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.