Cornelius "Neil" Murphy Jr. came to Syracuse University in 1966 to earn his Ph.D. in physical and organic chemistry. Afterward, ready to leave for London on a post-doctoral fellowship, he and his wife learned they were expecting their first child.

Postponing the study abroad, Murphy saw an ad on a bulletin board at SU's Bowne Hall for an opening at the O'Brien & Gere engineering firm.

It launched him on a 30-year career to chairman during a time the company grew dramatically. In 2000, he left O'Brien & Gere to become president of SUNY ESF where he oversaw new construction and a 30 percent growth in enrollment. In January, when Quentin Wheeler became president, Murphy became senior fellow in environmental and sustainable systems.

During his career, Murphy has taken on untold roles in the community, most recently co-chair of the Consensus Project, a commission to improve local government.



Were you in leadership roles growing up?

Not really. As a kid, I was involved in Boy Scouts, and I was a junior assistant scoutmaster -- that kind of stuff.

I don't think it was until I finished my graduate work and started at O'Brien & Gere that the whole concept of leadership was even important to me.

How did it become important?

As you start to grow in an organization, there are more and more people that you have responsibility for. If you take that to heart, you realize that in some respects their well-being and the well-being of their families is your responsibility.

So you have to step up and you have to do those things that can best assure their well-being and their opportunities for success.

Tell me about people who influenced your leadership.

The first person probably was my dad. He instilled in me the need to respect everybody. It didn't make any difference if they were the CEO or whether they were the janitor. They all contribute to success. He also taught me the importance of making a commitment.

At O'Brien & Gere, Frank Drehwing gave me the latitude, the space, to grow and encouraged the growth. It's special if you're a young person and you come into an organization and your first boss is of that type -- that allows you to grow and to branch out and to have different experiences.

The third group is the people that I had the privilege to lead. They taught me an immense amount, whether it's my good friends at O'Brien & Gere, or whether it's our faculty and staff here, or maybe even most importantly the students.

What have the students taught you?

A lot -- they're incredible.

I remember a strategic planning effort just after I came to the college. It was a distributed kind of effort and an engagement kind of effort. The students' message to me was "Neil, if you're gonna teach green, you gotta be green."

A very simple message.

They've taught me a lot -- seeing their creativity and their passion and their commitments.

I'm a better person today because I've had 14 years of that kind of associations.

Walk me through your 30 years at O'Brien & Gere.

I started as a lab technician to develop an analytical methodology to measure mercury in the sediments and the fish flesh of Onondaga Lake.

O'Brien & Gere had had a history of doing upgrades for the Metropolitan Sewage Treatment plant. The firm received a grant in the late '60s to do the baseline study of Onondaga Lake to define what the problems were and then to come up with potential solutions.

I spent the better part of a year and a half or two years in the laboratory, doing not only that, but working on other analytical problems that were related to environmental issues -- chemicals and toxics that would be in effluent from industrial discharge, water chemistry in the lakes and receiving streams and that kind of thing.

The firm was what people referred to as a classic civil engineering firm, civil sanitary engineering firm. The firm began to transition to provide more of a full-service kind of consulting service. And to provide services to industrial clients that had more unique kinds of environmental problems. I was pulled out of the laboratory and became basically a project engineer and a project manager, and then by 1980, I was named a vice president.

I was leading an internal research group of roughly 20 or 25 people. We were always the ones that took on the unique, more challenging problems.

About four years later, I was promoted to senior vice president and shortly after that I became a president of the subsidiary companies. I became president of another subsidiary company. In 1992, I was promoted to be president of O'Brien & Gere Engineers. I served in that role for about five years, then became chairman of the board of O'Brien & Gere Ltd., the holding company. In 2000, I left O'Brien & Gere to take the position here in the college.

So, during your time, O'Brien & Gere changed to a much broader focus.

Yeah. And it grew from maybe 50 people to a thousand people.

What allowed that growth and success?

We were fortunate to attract and hire very good young people. You knew you could build your career there. It was internally owned and because of that everybody valued the opportunity for their professional development and their professional practice. There are a lot of people that literally the body of their life's work was represented in their employment at O'Brien & Gere.

You took on tough challenges. What's your advice for anyone who wants to tackle something hard to do?

Go for it. You never get satisfaction from doing things that are easy. You always get the satisfaction from doing the things that are more difficult and the things that draw out more of your skills and talents. Difficult things allow you to grow, give you the greatest satisfaction. Don't shirk difficult things.

You have one now -- the Consensus Project.

There are 17 of us on that commission - three co-chairs, Jim Walsh, Kathy Richardson and myself.

The basic purpose is to take a look at government structure in Onondaga County. Is it the structure that can optimize the delivery of services and best serve the people? Or should we have a different form of delivery of those services that could better serve the residents.

I think a lot of people view that the current form of government -- not just in Onondaga County but probably in Upstate New York -- is probably a 19th century form of government that has been layered to meet incremental needs.

We've been reaching out to the community -- meeting with many different groups.

In the end, getting the feedback from all of the constituent groups -- the public, things like the village mayors association and town supervisors association -- we start to build a consensus on what the model of government should be. That ultimately, I think, leads to a vote on the part of the citizens of Onondaga County.

It could be anywhere from shared services -- we've got to do better to share services with the existing structure -- all the way potentially to a new structure of government.

Probably it's going to be someplace in-between.

The weekly "CNY Conversation" features Q&A interviews about leadership, success, and innovation. The conversations are condensed and edited. To suggest a person for CNY Conversations, contact Stan Linhorst at StanLinhorst@gmail.com.

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