A Vigilante Travels the Consulting Circuit Alone

In the spring of 1952, a little less than three weeks before an undergraduate troupe was to present its first outdoor performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the director quit, calling the situation hopeless.

Undeterred, the show’s producer—Thomas N. Billings ’52—didn’t hesitate: he would fill in as director himself.

Commencement was fast approaching, the Harvard Dramatic Club was desperately strapped for cash and Billings was producing the Shakespearean comedy to raise some much-needed revenue.

On opening night, the players and spectators assembled behind the Fogg Museum, which then offered a picturesque setting for a summer gathering.

Drizzle wetted the faces of the actors and audience members in the garden, and some of the light-bulbs strung in the trees to illuminate the performance exploded.

Billings stood before the audience and said he wouldn’t be offended if they left. But no one did, the show went on, and the performance received rave reviews in the Boston Herald.

That night proved to be Billings’ fondest Harvard memory.

It was also a time when he quickly took control and solved a problem—something he has made a career out of.

Billings is a vigilante, in his own way. He’s never spent much time doing one thing in particular, preferring to show up, strike and fade away. He never stayed at one job for very long, instead filling in where he was needed.

He’s spent his professional career largely as a consultant, playing fast and loose in a world of headhunters and making a name for himself on his own.

Billings has worked for both the National Rifle Association (NRA) and a counterculture magazine called the Mother Earth News. His many exploits in journalism and consulting have won him mention in no less than six editions of Who’s Who (including Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in Science and Engineering).

More recently, returning to older passions, he has started directing plays for his local theater, recording voice-overs for documentaries, writing a cookbook series, running his own publishing imprint and dabbling in the software industry.

Though it ended in Tercentenary Theater, Billings’ undergraduate career began at Deep Springs College, a small working cattle ranch in rural California that also offers a highly-regarded two-year liberal arts program.

After two years of ranch work and course work at Deep Springs, he transferred to Harvard. Here he discovered that he had already completed all the requirements for his government concentration. Freed from the pressure to specialize in one area of study, Billings explored the full diversity of classes in Harvard’s catalog.

“I had the privilege of spending my two upper-class years taking...things like geology and architecture and music,” he says. It was “really enriching stuff.”

He also became active in the Dramatic Club and the College radio station, WHRB, and eventually wound up as president of both organizations.

His time with the Dramatic Club inspired him to spend two summers working as the assistant to the general manager of a New Jersey theater company, and his interest piqued.

“As a result of that...I decided to change my whole life career objective,” he says. “I decided I’d study business...and go into the theater business.”

But after earning a degree from Harvard Business School, Billings decided that going into the theater business “wasn’t the smartest thing to do” and turned his sights on newspapers instead.

“I made the circuit from Denver to San Francisco to San Diego to Houston,” he says, “and talked to 28 different newspaper organizations, and every one of them turned me down.”

But Billings did eventually get a call from Copley Newspapers in San Diego and was offered a spot on the corporate staff. Thirteen years later, in 1970, he left his job with Copley (which, looking back, he remembers as “nirvana”) and decided to become a consultant.

From here on, Billings’ professional life was marked by a parade of different posts—from business manager at the National Enquirer to editor of the United Nations Observer and International Report to an executive editor of the United Media Chain.

Lead among his roster of clients was the National Rifle Association, where in 1976 he became executive director. The organization was losing millions of dollars every year in the mid-1970s, and Billings was brought on to make it financially solvent once again.

To this day Billings lists his brief work with the NRA, which turned around its financial statement, as his most rewarding achievement.

But he never shared the ideological fervor of his colleagues. He says he never owned a gun in his life, which made some of his coworkers uncomfortable.

From their point of view, Billings says, “it was clear I wasn’t one of them.” But as far as he was concerned, he had no qualms in the two years he spent there.

“As a management consultant, I view the world the same way as lawyers view the world,” he says. “As long as the other organization is functioning in a legal manner, they’re probably entitled to...competent management.”

From the NRA, Billings headed directly to the other end of the political spectrum, becoming president of the Mother Earth News. The publication, which contains articles on sustainable energy and raising crops and livestock, is what he calls “a marvelous counterculture magazine.”

But all that, Billings now insists, is “ancient history.”

After these initial excursions in journalism and consulting, a headhunter found him and asked him to move to San Francisco and become president of the Recorder Printing and Publishing Company. He accepted the job and presided over a battery of daily legal and commercial newspapers in San Francisco.

At the same time he acquired another printing company and, in the process, met an attorney who represented a startup personal computer company in Silicon Valley.

The attorney asked Billings to head up an effort to write the technical manuals for the PC startup.

“We’ve got this wonderful machine we’ve been shipping to people for 90 days now,” the attorney told him, “but there isn’t a shred of information to tell people how to use it or even how to get it out of the box and plug it into the wall.”

The prospect of entering a new and growing industry was too tempting to pass up, and he accepted. Running the nascent company’s technical publication department, Billings headed a team of 40 writers producing “jillions” of technical manuals and instruction booklets.

From publishing technical materials for the company, Billings went on to become its worldwide director of marketing, communications and public relations.

The firm enjoyed financial success during one year in the early ’80s, but good times did not last long. At one time it employed 3,000 people, but the next year the thriving operation had become one of the fastest shrinking companies in the area.

“IBM introduced its PC,” Billings says, “and in those days there was a lot of security in the three letters IBM and not much security in anyone else’s name.”

The company went under along with scores of other startups at that time.

Undaunted, Billings contacted a headhunter who got him in touch with another young computer company. He was sent to London to be general manager of the company’s British subsidiary while its initial public offering was being prepared in the United States. Initially the assignment was temporary—just six to eight weeks—but those few weeks turned into five years.

That company also eventually went bust, but Billings retained a number of consulting clients in Britain, including Insignia Solutions, another young technology firm, and eventually became managing director.

For a year-and-a-half, he commuted from London, where the firm’s development group was situated, to the marketing operation in Silicon Valley.

But by 1990, Billings had left Insignia Solutions and once again began consulting, once again moving from job to job, looking for new scenery.

He is writing a cookbook series and has authored a children’s book, The Cat Who Couldn’t Meow, which he says follows “the saga of our blue chartreux,” one of the seven foundling cats his wife has collected over the years. In conjunction with his writing, he has founded his own publishing imprint, Zzyzzyx Press.

Billings also keeps busy singing bass in his local choir and lending his reassuring drawl to voice-overs for documentaries. And he hasn’t forgotten his early pursuits—he now acts in and directs shows at the Alameda Repertory Theater, which he founded, and writes editorials for his local newspaper.

These activities bring the resume of Thomas Neal Billings up to date—a resume filled with occupations and pastimes. He recalls the complicated chronology of his past 50 years easily and cheerfully offers his daughter’s appraisal of a life filled with frenetic activity.

“One thing they can’t say, dad,” she told him, “is that you haven’t lived an interesting life.”

—Staff writer Stephen W. Stromberg can be reached at stromber@fas.harvard.edu.