Buzz Shaw stood at the front of the classroom in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, working at the teaching console, trying to turn on the overhead projector. His blue eyes narrowed as he stared at the array of switches before him. Finally, he pecked at a button, and the projector’s light snapped on. He swiveled his head to look at it, then patted the console in gratitude. Technology wasn’t going to fail him today.

Shaw started his lecture, but a few minutes into it, the projector’s light shut off.

‘Anybody know why this is not working?’ Shaw asked his class.

Several of the 12 students buried their heads in their arms. It was a 9:30 a.m. class, after all. A handful of the students suggested Shaw call tech support. Shaw brushed it off.

‘Who needs props, right?’ he asked.

Shaw had never before needed to master technology. During the 13 years he served as Syracuse University’s chancellor, he had assistants who operated projectors during his presentations. Now, almost a year and a half removed from that job, Shaw has to fend for himself.

Though he retired as chancellor in the spring of 2004, Shaw says his life has changed little. He is still doing the things that have always mattered to him: teaching, leading and learning. He and his wife, Mary Ann, have also kept at least as busy as they were when he worked 70-hour weeks as chancellor, and she volunteered for various community organizations.

Since the projector had failed, the students pulled out their textbooks in preparation for Shaw’s regular grilling on which part of their reading assignment had what he refers to as ‘take-home value.’ It was the week before Thanksgiving Break, though, and nobody had done the reading. Shaw turned to a visitor in the classroom and joked, ‘You know, 90 percent of these kids are failing this class. And the projector doesn’t work.’

The text they were supposed to have read was a section of ‘The Intentional Leader,’ the book Shaw wrote in his first year of retirement. It’s a compilation of his graduate work on the sociology of organizations, research he’d done by reading 25 or so books on leadership and, most importantly, his own experiences. ‘The Intentional Leader’ is a slim book of 226 pages, and Shaw said he expects his students to know its contents well.

Aside from working on the book, Buzz and Mary Ann spent the first year after he retired split between their two homes in Skaneateles and Western Springs, Ill. While in the Midwest, they traveled around to visit their three children and seven grandchildren in Illinois and Missouri. In the past, the Shaws scrambled to find the free time to bring their family on a Nags Head vacation in North Carolina. Retirement changed that. They also went to baseball games, took a vacation with the grandchildren to Niagara Falls and attended some Broadway shows.

‘It was a wonderful year,’ Mary Ann said. ‘We did things we hadn’t had an opportunity to do in a long time.’

Shaw paced the front of his classroom in a gray shirt, silver tie and dark gray pants. They had finished going over the homework assignment, and now the class looked over a packet about changes in organizations. Meanwhile, Shaw told them how he handled SU’s financial restructuring in the early 1990s. The packet itself was drawn from a presentation Shaw gave to professionals eager to become better leaders. From textbooks, to handouts, to lectures, much of Shaw’s class uses his own leadership experiences.

‘He’s gone from practicing leadership to teaching it,’ said Dennis Gillen, chairman of the management department and professor of strategy in the School of Management.

He teaches it to a class of 16 students, mostly seniors. Although a popular former chancellor teaches the class, its 25 spots never filled. But Shaw doesn’t take it personally. Students shouldn’t sign up for a class just because the former chancellor is teaching it, he says. Anyway, the course is an elective that many students simply can’t take.

But senior finance major Wei-Ming Leong, who sits in the front of the class, is there because of Shaw. The SU tennis team member met Shaw at the Drumlins tennis court, where he is a regular, just before he retired. Knowing she was a management student, Shaw told Leong about the leadership class he’d be teaching this fall. She says he seemed like a nice guy, so she decided to give his class a try.

So far, she said she doesn’t regret that decision. Shaw is animated and down-to-earth in class, which makes Leong feel comfortable around him. She says the class itself really isn’t too intense – the textbook is only 226 pages, after all – but the students are learning just from listening to someone who has been a leader. Sometimes Shaw brings in speakers from a network of leaders he’s met and worked with, while in other classes he tells stories about his own experiences.

Leong says that since she has been in the class, she has sensed a change in the way she approaches leadership. She can look at her tennis coach now, and evaluate the way he leads the team. She knows how to portray herself as a better leader. She knows how to listen. In short, she’s become more self-aware.

Self-awareness is one of the keys to Shaw’s leadership lessons. Back in class, he passed out a 10-question survey designed to measure his students’ entrepreneurial qualities. The idea was that once they knew themselves a little better they would be able to become better leaders. Students had to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 6 on questions about how willing they were to take risks, and how confident they were. After they finished marking their sheets, Shaw asked for their answers.

