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JAMES AUSTIN, Faculty Chair, Harvard Business School
AMY DEAN, Executive Director, South Bay Labor Council
LINDA LAWRENCE, Former Vice President, Netscape International AOL Inc.
JAN MASAOKA, Executive Director, Compasspoint Nonprofit Services
JUDY NADLER, Senior Fellow in Government Ethics, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University
QUINN TRAN, Co-founder/Chief Marketing and Sales Officer, Knowledge Tek Software
Moderated by ANN SKEET, President, American Leadership Forum, Silcon Valley
Ann Skeet: I am the president of American Leadership Forum – Silicon Valley (ALF). Ours is an organization whose mission is joining and strengthening leaders to serve the common good. We select leaders each year from private, public and nonprofit sector roles – philanthropists, community leaders, labor leaders – and bring them together in a one-year program that’s designed to help them learn more about the community that they are participating in from different perspectives. It’s designed to foster boundary crossing, and boundary crossers really are those people who are able to move from corporate to civic life, from the nonprofit boardroom to the public forum. They are rare individuals and I think often make stellar leaders.
Yet not all leaders are boundary crossers nor need they be. So one of the questions we can ask ourselves today is, Is collaboration really one of the critical skills for being an effective leader? Or is it that those able to motivate people through traditional command and control styles are more effective?
Across the political, business, media and other sectors, we seem to have some significant issues with leadership. We’ve gone from a president who looked to public opinion for guidance with many decisions and behaved unethically to one who was considered to have a perfunctory understanding of those issues and relies on close advisors for deep knowledge. Members of Congress and our own local legislators spend much of their energy raising money and have little time left for the public’s business. Corporate leaders seem willing to bend the rules by misstating profits and taking extraordinary compensation not reflected in the benefits to employees or shareholders. We have problems with integrity.
Is leadership in its true sense – the ability to motivate, inspire and find creative solutions – increasingly scarce? What are examples of the inspired leaders that we look to today? Can we find them in a particular sector? Are we properly instilling the values of responsibility and ethics?
Perhaps we’re seeing breaches in leadership trust because the checks and balances we set up in our capitalistic democracy are, in fact, working. Perhaps leaders who have arrived in their roles through traditional paths are failing because the citizenry they’re working with are increasingly no longer traditional but a diverse population seeking different things. Our forefathers created a set of guiding principles for a country gathering together people from around the globe. But could they have imagined a world where barriers to being together would have been eliminated so that people from so many cultures were living together, where ideas from around the world could be traded so quickly and fluidly by so many? Perhaps democracy itself simply needs an upgrade. Maybe we are recognizing that power does not equate to leadership; that leadership often comes from those who seem powerless, who seem to have limited influence but possess the willingness to apply their abilities.
What’s the media’s role in the way that we see our leaders? Have they exalted the wrong attributes? Fallen too easily prey to the public relations efforts of politicians and CEOs? Ignored the efforts of the average citizen to make changes, improve conditions and find creative solutions to problems? Some of our most cherished leaders made their mark for advancing unpopular views of the world and, in doing so, changed the way we live. In today’s world of continual polling and reporting of public opinion, what is leadership? Is it serving the majority opinion of your constituency? Or helping a constituency to understand why a minority point of view might be better? When was the last time we held up someone for posing a significant yet unpopular change? Who is going to suggest that term limits are a mistake, that Prop 13 should be undone, that paid maternity leave should be lengthened? Can true change occur with the current systems in place?
Shoshana Zuboff of Harvard Business School and James Maxmin, former CEO of Laura Ashley and Volvo, argue in The Support Economy that the next business revolution is underway. The Support Economy starts with a compelling premise: people have changed more than the corporations upon which their well-being depend; there is an opportunity to forge a capitalism suited to our times and unleash a new potential for wealth creation. Today’s citizens want more from their corporations; they want to take their lives into their own hands and are ready to pay for the support and advocacy necessary to fulfill that yearning.
