While literally countless important questions swirl around us every day, there are few that stimulate me as much as, "What makes a great leader?"

It's a loaded question, of course, because embedded within it is another question, "Are leaders born or made?"  (The short answer, for today, is—"Yes."  But more on that Russian doll another time.)

Leadership is such a perennially important issue and this year is no different.  Every generation believes its time is unheralded and novel, and ours is not unique: we continue to live in undeniably tremendous times—an era of explosive growth, ceaseless change and limitless potential.  (But again, the same could be said 4,000 years ago...2,000 years ago, and again during the Renaissance...it is no less true today.)

As always, we need great leaders and greater leadership if we are to continue progressing in fields and practices as diverse as geopolitics, science, economics, finance, spirituality (yes, spirituality), innovation and sustainability.  From natural to man-made disasters in Alaska, New York, Sri Lanka and India to Thailand, Haiti and Louisiana, the importance and effects of leadership (or its absence) are—if we are fortunate—a broadcast away. 

In future blogs, I commit to writing more extensively about leadership at large, but today I will limit my thoughts to the importance of formal education (e.g., the University) as a mechanism and greenhouse for creating and growing tomorrow's leaders and will then conclude with a rough table differentiating poor from great leaders.

My preliminary comments are inspired today by John Sexton, President of New York University ("NYU").  My later comments are inspired by John Maxwell, author of 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership (among other books). 

Though I believe there are indeed few 'new things' under the Sun, to the extent these men's ideas are held tenably together, I am to blame.

Universities for Tomorrow

Describing the University for Tomorrow requires a few thousand dissertions and years of research, to be sure, so I will simply take a slipshod whack to get your mind whirring.  You, along with millions of others who are already studying this opportunity, can do the remaining 99.9999% by filling in the gaps.

Fact #1: 70 of today's 85 oldest organizations are, in fact, universities.  (Vatican City and Parliament are examples of the other 15.)

Fact #2: If you want to create a vibrant 'center of thought,' create a great university and wait 200 years.

Fact #3: The universities-within-walls which brought us this far will not lead us into the future.

What NYU is doing in Abu Dhabi is right on the money: it's primarily about people, programs, teaching and research (and just so happens to serendipitously be what my doctoral program was, but on steroids to the 100th power).  I attended the modest Union Institute & University, the first "University without Walls" and participated in classes hosted in Brattleboro, Montpelier, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Sacramento and Miami.  We regularly embraced eccentric professors on sabbaticals from the Ivy League who operated 'unfettered' from many of the restraints they described occurring in Cambridge, New Haven, Providence, Princeton, Philadelphia, Hanover, Ithaca and NYC. 

...but I digress...

What encouraged me about Mr. Sexton's comments was the notion that tomorrow's university is an open, diverse, ecumenical, organic circulatory system of ideas and best practices that will focus on creative, exploratory thought and nuanced discourse.

I couldn't agree more. 

Indeed, any university, even the ones mired in the past (the ones we revere, historically) are mandated to help students learn to think (and critically) for themselves.  But my impression, far too often, is that university life can quickly become High School 2.0, packed to the gills with memorizing facts, completing rote work, regurgitating information or defending knowledge.  Unquestionably, we should possess societal standards of 'minimum knowledge,' but I expect this work to occur more fully in grades K-12.  The undergraduate years can round-out this process, but the fact that today's ACT and SAT tests still emphasize standardized knowledge, facts, reading, mathematics—and some writing (though many admissions boards admit they don't quite know what to do with this element yet)—I remain concerned that our perspectives are deficient.

While the United States is proceeding toward national standards in 48 of the 50 states, China is migrating toward a more exploratory curriculum designed to create great THINKERS and INNOVATORS rather than fact-regurgitators.  The ideal approach is, of course, a hybrid that includes the best of both.  We need a hygiene-oriented 'bare minimum' (which should be rigorous, not minimalistic; a 'threshold knowledge base' if you will) combined with strong creative and critical thinking skills.  IQ has never been a predictor of leadership success and it never will be.  Similarly, while standardized admissions are undoubtedly sufficient at predicting university success, they are representative solely of the coursework comprising undergraduate schoolwork—which illuminates my point and the 'smallness' of what we expect today.  Moreover, IQ and standardized metrics will never wholly predict a leader's ultimate societal contributions, service to humankind or general performance, so whatever the University of Tomorrow intends to look like, it must quickly learn to shed historic metrics in favor of indices that get at meaning, contribution and potential.

