A Second Master's Degree: What Isaacson, Miller Taught Me

People ask why I say my time at Isaacson, Miller in Boston was a second master’s degree. I mean it literally. I already had one, from the University of Missouri-Columbia. What I got at Isaacson, Miller was the other one, and nobody handed me a diploma for it.

Some of it should probably go in a book. Here are the pieces of it I can tell now.

It was never only about executive search

I have spent twenty nine years in this business. I started at Isaacson, Miller, working for Arnie Miller.

Some context for anyone outside this business. Isaacson, Miller has been the number one executive search firm in the nonprofit and mission driven world for about as long as that world has had one, and it still is. John Isaacson is a titan of this industry, and the firm he built is the standard everybody else in it gets measured against. Arnie Miller had run presidential personnel for Jimmy Carter before he co-founded it. That is the room I walked into at the start of my career. I call my time there a second master’s degree, and I mean that literally, because I already had one.

It was never only about executive search. It was about politics. It was about policy. It was about how the nonprofit world actually works, and the healthcare world, and government. You cannot place the president of a university or the head of a health system without learning how those institutions really function, who holds power inside them, and what breaks them. I got years of that, from people who had spent their careers in it, and I was paid to be there.

Here is what that education actually looked like. I was working a search with Lisa Savereid and she wanted me to start learning how to conduct a reference call. So she brought me into her office and let me sit there and listen while she took one. The reference was General Colin Powell.

Nobody sat me down and taught me a method. She simply let me hear how it is done at that altitude: what you ask, what you do not ask, how long you leave a silence, how you get a person of that standing to tell you something true rather than something polite. You cannot learn that from a book and no firm I know of teaches it. I learned it because someone senior thought a young recruiter should be in the room.

That is what I mean by a second master’s degree. Lisa is gone now too.

The reason I saw so much of it was the internet. I was the one in the building who understood what it could do for recruiting, at a time when most of the profession had not decided it was for them. So I became the pinch hitter. When a search was in trouble, I got brought in.

That meant working alongside a great many partners on a great many searches, and every one came with an industry attached. Conservation. Environmentalism. Advocacy. Government. Transportation. Higher education. Health. I was not studying those sectors, I was trying to fill a hard job in each of them, which turns out to be the fastest way to learn how anything really works.

And sometimes what I did for them was simply put the search on the internet.

The other thing I did was build. I built the firm an intranet. That was the word for it at the time, and it is the right one: an internal site the recruiters worked from, where what we knew about sectors and institutions and people actually lived instead of sitting in one person’s head. Eve Porter Zuckerman and I worked on that together.

Word got around. A partner mentioned it to another search firm in town that needed the same thing, and they called me. One slow summer, the couple of months when everyone is on holiday and the searches that were going to close have closed, I spent building theirs.

Here is the part I had not thought about in years. I was doing all three at once. Still on the Isaacson, Miller payroll part time, building a research system for a second firm, and filling technology searches for a third. Three firms in one summer, early in my career, and I went straight back to Isaacson, Miller when it was over because I was not going anywhere.

That same summer I also worked for Mark Woelters, a former Isaacson, Miller partner who had started his own firm doing technology search. His offices were in Faneuil Hall. I went in as an associate and filled technology roles for him: programmers, engineers, the people who build the thing rather than run it. So while I was building a research system for one firm, I was recruiting the kind of people who build systems for another.

I had never done anything like that before. I learned it by doing it, because somebody needed it and I was the one who would try. That is the part of the second master’s degree nobody would have predicted, and it is the part I have used every day since.

That is where ExecSearches came from. Not a business plan. A thing I kept doing for colleagues until it was obviously worth doing on purpose.

Two groups, one building

Something worth explaining about that firm. There were two distinct groups inside it, Arnie’s and John’s, and they worked together. The project I was originally hired for was a joint one, a partner from each side. That is unusual. In most firms the practice groups guard their turf. There I was handed straight across the middle of it, which is how I ended up working for so many different partners so quickly.

One of them was Manny, with whom I worked a great deal and from whom I learned higher education fundraising, which is its own discipline and nothing like corporate development.

We ran a Director of Athletics search and I went out to the University of Connecticut for it. On the drive back to Boston, Manny said something I have not forgotten. “Wow, Jay. The way you were dropping names and talking sports with Lew, and the assistant AD, and the coaches. That was impressive.” He did not follow the game himself. I did.

The search was to replace Lew Perkins. Kansas had hired him away and he was leaving Connecticut, so we were not recruiting him, we were finding his successor. I knew exactly who he was, because he had been the athletic director at the University of Maryland, and I had followed Maryland basketball since I was a boy. My brother went there.

That was the program, and the era, of Lefty Driesell and Len Bias. He was the best player I ever watched, and I watched him from close range. My brother and I were at Cole Field House the night Bias threw down a dunk directly over where I was sitting. I saw him play against Michael Jordan when Maryland met North Carolina, two of them on the floor at the same time.

