Chapter Seven

“The future has no shelf life,” declares leadership guru Warren Bennis in Chapter One. He could have easily been paraphrasing the legendary New York Yankee skipper Yogi Berra, who observed: “The future ain't what it used to be!”

Predicting the future is often a fool's game. Think about Charles Duell, who as commissioner of the U.S. Office of Patents might have known better, but as early as 1899 pointed out: “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” Or consider President Grover Cleveland's prophecy in 1905: “Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote.” Decca Records in 1962 declared that “guitar music is on the way out”—which explains why the company turned down the Beatles. Fred Smith's student paper proposing the idea for an overnight delivery service (that is, FedEx) earned the following comment from his Yale management professor: “The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C,’ the idea must be feasible.” And it wasn't so long ago that Ken Olsen, Digital Equipment's CEO, was so bold (or rash) as to wonder aloud that he couldn't “imagine why anyone would want a computer in their home”—let alone their laps! Even Microsoft's Bill Gates insisted that “640K of memory ought to be enough for anybody.”

In looking ahead, especially for the upcoming generation of leaders, our point is that the future is uncertain. However, there are lessons from the past that will continue to be an important part of the future's landscape. In fact, research strongly suggests that the ability to look first to our past before we march blindly forward actually strengthens our capacity to see the future more clearly. Here's what we think are four enduring principles to guide the millennium generation of leaders as they travel into the future.

Lesson One: Leadership Is Everyone's Business

Myth associates leadership with superior position. It assumes that leadership starts with a capital “L,” and that when you're on top you're automatically a leader. But leadership isn't a place, it's a process—and this becomes all the more important to appreciate going forward in time. Leadership involves skills and abilities that are useful whether one is in the executive suite or on the front line, on Wall Street or Main Street, on college campuses, community corners, or corporations.

And the most pernicious myth of all is that leadership is reserved for only a very few of us. This myth is perpetuated daily whenever anyone asks, “Are leaders born or made?” Leadership is certainly not a gene, and it is most definitely not something mystical and ethereal that cannot be understood by ordinary people. It's a myth that only a lucky few can ever decipher the leadership code. Of all the research and folklore surrounding leadership, this one has done more harm to the development of people and more to slow the growth of countries and companies than any other.

Our research continues to offer convincing evidence that leadership is an observable, learnable set of practices. In nearly two decades of research we have been fortunate to hear or read the stories of over 7,500 ordinary people who have led others to get extraordinary things done. There are millions more. If there is one singular lesson about leadership from all the cases we have gathered it is this: leadership is everyone's business.

Just ask Melissa Poe of St. Henry's School in Nashville, Tennessee. As a fourth-grade student fearful of the continued destruction of the earth's resources, Melissa wrote a letter to the president of the United States, asking for his assistance in her campaign to save the environment for the enjoyment of future generations. After sending the letter, she worried that it would never be brought to the president's attention. After all, she was only a child. So, with the urgency of the issue pressing on her mind, she decided to get the president's attention by having her letter placed on a billboard. Through sheer diligence and hard work, the nine-year-old got her letter placed on one billboard free of charge and founded Kids for a Clean Environment (Kids F.A.C.E.), an organization whose goal is to develop programs to clean up the environment.

Almost immediately, Melissa began receiving letters from kids who were as concerned as she about the environment. They wanted to help. When she finally received the disappointing form letter from the president it didn't crush her dream. She no longer needed the help of someone famous to get her message across. Melissa had found in herself the person she needed.

Within nine months more than 250 billboards across the country were displaying her letter free of charge, and Kids F.A.C.E. membership had swelled. As the organization grew, Melissa's first Kids F.A.C.E. project, a recycling program at her school, led to a manual full of ideas on how to clean up the environment. Her impatience and zest motivated her to do something and her work has paid off. Today there are more than 200,000 members and 2,000 chapters of Kids F.A.C.E.

