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0:00
Thank you so much for joining us here today. This is a special Stanford event. We've got Bob Joss, as you can see on the screen with us here today talking about leadership demystified. This is our first virtual Alumni Education event of the academic year. We're excited to get on board again with these wonderful offerings, and we're especially excited about all of the international alumni who are joining us here today. This is sort of a precursor to what we're going to be doing this summer,
0:29
an international alumni weekend. We're back in business with our in-person events, and we're going to be doing one in Poland come June. And we couldn't be more thrilled. Speaking about being thrilled and thrilled to be able to introduce Bob Joss to you today. I'm thrilled because Bob is fundamentally a Stanford icon. He has two Stanford degrees, an MBA. Don't you laugh at your iconic status, Bob. It's true. He has an MBA from Stanford, from the Gsb. He also has a Ph.D. from the Gsb.
0:59
But most important to you, he was an absolutely superior dean for ten years at the GSB 1999 to 2009 and is a is a an essential member of the Stanford community. And I'm excited because he's going to be talking to today about the dynamics of effective management and leadership and which factors contribute to the success of managers and leaders. Anyone that works in any capacity for profit, nonprofit companies, boards, you name it. This is super, super important stuff.
1:28
And I have to tell you something, I'm so excited to be able to introduce Bob because one of the last times that Bob and I were on something like this, it was in person. It was a leadership Academy event at Stanford where different members of the Stanford administration talked to up and coming directors and senior directors about how to grow at Stanford. And I walked into the room and Bob was finishing his presentation. And there are two people on this campus.
1:51
You do not want to follow Bob Joss and Condi Rice. So to be able to introduce them as opposed to following today, is it really a treat? There's someone else I'd also like to introduce to you today. Her name is Diane Stewart. She's from the class of 84 and she'll be coming on the screen. There she is, class of 84. And as you see, she has a child who graduated last June and then one who is still here. And she's the president of the Stanford Women's Network, a part of the UK alumni club.
2:18
She'll come back on screen later after Bob is done talking and Diane will be the moderator of our Q&A session. So Diane and I are now going to go off screen and we're going to leave it to Bob. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for joining us here today. We're excited about Bob. Well, Howard, thanks very much for that nice introduction. And while I'm getting my screen ready to share here with everybody, let me say that my goal today is to help you get a better
2:49
understanding, a better awareness of what leadership is all about. And in particular, I want to demystify it. And I use that word because there's quite a bit of mystery around leadership. You know, I went to Amazon Books this week and I typed in leadership and there are over 60,000 books on this subject. And yet, despite this tremendous literary outpouring, here's what one scholar had to say. You know, leadership yet has an elusive, mysterious quality about it.
3:21
Easy to recognize, hard to describe, difficult to practice, and almost impossible to create in others on demand. So I thought I'd test out these four observations in the process of telling you the most common questions I get about leadership and how I answer them. Well, let's start with his observation isn't easy to recognize. And, you know, I find if I ask MBAs or alumni or executive students, they have no problem coming up with an example from history or from the news.
3:55
You know, about a leader that comes to mind. And, you know, it could be Mandela or Gandhi or Churchill or Thatcher or Mother Teresa or Lincoln. People say, wow, you know, they're leaders in my mind because they were visionary, they were great communicators, they were charismatic, they were inspiring. And so no problem, easy to recognize. But also when I asked them all, what about people that you've been personally close to, you know, did you recognize leadership there? And again, no problem.
4:31
People come up with teachers, coaches, family members, immediate bosses, people that had a real impact on their lives, usually very different from the famous people. The comments here are you know, they really trusted me. They backed me. They pushed me to do something I didn't think I could do. But it's easy to recognize. And if it's so easy to recognize, why is it so hard to describe? Well, I imagine, you know, that that has something to do with the 60,000 books.
5:02
You know, the reason that so many people have tried and I haven't begun to read all 60,000, believe me, but I've read a lot. And for my money, one of the very best writers about leadership was our own John Gardner. You know, John was a faculty member at the business school and at the ED school. He thought very deeply about leadership. He himself was an outstanding civic leader in America. And John said, look, it's not about fame or fortune or status or power.
5:34
You know, I said leadership is about it's about responsibility. And and he said, it's about responsibility in particular for a group. You can't think of leadership without thinking of it in the context of some larger group. You know, that could be a work team. It could be a small business, it could be a division in a company or an enterprise. It could be a a public entity, you know, like a school or a hospital or a unit of government, a city county, even a country.
