Love

Human beings have always created communities, beginning with the extended families that formed the basic social unit of human existence for more than a million years. Recently (ten thousand years ago), with the invention of agriculture, people began to give up the nomadic way of life. Humans began to stay in one place, store wealth, form large organizations, and create settlements and societies. The enduring basis for all civilization, however, lies in the formation of attachments to one another, and these loyalties are based upon the ability to love, care, or take interest in other people. The capacity for family attachment serves as the foundation for social living. And the building block for family attachment is the mammalian capacity to nurture and defend offspring.

The challenge presented by the increasing complexity of civilization during the last ten thousand years has been the extension of our sphere of loyalties beyond the family, beyond the town, beyond the tribe. Indeed, as the world enters the third millennium, humanity is exploring and experiencing the risks and opportunities in the globalization of human societies. The European Union, for example, is a bold experiment in creating an architecture within which the diversity of nations can thrive. Can people sustain loyalties so diffuse as these, across so many boundaries of culture, ethnicity, faith, language, and historical conflict? The scourge of terrorism that struck the United States in September 2001 is one of many horrible testaments to the difficulty of this challenge.

In this sense, the human enterprise is an experiment in love and community. As we learn to tolerate and then enjoy so much diversity, we strive to create communities in which more and more of our members can thrive together. When a CEO delights in corporate success, enabling the creation of new jobs, new wealth, or new sources of efficiency or pleasure, in some essential way the sense of meaningfulness comes from having made a difference in the lives of other people: customers, employees, and shareholders. Making such a difference, at its root, taps into the gratifications of love.

At Medtronic, the highly successful company that makes cardiac pacemakers, defibrillators, and other medical devices, shareholder value grew from 1985 to 2001 at a compound rate of 37 percent per year. The CEO, Bill George, known in the press for boldly declaring at the annual shareholders meeting, “Shareholders come third,” puts it this way: “Medtronic is not in the business of maximizing shareholder value. We are in the business of maximizing value to the patients we serve. Shareholder value comes from giving superior service to customers because you have impassioned employees serving them.” As he tells it, “The Medtronic mission—restoring people to full life—transcends the everyday struggles, the battles for market share, the vicissitudes of the stock market, the regular changes in the executive ranks. Its light beams on the company’s 25,000 employees like the North Star, providing a constant reference point against which each of us can calibrate our internal compass.”³

The compass heading that orients people most directly, even when you get blown off course, is loving and being loved. That’s the mammalian experience, the mother’s attachment to her nursing child, from which human beings have developed a generalizable capacity for love at ever-greater distances from home. The contribution of your work may seem less direct than that of the Medtronic folks, who literally keep hearts ticking, but you need only scratch the surface of your imagination to see that your successes put you back in touch with the pride of your parents, teachers, family, or friends. Success serves as a proxy for their love. In other words, an important part, perhaps the very heart, of feeling successful comes from reexperiencing the bonds of those you love.

If the acts of leadership, available to all of us, are such a potent source of meaning, then it is worth considering again the words with which we began this book. Every day, opportunities for leadership present themselves to us. Why do we refuse most of them?

We have devoted most of this book to exploring the dangers of leadership that make us hold back, as well as ways to diminish these obstacles and lessen the perils. In our work with thousands of men and women over more than thirty years, two final reasons for hesitation appear again and again.

• People get stuck in the myth of measurement.
• People forget that the form of the contribution does not matter.

The Myth of Measurement

For some people, stepping out on the line is worth the risk only if success can be seen, touched, felt, and, most of all, counted. But trying to take satisfaction in life from the numbers you ring up is ultimately no more successful than making survival your goal.

Meaning cannot be measured. Yet we live immersed in a world of measurement so pervasive that even many of our religious institutions measure success, significantly, by market share. Who’s winning in the missionary competition? Catholics, mainline Protestants, Mormons, Evangelicals, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus? How many Jews have left the fold?

