Barnard’s first 13 years with the company were spent working as an expert on the economics of telephone rates. By 1922, when he was 36, he began performing what he was later to call “executive services,” and by the age of 41 he had become the first president of New Jersey Bell Telephone. His 21 years as president were also the period of his most fruitful intellectual activity; both his books were written during those years. It may be remarkable that the Bell System tolerated such “deviant” behavior on the part of one of its chief executives, but Barnard surely separated his “personal decisions” from his “organizational decisions” (as he called them in The Functions of the Executive).