was helping him automate the process by which you manage surge flow. And by the way, I would be embarrassed today at the nature of that work. It was not environmentally sound, but it was how things were done then. And it was just a great experience—a wonderful experience.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
But after you earned your master's degree, you then decided to go to law school. What prompted you to consider that route?
[JIM CHAMPY]
You know, I looked at business schools and frankly, I couldn't figure out at the time what they did, what they really did. By the way, things have changed now. And I'm sure if you go to the, you know, the college, the business school at Ball State, they'll be substantive work. I'm sure that they're doing. But in those days, I couldn't figure it out.
And I thought, well, I wanted to learn more about business. And so I said, let me try law school because they were business courses that were tax courses. And I knew they would have depth or I expected they would have depth. And sure enough, they had more depth and more challenge than I had anticipated. You may remember, given your own profession, that where you went to work was a function of your standing in class—
[GEOFF MEARNS]
Very much so.
[JIM CHAMPY]
So, you know, you went to one of the big firms or you would, you know, clerked for a judge. And so it was a terribly competitive place. I wasn't prepared for that. And I actually worked harder at law school than I did at M.I.T. And you couldn't go to class without having read the cases. At MIT, I could sleep in the back of the classroom and nobody would say anything.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
(laughs) We don't encourage that today for our students, just on the record here, we don't encourage sleeping in the classroom. But you're right. You needed to be prepared.
[JIM CHAMPY]
You’re right, you needed to be prepared. And the other thing I didn't anticipate was a continuing intellectual discussion about the cases that we were studying. You know, I would finish a class and then for the rest of the day, my classmates and I would be debating about what we learned and what was right and was the judge's decision right. And that was very exciting. Just very exciting. By the way, I was first in my class in tax law. Tax law. And I always joked, you know, the tax law is a closed system. And I was already a systems thinker. And I would look to my classmates who came for liberal arts schools and I would say, well, they know how to add and subtract, but I know how to, you know, multiply and divide. And you needed to top that, you know, for a tax law. So I, I just enjoyed that discipline.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
Yeah. I'm not sure most law students enjoy law school as much as you did, but frankly, I enjoyed law school for many of the same reasons. And moving ahead in your life … after you graduated from law school, your father died somewhat suddenly. And the business that you described a moment ago was dissolved.
But you and a few of your classmates from MIT had already begun to form your first business—Index. So why don't you tell us about that period of your life and building that business.
[JIM CHAMPY]
You know, it was a difficult period in my life—not about Index, not about that company—but kind of the stretch for me and challenge for me to decide whether I was going to continue in the family business—this was before my father had died—or, you know, began this new career with MIT classmates to build this new company. That was a conflict. And then my father, in some sense died. So that conflict went away. And I could you know, join my classmates. Interestingly, in those days, there were not venture firms, Geoff, that gave you money. But we had one good client and that was the First National Bank of Chicago. And we had that client because one of my classmates was doing a PhD thesis that was supported by that bank that wanted to build an information system that allowed it to price portfolios, investment portfolios of their clients, daily.
And that may sound like a simple thing, but in those days it was pretty complex to make that work. You had to have multiple feeds, electronic feeds from all these different stock exchanges, and pricing, and it was complex. So we were in the business initially of building these large complex systems for banks that were expensive and paid for us starting this business. By the way, we each put in $275 to start it.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
That was your startup capital. (laughs)
[JIM CHAMPY]
That was our startup capital. And fortunately, the Bank of Chicago was willing to give us an advance on what we would be owed in order to give us capital. I remember here we are, four M.I.T. students, I remember painting the office we were in. And you know, we bought used furniture. It was nothing like what businesses look like today or when they're, you know, they're funded by venture firms.
But it was a great adventure. A great adventure. And I was the person who was seen actually as having the most business sense because I had worked with my father, I'd actually worked with the business. My other classmates had never worked for business. So I was considered the business expert of the four of us, but I was not the technology expert.