Melissa Poe is proof that you don't have to wait for someone else to lead. You don't have to have a title, you don't have to have a position, and you don't have to have a budget. By viewing leadership as a fixed set of character traits or as linked to an exalted position, a self-fulfilling prophecy has been created that dooms the future to having a limited set of leaders. It's far healthier and more productive to start with the assumption that it's possible for everyone to lead. If we assume that leadership is learnable, we can discover how many good leaders there really are. That leadership may be exhibited on behalf of the company, the government, the school, the religious organization, the community, the volunteer group, the union, or the family. Somewhere, sometime, the leader within each of us may get the call to step forward. Ordinary people are capable of developing themselves as leaders far more than tradition has ever assumed possible.

Lesson Two: Leadership Is a Relationship

Despite all the advances in technology, after all the irrational exuberance over the Internet has come and gone, we'll learn again what we already know—leadership is a relationship. Sometimes the relationship is one-to-many. Sometimes it's one-to-one. But regardless of whether the number is one or one thousand, leadership is a relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who choose to follow.

Evidence abounds for this point of view. For instance, in examining the critical variables for success in the top three jobs in large organizations, Jodi Taylor and her colleagues at the Center for Creative Leadership found that the number one success factor is relationships with subordinates. Even in this nanosecond world of e-everything, personal opinion is consistent with the facts. In an online survey the techno-hip readers of FAST COMPANY magazine were asked to indicate, among other things, “Which is more essential to business success five years from now—skills in using the Internet, or social skills?” Seventy-two percent selected social skills compared to 28 percent for Internet skills.¹ Even when Internet literati complete a poll online, they realize that it's not the Web of technology that matters the most, it's the web of people.

Similar results were found in a study by Public Allies, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating young leaders who can strengthen their communities. Public Allies sought the opinions of eighteen- to thirty-year-olds on the subject of leadership. Among the items was a question about the qualities that were important in a good leader. Topping these young people's list is “Being able to see a situation from someone else's point of view.” In second place, “Getting along well with other people.”² Young and old alike agree that success in leadership, success in business, and success in life has been, is now, and will be a function of how well we work and play together.

We recently asked a real, live twenty-something youth leader, Tara Church, the question about leadership in the future. “What do you think, Tara? In thirty-five years how will leadership be different?” She replied: “I don't think what fundamentally drives people will change all that much. What we do has to have meaning. Leaders have to be able to enlist people in a common cause, and I don't think you can do that without being in someone's presence.”

At the heart of the relationship is trust. Without trust you cannot lead. Exemplary leaders are devoted to building relationships based on mutual respect and caring. In a recent PriceWaterhouseCoopers study on corporate innovation in companies listed on the Financial Times 1000, the researchers reported that trust was “the number one differentiator” between the top 20 percent of companies surveyed and the bottom 20 percent. “The top performers' trust empowered individuals to communicate and implement change in order to turn strategic aims into reality,” said the investigators.³

Similarly, customer loyalty is the secret weapon on the Web. When Web shoppers are asked to name the attributes of e-tailers that were most important in earning their business, the number one answer is “a Web site I know and trust. All other attributes, including lowest cost and broadest selection, lagged far behind. Price does not rule the Web; trust does.”⁴ Long before “empowerment” was written into the popular vocabulary, leaders understood that only when their constituents feel strong, capable, and efficacious, and when they feel connected with one another, could they ever hope to get extraordinary things done.

Lesson Three: Leadership Starts with Action

When Charlie Mae Knight was appointed the new superintendent for the Ravenswood School District in East Palo Alto, California, she was the twelfth superintendent in ten years. She encountered a district in which 50 percent of the schools were closed and 98 percent of the children were performing in the lowest percentile for academic achievement in California. The district had the state's lowest revenue rate. There were buckets in classrooms to catch the rain leaking through decrepit roofs, the stench from the restrooms was overwhelming, and pilfering was rampant. Gophers and rats had begun to take over the facilities. As if this weren't challenging enough, Knight had to wrestle with a ten-year-old lawsuit, whose intent was to dissolve the district for its poor educational quality and force the children to transfer to schools outside their community.

