The Hartman Origin

Robert S. Hartman was born in Germany in 1910. By the time he was twenty-one years old, he had distinguished himself as a brilliant young scholar. He had studied in Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, and London—at the London School of Economics—and was back in Berlin teaching at the University of Berlin School of Law and serving as an Assistant Municipal Court Judge in a suburb of the city. He was fluent in six languages. By 1933, he was on a list of the top, up-and-coming young adults of promise in the entire country. His future was totally secure.

School days in Munich when he and his friends had slipped out of school to see the trial of Hitler that followed the famous “Beer Hall Putsch.” Hartman actively became engaged in some of the very first resistance movements against Hitler, putting his life at stake, and ultimately causing him to have to flee Germany. One of his most formative thoughts that would drive his entire career—“Hitler had found a way to organize evil; would it be possible to find a way to organize goodness?”—rose in his life at this time, and would define his life.

Hartman’s world, at the center of the resistance movement against Hitler, became almost like a James Bond novel. Many times, he almost lost his life, and he was actively pursued by the Nazis secret police. Escaping to England, Hartman became engaged with the rocket work of a man named Gerhard Zucker. The innovative concept of “rocket mail” appealed to Hartman’s sense of creativity and finding new solutions. He would also take this tact with his own work. He was Zucker’s promoter. A failed attempt before a large crowd of dignitaries from the English government—after several successful test firings—left Hartman looking for a new venture.

He met an individual from the United States who worked for Walt Disney, and who was looking for someone to promote Disney in Europe. Before World War II started in earnest, Hartman almost single-handedly opened Disney to the Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, and laid plans—later followed by Disney—to open the company into Western Europe. When the war started, Disney sent him to Mexico City where he opened the company’s work to Mexico and Central America. During this time, he clandestinely helping the OSS (precursor of the CIA) open secret networks into Germany. Hartman was extremely successful in business, and he always wanted his work to move beyond academic and clinical applications. He wanted to help businesses function on higher levels of success and accomplishment, and especially in ways that would serve customers and employees beyond simply making money. In 1946, he resigned from Disney feeling that it was important to do work that brought high purpose and meaning. Such work would allow a person to achieve highest contributions and make the most difference to others with their lives.

Hartman moved to the United States where he successfully gained the academic credentials that would allow him to be a university professor. From that point, he established an ever-increasing international reputation as a writer and scholar. His main teaching and research was in the philosophical field of axiology—the study of human beings from the perspective of their value systems. He believed that a person’s values constituted a major motivational factor in the way life was lived. Most significantly, he believed that values are primarily manifested in the judgments, decisions, and choices that drive a person’s life. Hartman taught at Lake Forest Academy near Chicago, the College of Wooster, Ohio State, Yale, MIT, and served prominent lectureships at major universities in the United States, Mexico, and Europe. He was also the recipient of a prestigious Fulbright Fellowship.

In addition to his classroom and writing work, Hartman was continuously compelled to make applications of his thought in the most concrete situations. In the early 1950s, he was instrumental in starting what was called “The Profit Sharing League,” an organization that worked for greater fairness in pay in business organizations. Some people today credit him with the formative structure of what has become the 401K plan. He wrote prolifically about the role of the church in the modern world. He was personal friends with leading thinkers of the time, and most especially Abraham Maslow. Maslow’s famous “Hierarchy of Needs” and Hartman’s “Hierarchy of Values” rose from personal, friendship conversations they had where they lived in Cuernavaca, Mexico, during an extended sabbatical that Maslow took to be in conversation with Hartman.

In the early 1960s, rising from a classroom discussion with students, Hartman began to consider constructing an assessment instrument that would bring the phenomenon of measurement to many of his formative concepts. He did not want an inductive, self-reporting psychological instrument like most of the assessments being created at that time. He wanted a deductive, rational instrument that would depend on individuals exercising their ability to make judgments, to prioritize, and come to solutions much in the same way that people are expected to perform on levels of high judgment in common work and life situations. He enlisted the brightest minds he could find in creating the tool. He wanted its findings to become a platform of conversation that would help people understand themselves better, and that would help organizations better understand the individuals and teams they put in place to accomplish their tasks. He firmly believed that one of the most powerful impacts that it was possible to have on modern culture was the impact that could be had on businesses and work organizations. He spent years refining and researching the 36 items that ultimately constituted the original assessment. People continue to be amazed at the accuracy of the insight and effective application that the tool has.

