warren bennis- on becoming a leader (unplugged)
TRANSCRIPT
On Becoming A Leader (Unplugged)A conversation between Warren Bennis & Moe Abdou
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On Becoming A Leader (Unplugged) Warren Bennis with Moe Abdou !
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About Warren Bennis & Moe Abdou Warren Bennis Warren Bennis, born in 1925, is an American scholar, organizational consultant and author who is widely regarded as the pioneer of the contemporary field of leadership. Bennis is University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Business Administration and Founding Chairman of The Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California. He has also spent time on the faculties of Harvard and Boston University and taught at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIM-C), INSEAD and IMD. Moe Abdou Moe Abdou is the creator of 33voices — a global conversation about things that matter in business and in life. [email protected]
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On Becoming A Leader (Unplugged) Warren Bennis with Moe Abdou !
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You’re the father of modern leadership in my opinion. You’re the founding chairman of the Leadership Institute at USC. I think you have written probably or co-authored 30 books. I’m just delighted to spend a few minutes with you today. I wanted to pick your brain on your favorite topic leadership. I started to think, if I were sitting in a room with you, what are some of the important questions I wanted to ask you? I think the first question that popped into my mind, when you look at today’s leader, when you look at a modern 2011 leader or a Barack Obama, do you see a difference between the one you saw back when you were thrust into this leadership thing in the military? What’s the difference? That’s a huge question. I’ll just take a few cracks at it. My feeling is we have to try to get as many of your questions in as we can. The difference is profound. What comes to my mind almost immediately is complexity. Things only seem complex to people living in a particular era, a particular time — can you imagine the time when President Roosevelt took office in 1933, there was something like 29 million telephones in this country. There must be 29 millions cellphones ringing right at this moment as we’re talking all over the world. If you take one big issue, the complexity of the fact is that due to media, TV, and certainly who could not mention social networking on a program that takes place in 2001, you realize that the big difference is how quickly and how fast space is condensed, time is condensed. Immediate communication is getting us faster or getting us quicker. Everything is more complex. The problem with leadership is really almost one of not IQ but it’s the capacity to handle cognitive complexity. Can you imagine the kinds of things that are on our President’s desk right now? You’ve got things exploding. You haven’t even looked at the newspaper you have today. Things exploding and it’s spreading like an epidemic of flu; protests across all those Middle Eastern countries. What’s going on right now in Libya with hundreds of people being shot. What I’m getting at is, the leader of today— I’m not just talking about state leaders. I’m not just talking Barack Obama. Just to give you one little example, when I was first getting my political consciousness which was 1933 with the
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new president in office — again, think of what I said about the number of telephones in 1933 — there were 60 million people listening to those fireside chats with Roosevelt. We were homogenous country. We were pretty well isolated. We had enough resources. We didn’t had to do much trading. To compare 1933 with this year of 2011 and the world at this time, but then take the corporate world, the educational world. To add one more thing, it may sound abstract, there will be something like 7 billion people on this Earth before the end of this year and a lot of it is going on in the world that had been colonialized for hundreds of years. I think of India right now — I lived in Calcutta for two years back in ’64-’65. This is a country that just recently sealed a deal with British Petroleum. They paid India somehow like 8 billion dollars and there will be a lot more. The Reliance company in India which is owned by the fourth richest man in the world. What’s interesting about that deal is that BP is buying acres of sea coast where they have natural gas over the whole east coast of India. They are paying about 8 billion dollars and they are going to pay a lot more. They are going to have that natural gas at their disposal, 40% of which will take care of India itself. So what I’m getting at? The most important thing about that deal, they may not 5:23 it, India is taking like a 15-year bet that this is going to work out. Can you imagine in India when I lived there putting up that kind of money to have a coalition with BP, but to take a 15 to 20 year bet on something. India was living day to day. In 1964, I visited a village people didn’t know that Kennedy had been assassinated. There was no radio. There were no telephones. Now the world we live in is totally wired. We are globally wired every minute. It’s gorgeous. It’s marvelous. It’s so challenging, scary, and adventurous. It’s going to take leadership. It’s a very, very demanding job that we’ve ever had in the world ever. It’s definitely an exciting and a challenging time; and also, a grateful time
for anybody who has an opportunity to have any type of exposure to you
that’s why this is a real privilege for me.