The Celtics drafted him. He was dead within days, before he ever played a professional minute. It is one of the famous tragedies of the sport and people who did not live through it cannot quite be made to understand what it did to Maryland.

So in the meeting I could talk. The athletic directors, the coaches, who had been where and when and what happened to them. I put the names on the table one after another, from memory, because I had been carrying them since I was a kid.

They were impressed. Manny said something like my God, Jay. He had a search to run in a world he did not know, and it turned out the person who knew it was the one doing the outreach.

That is why he took me onto the United States Olympic Committee search, and why I went out to Colorado with him to their headquarters. A search at that level, and I was there because of Maryland basketball.

The head of the USOC gave me a pin for the Salt Lake Olympics. I still have it.

None of that was professional knowledge. It was a childhood spent watching a team because my brother went to that school. And it mattered, because search is more than method. It is knowing the world a candidate comes from well enough to have a real conversation with them. Everything you have ever paid attention to is eventually useful. That is not a motivational sentiment, it is a fact about this job.

Penn, and a week

Upstairs there was a corner that belonged to John Isaacson. Karen Alphonse sat in it, and so did Sean, his associate and a friend of Karen’s. Karen took the senior work. Sean carried the rest, and I helped him on a great many of them. I also worked a search with John himself.

Those searches are where I learned higher education administration and the wider education administration world, including K through 12. We ran some very large searches for school systems, and if you want to understand how American public institutions actually operate, try filling a superintendency.

And John was watching. Not obtrusively, but he was paying attention to what I was doing and how, and the firm took it up. That is the thing about a place like that: the good methods travel fast, whoever they come from.

One of those was a major gift officer search at the University of Pennsylvania. It was not a hard job to sell. Penn, a senior major gift role, a high salary. Anybody in that profession would want to hear about it. Sean simply did not have the hours, because he was carrying other important searches at the same time. So I took the outreach.

What I did was not clever. It was only unusual. I went after every major gift officer at a higher education institution in the region, one after another, and I emailed each of them.

The email said roughly this. You are a major gift officer. You are at an institution near here. There is a senior major gift role open at Penn, the salary is this, and here is a link to a page about the search. Would you like to know more?

Nobody had ever seen that. In 1997 a job description was a document that arrived in an envelope, or as an attachment if you were lucky, and recruiting ran on the telephone and on who you already knew. I was sending qualified strangers a link and inviting them to go and read it themselves.

It was easy, and it was easy because the list already existed. We had the major gift officers at the other universities in the region and at the other Ivies. Nobody had thought to email them.

I emailed for a week. Then I collected the résumés and handed them to Sean, who was shocked at the number and at the quality.

I did not tell Arnie. I did not think it was that big a deal.

Sean must have told somebody, because it came up at a partners meeting and Arnie was in the room. He came across the office afterwards waving a fistful of paper, yelling email, email, it’s the future, and telling everyone what I had done. I have no idea what those papers were. That was the point of them. He was waving paper to say we would not be needing this any more.

He was not talking about a tactic. He had worked out, before most of the industry had, that the whole basis of finding people was about to change. The Penn search is where I proved him right, and he was in the building watching it happen.

Not one name. A pool. Because I had not gone looking for the one person who might say yes, I had told everyone who was qualified that the opportunity existed and let them decide.

Sean was stunned. So were the others. That reaction is the thing I remember most clearly, because from the inside it had not felt like an achievement. I had written some emails. But they had spent their careers building candidate pools one relationship at a time, which is slow and skilled and expensive work, and they had just watched it happen in a week.

There was a shape to it that I only recognized later. An email that reaches the right person. A web page that holds the real detail so the email does not have to. And then a document, a PDF or a Word file, for anyone who wanted the full position description. Three pieces, each doing the job the others could not.

That stack is now how the entire industry works. In 1997 it was just what I had to hand.

And understand what this search actually was. It was not a hard sell. Penn is Penn. The salary was high. Major gift officers across the region would have wanted to hear about it.

It just needed to be told to the right people all at once. That is what I did, and that is the whole of it. Everything I have built in the twenty nine years since is a larger version of that one sentence.

That is why they kept handing me the difficult ones.

Real searches, start to finish

It was not all outreach. I ran searches end to end with David Haley and with Arnie Miller.

David took me to Washington twice. Once for the National Council of La Raza, which is UnidosUS now, a senior finance search as I remember it. That is where I learned how civil rights and advocacy organizations actually work, how they are funded, and what it costs them to hold their ground.

The second trip was Amtrak, a chief financial officer search. That is where transportation came from. You do not understand a national railroad until you have tried to find someone willing to run its money.