The single greatest determinant of student performance in the classroom is the teacher's expectations.  Knowing this, we should ourselves have the highest expectations for tomorrow's teachers, educators, instructors, professors...and each and every one of them should be well-versed in the Pygmalion Effect.

Finally, the university of tomorrow should be a bastion of deep discourse, not soundbytes.  Mr. Sexton described at length the disadvantage that today's thoughtful politicians start from when they find themselves embroiled in conflicts with opponents adept at dumbing down exceedingly complex issues.  The media loves sticky slogans ("It's the economy, stupid."), but we must have an appetite for prolonged, nuanced, systemic dialogue if we are to more fully understand issues, one another and create students and leaders capable of doing the same.

Poor vs. Great Leaders

Perhaps contary to popular opinion, the leader at the helm of such a university is not terribly dissimilar from the sort of leader who thrives in enterprise.  In the comments of John Sexton and the work of John Maxwell, I see similar threads regarding how students, university officials and tomorrow's leaders interact with the world around them. 

In this light, I conclude today's very embryonic blog with the following table differentiating 'poor' and 'great' leaders.  I trust that it might prove handy somewhere along the line.

More on these and adjacent thoughts in the weeks to come. 

On May 20, 2010 I caught a neat episode of Charlie Rose on PBS featuring an interview with Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures. 

(Maybe you remember Nathan; he has been 'everywhere' the last couple years describing everything from IV's "mosquito-zapping laser" to their proposed "water hose in the sky," theorized to minimize global warming.)

IV has been compared to "Davos...in Birkenstocks."

Whether you're creative, love people who are or fancy yourself a polymath, you'll totally dig Nathan.  (Pun intended, given his fascination with paleontology and archaeology.)

It's fun, if only for a few minutes, to imagine how someone like him -- and his "lab crew" -- see the world. 

Here's a great article about Nathan by Malcolm Gladwell, along with a giddy presentation at TED.

I stumbled across an interesting article in a recent European issue of Fortune that explores the dollar-value of corporate virtue and, in particular, trust.  Perhaps you'll find it interesting, too.

Decisions, decisions, decisions.

We make countless decisions each and every day...every hour...every minute.

And most decisions aren't that hard.  We go with our gut, we experience 'behavioral shorthand' and know how, for example, to wind our way to work each morning without even thinking about it or, in the case of tougher decisions, we think, we pray, we seek counsel. 

But you know as well as I do that some decisions are very, very difficult.  Unimaginably gut wrenching.  Consider the sort our President is wrestling with this very week.  Or the sort our Supreme Court wrestles with each and every day.  Or the sort a grieving adult-child faces as her dying parent is placed on life support. 

And some of these decisions are in the oven for months...for years.  Indeed, they are very long in the making.

To describe this protracted 'deciding,' I use the analogy Decision Hill.

The first segment of Decision Hill is the ascent.  This is the acknowledgment that a decision, generally a complex, multifaceted one (and often an emotional one or one that will have 'tentacles' affecting others or 'collateral effects' beyond our immediate imagination) needs to be made.  Consider a neophyte playing chess with a grandmaster or a naive child wandering alone in the dark.  Neither is fully aware of the errors of his/her ways, much less the unknown and potentially devastating consequences that might follow an initial, innocent, well-intentioned mis-step.  In fact, consider the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger tragedy...or the pre-strike intelligence the NSA possessed on terrorists before the horrors of 9/11 in NYC.  Neither of these examples represent one huge or glaringly obvious oversight on anyone's part so much as an incremental, microscopic accumulation of residue...of tiny error after tiny error which, in the particulate, seem invisible, yet in the aggregate, seem enormous.

The ascent takes a very, very long time.

