- Hello, I'm back again, can you believe that?
(applause)
Well I don't know about you, but what I said this morning
was probably the hardest thing I have ever had to say
because it was so meaningful to me
that I had to keep digging my nails
into the palm of my hand
so I could keep talking, so bear with me.
This afternoon I want to talk to you
about something that's been
troubling me for the last few years.
I keep asking at the international leadership association
and elsewhere, leadership for what?
People talk about leadership ad nauseum,
but what is the purpose of leadership?
And I think that the real importance of leadership
is grossly misunderstood.
So Confucius said that the man who asks the question
is a fool for a minute, but the man who does not ask
a question is a fool for life.
So taking Confucius's advice, let me ask
leadership for what purpose?
Why, if at all, is leadership important
and why is the real importance
of leadership so misunderstood?
Through the ages, leadership scholars,
people in leadership roles and those
who have lived close to leaders
have contributed both to our understanding
and to our confusion about leadership.
From the ancient writings of early philosophers
to Carlyle's great man theory to Max Weber.
Those of you who've had me in class
know I tell you do not dare to die
before you read Max Weber.
Max Weber's tripartite description of charismatic tradition
of legal and rational authority, Hook's hero in history,
Greenleaf's servant leadership,
Burns's transformation of leadership model.
All of those have simply bedeviled the human imagination,
and more recently Kant's steps of adaptive leadership,
leader member exchange, authentic leadership,
invisible leadership, and even connective leadership
and I have to confess, I think I have been guilty
in contributing to this problem.
And there seems to be no end in sight.
Many of these approaches to leadership
focus on the means that leaders take.
Others focus on the personal characteristics of the leader,
particularly and most regrettably on charisma.
I once wrote a chapter in someone's book
called A Pox on Charisma.
And I know that Peter Drucker
shared my disdain for charisma.
Charisma by itself.
Few, if any of the existing leadership paradigms
differentiate leadership in terms of the ends or the goals
that leaders, together with their constituents,
my students know I hate the word followers,
identify as a worthy pursuit
and herein lies the basic misunderstanding
of why and how leadership is important.
In more recent years, I've begun to think
that while different types of leadership strategies
and approaches do matter greatly
and in complex ways, it is the goal
or the purpose of leadership
that actually is of primary importance.
By focusing on leaders' personalities
and the strategies they seek, we have I think mistakenly
put the emphasis on the person or the means
rather than the ends of the goals of leadership.
Let me drill down on this for just a moment.
We have I think misguidedly fixated
on the traits of leaders, their persona,
their personalities, and considerable scholarly
and popular attention too has been directed towards leaders'
charismatic glows, their exemplary characters,
their great conquests as well as
on occasion their toxic attraction.
We identify and measure the behaviors they tend to use
or should use under different circumstances.
In some of my own work, I realize
I have contributed to this problem.
While the person, the behaviors,
and the implementation strategies of leaders
are important to a full understanding
of the leadership process,
they are not the quintessential
or the most important function of leadership.
Rather, identifying a transformative purpose,
a noble enterprise that changes the world for the better
is the true essence of leadership,
and engaging others in this endeavor
is an essential part of the leadership process.
Otherwise, leaders are simply solo actors
or Don Quixotes with perhaps
a Sancho Panza or two in their thrall.
We want to read about leaders,
those who are long dead and those who are still living.
I did a search on the web for biographies of leaders.
In less than one minute, in seconds,
thousands of, in fact millions of citations came up.
There were hundreds of thousands of biographies
and entries on Hitler, on Roosevelt, on Obama, on Trump
and we can learn something from biographies.
I'm not against biographies
as I mentioned this morning with Boswell.
The critical issue is not what kind of leadership is best
or even which leader is most effective.
Instead the essential question should be
leadership for what purpose?
At the risk of sounding overly confident,
I think the answer to the question
leadership for what purpose is really
rather simple, if not always readily apparent.
The purpose of leadership is to identify
an ennobling enterprise or goal
that changes the world in some fundamental way
that engages others in that noble effort
and that creates meaning in the lives
of those who join in that enterprise.
That is in the life of the leader
and the leader's collaborators.
That noble enterprise often involves a moral imperative
that takes dedication and sacrifice from everyone involved.
Rarely is the task readily achieved.
It may seem daunting, even unattainable.
As civil rights activist Jesse Jackson understood however,
it should and I quote "meet the moral challenge of the day."
So it often remains elusive, waiting for some determined
individual or group to issue a clarion call to address it.
American former first lady Rosalynn Carter,
a keen observer of leadership suggested
"a leader takes people where they want to go.
"A great leader takes people where they
"don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be."
That I think is the crux of the issue,
identifying where we ought to be,
where we ought to go.
Those difficult destinations,
those meaningful missions,
those ennobling enterprises are the goals
that leaders in every arena and every era should identify
and urge us to achieve.