David Haley told me he would be a reference of mine for life. He is on every reference list I give, and he has been for twenty five years. He taught me more about how a search is actually conducted than anyone except Arnie.

And then there was San Francisco. Arnie’s search, with Laura Gassner Otting leading and me helping. The Electronic Frontier Foundation. Their executive director was stepping down and we were finding the successor. A large, serious technology search, for an organization that still exists and still matters.

I want to sit with that for a second, because I did not notice it until I wrote this down. In the late nineties I was helping recruit the executive director of an institution whose entire purpose was working out how a new technology should behave. Internet ethics. Data ethics. What we would now call governance. Nobody had a phrase for that job. There were no certifications, no frameworks, no degree programs, and no job board for any of it.

Twenty odd years later I built the job board. Not this one. ExecSearches came two years after Penn, in 1999. I mean the one for that work: AI governance, data governance, the people whose job is deciding how a technology should behave.

The office

None of this was a job description. I moved around the whole ecosystem of that firm and helped with whatever needed helping with. If something was stuck, I went to it. That is how you end up knowing conservation and transportation and academic medicine, and it is how you end up useful to three firms in one summer.

For two or three years I worked on the fourth floor, in his part of the firm. Much later they gave me an office, and it was right next to Arnie Miller’s.

I do not think anybody announced it or explained it. You are simply put somewhere, and where they put you tells you what they think. I was around him for years. I sat directly next to him for perhaps seven or eight months, near the end. I heard how he talked to clients, how he talked about candidates when they were not in the room, which is the real test, and what he refused to do.

That is the office I left from when I finally left.

I was not supposed to be there long. I was hired for a project. When I arrived nobody quite knew what to make of me, and I do not think anyone expected me to still be in the building years later with an office next to his.

I should say what I thought of him at first, because it was wrong. I had never worked in a city before. Arnie was gruff, plain spoken, no polish on him at all, and my first read was that I had landed with a tough city guy and had better keep up. I had no idea who I was working for.

What I came to learn is that Arnold J. Miller had joined the Carter campaign in 1976 and then run the Presidential Personnel Office from 1978 to 1981. He staffed an administration. Carter said later that the two of them made history together, because they put more women and people of color into senior federal roles than any administration before them. He worked for Walter Mondale. The firm was founded in 1982, Arnie’s name was on the door from the beginning, and he spent the next four decades doing the same work for universities, foundations, hospitals and cultural institutions.

I remember seeing the photograph and thinking, holy cow. That is the man I am working for.

So when that man came across the office waving a fistful of paper, yelling email, email, it is the future, he was not chasing a gadget. He was someone who had thought harder than almost anyone alive about how you find the right person for a job that matters, and he had just worked out that the method was about to change.

He was a tough guy. God, I loved him.

How it actually ended, and how ExecSearches began

They offered to hire me permanently as an associate. I said no.

Not because I did not want to be there. Because I wanted them to build the website I could see, and to run it as a profit center rather than a brochure. I had already shown them what putting a search on the internet did. I knew what the next thing was.

Karen Wilcox, one of the partners, told me I was a visionary. Her words, not mine. She said she could see what I was seeing, that I was seeing where the web was going.

That was the beginning of the bad news. The word visionary was how the no arrived.

She was not unkind about it. She was letting me down easy, and the compliment was the cushion. That is exactly why I have never forgotten the word.

They had discussed it. My idea was that the thing I had built should become a profit center for the firm: a real website with an interactive job board on it, tied to a database, with job alerts going out to people who wanted them. That was what the partners had in front of them, and that was what they decided against. She had argued the other side and she had won it.

She said she could see it, and that it might be something for later. But for Isaacson, Miller, right now, they did not need that. A firm like ours needed to present itself in a certain way, with certain colors. What they needed was a pretty brochure, built by a public relations firm with an Ivy background. Not an ugly hand coded interactive site from a Purdue guy. I was polite. Inside I was rolling my eyes.

What I said back to her was this. I can understand why the firm made that decision. I get it. I have not been here very long. I am not part of the institution. I am not even really an employee. I would have been, if you had made this decision the other way.

But I am just as happy to build it on my own, Karen. And I will have it ready by the first of September.

And thank you for letting me go and do it. I meant that. She could have said no. The firm could have kept it, or killed it, or told me it was theirs. She did not. She let it walk out of the door with me.

The brochure lasted about three years. Three or four years after that conversation the firm had an interactive site, close to the thing I had described to them, with PR firm polish on it. They got there. They just got there four years late, after paying somebody else to arrive at the idea they already had in the building.

That decision is the reason I left, and Karen Wilcox made it. Not Florida. Florida was the timing. If the firm had built the thing I could see, I would probably still be there.

I do not know what version of this is told inside the firm now, if it is told at all. Probably it is a line in somebody’s memory about a website that walked out of the door with a young associate who left for Florida. That is not what happened, and the difference matters.