My three partners were brilliant. They were more brilliant than I was.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
So as you're growing this, you know, as you're growing Index, you also then started, as I understand it, to shift to consulting with businesses because of that experience and consulting with CEOs regarding the application of maybe information technology, how to incorporate that technology in their business. And you were developing this concept of re-engineering. The idea that companies need to not just incorporate technologies, but need to change their business practices to capitalize on these new technologies. Tell us about how that idea or concept emerged from you and how you started applying that to really expand your consulting business.
[JIM CHAMPY]
Look, we could see how businesses were really operating at the time. And frankly, how fractured they were and the kind of structures they built and, you know, kind of these towers of professionalism and work and their organizations that didn't work together. We could see that as we're building these large, complex information systems. We're seeing it happening in multiple places.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
And was this … I'm sorry to interrupt. Was this in the 1970s? Was that about the approximate time frame?
[JIM CHAMPY]
This was, yes, the 1970s. And that went on into the eighties and it was in the late eighties that we actually started to develop from all those experiences we were having the re-engineering ideas, the process ideas. And interestingly, what we did, Geoff, was we sold that big software business that was working for the banks because we were a single product company, and you can't continue being a single product company forever.
And we were learning so much about business and the application of technology in business that we just sold that part of the company and started consulting and we actually built up the revenues within the year, built back the revenues within the year, and we were starting to learn more and more about business and how technology worked in business and how inefficient and problematic the current ways of business were.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
So this was the eighties then. And then my understanding is, I think it was mid 1990s, you were hired as the head of strategy for The Perot Systems. And you know, most of us of our age certainly remember Ross Perot, particularly for his independent runs to be the president. Share more about that company and tell us a little bit of what it was like to work for Ross Perot.
[JIM CHAMPY]
You know, it's really interesting. I was hired into that company by Ross’s chief lieutenant. We had become friends over the years. And it took four years for me to decide to go to work with that company. Part of it was I was unsure about Ross and his own management style, but he was running for president during the during that time for the second time.
And when I finally went to work for the company, Ross called me. I didn't get to meet him because he was on the campaign trail, but he called me soon after I joined and he said, “Would you listen to my infomercials and tell me what you think of them?” And that's the way Ross campaigned. He was on TV with his ideas about basically how to re-engineer government, how to change government.
And he called me one day and he said, “What did you think about the one I did last night?” I said, “Ross, I would change it in this way.” I told him how I would change it and the next time he had changed it, he had listened to me. I said, “Wow, maybe we can be friends.” And over time we did become friends. He was a little suspicious of me because he always said … he called, you know, the East Coast here, we were elitists. And I would say to him, “Ross, you can't call us elitist. We work in your company now,” but he considered us elitist. But over the years, we became very close, very, very close. And I became close to his family. And by the way, I knew that he would sell the business— the business I was in—because he had sold his private business, his I'm sorry, his last business, to General Motors, who wanted this business because they wanted to digitize cars. They had that image, but Ross wanted to run General Motors. So they finally bought him out a second time.
And he started the company I was in, and I was with him for 14 years. And we became closer and closer over those 14 years. And he no longer called me an elitist and we had a lot of fun. But he had an edge, by the way. He did have an edge. He was caring on one side and treated us all very well, treated the people who work for him well. But he had an edge and he could get tough. And I saw that balance. But I knew he would sell the company. And we eventually did.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
And when you say he had an edge, that it was clear he had expectations for excellence across all relationships.
[JIM CHAMPY]
That's right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And if he didn't see it, he demanded it. But he had, you know, he one belief that turned out to be problematic. Would have been very problematic if he had gone to Washington. He believed that if you had a tough problem, all you had to do was put 12 smart people in a room and they could solve it.
He didn't like the idea as a management team that we had meetings though. He felt that was a waste of time, in his mind. And by the way, I learned that from him. A lot of management meetings are a waste of time, and so he wouldn't let us spend a lot of time in those.
The other--I learned a lot from his principles. There was one in which he said, “Too much money makes you dumb.” And if you look today at the large companies out in Silicon Valley and the fact that they're laying off thousands of people, I always say how are they laying off thousands of people? Well, they had become very inefficient. They had over hired, but they could do that because they had too much money. So I've always seen those principles of his play out, particularly the one of too much money makes you dumb.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
Yeah. I think if you have limited resources, you have to be not just prudent, you have to be strategic as opposed to …
[JIM CHAMPY]
That's right.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
Yeah. So, is that experience then what led you to write the book, Re-engineering the Corporation? Because that book became wildly successful for a business book.
