Obituary: Kerry F Napuk, business mentor and social activist

Kerry Napuk: Free-thinking facilitator who never lost his enthusiasm for new businesses

Kerry Napuk was a genuine polymath with a free-thinking, cosmopolitan outlook that made him very much a favourite American making his home in Edinburgh.

Born in a small town in the western state of Montana, he was brought up in San Francisco. He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in business administration and a master’s in economics. The campus was internationally recognised as a centre for protest and radical action, and Kerry was very much a part of this. He was selected as the national trainee at the AFL-CIO, the American equivalent of the STUC.

He worked for a year in Washington DC before leaving to become research director from 1964-68 for the United Packinghouse Workers in Chicago, the union representing labour in the meatpacking industry. Kerry always had close ties to the unions and political movements, including being a marshal at Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech in 1963, as well as working for Robert Kennedy’s staff. He also campaigned for better rights for the California farm workers alongside Cesar Chavez. One of Kerry’s proudest moments was meeting his political hero, John F Kennedy, at the White House.

He left union work in 1969 to become project manager of the California Steam Bus Project, in which the state sponsored three separate trials of steam-powered buses in a bid to cut pollution.

Kerry’s report was quite favourable, but the trial was never repeated, he suspected, because of lobbying by the auto industry.

It was at this time he met his English wife, Angela, at a political rally. They married and moved to the UK in 1973, settling in the Borders a year later. Here his children, Sarah and David were born, before the family moved on to make Edinburgh home in 1985.

For five years he acted as a company doctor for the north-east regional director of the Midland Bank in Newcastle. He also joined the boards of ten small and medium-sized companies and co-founded four new technology start-ups, raising £4.25 million in venture capital.

His work with growing companies led him to join the board of Insider Publications, which had launched the magazine Scottish Business Insider in 1984. Kerry was its first non-executive director and acted as mentor and friend to the firm’s founders – roles he maintained for 15 years until the company was sold in 2000.

During this period his knowledge and practical assistance were also critical to the successful opening of Mamma’s restaurant in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket. His presence as investor-director on the board ensured that business growth was strong until its sale in 1994. It remains a landmark restaurant in the city today.

Kerry’s interest in strategic planning for smaller companies led to the publication of his well-received book, The Strategy-Led Business.

At the same time, acutely aware of the need to get more people actively involved in organisations, he began to use large group processes to stimulate strategic planning. As a director of Open Futures from 1997 to 2006, he facilitated 100 large group events involving more than 7,000 participants from all sectors in Scotland, England, Romania, Moldova and Armenia.

These included a first large group event for theatre in Scotland at the Tramway in Glasgow in 1997, and a masterclass at the MSC course in healthcare at Stirling University – a project that eventually led to his further publications, Strategic Planning For Your Company, and The Large Group Facilitator’s Manual.

Retirement was never going to be an option for Kerry. He remained active in several charities, notably as a board member of InterMinds for International Mental Health Development, and Papyrus, the Prevention of Young Suicide. In 2012 he took great delight in announcing his return to facilitation work with Open Space.

It was no surprise, too, to see him firing off letters to the press at the time of the banking crisis condemning the fact that there was still no sign of any non-executive directors on the boards of financial service institutions being held accountable for their failure to mitigate risk while pocketing lavish fees.

Kerry never lost his enthusiasm for new businesses, championing several, providing advice and encouragement to young entrepreneurs, and spinning off ideas of his own. In his seventies he embraced social media, seeing the potential for collecting oral histories. A favourite mantra (one of dozens he occasionally created or “borrowed”) was Sir Barnett Cocks’s lament: “A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled!”

One of his last great commitments was to the Edinburgh & Lothian Prostate Cancer Support Group. A patient himself, he took a leading role in organising a major conference in Edinburgh in 2009 on prevention, detection, diagnosis, treatment and support. His own research and reading were of such quality that a medical specialist visiting Edinburgh was moved to inquire of a colleague from the Western General Hospital if Kerry was an oncologist?

As a group member, he combined a sharp intelligence with a fearless disregard for position and reputation when questioning Scottish health policy on treatment options and drug availability, but all in the interests of another underdog to whom he gave his full backing – the male patient.

In his private life Kerry listed food, music and politics as some of his main interests. He could be excellent company and remained well connected, well read, generous with his time and knowledge, and, not infrequently, wonderfully, engagingly thrawn – in its best Scots sense, and a description he would have taken as a compliment and a true confirmation of Scotland as home.

Kerry Napuk is survived by his wife, Angela, son, David and grandson Jack. His daughter, Sarah, predeceased him in 1997.