6:05
But you have to think of it in the context of a group pursuing its purpose and seeing that that group does better. However you want to measure it or think about it. I think another scholar who I admired a lot, Ed Shine, pulled John Gardiner's ideas together and said, Look, it's about wanting to do something new and better and getting others to go along. Short Sweet. I like it. A great definition. Second question I want to share that I get a lot is,
6:39
you know, is there a difference between management and leadership? Because we often see the terms used interchangeably. And I think the answer is yes, there is, but it's not what people often think. You know, you'll hear people say she's a great leader, but I'm just not good at managing or he's a great manager, but quite weak as a leader, as if people could only be good at one or the other and or you couldn't do both together. And I think I think the person that had the best insight on this for
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my reading was a scholar at the Harvard Business School, which is, okay. John Cotter and John spent his career just studying. You know, what do leaders, managers really do? And he said, look, if you're responsible for a group of people, as John Gardner said, you know, you have to do two kinds of work. You number one, you have to do management work, the work you do to help the group cope with complexity. Now, groups are complicated.
7:39
There are lots of interdependencies, and so we have plans and budgets to figure out where is the money coming from, where's the money going? You know, we have organization charts and job descriptions and divisions of responsibility so people know who's doing what. We do a lot of controlling. We compare our actual performance to our plan performance both individually and for the entire group. We're solving problems. We're pushing the group in the right direction. It's really important work.
8:09
It's an awful lot of what we teach, what we do at the Stanford Gsb, but he said there's another kind of work you also has to do and think of leadership as a kind of work, he said. It's the work you have to do to help your group cope with the need for change. And it's a rare group that doesn't need to change. You know, you're being pushed by competitors, by markets, by regulation, and he said that work is so different from management work. It involves these three things.
8:40
First of all, some sense of direction, you know, change from what to what what do you want to look like? If you go through a change and it's different from today? The second thing is he called aligning people, which is he he said, well, you know, it's a lot of communicating is just communicating, communicating. John Gardner like to say all leaders are teaching and especially they're answering and addressing the question of why, you know, why do we need to change what's in it?
9:09
For me, change is painful for a lot of people. They don't like it. So and I need to convince to persuade people that the change is beneficial. And the third element of this leadership work is motivation. You know, so people don't lose hope. Most major organization change efforts do not succeed. You know, people do lose heart. They do lose hope. They give up the job of a leader, said John Gardner, is to keep hope alive. A leader is a dealer in hope, said Napoleon. So that's leadership work.
9:46
Now, when you look at these skills that are required for these two different kinds of work, it's pretty interesting to see the differences. You know, management work is all about appealing to people's thinking. You know, it's rational, it's analytical, it's about keeping the place in complying. It's an under control. It's more of a science. In fact, we even talk about management science. It operates through formal power. A boss and a subordinate, and we know each other's roles.
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It works through hierarchy and systems, and we're on to solutions. We're executing. It's the hard stuff in the sense that it's quantifiable in dollar terms or other number terms. The leadership work is a totally different set of skills. You know, it's about how people feel. It's emotional in its structure, it's about inspiring commitment. It's much more of an art than a science. As a leader, you're really dependent on people to get enthused,
10:48
to get excited about the change that you're talking about. It works through people and culture, and you often have many more questions than solutions and you have to learn your way forward. It's the soft stuff and yet, you know, the touchy feely, the organizational behavior. And yet, as we know, you know, the soft is what's really difficult. And when I look at these two kinds of work and the skills required, it, it reminds me a bit of the game of golf.
11:20
You know, in golf, there's a long game and a short game, and they could not be more different in terms of the skills required. And yet, if you want to master the game, you need to be good at both aspects of the game. And if you want to be good at helping a group achieve its purpose, you do have to be good at both kinds of work. You're the more the more your group needs to change. Maybe you do more leadership work and the more senior you are. Maybe you're doing more leadership work,
11:50
but nobody is ever just exclusively doing one or the other. You've got to do both. So leadership work, you know, Cotter said it's about vision, alignment and motivation. How if I often wondered, you know, how he came up with those three things. But a couple other scholars, I really admire their work. Warren Bennis, said, Look, a leader has to provide three things direction, trust and hope. And at Santa Clara, you know, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner said, you know, we surveyed over 30 years
12:24
as many as 2 million employees and said, what do you look for in a leader? What do you want in your leader? And these are the three things that came up the most. We want our leader to be forward looking to be honest and inspiring. And when I look across these three, I'm struck, you know, how much they landed on the same page and really came up with the same three aspects or elements of what leadership work is all about. As I said,
12:54
you know, it's the work you do to help the group cope with the need for change. And change is hard, but it's also what a couple of scholars at the Kennedy School, Ron Heifetz and Don Laurie, call the hardest kind of change. You know, the sort of change where the group has to face up to its most difficult challenges and they call it adaptive change. This is the change where, you know, you know, the group needs to change, but you don't know exactly all the steps to get there.