The next leap forward in wealth creation depends upon developing a new capitalism that speaks to the needs of people today. What kind of business leaders will be required if this transformation occurs? What will the skill of these future organizational leaders look like? What will the leadership of the federation that these authors suggest as our future commerce organizations require? What are some of the unifying attributes we hope to see in leaders in any sector?
Linda Lawrence: Unnatural financial markets have rewarded mediocre, even irresponsible performances in business today. In my 20 years in technology, I have never encountered a company where you could go public without any plan for profitability. The overstatement of earnings and the manipulation of stock have been well recorded, but less visible is the community of artists whose lofts were displaced by dotcommers who somehow thought that all of us would buy more toasters because we could get them online. Did you really think you would sell more stuff, did you really think we could grow the economy overall because you had another avenue for purchasing things? The overall advertising spending of corporate America – in fact, worldwide – is notoriously flat. I’m not really sure what the calculations were for thinking that somehow, because we have these online pop-ups and banners and all these really fun things, did we really think that would grow the overall economy the size of the market for those products?
Today’s leaders are subject to unparalleled risk: pressure to deliver unnatural growth to investors every quarter; increasing ability to globally transfer products and services have brought new competition to their whole markets – which have traditionally been the bread and butter for those companies. They put aside the needs of their family, even their own health to keep pace. It has never been harder to seat a viable board of directors with frivolous lawsuits and the cost of board insurance soaring.
Motivate, inspire and solve problems with high values and ethics. History is littered with leaders who have trouble keeping their hands to themselves but who nonetheless accomplish a great deal of good for the people who follow them. How many people can live up to these expectations? In our search for superheroes, are we creating emperors without clothes? Bergen Evans has another view on leadership: “For the most part our leaders are merely following out in front. They do but marshal us the way that we are going.” What are we willing to do? Are we willing to accept a lower rate of return on our savings and investments in order to incur sustained and responsible performance? Do we have the capacity? Nearly every global industrial sector already exceeds our ability to consume. Are the wealthiest amongst us prepared to give up some wealth and convenience to ensure the availability of food, health care and education for all of our citizens? Can we accept the weakness of our leaders in order to benefit from the greater good they may inspire and motivate? Do we need to turn them into rock stars? Will we replace the leaders who do not put the needs of the many before the needs of the few?
Some people have. George Soros’ Media Development Loan Fund motivates leaders who compete in their day-to-day job, in print, broadcast, electronic media around the world, to work together to ensure the existence of independent media in countries where the government controls – either directly by owning it or indirectly by buying up all the paper or all the printing press capacity – the information available to their citizens and indeed to the world, because a free and independent media empower the poor and spur development.
I was inspired by Linda Darling-Hammond’s case study on the state of Connecticut’s successful efforts to leave their ranks in the bottom 10 percent of all states in the nation in reading, writing and arithmetic. And with the collaborative efforts, the leaders are now ranked in the top 10 percent in all three of those areas. Closer to home, I admire Nevida Butler, who is the executive director of the Ecumenical Hunger Program, because she solved the problem of food, shelter for the people in East Palo Alto who cannot provide for their families today. They did it with a clear mission and plan adjusted to accommodate the unexpected; they did it with a collaborative effort sustained over many years, even decades, in some of these cases, needed to achieve these results, and they had the courage to face the wrath of the few in order to gain results for the many. Last fall, in a speech delivered as the American Leadership Forum’s Exemplary Leader Award winner, Ambassador James Joseph drew on his extraordinary success as a collaborative leader in all three sectors: public, private and public benefit or NGOs. James Joseph called on all of us to simply do something for someone else, make the condition of others our own – to harness this powerful force in building community.
Quinn Tran: In my experience observing and studying corporate leaders as well as political leaders, there are so many that make grand examples. Oftentimes they come quietly, oftentimes they go quietly, but the bottom line is that they make profound impacts on the people, the communities and the world at large.
Colin Powell is an excellent example: someone who comes from a military background, underprivileged background, who has continuously worked to improve the status of people in his community but has enough self-restraint and ability to listen and engage other world leaders in conversation and persuade them, and lead them to the best place for America in the global stage.
