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Today's Featured Biography

 
Bill Slebos

I attended the University of North Carolina and graduated somehow. I have always loved school and hated being a student. I don't learn by reading so college was a chore.

Julia and I are about to mark our 44th anniversary. It never occurred to either of that we would be at this point in life. Who thinks at 21 that you will be with the same person at 65? Not me, that's for sure.

Early on I worked as a banker, but was not much good at it. I actually loaned money to people who needed it. Imagine that. Bad match. About a year after the bank and I parted ways Julia and I took off for eastern NC to do some farming with another couple and their child. I managed a hog farm. It was a great year in that we learned a lot and had a lot of fun but farming was way too hard, so Julia and I taught school for three years in the same region, really poor and uneducated population. We had our first child Matt while there.

We moved back to the Durham/Chapel Hill area in 1974 and have been here since. It's a nice place with a little bit of winter, some really hot summers, and incredible springs and autumns. I spent the next 25 years or so working for Duke University.

During my last ten years or so at Duke I was able to negotiate with the university to let me be held accountable for a body of work and not for my time and was able to build my consulting business - the constellation group - using Duke as a base. Mainly, what I have done is work with leaders and teams who are at intersections and need help in figuring out what to do and where to go next. I left the university in 1999 to devote all my working time to our business. I hated being in an organization. I have always been slightly rebellious and dubious. I am not working a whole lot now, about a week a month. That feels right.


We have two sons. Matt is 38 and he and his wife Kelley live in Chapel Hill, 10 miles west, with our first and as yet only grandchild, Leo. Andrew is 30, single and has been living with a wonderful woman for about 2 years in DC where he went to George Washington as an undergraduate and has been since then. I have had a lot of work in DC over the past decade and have been able to spend a good amount of time with him. That, too, has been and continues to be wonderful. We have a great deal of history with DC. I was born there. Julia was raised there. Both of Julia's parents and my mother are in Arlington Cemetery.

We live in Durham, NC one block south of Duke’s West Campus. We like being in a university town. There are so many cultural opportunities. There also is a pace and rhythm to universities that feels right – fall semester, long holiday break, spring semester, long summer break.

By avocation I’m a photographer, a bicyclist and bike repair person, I collect all kinds of music (opera, Latin and Hispanic, choral [ including Russian liturgical], blues, jazz {1935-1965), classical [mainly romantic], rock and roll, folk, I paint various objects (chairs, broom handles, a mirror made with an old toilet seat as the frame was one of my latest creations) in a kind of folk art style, I love and watch lots of movies but hardly ever see one in a theater. I love my dog.

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