This post was updated Feb. 6 at 7:54 p.m.

At the Berry Gordy Music Industry Center, the impact of Motown lives on at UCLA.

The center was founded following a $5 million donation by Gordy – the founder of Motown Record Corporation – last year. On Monday, the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music hosted a panel discussion with several music industry executives who had years of experience working with Gordy. Brenda Boyce is a former Motown executive, Carol Perrin is the CEO of Gordy’s companies and Suzanne de Passe is an Emmy-winning Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee who was the president of Motown Productions.

Boyce, de Passe and Perrin spoke with the Daily Bruin’s Reid Sperisen about Gordy’s legacy and their experiences working for Motown.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Daily Bruin: This is the first year since the official formation of the Berry Gordy Music Industry Center. What does it mean for Gordy’s legacy to be carried forward within the UCLA music industry program?

Carol Perrin: His whole life he was a teacher. He is a teacher. Knowledge or information – he didn’t keep it to himself. He shared it. He shared it with his artists. He shared it with his producers, he shared it with his business people and he shared it with the world. Being at UCLA, the goal was to be in a public institution that would be able to share his vision to the extent it can to the entire community, to all communities. He always said that his music was music for all people and the “All” was capitalized, so being here at UCLA is very meaningful.

Suzanne de Passe: The interest that he has in people achieving their potential is a foundational element of why he wanted to do this in the first place. Today, in a more structured collegiate academic environment, his legacy will be that he cared to accept the environment of today to further his philosophy and his feelings about how things should be done.

Brenda Boyce: What Carol was saying about music for all people, it’s also the various generations of people. He talks about the grandparents, the great-grandparents and the kids that still love the music. So the music is generational, and so we believe that the music will be multi-generational and that the music will be forever. And that’s one of our slogans. We say sometimes “Motown is forever,” and we believe that.

DB: What elements of the Motown business model discussed today can continue in the future for young employees entering the music industry, and in what ways does the music industry of the future need to change and evolve?

CP: The philosophy of “Competition brings success, but don’t let the competition get in the way of the love,” I think is critical. That was a philosophy that was central to Motown, but I think it’s central to going forward today. We need to have collaboration, we need to have understanding, we need to be able to see – this is his visions – to see in other people what they may not have seen in themselves and help bring that out. Those guidelines, which he called his philosophies, are very important today. Although the modalities may be different now, those are fundamental basic concepts that haven’t changed, and if people incorporate them going forward, I think that’s the message that we would like the Center to sustain.

BB: Those philosophies that she’s talking about, those were not just philosophies. They were signposts, goalposts – they were philosophies that he used to keep him on target. Having those were very important. There’s a poem that he loved. He used to recite “If–” by Rudyard Kipling, but the key line was about triumph and disaster. He treated both of them the same, and just because you may fail in one area, if you didn’t keep trying, you wouldn’t know what failure was anyhow. But those failures are stepping stones to success. The business part of what made him be so special also was that visionary feeling that he had. He was not going to ever give up, because he had a vision, and he was not going to stop until that vision was fulfilled.

SD: This program can serve as an inspiration to the future generations of people involved in a music career – whether it’s the business side or the creative side. But I think there’s a difference between inspiration and perspiration. He serves for all of us and certainly many, many others around the world as inspiration. If this program can somehow harness that energy of inspiration, to want to succeed in whatever the chosen field may be, that’s the success.

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DB: What stands out as a favorite personal memory of your extensive experience at Motown?

BB: I started working there when I was 18 years old. I started in Detroit. The company was a Black music company. The honor to work for him supersedes anything to me, working for someone this much of a genius. There were times during the ‘80s that I was asked, “You should go to RCA, you should go to Warner Bros.,” but none of them were Motown. There’s something that I could never, ever explain about the honor, and working for such a company and working for him directly now is just an honor.

CP: Growing up, I was a huge Motown fan, and the artists were my idols. The big deal for me was my first meeting with Mr. Gordy. At the time, I was at a law firm, and I was told that the meeting was going to be 15 minutes, and it wasn’t going to last a minute more. I got there at around 10 a.m. and I left at 4:30 after watching movies, dancing, walking around the grounds. It was such an extraordinary moment to actually meet someone who you had read about, heard about, known about, and not realize just what a great human being they are, and how relatable he can be, and how gracious he is and how sharing. Then move that on to the first time I met Smokey (Robinson) or Diana (Ross), I’m in awe. Then the next thing I know, I’m a regular and one of the crew. It was a very wonderful transition time.

SD: For me, when we won the Emmy for “Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever,” and I was the lead executive producer and therefore made the speech. Perry Como came out and opened the envelope and said, “Motown 25” and it was like, “Oh my God.” And I got a chance to stand there in front of the world and everyone and thank him and to be able to say that “This one’s for you.” His reaction to that was a high point for me because he was in tears. I was in tears. He was just so effusive and happy and thrilled for the company, for the moment, for me.