Nelson Mandela came quietly but made a huge impact in the world. Consider how the kind of experiences inflicted on him during seven years in prison, that he can really transform the political system in South Africa and brought the country and together – that was a huge accomplishment.
When it comes to some business leadership, we are too much impacted by the negatives and the sound bites the media gravitates toward. About ten, 12 years ago, Lou Gerstner was appointed CEO of IBM. He came from Nabisco. People said, Why appoint a food person to be in charge of a giant IT company? Six months into the job, Gerstner shared his view of being at the helm of IBM. A lot of people felt that leaders have to have a strong vision. Gerstner stated, “Frankly, I don’t have a vision. I have to look into my people.” He wisely engaged his people from different ranks into a dialogue, a very difficult dialogue at IBM at that time, as to how he then and his team could transform IBM. He left IBM a much better and healthier company.
We might disagree with the style of management and the practice in industries of Bill Gates. But there’s no denial that he was an absolutely brilliant entrepreneur, sometimes acted decisively on his instincts and got people to listen and follow but sometimes quietly sat back, listened to his people and summarized the feelings and the sentiment of his people and the market conditions at large and chose a course of action that continued to transform his company and in the process created wealth – not only for him but for many at Microsoft. What would he do with that wealth? He’s publicly stated that he left quite little in comparison of his wealth to his children. The large part of it goes to education, health care, to benefit people in many parts of the world.
What do we learn from those leaders – people willing to step forward, to inspire, to sacrifice? One distinguishing characteristic: the ability to listen, the willingness to listen, engage in dialogue, think outside of the box – and take on personal risks. These leaders show that life, after all, is not about material goods for oneself but the good we can impart to younger generations or to the rest of the world. Are we in the position to be leaders? If we lead, who do we lead? We have to teach our children and keep reminding our children and our grandchildren that really it’s our responsibility to make changes and to give and to share and that’s what makes life matter.
James Austin: Our top educational institutions must accept as an inescapable imperative the mission of developing in future leaders the qualities of mind and heart that are essential. Schools play a critical role in shaping our leadership talent pool, and this is a really tough and complex task. The mission of the Harvard Business School’s MBA program is to develop outstanding leaders who will contribute to the well-being of society. How do we pursue this mission?
We’ve had, for over a decade, courses on leadership and values aimed at developing a capacity for ethical analysis and moral reasoning in managerial decision-making. They teach how to understand and deal with moral dilemmas where the tough decisions reside. We have recognized that the true scope of leadership of our graduates goes far beyond the factory floor or the office door. Eighty-one percent of our graduates are involved in some significant way with nonprofit organizations. Fifty-seven percent sit on boards of directors of nonprofits. Many others are managers of nonprofits.
There are growing expectations that corporations will contribute to meeting societal needs beyond the narrow confines of producing and selling goods and services. Beginning in the 1990s, there was a push to downsize government, devolve responsibilities to the business world and nonprofits for addressing social needs and providing social services. There is a new set of core competencies business leaders must have to understand larger needs in society and to interact effectively with community stakeholders. To help develop those competencies, a decade ago the business school initiated the program on social enterprise. Courses and research enable students to understand the management of social purpose organizations and the processes by which corporations create social value.
The initiative also offers short courses in our executive education program for executive directors and board members of nonprofits. The Harvard Business School is no longer the exclusive realm of corporate leaders. Social sector leaders are also in our new constituency.
Our students get exposed to this material, because we’ve made it part of the required first-year curriculum. But that’s not much of a test. They also enroll in our electives in the second year. More significant is how students use personal time. One thing they do is create student-run clubs. The biggest club is the Social Enterprise Club.
There is unprecedented concern about becoming responsible leaders who will make a positive difference in the world. There is hope for the future – but what about the present? The recent obscene scandals cast a depressing shadow of doubt over the business community. These catastrophes have revealed how costly ethical lapses and irresponsibility can be. Business survival itself is jeopardized. But those failures, because of their magnitude, crowd out a multitude of positive examples of responsible business leadership. One trend that is particularly encouraging: growing collaborations between businesses and nonprofits.