[JIM CHAMPY]
Yes. Yeah. We started developing a principle about how companies were wasting money. We could see it. And, you know, we had some very interesting cases. We saw an insurance company in which a salesman would sell a policy and it would take 26 days to get that policy out the door. And we would say, “Why does it take 26 days to do a simple piece of work?”
And so what you started to see were multiple departments for which that work had to go. And at the same time, the Japanese, particularly Toyota, had figured out how to do through their Kaizen, through Japanese techniques, how to do work with a dramatic fewer number of people than Ford, GM, Chrysler. Were doing the same work, the same processes, and here were Japanese doing it in a tenth of the time. And when you looked at it, the work was being done fundamentally differently. Still good work.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
And I was going to say not only more efficiently, but they were also maintaining high quality standards in terms of the products they were producing.
[JIM CHAMPY]
That’s right. Costs were improving, time was being shortened. And the, you know, the quality of their product was increasing. So they were achieving all of that. And what made the book partially, I think very successful was that the American auto manufacturers, the American industries were seeing this. They were saying we got to change. We have to change how we're, you know, how we're operating if we're going to compete in the global marketplace.
So the timing for the book, Geoff, was very, very good. We had enough businesses worrying, appropriately so, about their future competitiveness. And our book was about that. And it was very impactful because it was about that. By the way, if I if I could, you know, if I could take pride in that book, it was also very readable.
It was not one of these business books that was just unreadable or a waste of time, you know, before the first chapter. It was, it was frankly a very good book. It took us four years to write it, Geoff. And at one point, our publisher didn't believe we would ever get it done. And he called me one day and he says, “We're dropping the book. We don't think you'll ever get this done.” And they did. They did. And my coauthor was very worried, but I had enough business acumen that I said, “Don't worry, Mike, we can resell this.” And sure enough, within a week, our agent had resold it. And by the way, the old publisher never recovered from that. But the new publisher made a lot of money off the 2 million copies.
By the way, it was also published in 26 different languages. So it was a world phenomenon, particularly in London, in Japan, in Germany. And I would get these copies of it in different languages. I still get them, by the way, Chinese and Asian languages. I can't read them.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
But you still have them on the shelf.
[JIM CHAMPY]
I do, behind me. On my shelf. And I still get some of these and I say, “What is this language? I don't even know what the language is, but I do have them.”
[GEOFF MEARNS]
Good. And I hope you're still getting some of those royalties, too—
[JIM CHAMPY]
You know, I never got a cent of royalties because I had a principle that because it was my company that provided the resources for the research the book needed, the examples we could write about, the book and all the speaking fees—and I was getting very high speaking fees; I was a minor celebrity in those days in business—I said the company should have all of those. I wanted to get paid well by the company. And then I had ambitious people in the company who would come to me and say, “We want to write a book.” And I would say, “You can write a book, but the company is going to own it.” That was the principle.
And I still did very well under that principle, but I never took a piece of the royalties.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
Yeah. And it was that book that is the bridge to your connection to Ball State.
[JIM CHAMPY]
Yes.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
As as I understand it, a student at the time, he was a student in the Miller College Business, they were reading your book, Re-engineering the Corporation. And so Kyle Hayden, I understand that is his name, reached out—called you one day and asked whether you would meet with him and several of the other students in the class. Why don't you tell us that story? Because I heard it from you. It's a…. it's a great story.
[JIM CHAMPY]
The way it happened was Kyle got to my assistant. In those days, I had an assistant. I don't have one now in retirement. And he called her, her name was Deedie, and said, “We'd like to speak to Mr. Champy.” And she said, “There's a student on the phone here who wants to speak to you.” And so I got on the phone with Kyle, and Kyle said, “Look, I want to have a group call with our class and you.” So we had that. We had that call. And then Kyle called me back and he said, “Well, we're going to rent a van and come to Boston to talk with you.” And I said, “No, you're not. It's the middle of winter. I can't have you coming to Boston in a van to talk with me.” And I was doing a lot of business in Chicago and staying at the Chicago University Club, which is a wonderful place.
