PRINCETON: Innovator has personality for it

By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
   Herb Greenberg has been proving the doubters wrong for most of his life, even as nothing ever came easy for him.
   He was the kid from Brooklyn who lost his sight at the age of 10, who would join the Boy Scouts, earn his doctorate, start a successful company, raise a family and keep going at the age of 83.
   ”And no, I’m not retiring,” said the octogenarian from the Princeton office of Caliper, the company he started that produces personality tests that have been used by more 28,000 companies.
   Mr. Greenberg is being recognized this week by the Princeton Regional Chamber of Commerce at its gala Thursday night with its innovator of the year award. Three others also are being honored as well for their contributions. “I was a major, major, major innovator 51 years ago, and I suppose in some respects I still am,” he said in an interview at the company’s office in Carnegie Center.
   He recalled how as a professor at Rutgers, he and a colleague were contacted by a major insurance company that was having high employee turnover. The company, which Mr. Greenberg did not identify, wanted them to develop a test that would identify who would make good salesmen.
   Some 3.5 million people have been tested in the 51 years Caliper has been in business, a start-up company that Mr. Greenberg has no plans to sell, though he gets regular offers.
   Mr. Greenberg has taken the test, and offered that it gave a fairly accurate assessment of himself: a driven, competitive man who is bad at details and “occasionally disorganized,” in his words.
   That personality was shaped growing up in Brooklyn, as Mr. Greenberg was the oldest son in a Jewish family.
   ”My parents totally believed in me,” he said. “So that gave me a core of self confidence that I believed if I felt something was right or believed in doing something a certain way, maybe, while I might make mistakes, my batting average would be OK.”
   He withstood failures during his career, drawing from that self-confidence his parents instilled to move on to the next opportunity. When he lost his sight as a 10-year-old due to an infection, several Boy Scout troops would not accept him. His family refused to send him to a special troop for the blind in the Bronx. Eventually, would join troop 271 in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, rising to assistant scout leader.
   Later on, he would go to college and earn a doctorate from New York University.
   In business for more than half a century, Mr. Greenberg does not rest on his laurels. Today, the company has a research team trying to make the test better. There is still a commitment to never accept mediocrity.
   ”You, know it’s funny,” said Mr. Greenberg. “The original thing that we had to do was to prove that a test could help you determine what someone could do.”
   Today, that is no longer the issue. Rather, he said the challenge is to convince companies that the way they hire is wrong. Instead of looking at applicants’ past jobs, companies should look instead at what qualities job seekers possess to match the competencies to meet those tasks.
   His advice: “Find somebody who possesses the internal capacities to do a particular job. Give them training to teach them how they can do that job and you’ll have success.”