In the late 1960s, Hartman determined that he would live out the rest of his life only in places where he loved to be. He had been all over the world many times, but settled on the area of Mexico near Cuernavaca and the hills of East Tennessee. The University of Tennessee in Knoxville provided him with a Chair of Excellence in their philosophy department. His writings and teaching at UTK and the National Institute in Mexico would be the culmination of his formal work. Today, there are Robert S. Hartman Institutes in the United States, Mexico, and Europe that are designed to advance his work. His papers are housed at the Graduate Library of UTK, which is also the primary headquarters of the Institute that is still advancing his work through translations, annual meetings, and a Journal. The website of the Institute is a good place for a person who is more curious about Hartman and his work to find additional information; numerous resources and references that can be followed in many directions.

Following a heart attack in early 1973, Hartman’s health began to decline, and he suffered a second heart attack before the end of that year that took his life. Before his death, he received notification from Europe that his work had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1973. He was survived by his wife, Rita—an exceptional scholar and advocate of his work in her own right, a son Jan, and two granddaughters. Both Rita and Jan are now deceased, and both granddaughters are actively engaged in the work of the Institute.

Hartman was a teacher and a writer, but he was also a person deeply into application of his work in real-life settings. Because of this, he pursued very few avenues of personal self-promotion common to known scholars of the mid-20th century. He spent endless time working with businesses and applying his work. In the end, his writing never was as prolific as that of others such as his friend Maslow. In addition, much of his first published work was very deep and very difficult for masses of readers to understand simply. Therefore, Hartman did not achieve the acclaim of many of his peers and friends. This fact is changing as the work of his Institute and the popularity of his assessment grows. It may well be that the profound success of his tool as it is used in organizational settings will become the portal needed to introduce his larger body of work to the rest of the world.

I found out about Robert Hartman totally by accident when I was at the end of my sophomore year in college. A very poor teacher had challenged a classroom full of struggling students to find some “ism” or “ology” that he had never heard of, write a paper on it, and give a presentation to a class. As he explained, no one had ever done this, and he had no high expectation of us. I was too close to my old athletic roots at that time, and was hyper competitive. After class, I immediately headed for the research section of our college library.

Looking through a large book in the basement of the library, and almost late for the next class, I turned to the last page of the “A” section of the material. There I found “axiology”—and, even more, there I found Robert Hartman. The die was cast. I spent the rest of my undergraduate time and my first Master’s time making myself familiar with everything about Hartman I could find. Again, by accident, I discovered his coming to UTK. I made fast work to finish the degree I was pursuing, and gained a fellowship to study in Knoxville. It was the best decision of my professional life, and I have given 40+ years to advancing and refining Hartman’s work in numerous academic and organizational settings.

Personally, he was a wonderful man. I was close to him over a three year period before his death. We talked for hours on end, often about philosophy and axiology, but often about football, religion and politics, and what it was like to grow up in East Tennessee. I loved his “Hitler stories,” and how he had actively resisted the Nazis movement. I never succeeded in getting him to attend a UT football game with me; from times in the 1930s when he had heard Hitler speak at his great rallies, he had never liked to be out in large crowds. He laughed easily, and his personal encouragement to apply my background and experience in religion and theology to his work led to my first publications. Both he and Rita were gracious to me in ways young graduate students would have no reason to expect. I am eternally grateful for whatever he saw in me, and I continue to unpack and see more and more in his work that intrigues and tantalizes me to this day.

Hartman’s work in philosophy extends the rigor and insight of that discipline to new heights of relevance. His work with the assessment instrument has been remarkable in the success of its applications. I continue to believe that human beings are deeply defined by and motivated by their values and the values of their cultures. To be able to better examine and even measure the impact of these value orientations is profoundly important. In a world—at almost any level—still deeply encumbered by “bad judgment,” to have the ability to advance in the most strategic ways “good judgment” is a critical challenge.