Ralph at his desk in his plainly furnished office
on Lexington Avenue in midtown Manhattan.

Picture the corporate executive that Charles Dickens might have created in an uncharitable mood if he were writing today. Dickens’ bigwig would be cold-hearted, single-mindedly profit-driven, controlling and unbending. He would not understand the concept of social responsibility.

Ralph Weindling, a former corporate bigwig himself, is so much the opposite of this caricature that the many people he has helped in his retirement pull out all the stops to express their affection and admiration for him.

“I love Ralph!” said Rebecca Thornton, president of the Dutchess County Land Conservancy. “I think he’s fabulous.” Her judgment was affirmed in terms only mildly less exuberant by two other leaders of nonprofit organizations – Shelley Emmer, director of foundation and corporate giving for the Doe Fund, and Harriet Taub, executive director of Materials for the Arts, a program of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

The mild-mannered recipient of these tributes is the 78-year-old former president of The Diebold Group Inc., a company that pioneered in advising corporations in the application of information technology to business, and also ran some businesses itself. At its peak The Diebold Group employed 350 people. Ralph retired after the company was sold to Daimler-Benz in 1991.

For the next five years he headed the Graduate School of Management at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. When that stint ended he took time out to decide what he could do to “make a difference,” a priority with him throughout his career.

Now he finds himself making a difference to nonprofit organizations. With his help, they are finding it possible to achieve success in “social enterprise,” a catchphrase that stands for creating and sustaining revenue streams that will keep the organization on a firm financial footing. The goal is to find enterprises that are closely related to the mission of the nonprofit itself.

Ralph at a reception at the Salmagundi Club in
Manhattan last December before the program.

“I was looking for something to do,” Ralph said. “I got in touch with the National Executive Service Corps, and they gave me an opportunity to work on some projects.” The mission of the National Executive Service Corps is to help strengthen the management of nonprofits. To do this it utilizes the consulting services of people who have served in senior corporate capacities. “Just here in the New York area we have 300 people offering their services,” said Marvin B. Berenblum, chairman of the Service Corps. Over a period of 33 years over 2,000 nonprofits in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have used these services.

Last December Ralph appeared as a panelist at a program sponsored by the Service Corps at the Salmagundi Club in New York City. He described himself as a “planning enthusiast.”

“Develop a strategic plan – a business plan,” he advised. “Get consensus on your board of directors. Name an individual to follow through.”

These principles were developed and refined by the celebrated management guru Peter Drucker, whose prolific writings Ralph has long admired. But advocacy alone was not sufficient to win the affection of the beneficiaries of Ralph’s services. “He’s concerned, compassionate,” said Ms. Emmer of The Doe Fund. “He’s a great guy to work with.”

The Doe Fund runs transitional residences for former prisoners and homeless people. Seven hundred people a day inhabit its four residences, three of them in New York City and one in Philadelphia.

Ralph’s task was to supply input on the fund’s business initiatives, or “micro-enterprises.” One of these involves resource recovery. Waste cooking oil is collected by truck from restaurants, brought to a warehouse and picked up for recycling into bio-diesel fuel. The nonprofit has been at this task for three years. “It’s poised to be self-supporting, but we think it’s going to be a good money-raiser for us," Ms. Emmer said. "Also we think it’s a service to the city. Some of that oil was being dumped illegally.”

Time for a one-on-one discussion
before the panel program begins.

The city’s Materials for the Arts program found Ralph a big help in solving a knotty problem. The goal of the program is to collect a wide variety of materials used in the arts – everything from furniture to art books to ribbons – for use by cultural organizations and public schools. It created a support organization of volunteers called “Friends of the Materials for the Arts” to help collect materials. This was no small task. In fiscal 2008 alone the department collected $6 million in materials weighing over 700 tons, largely from major stores and corporations.

The problem was that the personnel best positioned to do the collecting were moonlighting employees of the department itself. Should they be paid? Would their pay be considered “double dipping”?

“Ralph interviewed all the stakeholders,” said Ms. Taub, the executive director of the program. “He was methodical, eloquent and thoughtful.” In the end the city’s Conflict of Interest Board agreed that the employees could do this work for pay so long as they were not getting paid for it twice – both from the city and from the Friends.

Ralph was born into a well-to-do Jewish family in Berlin on June 29, 1931. The family’s business interests were in real estate, banking, radio manufacturing and exporting. With the political picture darkening, Ralph’s father, Arnold, and his three uncles moved with their families to London in 1933. Then, in 1939, Ralph’s mother moved with her two sons, Lester, 12, and Ralph, then 8, and one uncle to New York. His father and two other uncles stayed in London. Later they were sent to an internment camp in Canada. Not until 1945 was the family reunited in New York.

Arnold and a brother went into the real estate and construction business, which was the principal family business until the properties were sold in 2000 and Lester retired. The two brothers now occupy an office at 570 Lexington Avenue.

Ralph gets ready as last December's National
Service Corps panel program is about to begin.

After schooling at the Dalton School and Horace Mann in Riverdale, Ralph went to the Wharton School for an undergraduate business education at the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated in three years, in 1951, and then to the Harvard School of Business. Later he served a stint as an Army officer with the Quartermaster Corps in Korea. “I have considerable respect for the U.S. military,” he said. “I found they were dedicated and fairly competent.”

After military service he chose to work in a small corporate environment, where he could satisfy his urge to make a difference. The opportunity came to him from John Diebold, one of the pioneers of the postwar automation revolution. Diebold was also a graduate of the Harvard Business School. Ralph met him through a mutual friend. “He was a brilliant futurist,” Ralph said.

In his long career with John Diebold, Ralph served variously as managing director of European activities, executive vice president, chief operating officer and president. In Europe he set up a group of operating companies in computer leasing, container leasing and European softwear, companies that he later liquidated when Diebold narrowed its focus. It set up a research arm to develop better and better computers, and at one point 100 companies were each paying $20,000 a year to keep abreast of its findings.

In 1998 the purely pro bono phase of his career began. The list of nonprofits that have attended to his advice now numbers over 20. It includes the Visiting Nurse Service of New York City, the Staten Island Botanic Garden, the New York Police Museum, Guttmacher Institute, the Flatbush Development Corporation, the Queens Public Library, the Skyscraper Museum, the Greenbelt Conservancy, the China Institute and the Dutchess County Land Conservancy, where Ms. Thornton has become so ardent a fan. Ralph himself lives in Dutchess County, with his wife, France-Helene. They have one son.

Until Ralph came along the Conservancy had no long-range strategic plan, Ms. Thornton said. It worked on a year-to-year basis. “Ralph spent a huge amount of time interviewing people and doing background research on the county,” she said. In the end the Conservancy came up with a more detailed mission statement with broader goals, set up procedures to support agriculture in the county and to assist towns in creating and managing new parks, and conceived new methods of land acquisition for conservation.

“Ralph is soft-spoken and deliberate,” Ms. Thornton said. “He’s a stickler for details, and he’s very practical. When he speaks, people listen.”

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