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I’m glad you used the word challenge. This is no time for saying, it’s awful. It is awful in some ways. When I think of my students — the president of USC and I teach this course every year called the Art and Adventure of Leadership. It is not a science this leadership thing. There are too many factors, too many variables, too many personal issues, and the vicissitudes of time. We just appointed recently at USC a terrific president. He’s got all the qualities to make a great university president. He’s following Dr. Steven Sample, who did a great job. He had a great run for 20 years. Our newly appointed president, Dr. Max Nikias — he was borne as a Greek Cypriot, kind of an immigrant and came here. He’s got everything you need and all the qualities that I think are important. Can I say for sure whether Dr. Nikias will succeed? No. I think he will. I was on the search committee. We’re putting our money on him. But given the vicissitudes, the changes, the surprises. During that campaign when Hillary kept saying, “Barack Obama, is he ready for day one?” You know something; nobody is ready for day one. Day one is going to bring you more surprises than you could have thought of on day two. There is no such thing as anyone being fully prepared for day one because there are so many uncertainties. We can do the best we can to understand everything that’s going on. We need damn good people out. We can no longer on an organization like we used to during the 30s where one guy, one person, could rule an empire. It’s no longer true of this. There is too much going on, too many to disrupt with inflection points, too many surprises. If there was anything I ever told, 8:38 one is, you got to really want to do it. Moe, you really got to want to do it. It comes with tremendous opportunities and tremendous sacrifice. The other thing I guess I would tell them is you got to get damn good people around you. The myth that you could do it alone is very American. We got John Wayne. You only have to say to the men, “Saddle up” and they’ll do it. Well, ‘saddle up’ isn’t a mission statement for today. I’m not sure it even was in the 19th century. The life of a leader today is to be cherished, to be treasured, to be wanted, but it comes with risk, sacrifice and incredible challenge and 24/7 days.
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What would you say are the most important priorities for leaders today
whether it’s public life or private corporations? What should be on their
agenda? The first thing is to be clear. People talk about vision. You got to do the best that you can to make certain that no matter how big or small, everybody is clear about what our purposes are. To make those purposes as clear as crystal everybody at least understands that. Second, I want to use the word alignment, you got to get your people aligned and working together because you can’t do anything today without the C word (Collaboration). It takes two at least. It not only takes two to tango, it takes two at the very least to create anything. I love the Biblical story of Moses and Aaron. Moses stuttered and stammered. He was insecure. He was the leader of the people of Israel. God was getting impatient with Moses. Moses kept saying, “This is my people and they won’t listen to me. How can I get the pharaoh to listen to me?” God was patient enough to appoint. He said, “Moses, take Aaron.” So he takes Aaron the brother. Interestingly enough, Aaron starts talking to the pharaoh. The punch line was, “Let my people go.” Aaron started off by reading the plagues that could happen to Egypt. There were going to be 10 if they didn’t let the people go. They had a few bargains in their pocket like this will happen if you don’t let us go. Aaron gives the first three plagues and then Moses gains his confidence, he says, “This is the other seven, let my people go.” He wouldn’t have done it without Aaron. We need each other to succeed. You got to be sure about the purposes. You got to get people aligned and working together. You need collaboration at every level for an organization to succeed. You need to have people around you who can try to foresee, to the extent that they can, all other factors which could affect your success. You sort of need somebody with kind of a spy glass to see emerging tendencies that can sort of not let everyday be too much of a surprise. I don’t know how to put this exactly but a lot of faith, luck, and circumstance. Some would argue and I would not disagree that somehow God is on your side. Let’s hope when we’re having a bad leadership day that he’s not having a bad hair day. We need a lot of different things.
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The truth is that I can give you, if you look at the Middle East, can anyone predict what’s going to happen there? Not right now. Knowing the history, knowing the culture, I think we can try to make some guesses what will come about and then we just have to have the breaks. Things I mentioned first; inspired followers, collaboration, clear cut purposes. I’ll take one or three of those that are pretty good and pretty important. I want to spend that moment on this collaboration piece because I’m a huge
believer in that. Collaboration and partnership certainly can multiply your
progress whether it’s in business or in life. Yet, as you know, they are really
challenging to build. What are some of the essential ingredients to building
a successful collaborative partnership? I want to push a book I co-wrote. It’s a book called Organizing Genius. Throughout my work, I think there are certain themes — collaboration is certainly one of them — because as the tasks get more complex as no one person — I love the Japanese phrase, ‘no one is as smart as all of us.’ There is more and more evidence coming out that creativity can be borne in groups, that can be as far reaching and as important as the idea of the lonely scientist who is by himself in a laboratory says, “Eureka!” is not the way it works today. It has not worked that way. We elevate the image of a Thomas Edison or somebody but basically there has always been a group of people involved in almost all important creative endeavors. Margaret Mead once said to me about 50 years ago, “Don’t you forget for one minute, it’s always the strong small group of committed people who will change the world.” Let’s start with Jesus. There you go, a group of people aligned and caring. They did change the world. That’s an example from the Bible but there are other examples in real life. Collaboration is key. I’m glad you came back to it. The book I wanted to push earlier which I forgot to even mention. I don’t think I gave you the title, it’s Organizing Genius. It talks about the six hot groups, how they formed, how they worked, including groups like the Manhattan Project. The PARC group that developed it first, you know, sort of GUI, the laptop computer—Apple, really stole the idea — they didn’t steal, they gave it to them at the PARC laboratory that was part of Xerox. Xerox fumbled the future. They