13:25
And you have to you have to have others help you come up with the answers. You don't have to have all the answers. You don't have to bear the whole burden. But you do need to get the group learning its way forward, needing it to adapt. And, you know, they said, Look, after all, your job is not to maximize the group's comfort. Your job is to maximize their well-being. And sometimes you have to knock them out of their comfort zone to face up to these most difficult challenges, adaptive change
13:59
and I think because leadership is this difficult work of change and this hard kind of change, that's probably why David Campbell said, you know, it's difficult to practice. Third question I get a lot Are our leaders born or made? It's kind of an age old question and I'm asking to ask you this question. We're going to put up our very quick poll, you know, only a few seconds, but where do you come down on this? You know, our leaders largely born or are they largely made?
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And I'll give you, you know, 15, 20 seconds, you know, we'll zip through and get a show of hands. Yeah. And it's really interesting. So you're sort of tending toward a 30% largely born and 70%, 65% largely made. And, you know, the interesting thing about that is that that's you know, that's where social science research comes out a little bit. You know, there are obviously some characteristics, some inherited attributes that are really valuable when it comes to to leadership work. And
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we can share the results. If you want to just look quickly here, hopefully people see that it's 35, 65. And but I think the excuse me, the weight of the evidence and and maybe you can take let me take that down. Now, at the moment, the weight of the evidence is that while there are these inherited attributes that are helpful and valuable, the born part of the question that most of the most of the research says, you know, leaders are largely made. And and so then a follow on question.
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If leaders are made, does that mean leadership can be taught? Which may be a funny question for someone who teaches a leadership seminar for the last 23 years to MBAs. But my answer to that is, you know, leadership can't be taught, but it can be learned. And there's a distinction, you know, and the learning for leadership is leadership. You know, get into a leadership role and see if you can play that role to help a group change for the better take on the responsibility.
16:23
You know, the Chinese have a saying I hear and I forget. I see and I remember, but I do and I understand. And of course, understanding is that deepest form of learning and leadership. Learning is this learning by doing And it's not just the Chinese. Here is a 2000 year old Greek philosopher. Whatever we learn to do, we learn by actually doing it. And that's why we say leadership learning is experiential learning, learning by doing.
17:01
But there are some paradoxes in this learning that I'd like to share with you. You know, one is it can take a long time. Experience is the hardest kind of teacher gives you the test first and the lesson afterward. And some people, some people never get the lesson. You know, they just don't reflect enough on the test. So it can take a long time. Second thing is, while we learn a lot by not making mistakes and so much of our learning in leadership learning, we often learn the most from mistakes
17:39
and mistakes are painful and difficult to admit or face up to. I often ask people, you know, how did you learn to hire people? And most people will say, you know, I learned by hiring the wrong person. And if it was easy and you got it right all the time, you often don't learn much because no one ever gets it right all the time. I had a boss early in my career who said, You know, I've got to leave you in this job long enough for your mistakes to bite you in the rear end.
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And I didn't quite get what he meant until I made a big mistake and I had to work my way through it. And I think I see today, even sometimes fast growing companies, people get promoted so quickly that they aren't in the job long enough to get this sort of learning and learning from mistakes. And it's not just mistakes, it's it's what Morgan McCall calls powerful experiences. You know, these hairpin curves, these stomach turning drops. And here are some of the powerful experiences that
18:45
that he puts in his in his book. And as I scroll through them, this is not all of them, but most of them. You know, it's a pretty daunting list. And I suspect that many of you on the call have have had some of these powerful experiences. I know when I look through the list, I think I've had virtually all of them. And I'll have to say they weren't necessarily fun, but as I look back, they were great learning experiences. You know, I had a director at the bank in Australia where I was,
19:18
and when we had a particularly challenging situation, he used to say, Oh, this is this is such a character building experience. And I thought, you know, I could do without all this character building. But but he really was right about that. He had a good point. Powerful experiences after all, and experience can only teach what's in it. So the more challenging, the more powerful the experience, the greater the learning opportunity. Here's an interesting observation.
19:49
Jeff Immelt, who wrote a book just a year or two ago after his time as CEO at G.E., says, I wish I had experienced more different things to be better prepared for the world. I saw and he talked in his book about during his tenure all the way up to becoming CEO. GE did so well. It was always onward and upward. He didn't have as many of these powerful experiences as Morgan McCall mentions. A mind stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions,
20:25
which is why experience learning can be so powerful. And then a final element of leadership learning is, you know, in any organization there's kind of a natural hierarchy of management and leadership work. And in each of these various roles, you learn so much more. You know, we start by managing ourselves and we get good at that. That's how we all got into Stanford, because we're in control of our work and we meet our deadlines and we deliver high quality work.