And I said to Kyle “Well, why don't you organize your class and I'll meet you at the University Club in Chicago.” And sure enough, the class showed up. By the way, Fred Kitchens, who is their professor, always required them to dress in business suits with a red tie. So there's a class that shows up in their business suit and red tie. They were staying at a hotel across the street. And we have this wonderful discussion, not just about the projects that they did with Re-engineering, but they were very interested in learning about life. They were seniors, they were going to graduate. They knew, by the way, from my own resumé that I, you know, I was married, I had a wife, we had a dual career.
I had a young son. They wanted to know how all that worked and how they could balance their personal life with their work. And so for me, that was equally satisfying to be able to have that discussion and at the same time talk about their work. And for 17 years, that's what we've done. Because at some point, by the way, during those times, Perot was frankly subsidizing the cost of having those meetings so the students didn't have to pay for it.
But then there was a change and, you know, the company decided that although it was hiring from some of those classes, Kyle eventually himself went to work for Perot, that wasn't going to happen anymore. So Kyle and Ball State invited me to come to the campus. And so I did. I flew out. I stayed in your on-campus hotel and got to know the place even better.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
Yeah. And so as you said a moment ago, you've been coming to campus to meet with our students for 17 years now. Sounds like it's been very gratifying to you.
[JIM CHAMPY]
Yes.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
Is there something that you would say is distinctive about our students that continues to bring you back to our campus?
[JIM CHAMPY]
Look, I always love the practicality of the students. They wanted to find themselves good jobs. Good jobs. They at times felt restricted, you know, they go as far as Chicago in looking for their jobs. But I love their sincerity to find, you know, to go do good work somewhere and their desire to do that. They wanted to know about how to find that kind of job, what to do next.
But, you know, not only was it about your students, it was actually it turned out to be about me. Because Fred would get them to prepare questions for me to address. And so I would get 30, 40 questions to, you know, to think about before I arrived at Ball State. And some of them were very profound. And they caused me to think to think about my own life. One of them, just to give you an example, one of them was, “Have you ever failed at something in your life and how did you recover from it?”
[GEOFF MEARNS]
Great question.
[JIM CHAMPY]
I’d never thought about that.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
Great question.
[JIM CHAMPY]
And in that session, I realized that I had failed in something when I was in high school. And was still angry about it. I was still angry about it, and I immediately lost my anger about it. I said, “I've got to get over this.” But the students were so challenging in questioning what life was like. But they also want to go off to good jobs. They wanted to go off to good jobs. And, you know, I did grow up and I was in an elitist environment here on the East Coast. And I liked some —I liked the intelligence in that environment. I didn't always like the values. Now, I liked the MIT values. But I was growing up in Cambridge, where there were other schools—I won't name them—where I, you know, I saw the arrogance. I saw that people did not respect work broadly. I didn't like that. I didn't like that. I liked the values of MIT, but I didn't like the values of other elitist institutions. By the way, I'm not talking about Yale. I know you're a Yale alumnus, but boy, in Cambridge, I didn't have to walk very far to find that. And that was so different, coming to Ball State. So different.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
Yeah. As a Yale graduate, I suspect that my views about the character of the folks at Cambridge were probably on the same page on that one.
[JIM CHAMPY]
Interesting, because we knew the difference in law schools. We knew that, you know, where you wanted to go, what you wanted to do. It was very different than the Harvard folks. And that we knew that were differences.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
Yeah. So it sounds like it was both gratifying and also a little bit of a kind of a counseling session for you to reflect on your life. I also understand, it must be very gratifying that a few years ago, some of our students chose to recognizing recognize you by creating an award, the Jim Champy Award, which they give every year to an outstanding senior in the business college.
What did that mean to you when our students chose to recognize you that way?
