Robert Spich Reflects on his Peace Corps Experience

2011 marks the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy issuing and signing the executive order that created the Peace Corps. The UCLA campus and community played a key role in the creation and launch of the Peace Corps as an original site for training and preparing volunteers to go overseas.

UCLA Anderson Senior Lecturer Robert Spich joined the Corps in 1966, traveling to Chile where he remained until 1969. Spich's connection to the country remains strong today, traveling there often (and to other South American countries) to lecturea and teach. He recently joined the UCLA Anderson blog to reflect on the impact his Peace Corps experience had on his life and career.

"The question that camp to me while in the Peace Corps that reallys haped my thinking and my interest -- and where I went in the academic world -- was 'Why are some people rich and some people poor? Why are some nations successful and others not?'"

Spich's query began in a small village, where he would muse about the inequities of Chilean life with a bee keeper who asked him simply "Don Roberto, how long can this go on the way it is right now?" -- referencing the unfairness, inequality and poverty rampant in Chile at the time. It continued when he returned to the country a few years later as a teaching fellow from Tuft University's Fletcher School of Diplomacy. On this second trip, Spich worked with the elites and got a look at Chile from the other side of the equation. 

Video: Robert Spich and others from UCLA reflect on their Peace Corps experience in a video narrated by Vice Chancellor Emeritus/UCLA Anderson faculty member Dr. Elwin Swenson:

 

"When I came back the second time I was working with the people against whom the revolution was being made, so I saw two parts of the question," Spich said, "I began to see complexity where I had thought there was simplicity. I started to understand the critical importance of management and organization. That's sort of when I came to the conclusion that management and organziation are very important to success and especially to development and even why some people are rich and some are poor."

Spich said he began to see a correlation between being successful and being more organized and that's when he decided to get a management degree (a move some that led some of his "PC friends" to call him a "traitor.") Now, he sees a correlation between the Chilean success story, which he says is really the creation of a strong middle class, and the vanishing middle class in California.

"Fitzgerald wrote that the sign of a great mind is the ability to hold contradictory ideas at the same time," Spich said. "It could be dissonance it depends on how you handle it. If you can’t handle it then you try to get rid of dissonance and you do it by looking for content or information that supports your points of view, but dealing with the contradiction is painful all the time. 

"I had to deal with that dissonance, my friends asked me how I could work with the poor and then work with the capitalist pigs and I said 'Well, because these things are complex and you do realize that there is a larger story here.' And now having worked with managers with Executive MBA students, with CEOs about California competiveness, I suddenly find myself thinking, that I know about development in Chile but now I’m concerned about California … are we going to start getting poor?"