Dr. James T. Mahoney, a co-founder of MRG, recently passed away at the age of 93. Dr. Mahoney is pictured at right in the above photo, alongside his fellow founding partners, the late Tom Rand (center), and Jim Lomac (left), who has written this tribute. All of us at MRG extend our deepest condolences to the Mahoney family.
We recently learned of the passing of Dr. Jim Mahoney, one of MRG’s founding partners. It is not an exaggeration to say that without Jim, there would be no MRG. His entire professional life was dedicated to evaluating people and organizations to help them become more effective. His real genius, however, was most obvious in his ability to create a series of assessment instruments that, after 36 years, are still providing individuals with profound insights.
In my last conversation with Jim, I related my experience coaching a leader with an international humanitarian organization. This individual was born and raised in a very remote village in Africa. Employing his own initiative, he eventually moved to a city, worked his way though university, and is currently participating in a leadership development program that uses MRG’s Individual Directions Inventory™ (IDI). After receiving his feedback, he attended a one week, face-to-face training session with a number of other humanitarian leaders, a group of whom also came from rural villages across Africa. Among themselves, they concluded that the insights were reminiscent of the mysticism that was practiced back in their remote villages.
Jim was amused by this observation, but for him it was further validation of his original premise which underlies the IDI: there are a certain number of motivators which are universal. No matter where a person comes from, what they have experienced, where they have traveled, or what they have achieved, they are common to all of us.
I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to share that story with Jim. After all, what greater tribute exists for a person’s life’s work than to realize it is having a lasting impact on people around the world.
I have had the opportunity to meet this wonderful pragmatic scientists. My thought are with him somewhere in this universe. Pierre Gauthier from MOntréal Canada