These challenges would discourage almost anyone. But not Knight. After assuming the post, she immediately enlisted support from Bay Area companies and community foundations to get the badly needed resources. The first project she undertook was refurbishing the Garden Oaks School.

Volunteer engineers from nearby Raychem Corporation repaired the electrical wiring and phone systems. A volunteer rat patrol used pellet guns to eliminate the pesky rodents from the site. The community helped paint the building inside and out, and hardware stores donated supplies. Before long, local residents began calling to find out what color paint was used for the school so they could paint their houses in a matching shade. They went out and bought trees and sod and planted them in front of their homes. New leadership came forth from parents who began to demand more of a say. In response, an “Effort Hours” program for parents was set up so that they could volunteer time at the school. Teachers began to notice that something was happening, and they wanted to be part of it too. The district was on a roll.

Within two years of Knight's arrival, the children exceeded the goal of performing in the fifty-first percentile on academic achievement scores. Today one of the district's schools has climbed above the seventieth percentile, miles above the first percentile where they had started. The district was one of the first schools in the state to use technology in every discipline, outdistancing every school in California technologically, and it was the first elementary school to join the Internet. The lawsuit has been dropped. And for the first time ever, East Palo Alto received the state's Distinguished School Award, based on its improved test scores and innovative programs.

If we are going to have a future—let alone thrive in one—we learn from Knight that leaders don't wait (in fact can't wait) for grand strategic plans to be completed, new legislation to be passed, or consensus to be built. Like other leaders, Knight knew she had to get started. “It's hard to get anybody excited just about a vision. You must show something happening,” Indeed, when high school students were asked to describe a time they had acted with integrity, their cases were ultimately about leadership. Faced with a challenge, some deviation from the norm, routine, principle, or belief, they felt compelled to take action. Many of these young people said they had no choice but to take action (to lead).⁵

Leaders, Peter Drucker once observed, are “monomaniacs on a mission.” We agree. They seize the initiative. Starting a new organization, turning around a losing operation, greatly improving the social condition, enhancing the quality of people's lives demands a proactive spirit. Waiting for permission to begin is not characteristic of leaders. Acting with a sense of urgency is.

In our well-intended efforts to thoroughly diagnose the situation, to craft artful change programs, and to build broad consensus, we stall progress. By all means be true to intervention theory and practice, but also get things moving. Focus on small wins—things like fresh paint and clean school yards. Set up little experiments instead of grand transformations. Transformation is a scary word. It may even discourage people. It may also fuel cynicism. Little successive victories earn a lot of credit, and they inspire confidence. As the Jedi master Yoda instructed the young Luke Skywalker: “Try not! Do, or do not. There is no try.”

Lesson Four: Leadership Development Is Self-Development

Self-awareness is central to being a successful leader. And this is precisely what Dan Kaplan, president of Hertz Equipment Rental Corporation, told us: “I know who I was, who I am, and where I want to be. So, in other words, I know the level of commitment that I am prepared to make and why I am prepared to make that level of commitment, personally. I know what it takes to achieve success for me. That success for me comes from paying a big price, putting a lot of work and lot of sacrifice behind it.”

Kaplan's words reflect an ancient commandment: Know thyself. Warren Bennis called the “management of self” (knowing your skills and deploying them effectively) a leadership commandment. “Management of self is critical,” he says, because “without it, leaders and managers can do more harm than good. Like incompetent doctors, incompetent managers can make life worse, make people sicker and less vital … some managers give themselves heart attacks and nervous breakdowns; still worse, many are carriers, causing their employees to be ill.”⁶

At Santa Clara University, we take as our mission the education of leaders with competence, conscience, and compassion. Nothing particularly unique about the competence piece, but our attempts to make people more conscientious and compassionate require an exploration both of the inner territory and of our relationship with others. Conscience informs and develops the ethical and moral dimension inherent in all human beings, regardless of their religious or cultural background. Compassion nurtures the human desire and will to fashion a more humane and just world. In the framework of leadership, it is making a difference in the world and in the lives of others. As Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, explained: “To know and not to do, is not to know.”