20:57
And then maybe someone asks us to manage other people and there, you know, the skills that made you good at your earlier job are not going to help you much at all in the new job. You know, you're no longer doing the work, you're managing the doers, you're trying to figure out how to schedule it and how to assign it and figure out who can and who can't do the work and how to coach those who are struggling. And then maybe you manage managers. And that sounds very similar to managing others, except
21:29
the people you're now managing are managers, and you have to figure out who can and who can't manage and how do you deal with that situation? How do you coach them and help them get better as managers? And how do you stay in touch with the front line? Maybe you're a functional manager and in something like finance or human resources or strategy or marketing, and your job is to see that the group, the organization succeeds through excellence in your function.
22:01
And yet most of the people who really deliver the function, if you will, don't work for you. They work all throughout the organization and you're in a staff role trying to trying to influence without a lot of authority, trying to work with other members of the staff organization and meet a lot with line people, lots of peer relationship development or a business manager. You got to pull it all together. You got to get line and staff working with each other.
22:29
You got to think strategically, you got to think operationally. You have to know what's going on. And it goes on with bigger organizations to group executives. Enterprise Manager The important point is the reason they drew these lines and, you know, kind of switching directions is you have to go through such a complete reinvention of yourself at each one of these passages. You literally have to find a new way of thinking and a new way of being.
22:59
You develop new skills, you spend your time differently. You value different things. And it's a way of learning so much about leadership and management. Depending on the type of experience you have, you're not just a challenging experience, but a different level of complexity. And so, you know, I think because, you know, there's so much learning to go on in terms of leadership learning. James MacGregor Burns had a famous statement. You know, the most marked characteristic of a leader
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is the capacity to learn from others without being threatened, the capacity to learn from others without being threatened. These others could be your subordinates, your peers, your bosses, your customers. There are so many sources where you can gain learning. But because this learning takes time, because it means mistakes, because you learn from powerful experiences and all different levels of complexity. I think this is why David Campbell said, you know, it's
24:04
almost impossible to create in others on demand. You know, it takes time. Fourth question I get often is, you know, is leadership transportable? Could could you be a very effective, successful leader in one company or industry or culture? And can you transport that to a different situation, a different company, industry, culture, and be equally effective, be equally successful? It's a very common question. And again, it's one
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I want to stop and take a quick poll on and just see how do you come out on this. We'll take a few seconds here. Now that I know how to work these out. Very interesting. Yeah. Now, so you're you're a very you're like the MBA students, you know, when I ask this in class, I'd say at least 80%. And and that's where you come out. You know, at least 80% say, you know, it's yeah, it's readily transportable and you know, a good leader in in one circumstance can be a good leader
25:11
and another and you know I think there's no question that's true. But I also want to say that it's really tough. You know, we talk about leadership taking place in a context, you know, and that context changes and it puts, you know, a lot of interesting challenges to people. The situation that comes to my mind is, you know, John Gardner said a lot of leadership is teaching, you know, and it's hard to teach in a situation if you don't understand it deeply. And it's hard to understand it deeply
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if you haven't experienced it enough. And that's why when someone does move into a different situation, a different industry company, country culture, you need a fair bit of humility about how much you don't know, and you need to ask a lot of questions. You need to recognize that there's a lot of learning to take place. You know, we have a lot of speakers at at Stanford Business School. We have a view from the top and one of our speakers a few years
26:22
back was was a fellow named Ron Johnson, who's a Stanford alumnus. And he had a really interesting career. I think he was an outstanding leader at Target, that successful retailer and a very senior role. And on the strength of his track record at Target, he was recruited by Steve Jobs to come to Apple and roll out that hugely successful concept of Apple stores. And on the strength of his leadership at Apple, he was recruited to become the CEO of J.C. Penney's.
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Penney's is that iconic but troubled retailer. You know, there was so much excitement when Ron Johnson's appointment was announced excuse me that the share the stock in the stock price at Penney's went up 40%. And yet 17 months later, he was fired by his board of directors. You know what worked at Target? What worked at Apple just didn't work at J.C. Penney's. And I always wondered a bit about what happened in, you know, seven
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or eight years later, he gave an interview in The Wall Street Journal. They said, What happened to Penney's? Well, I went too fast. I went too fast for the board, too fast for the employees, too fast for the company. And then he had this concluding statement. He said, you know, I was kind of situationally arrogant, situationally arrogant, which I guess is another way of saying, you know, I didn't take the time to figure out this different context, which was J.C. Penney's. So I think,
28:08
you know, your job as a leader, when you come into a new situation, you're trying to help that group cope with the need for change. But don't expect change to happen unless you can change. Also, you can't bring your old self to this new context, which is what makes the transferability or transfer portability of leadership a really tough challenge and one that people have to be careful about. The last question I want to share with you is are there certain tasks that a leader can't delegate?
