TEI's multitude of '12th men' (and women).

• Author: McCormally, Timothy J.
• Position: Tax Executives Institute

The analogy isn't perfect, but with the American football season winding down, I've been thinking a lot about the people who constitute TEI's "12th man." The term--which is rendered "10th man" in baseball or "6th man" in basketball--refers not to a formal member of a sports team, but to the fans who collectively represent an extracorporeal force that gives the home team an advantage. The concept of someone "off the field of play but nevertheless integral to the team's success" manifested itself particularly in the person of two individuals who, for different reasons, wound down their involvement in TEI in 2008.

The first person is Eileen Taite, who is immediate past president Bob McDonough's executive assistant at the Polaroid Corporation. Members of TEI's staff dealt with Eileen continually during Bob's ascension through TEI's ranks, and during his presidency the contact was almost daily. If we needed Bob's comments on a technical submission, we called Eileen. If we needed to discuss conference speakers and Bob was half way around the world on company business, we called Eileen. If we needed to nudge Bob on the million and two things that TEI demanded of him during his term, we'd call Eileen. And she was always there for TEI, with her Irish lilt and presumably a smile on her face.

I say "presumably" a smile on her face because until the Annual Conference in Boston, none of us on the staff had the occasion to meet Eileen. She made our jobs easier from the background, and it was a real pleasure for me and the other members of the staff who attended the conference to thank her in person for her efforts. (Oh, and yes, the smile was precisely as I had envisioned it.) Eileen's responsiveness to our requests and her overall effectiveness made our jobs easier; her good humor made them fun; and her skill at helping balance Bob's Polaroid and TEI duties made him the envy of the Institute's volunteer leaders. TEI clearly benefitted from her "above and beyond" efforts.

Unlike Eileen, whose face-to-face contact with TEI members and staff was minimal, the second person may have met more members than anyone this side of former Executive Director Mike Murphy. Kathy Stopa worked for Michigan State University for three and a half decades, and from 1973 until her retirement at the end of 2008, she was the primary contact between the Institute and the executive development program at MSU's Broad Graduate School of Business. If you attended TEI's Federal or...