Companies and nonprofits are combining core competencies in new ways to create greater social value as well as mutual benefits. New leadership requires being able to cross traditional sector boundaries to devise new resource configurations and innovative solutions to increasingly complex societal problems. The most successful alliances that I have studied have been characterized by what I call the “Seven C’s” of teaching collaboration:
- Clarity of purpose – being clear about why you are going to collaborate.
- Congruency – of mission, of strategy, of values between the nonprofits and the businesses.
- Creation of value – for the nonprofit, for the businesses, for society.
- Connection – with purpose and people, emotionally and organizationally.
- Communication between partners – which builds understanding and develops trust; both essential to partnerships.
- Continual learning – a discovery epic about how to create value and how to partner effectively.
- Commitment – to the partnership that is deep and enduring, that lives through the good times and the bad times.
Jan Masaoka: Of the leaders mentioned by name among the panelists, three are from the nonprofit sector, two from government and two from business. How many people here in the last two years have made a donation to a nonprofit organization? How many people in the last two years have volunteered for a nonprofit organization? How many people here in the last two years have made a contribution to a political campaign? About a quarter of the people who said they made a contribution to a nonprofit.
How many people in the last two years have volunteered on a political campaign? Again about a quarter or a third of the people who have volunteered for nonprofits.
How many people in the last two years have been a beneficiary of a nonprofit organization? Only maybe three or four people in this large room raised their hands.
Everybody here is actually a beneficiary of a nonprofit organization. If you have a daughter in the Girl Scouts; if you have a hearing aid that was developed in a nonprofit research laboratory; if you breathe cleaner air because of what the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition has managed to do; if you have a mother in a nonprofit nursing home – these have made us all beneficiaries of nonprofit organizations. Until we start thinking of ourselves at the nonprofit sector as being something to which we all contribute and from which we all benefit, then it’s going to continue to be relegated to an ethics course that makes people feel good about themselves later on because they took an ethics course.
Leadership is not neutral. There’s an attitude heard today about leadership as being neutral. Actually, we don’t have a scarcity of bad, successful leaders. We can see many people who are quite successful at being leaders who are leading all of us toward very bad ends.
There are three things we should expect any leader that we would claim to be a good leader to be looking at. One: reducing the disparities within the United States and between the United States and the rest of the world. Two: creating a sense of meaning and community for people; we know that in most cases people will choose meaning over life. Three: restoring and protecting our environment.
Many leaders are quite successful at increasing disparities between themselves and the people who work for them; for destroying meaning and community; and for raping the environment. Those are not the leaders we see a scarcity of.
I want to talk about institutional leadership, so it becomes less of an individual personal ethos and more an organizational strategy. We have a lot of institutional leaders now. We have leaders in education. The Brookings Institution is a great leader in social research. The Nature Conservancy is a great leader in protecting the environment. MoveOn.org is a leader in organizing mainstream opposition to the war. These organization are not led by an individual who was born with capable leadership qualities. Today we really need to look at exerting organizational leadership rather more than we need to look at developing individual leadership qualities within particular individuals.
Kofi Annan said that the 19th century was a century related to government overthrows and development, that the 20th century was one dominated by business and business development, and that the 21st century will be the century of civil society – which is to say the society that is nonmilitary, nongovernmental and nonbusiness. Peter Drucker said, “Every important idea for social change has come from the nonprofit sector.” Leadership is institutional, situational; the same organization can lead well in one era that can’t lead well in another era – and that it is fundamentally about values, community and meaning.
Amy Dean: When Americans consider leadership, we often look to how an individual responds in crisis: Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War; John F. Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis; Rudy Giuliani in 9/11. We look for that profile in courage that separates leaders from managers, distinguishes the few who shape events from those who only witness them. While that’s one way to define leadership, it should hardly be the only one. Some crises evolve slowly over decades – crises that never make the evening news but are of enormous consequence.
