Frank McNair

J. Frank McNair (born April 8, 1952) is an American management theorist and writer on a variety of subjects. His management writing, in particular, is focused on simplifying complex ideas and distilling them to a level that is easily accessible to the practitioner. He has been described as “a reductionist - a simplifier.” McNair commented in some of his early writing, “Business, on the whole, is difficult but not complex - much like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill.”
Education and youth
The son of a business person father and a community volunteer mother, McNair was raised in Laurinburg, NC. His father and both of his grandfathers ran family-owned businesses, and he spent much of his childhood soaking up the fundamentals of business management from these and other mentors. As a youth, McNair was active in sports (football) and Boy Scouting, where he was eventually named an Eagle Scout. He graduated from the local high school, earned a Morehead Scholarship to the University of North Carolina, and graduated from college in 1974. (Source: Registrar, UNC-CH)
Corporate life
Following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, McNair became a banker (First Citizens Bank and Trust Company) immediately after college. After a year in banking, he left to pursue his MBA from the Babcock Graduate School of Management at Wake Forest University.
In 1978, McNair joined R. J. Reynolds Industries, Inc. in Marketing Research. For the next decade he held progressively more-responsible positions in marketing, sales, and sales management at Reynolds, Sara Lee Corporation, and Douglas Battery Company. He was Corporate Director of Sales and Marketing for all product lines when he left Douglas Battery in 1988. (Sources: Vitae for J Frank McNair)
Work as a consultant and management theorist
In 1988 McNair joined his wife, Laura Turnage McNair, in her training and consulting business LTM Associates. The business was renamed McNair & McNair in 1995. Together, they serve clients in the US and internationally with solutions-focused approaches to the human challenges managers confront in running a business. (Sources: www.frankmcnair.com, www.mcnairandmcnair.com)
Personal life
McNair married Laura Lee Turnage McNair in July 1976 and they live in Winston-Salem, NC. They are active in a variety of volunteer organizations, where pro bono contributions of their skill sets help these non-profits succeed. (Source: Interviews with McNair)
McNair has been active at First Presbyterian Church and Saint Paul’s Episcopal, both in Winston-Salem, NC. He has done graduate work at the Center for Christian Spirituality at General (Episcopal) Theological Seminary in New York, and received a Certificate in Spiritual Formation from Columbia (Presbyterian) Seminary in Decatur, GA.
Publications
McNair’s writing has addressed a variety of topics and has not been confined strictly to the world of business. His publications include: "The Daily Far Afield" (newspaper satire), 1970-1971; “Taking Your Faith to Market,” a six-column series for Living Prayer Magazine, 1993; A Creeping Certainty (play), 1995; "It’s OK to Ask ‘Em to Work," 1999; "How You Make the Sale", 2005; "The Golden Rules for Managers,"; 2009. (Sources: Books in Print, Archives of "Living Prayer" Magazine, and The North Carolina Collection of the Wilson Round Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

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