April 22, 2021 – Jim Dickow, 78, passed away peacefully in the hospital in Milwaukee on Sunday morning, April 18, after a four-month battle with cancer, Bellwether League Foundation learned.
Jim Dickow was a stickler for detail and order. Given that Dickow began his career in the late 1960s as an engineer at McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft Inc., working to develop and simulate astronaut link-ups with an orbiting space station, his focus and emphasis on extensive and thorough analysis made sense. Those skills also certainly came in handy once he left the frontier of outer space for the confines of supply chain space in the healthcare industry in the early 1970s.
After spending more than a decade at Will Ross Inc.-Gentec Healthcare he dedicated the remainder of his career – more than 35 years – to management consulting via a variety of recognizable brands, including Kowalski-Dickow Associates (KDA), Amerinet, ServiceMaster, ARAMARK Healthcare and Lerch Bates. He concluded his four-decade run under his eponymous shingle, Dickow Consulting Group. During his final phase, Dickow collaborated on some projects with his KDA co-founder, Jamie Kowalski.
James F. Dickow served as a founding board member of Bellwether League Inc., the forerunner to Bellwether League Foundation. In those early years prior to his induction into the Bellwether Class of 2013, he functioned as the designated but unofficial parliamentarian of the board, a skill he developed while a member of his fraternity at Purdue University. He made sure his fellow board members followed Robert’s Rules of Order and managed their frequent meetings with congressional aplomb.
Jamie Kowalski, Bellwether League Foundation Co-Founder and Board Secretary, represented one-half of the prominent hyphenated consulting firm he started with Dickow in 1984, Kowalski-Dickow Associates, and fondly remembered his long-time business partner.
“Jim was a smart, talented guy who was a mentor to many – hundreds of clients, dozens of staff – including me,” Kowalski recalled. “I’ll always be grateful for that. He opened the door for me to begin my career path and became my partner to help me with whatever success I – we – had. And he was a friend for over 40 years. God bless him.”