‘Did anyone else put a check for No. 1 on ‘I enjoy taking it easy and having plenty of personal time?” he asked. None of the students raised a hand.

‘No?’ Shaw said. ‘Guess I was the only one.’

He was just kidding, of course. Even in retirement, Shaw has little spare time, and he wouldn’t want it.

When he’s not teaching his leadership class, he spends about four days a week going to meetings in and around Syracuse. He gives his speeches, gives advice to leaders at other universities and commutes daily from Skaneateles. He said he wishes he had a helicopter to make the latter a little easier.

Mary Ann, too, has been just as hard at work as ever. She chairs a local literacy initiative, Read Ahead. She also chairs the administrative committee for Success by 6, which helps kids prepare for school. She’s a member of the board of the Syracuse Symphony. She chairs the steering committee for the development of the Children’s Hospital. And she is the general chairwoman of fund raising for that hospital.

But Buzz and Mary Ann do take a little bit of time off to relax. Weekends are his to do with as he pleases, Shaw said. They take advantage of living by Skaneateles Lake during warm weather; Mary Ann has loved the water since she was a little girl. They go boating. Mostly, though, Buzz enjoys reading. He reads nonfiction books – often about leadership. He says he rarely reads fiction anymore. When he was chancellor, he read novels as a relief from reading the official documents that came with his job. A typical business trip to California, he says, would be worth three or four fiction books.

Back then, too, Shaw’s body clock used to awaken him before 6 every morning. Ever since his freshman year in high school, he had been waking up that early.

Now, though, he can sleep in. While writing the leadership book, he learned how to manage his own schedule. Although his days were no longer rigidly planned, he imposed an order of his own.

But he no longer arose at 6. Retirement was his chance to finally sleep in, for the first time since high school. So, Shaw says, he ‘slept in’ until a whopping 6:45 in the morning.

‘It makes the difference between Jay Leno and no Jay Leno,’ he said.

Shaw continued on with his lecture once the class had finished their self-awareness quiz. He told them about a recurring dream he used to have. In it, he’d get up to give a speech, but could not find his notes. Then the overhead projector stopped working. And then he looked down and realized that he had forgotten to put on his pants.

‘I don’t have (the dream) as much anymore,’ he said.

Shaw’s struggle with projectors is symptomatic of the hardest adjustment he’s had to make since leaving his post as chancellor – the loss of the infrastructure that helped him deal with the stresses of his busy life. The chancellor’s residence has a new occupant and the hired help now works for the new chancellor.

‘Now I’ve got to do what people who own a house do,’ Shaw said. He and Mary Ann get about five hours a week of help, but he’s learning how to do chores again. He takes out the garbage.

Perhaps Shaw’s most significant loss, though, is someone to help him grapple with technology. The problem goes beyond malfunctioning classroom projectors. Early this semester, Shaw approached School of Management professor Dennis Gillen in a panic. He wasn’t sure he knew how to use Blackboard, an online teaching tool.

‘There was an ex-chancellor needing a grad student to teach him Blackboard,’ Gillen said, chuckling at the memory.

But Shaw’s real technological nemesis is one that millions of people use daily; Microsoft Word. He used it while he was chancellor, but never for a presentation. There was someone else to do that for him. Now, though, he finds himself fighting the program. He says he refuses to conform to the way Word wants him to do his work. Mary Ann says he has also lost several documents while using Word. Simply put, Microsoft Word annoys Shaw.

‘I’d like to have a private conversation with Bill Gates,’ Shaw says.

After Shaw dismissed his class, several students lingered around the front of the room. Senior hospitality management major Krystal Fullilove was among them. She had casually mentioned during the class discussion that she worked at a local restaurant and Shaw was curious to learn more about her. He asked her the name of the restaurant and how much she made in tips during an average night.

‘He asks stuff about what we do outside of school and what we plan to do,’ Fullilove said. She’s talked to him several times, inside and outside of class. During these conversations, he often tells her simply to go for what she wants.

Shaw says as a professor, he is able to get to know students and faculty on a more intense level than he could as chancellor. He declines to talk about current Chancellor Nancy Cantor’s administration because he says it’s not his place. He says he is primarily interested in his students. He likes talking with them and giving them advice, then seeing how they use it.

Shaw says his world has gotten smaller.

‘That’s not a bad thing,’ he adds.

Published on December 12, 2005 at 12:00 pm