History

The Center for Applied Research, Inc. (CFAR) was founded as a private firm on September 1, 1987 by Vincent Carroll, Nancy Drozdow, Tom Gilmore, Larry Hirschhorn, and Lynn Oppenheim.

Born out of the intellectual and academic movements of the 1970s and 1980s, CFAR began as the only multi-disciplinary research center within the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. After roughly 10 years at Wharton, by mutual agreement and continuing support, CFAR was spun out to become a private firm in 1987. Our Founders joined together as serious thinkers with deep mutual respect and a shared belief that they could make it work as a private consulting firm with academic roots that included continuing ties to Wharton. Their combination of skills, assets, and professional experience laid the foundation for what CFAR is today.

As a firm, CFAR represented an innovative, practical approach to consulting, in a young industry replete with experts who were full of ideas, but short on real-life application. Our Founders had both, and they knew how to activate them to help clients get results. CFAR employed multi-disciplinary teams, applying a problems-based approach to align the expertise with the client problem—representing both a unique capability and a differential stance from our competitors.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, CFAR established a prestigious, committed client base—organizations driven by mission, with leaders unafraid to take hard looks at the inner-workings of their organizations in the service of strong relationships and solid economic outcomes.
As today, our clients came from both non-profit and for-profit worlds, and ranged from loosely-coupled to highly structured organizations.

Living at the intersection of the hard (finance, operations) and the soft (legacy, interpersonal dynamics), family businesses were an ideal setting to apply our ideas and capabilities. At the time, the study of family businesses was a new field in need of a steady hand. CFAR Founder Nancy Drozdow was among the forward-thinking cohort of emerging leaders who organized the work of practitioners, researchers, and academics, developing a new field. Nancy was involved in the founding of the Family Firm Institute (FFI), where she led the conference from which the groundswell of disparate thinkers and practitioners came together to stake out the new institute, now the leading association worldwide for family enterprise professionals (and where our current President, Debbie Bing, has served as Board Chair since 2019). Nancy is now a founding member of the 2086 Society, whose mission is to set direction for the advancement of practice, through FFI’s 100th year. We helped found the field, and we continue to shape its future.

Our Healthcare Practice has always focused on bringing integration to an industry susceptible to fragmentation and change—and working with leaders navigating new futures. CFAR Founders Tom Gilmore and Larry Hirschhorn were already widely respected psychodynamic thought leaders at the time of our founding, bringing with them ideas embedded in the then-burgeoning studies of systems thinking and organizational development that are, today, fundamental to every healthcare executive and organization.

September 1, 1987: (from L to R) Vinnie Carroll, Nancy Drozdow, Tom Gilmore, Lynn Oppenheim, and Larry Hirschhorn the day CFAR spun out of the Wharton School.

We shaped healthcare leadership through the design and delivery of the earliest nursing executive programs, including the Johnson & Johnson/Wharton Fellowship Program and the Robert Wood Johnson/Pew Charitable Trusts Program. We built on this extensive work with innovative research in the emerging field of interprofessional education and collaboration, and played a leading role in shaping the future of family practice and primary care in the US. Tom Gilmore’s and Lynn Oppenheim’s early partnership with the Association of American Medical Colleges laid the groundwork for our extensive work with leaders of academic medical centers and professional societies across the country. We continue this tradition today, where many of our Principals serve as faculty in programs including Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine and the Harvard Macy Institute and as local and national leaders for the American College of Healthcare Executives.

As CFAR grew, we expanded our operations to Cambridge, MA in the late 1990s. As we had done in Philadelphia, we strengthened connections with the academic world of Cambridge and Boston and over time have built a strong client base there.

In 2016, Debbie Bing became President of CFAR, marking the transition to CFAR’s second generation of leadership; overall, we have five second-generation owners actively engaged in the business. On April 1, 2019, Richard Levin & Associates, one of the earliest and most recognized names in executive coaching, formally joined CFAR—a natural evolution of an already successful relationship, designed to help us deliver even greater value to our clients. Today we serve clients from our offices in Center City Philadelphia and the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston, as well as virtually from our home offices.

As our name indicates, CFAR has always been a consulting firm with an “applied” focus: we bring ideas to life through our work, using them to resolve very practical dilemmas that get in the way of organizational excellence. And we remain on the cutting edge of the problems that our clients face today, whatever they are—those that are often not yet clarified, systemetized, or understood. Though the world may have changed, our mission remains the same as that day in 1987: to help leaders activate organizations to achieve their highest aspirations—productively, meaningfully, profitably, and with impact.

CFAR

Over the Years

1964

Management Sciences Center formed with Russ Ackoff as its first director and was renamed Management and Behavioral Sciences Center (MBSC)

1974

The Busch Center splits from MBSC

1977

Wharton Applied Research (WARC) splits from the Busch Center and Jim Emshoff named WARC’s first Director

1983

WARC creates first Wharton family business programs, the first ever academic outreach programs, anywhere, for family businesses

1985

MBSC and WARC merge to become the Wharton Center for Applied Research

1987

The firm goes private as of September 1, 1987, operating under the name Wharton Center for Applied Research with Vinnie Carroll as President

1988

Nancy Drozdow gets a regular column in BusinessWeek’s Family Business Newsletter

1988

Larry Hirschhorn’s books Managing in the New Team Environment: Skills, Tools, and Methods and The Workplace Within: Psychodynamics of Organizational Life are both published

1989

Tom Gilmore’s book Making a Leadership Change: How Organizations and Leaders Can Handle Leadership Transitions Successfully published

1992

Larry Hirschhorn and Tom Gilmore’s paper “The New Boundaries of the Boundaryless Company” published in Harvard Business Review

2000

Lynn Oppenheim becomes President

2001

Richard Levin’s white paper on children’s reactions to stress was distributed globally by the United Nations the day after 9/11

2003

Larry Hirschhorn receives a best practice paper award from the Academy of Management for a paper on Sandler O’Neil’s resilience after 9/11

2003

Managing in the New Team Environment and Making a Leadership Change both reprinted

2007

The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas published

2008

Debbie Bing’s paper “Crowding Out the Space: The Weakness of a Strong Leader” wins the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations’s (ISPSO) first Harold Bridger Award

2008

Larry Hirschhorn awarded the Eliott Jaques Award for his article “The Fall of Howell Raines and The New York Times: A Study of the Moralization of Organizational Life” by the Society of Consulting Psychology

2011

CFAR sponsors Family Business Magazines’ Transitions Conference for the first time

Dynamics of Consulting program launches

2017

Strategic partnership with Isaacson, Miller formally established after decades of collaboration

2021

Jennifer Tomasik named to the board of the Rhode Island Public Health Institute