Photographs courtesy of Mr. Greer
“The thing I remember about Deerfield, which everyone remembers about Deerfield, are the teachers—maybe no one more than Mr. and Mrs. Boyden. They played a big role in my personal life. I was often homesick. Mrs. Boyden would appear in my room and say, ‘Why don’t you come have cookies and milk with the football team tonight?’ Of course it was the biggest deal in the world—the football team! And Mr. Boyden at his desk in the center of the school—he would call you out of a crowd as you were walking by and ask you questions about yourself, your studies, your grades —just a very personal interest.” Mr. Greer rattles off the names of other influential teachers: Mr. Merriam, Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Reade, Bart Boyden, Mr. Olson, Mr. and Mrs. Suitor. He calls them his “role models for life” who taught him “the idea of integrity. I got my values at Deerfield, and the idea of community service.” After Deerfield, Mr. Greer went on to Princeton and then Harvard Business School. As a founding partner at the investment firm Weiss, Peck & Greer, and an early investor and director at Federal Express, Mr. Greer had over 35 years of business success. But even as a busy executive, dividing his time between San Francisco and Greenwich, he found time to give back, serving a combined 65 years on secondary and post-secondary school boards, including Tulane University in New Orleans, where he was chair, and Sacred Heart and Santa Catalina in California. “He had a marvelous opportunity to learn a lot about how these boards work,” says Rodgin Cohen, “and, the most important thing of all, how to interact with people . . . and he learned those lessons extraordinarily well.” Perhaps taking a page from the Boydens’ playbook, when Mr. Greer became Deerfield’s president of the Board, his focus was on empowering the people serving with him. “Phil really took the Board forward from an organizational point of view,” says Dr. Curtis. Mr. Greer cut down on committee reports so as to leave more time to discuss generative subjects at Board meetings. He also changed the committee structure, creating smaller committees but at the same time granting them more authority. As a result, says Ms. Strandberg, “it keeps everyone more engaged because you can really see the impact of your contribution and your effort.”
I’ve done well in business and I really feel a lot of it is owed to Deerfield, so I have to give back. If you believe that, I think it makes fundraising a lot easier.
Mr. Greer in his WPG San Francisco office. / Early partners / With Fred Smith at the delivery of the first DC-10 / With WPG partner, Steve Weiss, at a Cornell football game
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