In memoriam: Henry D. Sharpe, Jr.
May 5, 1923–July 1, 2022
Henry D. Sharpe, Jr., photo credit COA archives.
By Jay McNally ’84
In the late 1990s, there was a College of the Atlantic event at Harvard. This was a small gathering of maybe 15 or so people. I came after work, the only person in a business suit. COA Life Trustee Henry D. Sharpe, Jr., always interested in the oddball in a crowd, started a conversation with me. We had a lot in common aside from COA; we were both Rhode Islanders and had businesses in Providence.
Henry immediately charmed me with his wit and intelligence. He impressed me with the breadth of his knowledge, but as that conversation and our subsequent time together deepened, I was disarmed by his candid self-reflections and intellectual honesty. At the core, these were the aspects of Henry that were the most lasting.
These conversations drew me into his vision for what became COA’s green and sustainable business program. It would be easy to think Henry’s motivation for the program was simply to have business thinking in the COA curriculum, but it went far beyond that.
Henry thought about the impact his family’s business, Brown & Sharpe, had on the local and world stage. The flaw he saw was not appreciating the impact of waste and the fundamental value of recovering the usable bits of that waste. He thought that industrial and other organizational processes could evolve to capture the hidden value in byproducts, wasted human effort and intelligence, sub-optimal use of energy, and the attendant social and environmental impacts we see all around us. The COA community may now see this as common sense, but at that time, Henry was years ahead.
Over time, Henry and his wife Peggy became friends and collaborators on a number of projects at COA and, to a lesser extent, in Rhode Island. Their generosity in adding my name to the Sharpe-McNally Chair of Green and Socially Responsible Business currently held by the magical Jay Friedlander was and is a great honor.
I’ll always remember an afternoon when Henry visited my company, Ibis Consulting, when it was housed in a former Brown & Sharpe building. He spoke with my staff and showed slides of how the building had been used in the past and how the complex was configured. He told stories for several hours. It was a wonderful presentation and I could sense Henry’s glee in the telling. Lovely memories and a lovely man. That was Henry.