We wrestle with complexities.  With our emotions.  With possible outcomes.  We recall the past, we look to the future, we strategize, we visualize moves and countermoves, we think of the people who will be affected by our choices, we fall to our knees, we seek others' counsel, we T-chart the pros and cons, we flip coins, we toss coins in fountains, we wander and wonder, we rule things in and rule things out, we sleep on it, we eliminate outliers and finally...finally...after the grueling and the slogging and the swinging and the fighting and the traversing many meters to the top...we arrive, crestfallen, at the apex of Decision Hill.

And we straddle the tippy-top of this mountain.  We feel its enormity beneath and around us.  We accept the hollowness within us.  We long for the connectedness and renewal around us.  And we stare into the fog and darkness and storm and wonder if the heavens are with us. 

And we decide.

In an instant.

After the weeks and months or even years that preceded, we finally, exultingly, make a choice.

And this choice brings us -- in that singular moment -- from our ascension...to the second segment of our climb...the tipping point.

The slow boil is now a gas.

And with the clarity that cuts through the night like a knife through warm butter, we turn our eyes finally and fully toward the future.

The angst of deciding is behind us.

And we feel luminescent.  And buoyant.  And human again.

The weights slip off our shoulders, the bodice around our chest is loosed, the vice around our mind is broken, the chains around our ankles and neck and wrists are shattered, and we fall forward toward our destiny.

Like the child awaking to a pure and powdery snow on Christmas morning, it is the dawning of a bright, shiny, wondrous, clean, perfect day.

And we fall face-down upon our sled, grab the handles with shaky hands, and are restored and renewed.  We are officially in segment three: the descent.

Beloved gravity will do the rest.  Slowly, crunching...then quickly, now skittering...we gather speed and momentum and inertia and velocity...and we arrive, startlingly soon, at the bottom of the hill and find ourselves rocketing toward our future, snow spraying up all around us, ice crystals stinging our cheeks, laughter peeling all around. 

And like the shirtless, sledgehammer-wielding strongman at the summer fair, we are ready to slam forward into all the tomorrows that stretch out before us.

I want to encourage you today: It will get easier.  There is a top.  There is another side.  Even -- especially -- in the darkest moments of the darkest hours of the darkest days of the darkest seasons -- light shines on.  It always will.  It always has.  That's the benevolent nature of light.  It travels effortlessly and ceaselessly and swiftly across the darkest regions of the known and unknown universe to warm your skin.

That's all there is to it. 

Your charge...indeed, the only toll for your journey is pure -- and simple:

Believe

and

Keep Moving Forward

God speed.

On November 11, 2009 PBS's Charlie Rose welcomed Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, followed by Malcolm Gladwell who discussed his latest collection of short stories, What the Dog Saw.

I know that so very many of you are interested in their writing -- so I just wanted to share an opportunity to see them interviewed.  (http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/962 and http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/510 respectively.)

In conducting research recently, I came across the writings of Hippocrates.  Though he is miscredited with the precise phrase, "First, do no harm," he did write about abstaining from harming others -- medically or otherwise.

I really enjoyed a few, select lines from the contemporary version of the Hippocratic Oath, and thought you might, too:

I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.

I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery.

I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know.  Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death.  If it is given me to save a life, all thanks.  But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty.  Above all, I must not play at God.

I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability.  My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.

I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.

Adapted from the works of Hippocrates by Louis Lasagna, Academic Dean of the School of Medicine at Tufts University, 1964 

I usually restrain myself from sharing recommendations pocked with four letter words, the second of which is the only vowel.

But I stumbled across http://gapingvoid.com/books/ last week, bought the book at B&N, and read it last night.

It's hilarious and, though sometimes blue, full of great career advice for the 'creative thinker' or 'entrepreneur.'

i.e., You.

595,000 small businesses closed in 2008.¹

2,500,000 jobs were lost within small businesses in 2008.²

Americans' net worth increased $2 Trillion in Q2 2009 due to increasing stock prices.³

And Southwest Airlines has announced they are discontinuing lemons.  Literally.  No more lemons in any in-flight drinks.  This will save them approximately $100,000 in the next twelve months.⁴   (I remember American Airlines removed one olive from every first-class salad...way back in the 90s...and it saved them $42,000/year.)   