Then, then and only then,
there is leadership approaches
that I have already alluded to
as simply the means to those
life changing planet altering ends.
In short, the goal is primary.
The means, while still important, are secondary.
In preparing this talk, you won't be surprised to know
that I went back to consult some of Peter Drucker's writings
and in 2001 Peter wrote, and I quote,
"leadership does matter, but alas it is something different
"from what is now touted under this label.
"Leadership is not by itself good or desirable."
End of quote.
As you can imagine, I was both elated,
simultaneously elated and deflated
that way back in 2001, that Drucker wrote quote
"leadership to what end is thus the crucial question."
So as I might have guessed, Peter was there
before most of the leadership experts,
yet surprisingly this Druckarian wisdom
has been largely ignored.
Only when we have identified the nature
of the ennobling goal to which leaders should devote
their own and they collaborate its efforts
should we concern ourselves with knowing
what kind of leadership strategy to use
and when to use it or when to use them.
Only then does the question regarding which kind
of leadership approach to use become crucial.
Then and only then do all the different leadership theories
come into play and prove their value.
Let's rethink leadership for a minute.
Help me with this, let me digress briefly
just to tell you how I began to think
in this convoluted way.
When I was invited to a multinational business conference
in Nanjing in 2011, you may recall
that we were still in the throes
of a global economic turndown,
and I was asked to discuss
what could business do to address the crisis?
Remembering Confucius's advice, I felt the question
needed reframing to ask a different, larger,
more relevant question and that was
what can every sect, not just business,
do to rescue the world?
This demanded a global effort from every sector.
From business to religion and everything in between.
As a first step toward understanding that immense crisis,
we needed to ask how is the world spending its resources?
Or we might more correctly consider
how is the world misspending its resources?
While tourism was the largest global industry,
many people are surprised by that,
the defense industry is a close second.
Nations determined to protect themselves from attack
or engage in open conflict were voting
and even now continue to commit a significant portion
of their economic resources to defense,
even as the world has tried to come to grips
with the lingering economic malaise,
the world economic forum reported
that as recently as 2015 and I'm quoting,
"the economic impact of violence to the global economy
"was 13.6 trillion dollars
"in terms of purchasing power parity."
That is equivalent to five dollars per day
for every single person on this planet.
Now let's consider how the world's population is living.
As recently as August 2016 with a population estimated
by the UN at 7.5 billion, three billion people
around the world were living on $2.50 a day or less,
while more than 1.2 billion
were living on less than a $1.25 a day,
and here we are, the world, spending five dollars a day
on war, and the prevention of war.
And let me digress for a minute.
I was you know, really confused
and astounded to realize that
both in the last administration and this administration
we are proposing to use between one trillion
and three trillion dollars on upgrading our nuclear defenses
but remember, we never intend to use them.
If I said to this audience,
we are going to spend three trillion dollars
creating the most up to date, most technologically advanced
buildings on campuses throughout the world,
but we're never going to let you use them
you would take me away to the nearest psychologist
to have me examined, and you should okay?
Let's see, over 800 billion,
over 800 million people worldwide
did not have enough food to eat
and three million children die from malnutrition each year.
Approximately 1.2 billion people live without electricity.
40 million children worldwide live without adequate shelter
and more than 750 million people
lack adequate access to clean drinking water.
That 13.6 trillion dollars of expenditures and losses
represents 13.3% of the world GDP.
Moreover, more than 70% of the economic impact of violence
is mostly attributable to government spending
on the military and internal security.
The remaining 30% comes from quote,
"the consequential losses from violence and conflict."
Now let's compare this to what
we spend on peacekeeping, okay?
In 2015 alone, UN peacekeeping expenditures
represented only 1.1% of the 742 billion
of economic losses from armed conflict.
If we talk about not peacekeeping but peace building,
which I don't think we really know how to do,
maybe that's why we have to spend so much.
Those expenditures totaled 6.8 billion
or .9% of the economic losses from conflict.
So we're spending less than 1% on peace building
compared to what we spend on defense.
Clearly the world is not thriving financially
and certain regions and people of the world,
as we just saw are still living
in abject poverty and misery.
Still their governments are spending resources on war,
its prevention, and or its conflict.
To put a different lens on the problem,
funds spend on the military
and homeland security do create jobs.
However, an interesting fact,
domestic spending on health, education,
infrastructure or clean energy create even more jobs.
Investing 230 billion in war creates 1.6 million jobs,
whereas investing the same amount in healthcare
creates 3.2 million, twice as many jobs.
So the jobs creation argument simply doesn't wash,
and those were just US figures.
Think about what the global figures would tell us
to our collective shame.
So I began to think how could we
think about this differently?
Well one thought that occurred to me was
how about making the defense industry nonprofit?
Let that sink in for a minute.