28:45
This is, you know, delegation is something we like to do. That's how we develop leaders within our own organization is to give them more and more responsibility. But John Gardner like to remind me that there are two things you really can't delegate as a leader. The first is this business of setting direction. You know, we we want to have a lot of conversation. We want to gather input, we want people's ideas and debate. But it's some point, you know, somebody has to say the train
29:18
is leaving on this track at this time, in this direction. I hope everybody can get on board. But if not, the train is going to leave without you. And that's the job of a leader or as our great tennis coach, wonderful guy, Dick Gould, who recently wrote a great book on leadership, he said, you know, often the leader envisions things that the rest of the team cannot yet see. And it is that responsibility of vision, of setting direction that John said no, you just can't delegate
29:56
that that's your job, whatever group you're leading. And the second thing he said, you know, you can't delegate is that when you're in a leadership role responsible for a group, you serve as that group's symbol. You know, you represent that group to the outside world and you represent that group to itself. And you just can't delegate that to anyone else. You know, this was really brought home to me in a rather poignant way when I was at the bank in Australia,
30:27
and we had a tragic situation 1400 miles away in New Zealand where there was a hold up in a branch and one of our tellers was shot and killed. It's really my first experience with a fatality and many, many years of finance, and we were commiserating about this at our headquarters in Sydney and our head of human resources said, Well, Bob, you're going to the funeral, aren't you? And I had to confess and I hadn't thought about it and I wasn't sure it was a little uncomfortable.
31:01
Gee, I didn't want to be a distraction. I didn't know the people there. Oh, no, he said, It's really important that you go. And I had such a respect for his his views. And my wife, who said, Of course you should go, that I went and it left a huge impression on me. I was kind of blown away by the experience. It meant so much to the family of the person who'd been killed. It seemed to mean so much to the staff in New Zealand that I never forgot it. I remembered this, this,
31:35
and it wasn't really me personally, but but you know, I was representing nearly 40,000 people who who were hurting and grieving along with them in this tough situation. And, you know, a few years later, when I was back at Stanford and and teaching a course on leadership, I read one of those 60,000 books. The book was by, interestingly enough, by Rudy Giuliani, who who's in the news now for a lot of different reasons. But at the time, he had recently stepped down as mayor of New York,
32:11
and he wrote a pretty good book on leadership. And when I got to Chapter 11 in his book, the chapter heading was Weddings, Discretionary Funerals mandatory And in that chapter, he talked about, you know, when the group is celebrating and having a good time, you know, it might be nice to be there, but you don't have to be there. But he said when the group is hurting, that's when a leader needs to be present. And of course, that whole New Zealand experience,
32:43
you know, just came flooding back to me in a way that I now understood, you know, why it had left such a big impression on me. And, you know, as fate would have it, a few years beyond that, you know, we had five tragic fatalities of students at the Gsb with accidental deaths. And I knew exactly what I had to do. You know, I had to meet with the families. I had to be present with the students involved in the memorial services. It just was now automatic in my learning. And it's a
33:19
you know, it's a really good example of how leadership learning takes place. You know, you have an experience like I did in New Zealand, and you have a chance to reflect on it, which is important so much so much reflection is required. And then if you can make sense out of it, which I really did, and in reading Giuliani's comments, that that it's really meaningful for you and you can integrate it into who you are and how you behave going forward. And then if you have a similar or even closely
33:51
similar new experience, you know exactly what to do. It's just a way of thinking and being that is now a part of you. And that's a really good example of leadership learning. It's also a good example of how leaders play a role. You know, I call it a role one plays in changing an organization for the better. And in that definition, you know, every word is really important. You know, we talk about organization because leadership takes place
34:23
within a group, a group with a purpose, and you are accepting responsibility for success of that group. And and of course, it's about changing because we said that it's the work you do to help the group cope with the need for change. And there's no point in changing unless you really think it's going to be for the better, which means you have some vision of what better looks like. And then you're doing all this teaching and persuading about why that change is needed
34:56
and then you're doing so much motivating. So the group keeps at it, doesn't lose heart and doesn't lose hope. And then finally there's this role that you're playing and you know, John Gardiner like to remind me that, look, he said leadership is not really a science at all. It's an art. And he said in particular, it's a performing art, a performing art. And in this performing art, he said, no, you you are the instrument. So you need to know it well. You need to play it well.
35:30
And I think that's why so much of the leadership literature is about self-awareness and self-knowledge and self management. And it's especially important that you you learn how to play what might have been little used parts of you until you took on a leadership responsibility. And these would be the parts that you know, are are capable of evoking emotion and feelings in people. You know, as we said, the leadership work is the kind of work where feelings dominate thinking.
