In memory of George Stungis–by Tom Schori
Friday, September 12th, 2008
George, a Ph.D. physicist, hired me years ago at Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company as a senior staff advisor. That opportunity George provided constituted my formal introduction to marketing research. George was a brilliant man. While at Brown and Williamson, I had many adventures with him solving unsolvable problems.
I recall when we were getting ready to launch Barclay: Stungis said “If it gets one share point, your career is guaranteed for the rest of your professional life.” And, shortly after was launched, it had achieved 1.1 share points—the most successful new product launch in the industry (to my knowledge) since Philip Morris launched Merit.
A couple months later after George and I had returned from corporate headquarters (BAT) in London, I was fired by the new senior marketing vice president. I don’t mind being fired (the V.P. didn’t say fired; he just said that they needed a quantitative type—not me). The fact is, though, that I am a quantitative type. But that’s neither here nor there. George was out of town when I was “fired.” When he returned, I fussed at him saying “George, if I was to be fired, you should have been the one to fire me.” But I didn’t hold a grudge. I still had to make a living to support my family. So I hired my old boss, George Stungis, to work with me doing competitive analyses for major corporations.
Subsequently, using a decision analytic approach similar to what we’d done with these competitive analyses, George and I created a mathematical model that we published in the Journal of Homeland Security entitled “A Terrorist Target Selection and Prioritization Model.” This model:http://www.homelandsecurity.org/newjournal/articles/stungis.html , which received some acclaim, allowed us to predict just what the bad guys were likely to do. Putting together a team of specialists, we utilized our model to assess a seemly obscure county in Florida—the results of which were also published in the Journal of Homeland Security–in an article entitled “A Prescription for Safeguarding Against Terrorist Attacks”. Here is that article http://www.homelandsecurity.org/journal/Default.aspx?oid=146&ocat=1.
George was also my Christian friend. He believed that old physicists become cosmologists—the study of everything. My wife thought I was crazy when I was reading the numerous books on cosmology that Stungis had recommended—books written by Ph.D. physicists, some of whom were Nobel Prize winners. He had planned for the two of us to write a scientific article to mathematically prove the existence of God. Neither he nor I needed any proof, but we thought it would be great fun to write it.
But we won’t be able to do so because George is already with the Lord. So the next time that I will see him face-to-face will be in the New Jerusalem—heaven on earth.
Let me tell you the rudiments of what Stungis postulated about the spirit—the human spirit that departs each of us when we die. To have any notion of what he was talking about, I had to learn a little bit about general relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, and worm holes.
String theory proposes dimensions beyond the 4 we can easily conceptualize—height, width, depth, and time. Stungis envisioned that our spirit, when we die, passes through a worm hole to another dimension (heaven). For that to be possible, he postulated a very simple solution, namely that the spirit was an electromagnetic particle with no spin, no energy, and no mass and, thus, could pass through the worm hole to heaven.
George, you and your inquiring mind are missed.