I wish the CEO of Boeing were here.
One powerful way to address this problem
is to move the defense industry from the for profit
to the nonprofit column.
Just for a moment, think about what would happen
if every country on a Friday afternoon at four o'clock
made defense contracts nonprofit.
Wouldn't that make the defense industry
a truly patriotic sector?
(audience laughs)
And what if every country had a department of peace
and Benjamin Rush, who was one of the founders,
one of our founding fathers, go on the web you'll see this.
He wrote a description of a department of peace
and even described and designed the room
where peace documents would be signed,
but it's introduced at virtually every congress
and it is just totally voted down
or doesn't even come for a vote.
In my own thinking about these obscene expenditures
on weapons of war, I have been inspired by the video
of an Egyptian man who previously had produced land mines.
I watched him one night when I was in Sweden
and I was jet lagged and I couldn't sleep
and I turned this on.
If anybody finds that video, please send it to me.
I've searched and searched.
He used to make land mines.
Now he makes land mine detectors,
and when he began to talk about land mine, his switch,
you could see how his face changed.
He now passes what Peter Drucker
used to call the mirror test.
Can you look in the mirror and be proud
of what it is you do and who you are?
Let me be clear, I'm not against making reasonable profit.
Rather I'm protesting how and on what that profit is made.
If we think about the human costs of war,
the World Health Organization estimated in 2002
that violence cause more than
1.6 million deaths worldwide every year,
and let's not forget at that time
the total world population was 6.3,
so 1.6 million out of 6.3?
That's mind boggling.
Since then the world has also
become awash in wars and terrorism
and I've all kinds of statistics
from the Watson Institute at Brown
that for the US alone over 370 people
had died due to direct war violence
and at least 800,000 more indirectly.
200,000 civilians have been killed
as a result of the fighting at the hands
of all parties to the conflict.
The US federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars
is about 4.8 trillion dollars
and the wars have been accompanied by violations
of human rights abroad and even here at home.
And the wars did not result in any inclusive,
transparent and democratic governments
in say Iraq or Afghanistan.
I think we have to be serious and question ourselves.
What are we doing, what are we thinking?
Despite fewer wars since 2008,
the number of deaths worldwide has tripled
and the number of displaced persons
exceeded 50 million people in 2013.
It's gone up since then.
These are not...
These are not unimportant issues.
These are things that you as decision makers,
as people who have control over resources,
who make decisions every single day
about how to spend money, what kinds of products to develop,
what kinds of initiatives to undertake,
you need to think about this.
I could spend the rest of my time talking about this
and the costs of terrorism, the costs of terrorism
are incredible, but the point is that leaders
of the world's countries, not the average citizen,
made those momentous and destructive decisions
to allocate their resources
to the goal of defense or preparation for
or conduct of war.
However you choose to frame it
many current world leaders identify
and continue to identify war as a worthwhile goal.
Following Confucius's advice, let me ask one more question.
Why do the world's leaders focus on war
rather than an ennobling goal
to transform and enhance the world?
There are many ennobling goals
and we could enumerate many,
but peace beckons us as the queen of noble enterprises
and we shall turn away from that call
at our own and the world's peril.
Let's also remember that history will be our judge.
So I mentioned it today to you to this audience particularly
whose influence on thought and practice
can be and is immense.
As such, so is your responsibility.
Consider this a serious call to peaceful arms.
Since my own awakening, I've continued to think about
and work on a comprehensive plan for peace and prosperity.
It's called a connective leadership strategy
for global, enduring, and sustainable peace
and equitable prosperity.
I have linked peace and prosperity because I sincerely
do not believe that we shall ever have peace
if large segments of the world live in poverty.
And this peace plan is conceived as open source,
and what that means is that everyone,
each and every one of you is invited
to go on the web and amend it, change it,
update it, add new things to it.
I beg of you to do that.
It's the web address is www.connectiveleadership.com.
It's that simple.
I think about peace not simply as an economic necessity
but as an ennobling enterprise as well.
I think some people who know my work,
my concern about this would say I obsess about it
but I think about leadership for peace
and I try to examine the reasons
why world leaders have been unable to achieve world peace,
why peace continues to be so elusive.
And this also made me reconsider
how I think about leadership
and the role of leaders in identifying worthy goals
more noble enterprises
for themselves and their collaborators.
There are many ennobling enterprises,
but I do believe that peace
is the pinnacle of noble endeavors.
Global peace, national and community peace,
peace in the workplace, even peace in the family.
Most other ennobling goals
are hampered or impossible without it.
In addition, equitable prosperity is the handmaiden of peace
for when only a small minority of the world's populations
live in prosperity while the rest struggle
in varying degrees to exist,
peace becomes an unreachable goal.
Now I'm skipping a whole bunch because I'm aware of the time
but let's return to rethinking leadership.
