Alumni Focus: John Scherer '62

John J. Scherer IV '62 has been in a different kind of ministry since he left Roanoke College as a fourth-generation legacy. Influenced by Homer Bast's experience in the Navy, Scherer chose to attend Officer Training School and combat training on destroyers in Newport, RI. There, he found himself compelled to minister to fellow officers. He then attended Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary and spent his intern year walking the streets of Norfolk at night, he says, "in my jeans with a crucifix, doing crisis counseling with hookers, pimps and sailors five nights a week."

He took as many conflict resolution workshops as he could, realizing that what he was learning was something essential he recognized within himself. "That is how I knew that this is what I was meant to be doing," he says. He then accepted the position of Lutheran chaplain at Cornell University, where again he gravitated towards the ministry, under the guise of conflict resolution workshops. "I turned my church into a training center," he says. The University asked him to do a two-week drug policy workshop in the dorms; in 1972, he was one of two people who was acceptable to both students and staff when the students occupied buildings in protest of Vietnam. "I was crawling in and out of windows, between AK47s and M16s," he remembers.

All of this came together in 1973, when an acquaintance asked him to create the first Master of Arts program in applied behavioral science at Witworth College in Spokane, Washington, which was done in collaboration with the Leadership Institute of Spokane. Nine years later, Scherer was suddenly in the corporate world, still teaching and still ministering, but this time to leaders of companies such as ACE Hardware, Aetna, Babcock & Wilcox Engineering, Boeing, GTE, Polaroid and the U.S. Army.

It was a close call for Scherer, who barely graduated from high school in Richmond. Raised by his Lutheran minister grandfather, who was his hero, the bottom of Scherer's life dropped out when his grandfather died. He went from president of the high school student body and a straight-A student to failing math, with an IQ of 154. "I did not know what I was going to do. All my friends were going to Ivy League schools," he recalls. His grandfather had connections to the president of Roanoke College and Scherer's great-grandfather even helped found the college. As a courtesy, Roanoke College's president met him in a Richmond hotel room, offered him a scholarship and a job working in the dorms for his room costs and the dining hall for his food. The Lutheran church kicked in for book money. But still Scherer's road wasn't clear and straight.

A week after he began classes at Roanoke College, he walked into the dean's office on campus feeling like a total failure. The dean was unsympathetic. "We turned down seven men so you could come here. Get out of this office and just do it," Scherer was told. "I remember walking out, standing in the hall absolutely stunned. I staggered back to my room, sat at the edge of my bed and thought, 'Well, I guess I'd better do it.' "

He made the Dean's List, graduated with honors, was president of the Honor Council, vice president of the student government, selected for membership in the Blue Key Honor Society, captain of the varsity swim team, and majored in history and philosophy.

He was called to the ministry one day while on his destroyer. "I remember sitting down one afternoon with a yellow pad in front of me, and I drew a line down a sheet of paper. I asked, 'What would I really, really like to do?' A voice clearly said, 'John, be with people at the level of their deepest need.' I remember thinking, 'Could you be a little more specific?' I wrote it down right away and realized that was how my grandfather was - being with people at their deepest need."

In 1987, Scherer created the Executive Development Intensive, one of the nation's first holistic experiences to help senior executives; in 1994, he created the Leadership Development Intensive, a group version of the former. The Scherer Leadership Center helps transform executives and their organizations to levels of higher performance to achieve their objectives. He has written Work and the Human Spirit, and his latest book, Five Questions that Change Everything, will be released this year. He recently was named one of America's Top 100 Thought Leaders in Personal Excellence by the editor's of Personal Excellence magazine.

Scherer says he learned from experience - from the streets of Norfolk to Masai Land in Kenya, where he has taken four groups of people in a leadership group to build schools and faculty housing and provide water sources. There, at night, these executives talk about team leadership and collaboration.

He asked the head of a company once why he chose Scherer to work with his executives, and the man said, "I've turned my entire leadership team over to you for three years. I've trusted you. What do you need me to say?" Scherer says those who have taken his seminars seem to come out of them with a greater sense of purpose, a greater sense of power, and an author in their lives. Not victims. And that, they say to him, "we can't get anywhere else.''

When a friend asked him what his exit strategy to leadership training would be, Scherer replied, "Death." For as long as he can think and talk, he says he will contribute. "I want to be with people at the level of their deepest need."