[JIM CHAMPY]
You know, it was very, very meaningful. And, you know, we've been active in other institutions, other colleges that I think have always appreciated our, you know, our time, our advice, and our philanthropy. But I don't think anything had ever been named for me or for us. On all of that work. And so this this was very meaningful.
It was the tenth anniversary, by the way, of my coming there. And we had a celebration, actually had a celebration. And the, you know, the naming. And so I knew, also, that it would be recognizing a student who I believed would appreciate it. And they. That there was an award that recognized their work—their work— in the class. And so it was extremely gratifying.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
Yeah. And you have been very generous with your time, not just here at Ball State, but you've committed great service to MIT. You and your wife have been generous philanthropically to a variety of higher education institutions. And so that really brings me to the kind of the last question. It's the question that I ask all of my guests at the end of these conversations.
You spoke a moment ago about values, about character. As you know, here at Ball State, we're guided by the enduring values that are represented by Beneficence. It’s a beautiful statue on our campus, which you've seen. So beneficence means at its core, beneficence means doing good for other people through service and philanthropy. So, Jim, if you would, tell us what beneficence means to you.
[JIM CHAMPY]
Look, from the perspective of education, Lois and I have always believed that education is the great elevator for everybody, for everybody. For us, without question. I believe, you know, we went to these very formidable schools and places. But even for us, it changed our lives for both Lois and me. And I could see how education was changing—we both could see our lives—how it was changing everywhere, everywhere. And so we started to focus our philanthropy on educational institutions. And we've continued that. Almost all our philanthropy, Geoff, has gone into education institutions, from secondary schools through graduate schools and very different kinds of schools. Now, a little bit of our philanthropy now goes into health care, because we also see that as critical and we want to support the advancement of health care.
But most of the philanthropy has gone into universities, colleges, secondary schools. And look, the other driver, and some of this was represented in a response to another question that I had from your students, was “How do you want to be remembered when you’re dead? When you're when you're not here?” By the way, it was the only time in 17 years that I felt the emotion, that I felt emotional.
Brenda [Davis] may have seen this. She was you know, she was she was in the room. And suddenly, you know, I had never really thought about how I would be remembered. But, you know, my answer, as it becomes increasingly so, is simply to have done good, to have done good in in life. At my age in particular, I don't need anything more. I don't have to do anything more. Lois and I live a good life. There's nothing more there. But now is the time to just concentrate on trying to do more good and to find institutions where that is valued. By the way, it's not always valued at some institutions, but I don't want to spend my time anywhere where I can't really add something to the institution, not just philanthropy, but advice and counsel and where that's welcome.
So I'm fortunate there are few institutions around here that do that, and I feel at Ball State, frankly, it's welcomed and you know, I'm satisfied. I'll tell you one very quick story about that award and in some sense it's where some philanthropy actually began at Ball State. I said to Lois, “Lois, I can't have, you know, the only award I have out there with no money attached to it.” It’s got to have some financial reward other than just a piece of paper that Ball State gives to these students. And so that's where you know, that's where our gift has gone from, you know, to Ball State at this point. But there was a bit of selfishness in it. But most of that is about just trying to do good and make sure that whatever experience that I’ve had and whatever advice and counsel I can bring is valued and might bring about some change in the institution.
And by the way, all institutions are really challenged right now financially, you know, and otherwise. So, you know, we're trying to pick institutions where we can do good or we think people would listen to us. And where, frankly, most of the gifts would be used for the benefit of students. By the way, we've never given a gift to build a building. We have given gifts in health care to support research, fundamental research. But you won't find a, you know, a brick anywhere with our name on it, or certainly not a building with our name on it. But you'll find students who every year are helped.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
Well, the mark that you've left is in the hearts and minds of all of the students and so many other people that you have helped through the course of your life. And Jim, on behalf of Ball State University, thank you very much for your many contributions to our students and to our institutions. And thank you very much for joining me for the conversation today. I'm very grateful.
[JIM CHAMPY]
And thank you for the experience. You know, you've added to my life. You've actually added to my life in the quality of work and what I can contribute with your students. And I thank you for that.
[GEOFF MEARNS]
Thank you, Jim.