Roger Hale’s résumé lists more than two decades of CEO experience and directorships for five highly regarded local companies: St. Paul Companies, Valspar Corporation, Donaldson Company, U.S. Bancorp, and Dayton Hudson (now Target Corporation). Yet today, eight years after stepping down as president and CEO of Golden Valley–based Tennant Company, Hale believes he is uniquely unfit for service in corporate boardrooms.
“I think, generally speaking, retired CEOs should not be on corporate boards,” says Hale, 72, whose tenure at Tennant, a manufacturer of nonresidential floor maintenance equipment and floor coatings, spanned 38 years, including 22 either as the company’s president or CEO. “When you’re not actively involved in running a business, you begin to be out of the loop. It’s a whole lot different reading the Wall Street Journal every day, which retired executives tend to do, or reading the New York Times or the Star Tribune, versus being in the trenches every day, where the issues are very real and alive.”
Hale’s experience as an executive made him a valuable board member. As a CEO and a director, Hale was an early adopter of innovative ideas and strategies. “Roger brought a fresh point of view through his commitment to new thinking, and we all benefited from that,” says William Hodder, Donaldson’s CEO from 1982 to 1996. Hodder adds that “Roger was on the cutting edge of CEO evaluation, which used to get a lot of verbiage, but received very little execution. Roger was at the forefront of a documented CEO review against pre-agreed-upon standards and performance levels.”
Hale also brought his interest in shop-floor management to his board service. As a director on the Valspar board in the 1970s, he shared manufacturing quality-control strategies and processes he was implementing at Tennant. “Roger was really a pioneer in the Twin Cities in terms of the whole manufacturing quality movement,” says Angus Wurtele, Valspar’s CEO from 1965 to 1995 and a friend of Hale’s since childhood. “This was long before ‘quality’ was a trendy word in manufacturing, and it helped both our companies.”
Since retiring from Tennant, Hale has continued working on boards, though they’re nonprofit ones these days. He served three years as the Minneapolis representative to the Metropolitan Airports Commission and a five-year stint as chairman of the Governor’s Work Force Development Council, a quasi-governmental agency that helps shape work force policy statewide. He’s currently chairman of the board for the Ploughshares Fund, a San Francisco organization that aims to reduce worldwide reliance on weapons of mass destruction.
In addition, Hale has served as chairman at Public Radio International, and was president of the Walker Art Center board during its campaign to raise funds for the museum’s expansion, which opened in April 2005. “It was fundraising in the face of a severe market downturn,” recalls Hale, who helped the Walker eclipse its goal of $92 million.
“When I was most busy the five years after I retired, one of my kids said, ‘Dad, you’re working harder now than when you had a full-time job,’” Hale says. But he still finds time outside his board work to pursue a pair of recently adopted passions. He’s been studying French for the past year. And he’s been steadily upgrading his chess game. “Let me put it this way,” says Hale with a chuckle. “I think I’m a better chess player than players who regularly beat me do.”
