Vision. Leadership. Better ideas.
In brief: Dale Murphy was born and raised on Mercer Island. He registered to vote here at age 18 and has voted here all his life. He attended public schools
here and went on to get a PhD from MIT. He was an assistant vice president at Citibank before becoming a business educator. He taught international business, international relations, corporate responsibility, and entrepreneurship at Harvard and Georgetown Universities before returning home. He brings insights from around the world to solving problems here; and believes we can lead by example for other states to follow. He serves on the Board of
Global Integrity, a non-profit organization which works to improve governance and reduce corruption worldwide, founded by a former student.
Background: Dale's parents, Bob and Dora Murphy, moved to Seattle in 1952 and to Mercer Island in 1958. His father practiced architecture with John Morse & Associates for 30 years, until forced to retire due to Parkinson's Disease. His mother ran a popular day-care center at the Episcopal Church, was an Arboretum Native Plant and Japanese Garden tour guide, Garden Club member, and was active in local environmental, education, civic, and Parkinson's causes. His father's parents were career-military, serving in both World Wars. (Grandfather Murphy was a US Army Colonel, who survived the
Bataan Death March and three years as a POW -- giving Dale a personal interest in the treatment of war prisoners.) His mother's side were missionaries in Burma, where they helped create the first written language for the Kachin minority (see
Photo Gallery).
By age 14 Dale was mowing lawns, reading water-meters, and doing other odd-jobs. He worked as a forest firefighter based out of North Bend, and fought forest-fires in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualamie National Forest and Olympic National Park. He paid for college through scholarships and work-study, as a bus-boy, waiter, and summer-jobs. He became a micromputer specialist and international consultant, working in Cambodian refugee camps (helping those who fled the
Khmer Rouge), and helping develop free markets in Africa and Asia, before starting his PhD program. He was awarded partial scholarships for graduate school, and worked every semester as a research or teaching assistant.
While completing his PhD, Dale received a Top Secret security clearance to work for Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State, George P. Shultz. Dale wrote classified memos on arms transfers to the Middle East and prepared briefing materials on US-Soviet relations for Shultz' negotiations with Soviet Foreign Minister Edward Shevardnadze. These materials highlighted the facts that the Soviet communist system was falling further and further behind.
Dale joined Citibank for two years as an assistant
vice president, to work on Latin American debt issues. He
served on the Chairman's staff to help resolve the most intractable economic problem of that time.
As a professor at Georgetown University, half of Dale's students were MBAs and the other half were Masters' students in the Walsh School of Foreign Service. Dale is the author of a book on international economic relations,
The Structure of Regulatory Competition: corporations and public policies in a global economy, published by Oxford University Press (2004). It received praise from leading scholars such as Robert O. Keohane, David Vogel, and Kenneth Oye. Dale has taught courses in how countries become democratic (with
Samuel P. Huntington), the origins of war (with
Joseph P. Nye), international business diplomacy, corporate social responsibility (CSR), the structure and strategy of multinational business, and entrepreneurship.
(
Foreign Policy magazine ranked Keohane, Nye,
and Huntington as among the 10 most influential
scholars of international relations.)
Dale's students have gone on to leadership roles in the corporate, government, and non-profit sectors, many in CSR (at Nike, 3M, Citicorp); a number have started their own companies (or 'intrapreneurship' within large institutions), including: Crow & Soldier, Sharper Industries, Global Integrity, Circle Capital, and IFC Against AIDS. (The latter, housed within the International Finance Corporation, effectively makes the business argument for HIV/AIDS prevention throughout the world.)