Much of my work over the last 15 years has been in the American labor movement. That’s given me a unique opportunity to see some of these crises firsthand and how they’re affecting Americans at their jobs and in their communities: failure to create career training and workforce development opportunities that enable workers to succeed in an economy that produces fewer goods and more knowledge; dwindling numbers of employers able to afford health care coverage to their workers and their families, and the inability of those workers to go out and buy it on their own; in California, child care workers with two-year degrees paid less than people taking care of our lawns and our shrubs – and those groundskeepers are earning poverty wage as well; and the political paralysis that stems from Sacramento to Washington that’s preventing government from responding to these and scores of other problems. It’s the quiet crisis of a nation where income and equality is growing, poverty is expanding and far too many Americans run the risk of being left behind. The willingness and the ability to respond to that crisis is a much better test of leadership than the decision to launch a war.
To a great extent, the crisis is grounded in the unraveling of the American social contract and the breakdown of a consensus about what constitutes the common good. The New Deal and World War II settled some of the toughest and most divisive questions this country ever faced. America reached a consensus: that social values and market forces ought to coexist. We said interests of employees and employers were complimentary. There was consensus that employers had a responsibility to promote the well-being of their workforce; that government ought to invest in creating public schools and universities, hospitals and infrastructure. Under Eisenhower we launched the most ambitious peacetime public construction project ever: the interstate highway system. When Michael Harrington wrote The Other America, no one of consequence, least of all President Kennedy, questioned government’s responsibility to lift Americans out of poverty.
Today, we’re living in a much different environment. Where there was once consensus around these and a number of other issues, there is now incredible polarization. Here in California, even though Howard Jarvis died long ago, his spirit will haunt the state capitol and still does. Legislators are so terrified of stirring taxpayer ire that they’re willing to let the infrastructure of the state crumble before they’ll reform taxes to put California’s fiscal house in order. Labor law violations have soared to an all-time low; businesses spend more money than any time before in breaking rules; and where America was making slow but steady progress toward racial reconciliation, for every attack on affirmative action, gains minorities have made in, for example, the medical profession, have been reversed.
The leaders we need, who can make a difference, aren’t simply going to be those who take a moral stand; they must be skilled at bridging the differences between diverse interests; people who understand how to reestablish a consensus about what actually constitutes the common good.
Though it sometimes appears that citizens have grown disinterested in becoming active in their communities, in a lot of cases, the problem isn’t that Americans lack interest in civic participation; we lack the time. When one parent worked a 40-hour week while the other stayed home to look after the kids, citizens had more opportunity to engage in their community; they could become leaders in their PTA, become involved in their church or their synagogue, have time to coach a Little League team or go with neighbors to a city council meeting. When both parents work 60-hour weeks, free time is often spent catching up on our housework, catching up with our kids or just trying to rest. Fewer of us are gaining leadership skills at the grassroots. Developing grassroots leadership is not an easy process. But if we want to restore the consensus about what constitutes our common interests as Americans, that’s where we’re going to need to invest our time and our resources. Substantive change never comes about only through leadership at the top – it always demands leadership at the grassroots.
Unlike most institutions in American life, organized labor owes its existence to the leadership of tens of thousands of people – people like my grandparents, who lacked wealth and privilege but never hope and vision. It was the vision of an America where working people could live better lives, with the kind of dignity and respect they and their families deserved. That vision defined leaders like John L. Lewis and A. Philip Randolph and Walter Reuther, and here in San Francisco, Harry Bridges. That vision inspired an entire generation of workers to take enormous risks – to protest, strike, even to go to jail. What made these leaders effective wasn’t only that they represented or presented exciting ideas; they succeeded in promoting leadership skills in others. Because of that, what began as a hope and a vision was transformed into fundamental action and change in America. That’s what we need to do again.
It begins when we think of leadership less as the mission of a small elite but as something Americans from all walks of life need to exercise on their jobs and in their neighborhoods. That’s the kind of leadership it will take to build a new national consensus, and that’s the kind of leadership that, in time, can restore America’s social contract.