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didn’t know what they had. Steve Jobs was there one day, he takes the idea and makes the first. It was only through collaboration that these things got done. We iconosize and lionize the great men. Forget about it. It’s like a New Yorker ‘forget about it.’ Organizations today of any size and importance have to have the very top 18 and that’s the only way it’s going to work. It’s that important. Your question is how do you do that? Well, I can’t do that on a quick radio show. The important thing is people all know that they are engaged in a particular set of purposes and they are clear engaged, aligned, and motivated. The leader’s job is not to be the total idea man. The leader of a collaborative group has got to abdicate his ego to the talents of the others. If he thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room like a Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard. Larry Summers is bright as hell. He almost appears to be. He could be the brightest. That’s not the point. He doesn’t bring out the best in others. He doesn’t give the others the opportunity to get out in that stage and dance and sing and be creative. He’s doing it all. It doesn’t work anymore. I’ll ask you a question, what’s your main question about leadership in general? You have asked good ones. Is there any single thing that either bothers you or worries you that you want to ask me anyway? I do. It clicked when I read right at the beginning of your memoir, you
shared a story when you were in 8th
grade where you were discussing a
favorite hobby and you invented one and that became the thing. What
triggered my mind there is that I thought that perhaps the reason we don’t’
have great leaders in the world today, just from all phases of it, that
perhaps we aren’t exposing our youth to leadership and putting them in
leadership positions sooner. What are your thoughts on that? It’s a marvelous question. I once wanted to do a book. Years ago when I was still in graduate school back east at MIT, there was a famous book called Why Johnny Can’t Read. You may not even remember that. I don’t even know why it comes to my mind. I thought, wouldn’t it be a good book — it was written about why kids don’t read quicker and good enough and all that, meaning young kids. I felt wouldn’t it be interesting to write a book called Why Johnny Can’t Lead?
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I had lunch two days ago with — I could call him a mentee, I don’t like that word particularly, protégé, a former student of mine, an informal student. He worked with me on a consulting project. He’s a Mormon. I bring this up — I am not a Mormon, I respect their religion. That’s not the point. The Mormon’s do a very interesting thing. You got to realize their track record of economic success and leadership really is amazing for a group as small as that. Interesting enough, they start their kids in two ways. First of all, at the ages of 5, 6, 7, even 4, they ask them to get up and give speeches at services, funerals, eulogies, and weddings. They get these kids to get up from their chair and speak and talk. Give a little talk early on. Most importantly though every Mormon guy and now Mormon girls at the age of 19 — I shouldn’t be calling them girls at that age or boys even — they go out and do missionary work for a couple of years. They get called every once in awhile even when they are older. You know what it might be like for a kid from the suburbs of LA or San Diego going out to some cold barren place in Russia where water is more expensive than booze and spend two years there working with people, missionary work, and helping people. They are interested in converting people too but their job is to influence and work in a foreign culture for two years. Is that a leadership experience? We need to build more of those into internships in high school and junior high. I was so fortunate, I went into a college in Yellow Springs, Ohio — it sadly went defunct about two years ago, some of the alumnus tried to revive it. It’s called Antioch College. You know why I went there? I went there because it was a work-study thing. I worked for three months. I went to school for three months. You were under supervision in that job. I had been four years in the army too. I was lucky, four years as a kid from 17 to 21. I was going to stay in. My life has been a combination of the effort of work and combining that with the effort of learning. Could anything be sweeter? I don’t know why I’m going there; what you asked me that I often lose sight of the stem that provokes a response but I hope that was somewhat relevant to what we’re talking about. The idea that an education of leadership should start early which I think was the implication of your question. That means both dealing with ideas and dealing with reality of work, bridging them, realizing that work without an idea is sort of dumb and ideas without practicality I think are useless.
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I love the idea on what leadership is all about, is bringing ideas and practice together. I don’t know the age one should start, I like the idea early. I like the idea of high schools should include internships where you’re not just sitting in school learning about 13th century French iconography. I want kids to be out there learning more practical stuff and dealing with people. The two most important things to me about the future leaders are these couple of things. You got to want it. It’s very important. It sounds so banal, so simple. You got to want it. You got really know who you are and what your values are. Thirdly, you got to have some form of social intelligence which includes the art of collaboration. Moe, you brought out of me in less in a half hour about the best I can do. I was energized and inspired by my conversation with you. It maybe you, it maybe the morning, it maybe the morning coffee I’m drinking, it maybe that I felt that your questions were terrific and I maybe in a good mood. It’s a bit like leadership today, there is so many unknowns that make something happen. I hope your listeners; I hope something happened to them that made them think anew, freshly imagine, what leadership is all about. That’s what I hope I did and I was able a little bit to accomplish this morning. It’s a privilege knowing you and I hope we can continue this dialog at some
future time. I hope you have a fabulous weekend. I can’t thank you enough.
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