Self-knowledge is an essential part of becoming a leader. To become a leader you must become yourself, and this prescription is one of life's most difficult. “But until you know yourself, strengths and weaknesses, know what you want to do and why you want to do it, you cannot succeed in any but the most superficial sense of the word.”⁷ The better you know yourself, the better you can make sense of the often incomprehensible and conflicting messages received every day: Do this, do that. Buy this, buy that. Support this, support that. Decide this, decide that. We need internal guidance to navigate the permanent white water of today's environment.

Diane Dreher, professor of English at Santa Clara and chair of our Faculty Senate, a few years ago wrote a book titled The Tao of Personal Leadership. In this book she describes the process of “leveling up one's self concept” and points out that new experiences test us in many ways. They draw on our internal resources, our knowledge, our skills, and an ever evolving sense of self. She tells a story about a friend of hers who was climbing mountains in Peru, pausing periodically to survey the majestic view and reflect on her life. The progressive ascent became a process of self-discovery.⁸

Leaders take us to places we've never been before, but before we can get anyone else signed up for the journey, we've got to convince ourselves to venture forth. We've got to find out what's important to us. What we care about. We've got to find our voice. As Anne Lamott, in her book Bird by Bird, observed: “and the truth of your experience can only come through in your own voice.”⁹

In his witty book Management of the Absurd, psychologist and CEO Richard Farson writes: “In both parenthood and management, it's not so much what we do as what we are that counts…. There is no question that parents can and should do worthwhile things for their children, but it's what they are that really matters…. The same dynamic occurs in management and leadership. People learn—and respond to—what we are.”¹⁰

All of the new and growing number of books these days on soul, spirit, and spirituality in the workplace are ultimately about finding one's voice. The failure to do so means we often end up with a vocabulary that belongs to someone else; we're the proverbial Theory X managers with a Theory Y vocabulary. These managers talk the talk, rather than walking the talk.

Finding a voice is most definitely not a technique. It's a matter of time and searching—soul searching. As an artist friend once explained to us: “There are really three periods in an artist's life. In the first, we paint exterior landscapes. In the second, we paint interior landscapes. And in the third period, we paint our selves. This is when you begin to have your own unique style.”

The same sense of appreciation about one's work, one's expressions, and one's life applies to the art of leadership. Most leadership development is still at stage one. It's still mostly about painting exterior landscapes, mostly about copying other people's styles and trying to mimic the great leaders. If we're to “level-up” and move beyond stage one, we need to enter the dark inner territory so that we can emerge from it into the light where we find our own true voice.

In search of excellence—an important book title at the end of the twentieth century—in a meta sense echoes the right call. Because it is not for us to be “in search of perfection.” Perfection is neither natural nor particularly human. What is natural is to keep on growing throughout life. Consider this hypothetical story about a talented baseball player. As a batter, this man was phenomenal: He always got a hit, and every hit was a home run. And as a pitcher, he struck out every batter. So what would be the consequence of such a player? Simply put: To ruin the game!¹¹

The moral is that like baseball, the leadership game is not for perfect people. If we somehow managed to become perfect, no one would let us play with them. What makes the game exciting is the process of discovery, the unexpected, the probabilities. And that's exactly what the future holds in store for all of us.

Keep On Learning

Learning is an essential part of the leadership process for everyone involved. What carries us through life is our ability to grow, to discover new possibilities in ourselves, in others, and in our worlds. Successful artists, inventors, scientists, executives, and leaders in any field never lose that spirit. When they don't know what they're doing, they embrace the experience, realizing with every fiber of their being that they're learning and that learning is what life is all about. Just like fruit on the tree, when we stop growing, we start to rot.

That's precisely why leadership has to be everyone's business. Why leadership will always be a relationship. How action brings forth the leader within. And, in the end, how leadership is about developing oneself to be an instrument for making a difference. And these principles ring true—whatever the future has in store for all of us.