Past Inductees

Marlowe Teig
Managing Director
Berkery, Noyes & Co.
2001

Marlowe Teig is more than a financial advisor: With experience as an educational publisher, he concentrates on advising publishing companies of all sizes toward successful ventures. A 30-year veteran of the industry, he's been called "one of the best publishers ever in the business," and is known for his "keen intellect" and "tremendous sense of the market."

Growing up on a farm in Fargo, Minn., Marlowe wore the usual agrarian attire, including cowboy boots. (Later, when his career led him to California, he readopted the unconventional footgear he's known for today.) His parents didn't have the money to send him to college, but still expected him and his six younger siblings to find their way to higher education. Marlowe, who had taken every science and math course his small high school offered, received a full-tuition scholarship to the University of Michigan. There he began studying engineering, but switched majors and earned his bachelor's degree in English literature.

After graduating, Marlowe went to work as an "assistant production-editorial trainee" at Prentice-Hall, and through a series of promotions, ended up as an editor in the company's college division. In the early 1960s, he joined Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and spent 16 years in various senior management positions, including vice president. There, as elsewhere, he showed homegrown concern for other people, and always tried to help, or act as a mentor, wherever he could.

He joined Houghton Mifflin in 1980 as director of the school division, and was named executive vice president in 1986. Marlowe understood how to relate to authors, former CEO Hal Miller recalls. Those in the editorial department often remarked on the good relationship Marlowe built with them every day. One of his associates at HM was Peter Sayeski, who is now president of SRA/McGraw-Hill. Pete remembers  pushing his ideas forcefully, but Marlowe wrote him a note that spoke of waves hitting a rock on the shore. The note said that eventually, the "waves" would wear him (the rock) down: an example of the nice ways Marlowe would come up with to help an associate who needed guidance.

Marlowe always has been demanding when it comes to producing a superior product, Pete notes. He had the courage to go against an "entrenched editorial department" when advancing marketing ideas for one Houghton Mifflin spelling program. The end result? When the department followed Marlowe's advice, Pete says, the product's market share increased by 65 percent.

In 1985, Marilyn Schutz (now of Marketing Projects Inc.) consulted Marlowe when seeking Houghton Mifflin's sponsorship for a special issue of Instructor magazine. It was the first time in education that any magazine had an entire issue sponsored by one company, and Marlowe had the vision to understand the power that relationships between businesses and schools could have. He also took the time to sit down with her and talk about the magazine's direction.

Between 1987 and 1988, Marlowe was vice president of educational publishing at Macmillan until he went out on his own to advise people who were working on deals to buy publishing companies. As he became more intrigued by the process of mergers and acquisitions, his list of clients began to grow. So in 1990, it was a logical extension of Marlowe's career path to join investment-banking firm Berkery, Noyes & Co. in New York City. He helped expand services to the educational and professional publishing community; within his first year, his efforts led to a sale. As managing director, he's responsible for originating, completing and managing sales, divestitures, and mergers and acquisitions, both in educational and professional publishing, and in the learning-technology sector.

Marlowe says being in educational publishing for 28 years gave him the opportunity to work on producing curriculum materials that teachers used to reach millions of children. That was rewarding, he says, but in the last 11 years, he's reaped different kinds of rewards: He's helped smaller companies to realize millions in cash, and he's helped numerous educational publishing companies to grow at a faster rate through consolidations.

Marlowe has been involved with the successful completion of more than 40 transactions at Berkery, Noyes & Co., including Houghton Mifflin Co.'s acquisition of Sunburst Communications and Pearson Education's investment in Boxer Learning.

On the volunteer side, Marlowe has served as chairman of the executive committee of the school division of the Association of American Publishers and as a member of its Freedom to Read committee. He's a past trustee and corporator of the Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Mass.

He lives with his wife, musician and vocal coach Carole Lynne. They have two grown children, both college graduates to whom Marlowe has passed his high standards - of individual achievement, and of helping others.

Ceremony Highlights

The trio of Leanna Landmann of TIME for Kids, Linda Meeks of Meeks Heit, and Joe Berkery, president of Berkery, Noyes & Co., got together for a touching and humorous presentation on Marlowe Teig, Berkery Noyes & Co. managing director. After several mentions of Teig's cowboy boots and Meeks' infamous "10 Reasons to Hire Marlowe," Berkery presented the Hall of Fame honors to Teig.

Teig thanked his family, all the people in educational publishing who once were teachers, and all the mentors who helped him along the way, taught him, and allowed him to do his job. 

"Teaching underlies so much of your enterprise," Teig said to the audience. "Teachers are the ultimate optimists ? they believe in the perfectibility of humans." Finally, he cited "my boss Joe: he taught me you can achieve whatever you can visualize. I accept this honor in the name all my great teachers who taught me so much."