As has been the case for a year-and-a-half, there continues to be sobering news, the periodic ray of hope, and examples that show the macro-consequences of micro-movements.

^1&2Source: Small Business Administration

^3&4Source: ABC News

Here's a fun article about Gen-Y and reading (or not) non-verbals. 

Gen-Y Johnny.pdf (168.09 kb)

Someone I respect shared it with me and, so, I share it with you.  Also because it references the late, great Ed Hall, one of America's premier anthropologists.

Enjoy.

Strolling thru Barnes & Noble the other day with my wife and daughter, I stumbled across a biography by Blake Bailey entitled Cheever: A Life.  Reading the jacket, I bought the 770-pages brick and am consumed by it in the margins of night time and pre-flight checks.

John Cheever, the highly acclaimed and prolific author of Falconer, The Wapshot Chronicle, and dozens of The New Yorker short stories was one miserable soul.  He said it himself, and I agree.

I’m in 'Chapter 1960' (he lived from 1912 to 1982), and his life remains a dark, overcast sky of alcoholism, loneliness, identity confusion, and depression.

It is heart wrenching yet engrossing to read as he fights, fails, and rises again, only to be consumed by disparaging thoughts, self-doubt, worry, feelings of inadequacy, and so much more.  His life is a proverbial yo-yo caught in the downward position.

I remain hopeful that – as his alcoholism lifts – the clouds may part. 

But I am doubtful; the omens indicate otherwise and I suspect that my hopefulness for him will be dashed by reality.

But I will learn nonetheless and, perhaps, come to appreciate all the more what so many of us take for granted.  Namely, a belief that many if not all things work for good, that tomorrow might be better than yesterday and that, as Viktor Frankl wrote, there is meaningfulness in hope itself.

With the recent celebration of our 16th wedding anniversary, followed immediately by the occurrence of Father's Day, I have a whole wallet stuffed with Barnes & Noble gift cards.  One of the 'givers' inquired, "What did you buy?"

In response to her, and a client this morning who asked, "What are you 'bedside reading' these days?" I offer this brief defense.

The table is spilling over with magazines: The Week, Inc., and Time -- to stay abreast of 'the serious issues.'  And I've got a couple issues of Entertainment Weekly, for those moments before take-off when my mind wants empty calories rather than world events.  There are undoubtedly moments when I cannot bear to read 'heavy stuff.'

I also purchased an assortment of interesting books, a couple new ones and a classic.  A Different Life by Quinn Bradlee looks promising.  A young man with VCFS who has memoir'ed his journey as a learning-disabled student, son, and friend.  I love the dedication page, "To my mom -- my archangel, and my father, who is my sword and shield."  We should only be so appreciated.  Losing Mum and Pup by Christopher Buckley, about his inimitable parents and their respective deaths in 2007-2008.  A loving tribute from a complicated son.  All the King's Men by Pulitzer Prize winner, Robert Penn Warren.  A classic, and more timely than ever, even 63 years later.  Finally, I've got an Idiot's Guide to Latin beside the bed because it has always fascinated me and I don't want my brain jell-o-ing to mush.  To keep a muscle, you gotta use it!

It'd be nice to be one of those folks who grows younger as he grows older (more curious, more free, more fun), rather than the other way around (less curious, less free, less fun)!  (Sort of a Benjamin Button, if you will, minus the drool and diapers at each life-endpoint.)

Keep the recommendations coming; I'll read all I can.  As a great mentor, Carveth Kramer, once said to me, "Leaders are readers" or, at least, they should be. 

For the last two nights, this 211-pages-page-turner absolutely possessed me.  The [not-long-but] short of it is this: after four years at Princeton, and just prior to attending Oxford on scholarship, author Walter Kirn gets pneumonia while visiting his parents.  Late one night he notices, for practically the first time, a few classics in his mother’s bookshelves.  From The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Great Expectations, he becomes engrossed and reads them, really reads them, for the first time in his life.

Setting his pretenses down – the ones he honed to enter and survive Princeton – he says, in the final lines of Lost, “And so, belatedly, haltingly, accidentally, and quite implausibly and incredibly, it began at last: my education.  I wanted [for the first time in my inauthentic life] to find out what others thought.”