36:09
And as Maya Angelou famously said, you know, people people will forget what you said. You know, they'll forget what you did, but they'll always remember how you made them feel and you know who you are and how you are as this leadership instrument is going to have the biggest impact on how people feel, not how smart or how clever you are, but how you behave and the example that you offer to others. And I think this is why Warren Bennis, the great leadership scholar, said,
36:47
you know, people become leaders the moment they decide how to be, how to be. And Gandhi was famous for saying be the change you want to see in the world. And I like to say, you know, be the change you want to see in your group, in your organization, You know, as a leader, you need to model the behavior that is critical to bringing the group toward a more successful future that you're trying to achieve. Well leadership I hope you would agree with me that it's
37:25
that's not intellectually complicated, but but it is behaviorally complicated. I think there's no question about that. And it's emotionally taxing. It helps to strengthen yourself emotionally and develop your emotional intelligence. It helps to keep your eye on the prize, which is a group achieving something pretty special, you know, and you're playing a role in bringing people along toward that better future. It's it's difficult work. It's taxing work, but very fulfilling.
37:59
You know, it can allow you to do something greater than yourself and to bring meaning both your lives and the lives of others. And it's work that's that's never been more important. You know, it's it is certainly the case that in modern society, we rely on organizations to get things done. You know, virtually everything that we do in terms of producing and delivering goods and services, they're done through organizations, through institutions, you know, And how well those organizations work
38:33
has a lot to do with our own success as people. You know, that helps improve our standard of living or quality of life. And, you know, when those organizations do poorly, people get hurt. They can lose their jobs, they lose their savings, they might lose their health or education opportunities. So the performance of organizations and how well they are led, the leadership that's brought to them has never been more important than it is today. And also, you know, just like these elephants,
39:08
you know, plodding across the plane, it's a journey and it's it's really a never ending journey, you know, And it's a journey in two dimensions, really. One is it's a hero's journey, you know, there will come a time in your lifetime when you maybe are tapped on the shoulder and offered a chance to do something quite special, unique to you. And what a tragedy if that moment finds you unprepared or unqualified or unwilling for that
39:41
which might have been your finest hour, says Winston Churchill so eloquently. It's a hero's journey. And if that call comes, answer the call. That's one piece of advice. But it's also a learning journey, as John Gardner reminds us so much that, you know, you never stop learning. You never master this thing called leadership. You learn something new virtually every day and every year. If you're open to the learning, if you take the time to reflect and learn.
40:12
And so the other piece of advice is never stop learning. Well, I hope I've been able to increase your awareness, your understanding of what leadership is all about. And in particular, I hope I've taken some of the mystery out of it. And now I would look forward very much to taking on your questions and and having an a conversation with you further. And I'll turn it back to Diane. Thank you. Thank you, Dean. Just that was terrific.
40:47
And I think because of the the title, the topic of this conversation, we've had so many questions submitted, not just during the chat, but also when everyone here first registered to be here. So we have a lot of questions. The Stanford team has tried to organize them in various categories for us and but we won't get to all of them. So apologies in advance for those we don't get to. But we have some that are, you know, lumped together. And I've been trying to follow along and add some value here.
41:24
One, there's a combination of questions that I find personally very interesting, and you talked about you had your chart listing out the qualities of a leader. And the question is, how do you how do you compare and contrast the qualities of a good leader or an evil leader? And I would go to your chart and I would say that the leaders like Stalin and Lenin and Hitler, they have mostly the same qualities, except maybe honesty, maybe not honesty. But what what would you like to see?
42:05
What could you tell us about that? And why do so many people follow these leaders who we would definitely consider is evil? It's a great question, and it comes up always in class, you know, in the context, say, of Hitler. And the chart I put up was about the skills required to do management work and to be good at leadership work. And no question, a lot of these so-called evil leaders had a lot of those skills, those leadership skills. You know, they can inspire people, they can evoke emotion,
42:42
and they were gifted communicators. So they had those skills where I think in common that where I come out on this is where they fell down is remember, it's a role one plays in changing an organization for the better, for the better. And I think the bottom line test, you know, in the case, for example, of Hitler, he was going to make Germany great again, but it didn't work out. It was not for the better. It was much worse.
43:09
And the German people came to understand that and don't want to go back to that. So, you know, I think it's ultimately has to do with the person's vision of what better looks like. And that's not so much a skill. They can be skillful at trying to persuade you toward a false vision. And so being able to discriminate between a vision I want to follow and one that I don't think is true. I think that's that's the distinction I would draw. Thank you. Thank you for that.
43:43
You also talked about experiential learning. So how do you identify and help to promote those leaders who perhaps have had no experiences? And how has that been altered by this new environment where we have either virtual or hybrid working conditions? How does that leader get that experience? How are they identified? They Yeah, great question because, you know, people can only learn this from experience, from taking on a leadership responsibility. And the important thing when you are in a spot
44:23
where you're trying to develop, say, younger leaders, people under you, is to be sure you're giving them that responsibility. But also with the right kind of coaching. You know, as a great scholar who wrote a book, Charles Handy, he talked about allowing your people to make mistakes above the waterline but not below the waterline. And, you know, I'm not a sailor, but I get that concept pretty quickly. You know, there are mistakes that people could make and learn from that won't sink the ship.