Judy Nadler: Ben Franklin once said that the noblest question one could pose was: “What good may I do in this world?” That is a defining question for leaders, and, especially, for leaders in the public sector. As someone who has served for 25 years in the public sector as an appointed library commissioner, as an elected council member and an elected mayor, I see several layers to the political leadership side. It is important to know the difference between the appointed, the elected and the career public servants. Those appointed, whether they be planning commissioners or state board members or Cabinet members, are, more often than not, chosen for their political or philosophical leanings; also it doesn’t hurt to know somebody, which is one of the other factors that often comes into individual appointments. Elected public servants are put into service for a variety of reasons, but the most obvious is they’re the ones who got the most votes. The career public servant, often referred to as a bureaucrat, chooses the public arena not for pay, benefits, stock options, but often for the challenges and amazing opportunities.
Let me also distinguish between what John Gardner called leaders and power holders. By definition leaders always have a measure of power; many power holders have no trace of leadership. If we equate a leader as someone who has been elected, there are thousands that fit the bill. But if we look at leadership, we have to define really our expectations, and that leader must honestly question his or her role in office. State Assemblyman Joe Simitian recently did a panel sponsored by The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. We brought people to talk about the state budget crisis and the ethical implications of a shortage of funds when there are many compelling and competing, important interests that need to be addressed. Joe said that when times are good, everybody is a leader, everybody looks good, you’re popular; when times are like they are now, when it is more likely that you’ll need to say No to a request than Yes, the true leadership challenges hit you squarely between the eyes. When those competing and compelling needs and limited resources come directly before you, leaders are put to the test and required to ask some basic questions: To whom do I owe my duty? Whom do I represent? Do I owe a duty to those people in my city, my county, my district, my state who elected me, but also to the broader community? But also, it’s important in the term limit environment we live in to ask ourselves the question in a broader sense: Whom do I represent – those who elected me, worked on my campaign, gave me money, agree with me, support me, are here today? Or those who will follow, the children who cannot vote for me but who will, in fact, inherit the decisions that I will have to make?
The true leader faces the challenge of looking at those who worked for their opponent and who really did hope to see someone else in that office but who also deserve, in our democracy, to be represented. It would be idealistic to think that every leader in the political arena is asking these questions with their busy schedules and the long list of lobbyists waiting to see them. But this will be the key to the budget crisis, not only in our local community in our state, but perhaps in our nation: Whether decisions will be made on values that I hold or by the polls, when the majority of the people in my city want X.
Leadership in context comes up in the public sector. While Rudolph Giuliani spent many years in public life, he is and will always be characterized by the actions that he took following the September 11 terrorist attacks. Martin Luther King Jr. responded to segregation in a way that was more compelling than any of the black leaders of the time, reminding us that historical performances come from great opportunities greatly met.
So what do we do about it? It also used to be that community organizations, such as those that we have seen drop memberships significantly – some have closed their doors – are now not providing the same kinds of opportunities for leadership. So where do we go for leadership? One thing we must look at is putting leadership education as part of our everyday approach. The American Leadership Forum is a model in several cities, and regions of the country.
I’m pleased to see Leon Panetta engaged not only in the work that he’s doing in Monterey, but he’s also an adjunct faculty at Santa Cruz University in the political science department. The young people are inspired by him and by people who are proud public servants and say, “You can really do something that makes a difference. You should give it a try. It’s challenging, it’s frustrating, it’s rewarding.”
My interest and my life in public service really began with the inspiration of Robert Kennedy who, when I was a sophomore in high school, was a candidate for president. In the Oregon primary, I worked on his campaign every day after school, every weekend. I believed in him. I believed in what he said we as young people could do. He directly addressed young people. He had many stages and chapters in his book that talked about the promise that young people brought to public service. And I believe that I in many, many ways am here in public service because of that inspiration.
Barbara Roberts, the first woman governor of Oregon, was elected the same day Oregon voters passed the equivalent of Prop 13. Going into office, she had a dramatic reduction in what she thought she was going to be able to use as resources to be the governor of the state. She spent a year going around at town hall meetings, listening to and trying to bring people to understand the complexities, to say, It’s your choice; what are you willing to do? What are you willing to support, what are you willing to sacrifice? I consider her to be a great leader for that reason.
Tom Campbell
Dee Dee Myers