Once upon a time, in an organization far, far away, I coached a young man who sniffed, "I don't read management books, because they're what everyone is reading.  I read other stuff, so I have something unique to say." 

"I understand your rationale," I replied, "but that's equivalent to saying, 'I don't speak English, because everyone's speaking English.  Instead, I speak Gomatan¹.'  What I suggest you do is read both.  Read the drop-kicks... Drucker, Peters, Covey, Senge, Collins, Katzenbach and all the rest, and also read as much -- or more if you wish -- that is outside the norm.  This way, you'll have the foundation everyone else has, but the added probability of being able to contribute a unique perspective every once in a while that dislodges groupthink."

I know that management books can sometimes feel quite pedestrian; that's a bit of what this young man was saying, but he was also exhibiting a scintilla of elitism, inferring that 'all the rest of the cattle can read -- sniff, sniff -- management books, but I'm going to read Literature.'  (Thankfully, every once in a while, really stellar 'management' books arrive, like Outliers and Made to Stick.) 

Alan Weisman's The World Without Us is no management book, but it is a book about sustainability, impact, legacy, systems theory and, as much as all these, it's flat-out fun. 

It's a thought experiment, nothing more.  And how.

Your mind will whir, some cogs will click, and all manner of ideas and implications will flutter through your mind.

It's deftly written, hums along quickly, and packs a periodic punch.  It will perhaps require a few sittings because it's quite dense, but it's a great guilty pleasure.

Try it, if you like.  It's not a management book in any pure sense, but that's precisely the point, isn't it?

¹Save yourself the googling, it's an invented-here language.

Jim Collins' (or, ahem, Collins's, if I am to be contemporarily correct) reputation is beyond reproach, but I must say, his tendency to convert what should rightly be a 'snack' into a bloating 'meal' is becoming wearisome.  (Call me jaundiced rather than scathing, but I expect better from Collins.  One could glean more insights from a playground, yet he's been rubbing elbows for two decades with the world's best and brightest and this is all we get?)

His latest book is just a 200-page exposition on the 4,000-year-old idiom (and timeless truth) "pride comes before the fall."  

No doy.  It took him 5 years and thousands of interviews to determine this... again?

Consultants get a bad rap because of such swill.  It's like the client asking, "What time is it?" and the consultant responding, "May I borrow your watch for a moment?"  

Collins's 'illuminating, revelatory, and epiphanic' stages of How the Mighty Fall include such nose-on-the-face nail-biters as:

Stage 1: Hubris Born of Success
Stage 2: Undisciplined Pursuit of More
Stage 3: Denial of Risk and Peril
Stage 4: Grasping for Salvation
Stage 5: Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death 

I think I get it.  We all do.  Pride, Excess, Denial, Demise.  Hmmmm... sounds like a combination of VH1's Behind the Music, Kubler-Ross, the Weight-Watchers/Slim-Fast methodology, and Common Sense.  Hardly worth $25.

His parting shot, captured on the back cover, [almost] says it all, "Whether you prevail or fail, endure or die, depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you."

Yes indeed, I'm responsible for Me.  Got it.  I'll try to remember that.

I'm confident that Collins's next book will be better; I think How the Mighty Fall is simply his Blink¹.  (For the record, both Built to Last and Good to Great were, to my way of thinking, exceptional.)  Publishers have a way of teasing books out of best selling authors like Collins and Gladwell, and oftentimes before there is a book... and sometimes even when there is no book.  (I know this is all very doorman-critiques-Bach, so far be it from me to judge, but alas, these are my two cents.  Take 'em at face value.)

Publisher's full synopsis

This week as I travel, I'll be reading The World Without Us, written in 2007 by Alan Weisman.  I have high expectations for this book, and hope to confirm them in my next review.  More then; make it a great week.

¹Sorry, but I thought Blink was as 'worthless' as The Tipping Point was 'priceless.'  I mean, "thin slicing," come on.  Talk about making a snack into a meal!  Since when are the notions of 'go with your gut, use your instincts, and trust your first impressions' noteworthy?  The Tipping Point was excellent, and Outliers is arguably the best social-science book of the last five years, but I thought Blink was much ado about nothing.