Only after leaders with their collaborators' help
have identified the transformative goal,
the noble enterprise that can change the world
in a truly positive way, can we then
actually understand how important leadership really is.
Only then can we reduce our misunderstanding
about the importance of leadership
not as an end in itself.
Not as something to be yearned for, sought after.
Not as a role that we want, not as embodied in any
one individual, but as the ultimate mechanism
for identifying a transformative goal
and then, only then, providing both leaders
and their collaborators with the appropriate strategies
or means or vehicles if you will
for enabling them to achieve this goal.
And here is where we must recognize
with both nuance and pragmatism the value
of the different kinds of leadership
and the leadership theories
that I have been dissing in this talk.
Think about the value of different kinds of leadership
for different goals and at different stages
in the quest for a noble vision.
So you see that there is after all
some use for all those theories of leadership.
To pursue this home grown analogy,
once the leaders and collaborators
have jointly identified a transformative goal,
leadership strategies then function
like a fleet of vehicles.
Limousines, sedans, racing cars, SUVs,
each with its own purpose.
They can take us to different destinations,
cope with different road and weather conditions.
For example, which leadership vehicle
is appropriate for reaching which goal?
And which leadership approaches or combinations thereof
in which order or in which sequence are appropriate
for each specific stage in achieving
that particular ennobling enterprise?
To oversimplify, if my goal is to attend
a state dinner at the White House,
should I arrive in a truck or a limousine?
Should I use a racecar or an SUV
or a limousine to drive up a mountain trail?
In other words, different leadership approaches
sometimes in different combinations
must be utilized with skill and nuance
for each stage of the leadership journey.
Selecting and using the appropriate leadership strategy
or strategies for each goal as well as
for each stage in reaching that target
are what makes leadership, not leaders per se important.
In fact, that combined with identifying an ennobling goal
is the true but often misunderstood importance of leadership
of leadership.
How am I doing for time?
Well no one knows, I'll keep going.
(audience laughs)
Okay, so let's play this out for a moment okay?
Connective leadership, which some of you will know
I believe is the best vehicle
when the goal is to bring together
diverse but interdependent groups
with potentially conflicting agendas, serves that purpose.
Adaptive leadership Heifetz's work,
provides the most appropriate vehicle
when in the pursuit of an ennobling enterprise,
collaborators are stymied by a task
that's never been done before.
Then that's the point at which the leader
has to create and hold what Heifetz calls
a safe place in which the collaborators and the leader
have the opportunity to figure out how to make it happen,
as Cleopatra once said, make it happen.
Servant leadership, Greenleaf's idea is called for
when the leader understands that attending
to the needs of the constituents will result
in their reciprocating with increased
engagement, teamwork, and performance.
Transformational leadership, Burns's work,
is required when collaborators and their leaders
recognize the need for change
that will also demand a moral transformation
in both the collaborators and the leaders.
Leadership strategies are simply the means
applied appropriately, adaptively, and authentically
that must be utilized at each stage of the journey
to reach that transformational goal.
We need to know what kind of leadership to use
for what, when, and in what combinations.
Still, the ennobling enterprise, the goal,
is always paramount.
To sum up, the identification or articulation
of an ennobling, transformative goal
is the misunderstood but primary importance of leadership.
That is what Peter Drucker was talking about.
Then and only then, leadership strategies
or the various approaches in many appropriate forms
described by all the different leadership paradigms
I've mentioned and others besides,
used under different circumstances provide
the means of the vehicle for reaching it.
In closing, let me add just one last thought.
Occasionally, occasionally, in the course of human events,
a transformative goal moves through three stages.
From first improbable fantasy,
and maybe that's where we are today
to insistent focus to inevitable fruition.
Peace is the acme of ennobling enterprises.
That overarching, transformative goal.
It is up to us to move that transformative goal
to inevitable fruition.
Let's remember Rosalynn Carter's words,
"great leaders take people where they don't
"necessarily want to go, but ought to be."
Let's also remember that Peter Drucker understood
that the true value of leadership
was the identification of a noble transformative goal
that changes the world for the better
in some crucial way that engages others
in that noble effort and that creates significance
and meaning in the lives of those who do.
And that means both leaders and their collaborators.
Only then can different leadership strategies
selected and orchestrated
by an engaged and knowledgeable leader provide the vehicles
that will take us to that life altering,
world changing destination.
In sum, it's not about the leader.
Rather, first and foremost it's about identifying
the transformative goal, and only then
do the appropriate and potentially
multiple strategies come into play.
Leadership we now see is actually considerably more complex
and subtle than most students of leadership
have previously realized.
I hope that you here today also agree
that leadership when it's no longer misunderstood
can truly transform the world,
and finally my last question I think Confucius would agree
is what will it take for you,
each and every one of you, to do your part?
Okay, thank you.
(applause)
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