44:56
And you often, you know, you have to withhold yourself a bit and step back and let them learn from those mistakes and coach them around. Could that have been done better? You want to save them from making below the waterline mistakes that could sink the ship. So I think that's a good way to keep that in mind as you're trying to develop younger leaders. Thank you. And given Stanford's location in Silicon Valley and the various startups and some of these startup companies that are are operating
45:28
on a thread for a long time, how do you as a leader or how do you suggest a leader maintain the morale and momentum and continue to inspire what are what would be some of the specific things needed for it as opposed to a major corporate leader? You have, you know, these startups and it's hard when you need money. Yeah, it is hard. And it and the other thing, as I mentioned, which I want to come back to, is, you know, they're growing so fast and moving people so quickly that they
46:03
they often, in fact, frequently don't spend enough time in a job to really learn very much. You know, they they have this role and they're moved on to that role and they don't have these so-called powerful experiences or these mistakes. They they realize this is not easy. You know, they they they get promoted and promoted. And then at some point, though, they'll run into a really difficult situation and they just don't know how to handle. So, you know, I think one of the challenges
46:33
that that all of the startups that want to become big companies realizes that they're growing faster than their people are growing management skills that then faster than their growing leadership skills, and they have to try to compensate for that. I know Google has spent a lot of time on this as they got bigger and bigger and realized, you know, they were they were just really short of management and leadership skill and talent and
46:59
so they spent a lot of effort on it and a lot of coaching, a lot of training, a lot of teaching people, you know what good management and good leadership is all about and encouraging practice because you can only you can only learn it from practice, You can read a lot about it, you can go to class, but you, you really you have to get in and take on the responsibility and own it and feel it and practice that to to ultimately learn what leadership is all about right now.
47:31
I know we talked a little bit about whether leaders were were born into leadership possibility, but do you have an opinion as to extrovert introvert who makes the best leader? Well, I think I do think there are certain certain sort of inherited attributes your extroversion, your communication skill, your warmth about people, your ability to connect with people, which is so I think, you know, I don't know where all that comes from.
48:00
Some of it can be learned and some of it is just sort of you and in how you grew up, maybe born or at least early nurturing by your parents, there's no question those those those elements or those attributes, personal characteristics can be super helpful. But I think, you know, I do think people largely learn this, you know, they learn it by taking it on. If they take on the responsibility, if they really care about the group
48:29
and they care more about the group's success than their own personal success. And that shows, you know, people see that and people know that you can be introverted and you can be shy. But if people genuinely can see that you really want this group to succeed and get better, however clumsily, you might convey that or communicate that you can be a very powerful and effective leader without being, you know, this charisma Matic, an extremely fluid speaker that people often think about,
49:02
you know, leadership now, you know, people do follow you know, charismatic narcissists from time to time. There's no doubt about that, because they get mesmerized by that. And but ultimately, it's not a successful strategy. You know, it will ultimately come to an end and usually a very bad end. But but for a while, you know, like it's like you say you can fool all the people some of the time, but but you can't fool them all of the time. Yeah definitely. So we have a lot of questions.
49:35
It doesn't come as any surprise that relate to diversity and inclusion. And and most of these are very broad. One of the broader ones is to what extent does diversity impact leadership? And narrowed down a little bit more would be how has your work or teaching on leadership been impacted by concepts and systems, systems and and perspectives developed by women and native Indigenous and people of color and others in underrepresented communities? Yeah, you know, diversity
50:16
is important in the particularly in the sense that as a leader you want to get a diversity of views. You know, you don't want groupthink, you don't want everybody sort of telling you both that you're right or that this is the right way to go. You need to take different perspective. Now, diversity can be a state of mind and everybody can look alike, but it often comes from different experiences and different backgrounds. And so one of the values in leadership learning
50:51
and in being in a leadership role is making sure that you're really getting different points of view and you're getting diverse points of view. The other thing I think that's important is, you know, by paying attention to virtue diversity and just being sure that you're fair, you know, that you're you're doing everything as fairly and equitably as you possibly can. And you to put in processes where you're trying to take out as much bias as possible and you're trying to make sure that you're
51:24
hiring and promoting for the right reasons and not the wrong reasons. You know, there's a classic case where orchestras, symphony orchestras always used to be virtually made up of white men. And, you know, then they went to a system just changed the process where all the auditions were done behind a screen. And the people picking the artists, you know, went by the sound of the music, and it changed the composition of the orchestra. Énorme Asli Now that's a vivid example, kind of easy to see,
51:57
but it's a very good one to make sure you think about in all aspects of your company. Do you have a discipline in your processes that is really making sure you're doing things fairly equitably inclusively? You'll get a better outcome if you do. And would you have any special advice for those leaders, those already in leadership positions who are in those underrepresented groups who might occasionally get pushback from others who feel intimidated or pushed aside?
