2008 Outstanding Directors

In 1959, he joined and subsequently scaled the executive ladder at Honeywell. “I had 10 jobs in 11 years,” Denny says. The high point of his Honeywell tenure, he reports, was his three-year stint in Paris as manager of a fully integrated, 1,250-person French subsidiary. “I was advised by the then executive vice president of Honeywell that that would be the best job I’d ever had,” Denny recalls. “Indeed, that turned out to be true.”

Denny left Honeywell in 1970 to take over as president and CEO of ADC, which, at the time, was a near-bankrupt electrical-components manufacturer with roughly 430 employees and $6 million in sales. He guided the firm into the telecommunications market, and deep into growth and profitability. When he retired in 1991, the company had 3,000 employees and $300 million in sales. Today, Denny proudly reports, ADC is a $1.5 billion operation with about 9,000 employees worldwide.

He stepped away from corporate board service when he left ADC. “I did so on the deeply held conviction that directors should be fully employed executives or business-world participants of some sort who are deeply involved in the business community, reading the financial and technical journals, and dealing with real-time problems,” he says.

Even during his executive career, Denny committed to only two boards at a time (“There’s a limitation to how much time you can take away from your principal occupation”), and he imposed a 10-year cap on all his board seats. “I believe that’s a really important part of corporate governance,” he explains. “Because of the natural social affiliations that develop over time on boards, especially those without term limitations, people begin to act on a friendship basis more than a governance basis. And that generally doesn’t produce the best decisions.”

These days, the admittedly “unplanful” Denny has a plan. He’s offering his services to small nonprofits on a problem-solving basis: “I’ll work with you for as long as it takes to solve that particular problem, then we’re done.”

In addition, Denny will increase his volunteer commitment to the Minneapolis Public Schools, which he serves as a GED teaching assistant. He also plans to expand on his Hill-fellow paper by focusing on what he believes is a crying need for a basic set of employment rights for all U.S. workers. “That’s a cause to pursue,” he says, “and everyone needs a cause.”