I want the people running that firm now, who were not there and have never heard any of this, to have it straight. I did not abandon Isaacson, Miller. They abandoned what I was building for them. They did not see how the web was going to be used for recruiting. I did. They could have had all of it four years earlier, and they could have had everything I have built in the twenty-seven years since.

Including this one. A hundred days ago the site you are reading this on was doing about ninety search impressions a month. It is now doing about nineteen thousand.

That shape has a name. It is called a hockey stick, and it is a mathematical description, not a boast: flat along the bottom for a long stretch while nothing appears to be happening, then a sharp bend upward into exponential growth. The flat part is not failure. The flat part is the work. Almost nobody stays in the flat part long enough to reach the bend, which is why so few people ever see one from the inside.

That is the same skill I had in 1999, pointed at a different industry. It could have been theirs. It is not theirs because of one decision, made by one partner, in one conversation.

So I said fine. And then I asked her: if the firm does not want it, let me take it on my own and run it as a business. She said yes. She was more than happy for me to go.

I told her exactly what I was going to do. I said I would be starting ExecSearches on September 1, 1999. I told other people in the firm as well, and I put it in writing. They knew, and they had until then to get ready.

I kept telling them. I am going to be ready in six months. Then four months. Then two months. I do not think they believed me.

Then they had to come back and ask me for a favor. The date arrived and their pretty brochure was not ready. The only working website the firm had was mine. So they came back and asked whether they could borrow half of it and run it as the firm’s site until the brochure was finished. That conversation was between me and Eve.

I said yes. Of course you can, for as long as you need it. I did not have to do that. I did it anyway.

So the same person told me I could see the future, declined to let the firm build it, and was glad when I left. I went and built it myself, on the date I had given them, and it has been running ever since.

My partner had just been transferred to Florida, in recruiting, in a job I had helped him get. We were moving. And I kept working their searches from there, over the phone. I was not the first person at that firm to work remotely, others had done it before me, but in my case it happened suddenly. There were searches I was carrying that they wanted me to stay on, and I stayed on them. The last was with Alan Wichlei, for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. That was the last search I did at Isaacson, Miller. I did not walk out on anything. I closed out every search I was carrying.

A couple of years ago I hit a genuinely tricky situation on a search and needed somebody to call. It felt like a question for Alan, and I had not spoken to him in a long time. He helped us a great deal. That is the other thing about that place. Twenty five years on, you can still pick up the phone.

I gave six months notice and told them exactly what I was going to do.

On September 1, 1999 I launched ExecSearches.com.

Their postcard website was not finished. So they asked me whether I would build them a section on mine, and I did. For a while, ExecSearches.com was Isaacson, Miller’s web presence, until theirs was ready.

I do not think they believed I would do it. I said a date and I hit the date. That is the whole beginning of the company.

Isaacson, Miller is also where I met Laura Gassner Otting. She joined me later as the first Vice President of ExecSearches and stayed a couple of years, until she left to start her own firm.

Karen Alphonse replaced her. She has been with me ever since.

That is roughly twenty five years. She is now Vice President, Policy, Regulatory Compliance and Candidate Development, and Counsel to the Chief Executive Officer, carrying two roles at ExecSearches and one at GRC Careers.

People do not usually stay twenty five years. I did not build a company that people leave.

Why it still matters

I went in to learn executive search. I came out able to build the systems the profession runs on, having spent years inside conservation, government, health, higher education and technology, and having watched people at the very top of the craft do the parts of the work that cannot be written down.

What it all was

Look at the list. Universities. School systems. Academic medicine. Public health. Conservation and the environment. Civil rights and advocacy. A national transportation organization. An energy cooperative. A government in the south. A former president’s library. The Olympic movement. An internet ethics organization. And a USAID search in Central Asia after the breakup of the Soviet Union, which was a hard one, and which they hired two people out of.

Every one of them is civic infrastructure. The institutions a society runs on and mostly does not think about until they fail.

That is what Arnie taught me the work was for, and it is not an abstraction. It is literally why the industry categories on ExecSearches.com are what they are. I did not design that taxonomy from a marketing exercise. I wrote down the sectors I had been taught, by being sent into them one search at a time, and they have barely changed in twenty nine years.

Arnie Miller is gone. Lisa Savereid is gone. What they did for me cost them nothing except the willingness to let a young recruiter be in the room, and to hand him the difficult ones. I have tried to run every business since the way they ran that floor.

AI governance is the newest piece of civic infrastructure. The titles are still being invented, and most people do not yet know which ones name the work they are already qualified to do. That is close to the situation I was hired into in 1997, and I know what to do with it.

Hunt Scanlon Media wrote about what I built, on September 16, 2026. The story of how Arnie told me who they were is here: The New York Times of the Executive Search World.