52:32
Well, that's a that's a good question. It you know, any time you're different, if you're if you're sort of different from the majority, I do think it may not seem fair, but you do have to work really hard to to to demonstrate that you're bringing something to the group that that that, you know, overcomes any difference that people see in you. You know, I my only experience with this. And so, you know, I'm a white male, but for quite a while in my career,
53:03
I was the youngest, you know, And I think that was the difference. I can see with, you know, all these elderly or more or elderly people in senior positions and I was quite aware I had to demonstrate that that, you know, while I was younger, I could bring something. And I you know, I just think that's that's something when you fall into a minority group, however, that group might be defined, you just have to you have to do your best to demonstrate that competency.
53:34
And do you have any particular views on quotas in order to try to make our groups, our organizations more diverse? What are your thoughts? Well, you know, I'm not they quotas can can serve a purpose. I prefer maybe it's a fine tuning of words. I prefer goals and timetables. And like we used to have going way back in the early days of affirmative action, you know, quotas make you nervous all the time. I'm not a fan of of a quota. And that we must do this and must do that.
54:08
We want to we want to do things fairly equitably and on merit as best we see it. But we definitely should strive to to accomplish certain goals. And I think having a goal to make your workforce look more like your customer base, look more like your country or your population, you know, I think it's a very good goal. You thank you for that. And I love this question. How do you see leadership bearing by generation from Baby Boomer down to Gen Z? And do you have a preference for a certain type
54:47
of leadership style? Oh boy. You know, having been retired a while, I don't see as much of Gen Z or maybe millennials, but you know, I, I think a key element of leadership is is, you know, caring about the group and demonstrating that you care about their group, you're not going to get people to come with you if they can see that you're in it for yourself, you know, and you're self promoting as opposed to you're in it for this group and the group doing well.
55:23
The I think one thing does worry me in recent years is, you know, there's an awful lot of promoting your own brand, your own self, you know, social media. And you can give off the impression that you're in it for yourself. And that's really kind of deadly to effective leadership, I think, regardless of generation. And I think sometimes people make the mistake of thinking, oh, that's that's what good leaders do. They promote themselves. Well, I just I don't think it's a winning strategy.
55:54
And it's one thing to be to be cautious and wary about if if you're in the generation that's in a lot of self-promotion. Yeah absolutely. I mean, on that note, do you think there's a difference in how political leaders should be versus a corporate leader? And do you think it's more acceptable given that political leaders are having to get the vote of the population in who who who are looking at social media and popularity? I mean, what is what are your thoughts on that?
56:28
Yeah Well, there's no question it's a there's a big difference. In fact, one of the interesting aspects of that question about is leadership. Transportable is is observe how hard it has been sometimes for business leaders to move over and become really effective political leaders and vice versa. Right. They're very different contexts, very different arenas. And, you know, within a business you have much more of a sense of making decisions and and the leader can set
56:59
a direction, you know, within a within a political role. You've got to you've got to bring people with you. You know, you've got to bring as many people. You can't just bring your faction, you know, what they say. And I think that's one of the problems today. You know, people appeal to their own faction and you've got to bring people from the other faction over and you've got to demonstrate that you understand both sides. And, you know, I know there's not an appetite to appeal
57:25
to the middle, but, you know, the job of a leader is to bring people with you, as Ed Sheeran said, not bring half the people with you. You've got to bring as many. You've got to bring a lot more than half to be an effective leader, both in a company and in a political sense. Right? Yeah. Thank you. So we're almost out of time, but I wanted to ask you one final question. I love this question and that is if you could have dinner with any leader, good or bad,
57:53
dead or alive, who would that be and why? Nelson Mandela. I just think he was a phenomenal leader who went through incredible hardship, 27 years in prison. And yet he came out not angry, but wanting to build a better future for his country. You know, just remarkable human being. I would love to have had dinner with him. You agreed. And so Dean Joss, any final comments before we wrap this up? Well, my final comment would be to group on the call.
58:27
You know, I know a lot of you are in leadership roles. You're fired in leadership roles. You know, I compliment you for taking those responsibilities wherever they might be. You know, I might be in business or I might be in, you know, some nonprofit part of your life. And that's great. And, you know, it's hard work and keep at it. You know, if not you, who else is going to do it? I think I want to congratulate you and encourage you and encourage you
58:54
to take on more because we the world needs you and the world needs good leadership. Thank you so much, Dean. Justice has been so useful, so informative, so inspirational. But our time now is coming to an end. And I also like to thank Howard for having been here in the beginning and to the entire Stanford team for making this so well organized. And hopefully next year we'll be able to do this in person and make it much bigger opportunity to have discussions and to meet with people.
59:28
And so yes, with that, our time is at an end And thank you all for attending and thank you Dean, us again. Thank you. It was great being with you. Thank you. Thank you.
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