We even witness religious organizations distorting their mission to mean “reaching more people,” as if souls were a measurable commodity. Indeed, the mission of bringing the applications of spirit, which is by nature beyond measure, to our daily efforts to live good and honorable lives seems estranged in the competition that measurement fosters. All too often, “mission” is something we do to outsiders, not something that drives the work inside the community itself. We seem to forget at times that “If you save one life, you save the world.”⁴

Of course, measurement is a profoundly useful device, but it cannot tell us what makes life worth living. The challenge is to use measurement every day, knowing all the while that we cannot measure that which is of essential value. In medicine, for instance, we often have to engage in triage because we don’t have the resources or the time to treat everyone needing help: We select those with the best chance of benefiting from whatever help we can give. And sadly, those with the worst odds get the least help. But one cannot imagine practicing medicine without the tools of measurement to assess blood pressure, heart rate, blood chemistries, and so forth. We save lives with these tools. In business and public policy, we continuously measure the value of our products and respond accordingly to increase value. In our household budgets, we allocate money to those activities that we value most. Yet, however useful these tools are, they mislead us when we apply them indiscriminately by habit.

Do many believe that when it is their turn to pass on, the Angels of Judgment will ask them, “Why did you teach 5 children to read, and not 16? Why did you create 803 jobs, and not 23,421? Why did you save 433 lives, and not 718?” Historians estimate that Herbert Hoover saved more than 100,000 lives by organizing emergency relief during World War I. Should this matter less in light of his failure to restore the economy as president of the United States after the stock market crash of 1929 and during the Great Depression that followed? We have learned greatly from his presidential mistakes, but can anyone assess or diminish the value of his life efforts?

Before graduating from Columbia University, Ron went to speak with one of the great twentieth-century philosophers of science, Professor Ernst Nagel. Ron asked, “What questions do you ask?” Elderly in his years and gentle in his demeanor, Nagel replied, “I have been asking, ‘What can be measured?’” Implying, of course, that not everything can be. Ron got excited: “Oh, as with Shakespeare when Juliet declares to Romeo, ‘… the more I give to thee, The more I have….’”⁵

We have rarely met a human being who, after years of professional life, has not bought into the myth of measurement and been debilitated by it. After all, there is powerful pressure in our culture to measure the fruits of our labors, and we feel enormous pride as we take on “greater” responsibility and gain “greater” authority, wealth, and prestige. And well we should, to a degree. But using measurement as a device is not the same as believing that measurement captures the essential value of anything. You cannot measure the good that you do.

Perhaps no activity in the United States teaches more children about the arts of measurement than baseball. Indeed, every part of the game is measured, and every player is a walking set of “stats.” Kids throughout this country memorize and traffic in these numbers.

By statistical accounting, Hank Greenberg was one of the greatest baseball players of his day, and fans throughout the 1930s and 1940s kept a running tab on his stats. Between 1937 and 1947, excluding the war years (Greenberg was one of the first major league players to enlist), he hit more home runs than anyone else in baseball. His career batting average, RBI totals, and home runs made him a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame. He is still among the all-time leaders in several hitting categories, including his tie for first with an average of .925 runs batted in per game. Elected into the Hall of Fame in 1956, he received 85 percent of the votes. In a sport where measurement is an obsession, Greenberg’s numbers were outstanding, among the best of his era, or any era for that matter. Yet one of his major accomplishments, one of his great contributions to the game, was totally immeasurable.

Greenberg had played his entire career with the Detroit Tigers. After the war though he had clearly lost a step or two, he was still hitting well, having led the league in both home runs and RBIs. The Tigers had finished in a respectable second place. But after the 1946 season, in part based on a misunderstanding between Greenberg and Tigers’ owner Walter Briggs, the Tigers shockingly and unceremoniously placed him on waivers, giving up their rights to keep him. None of the American League team owners claimed him, obviously suggesting that Briggs had gotten an agreement from them in advance. The National League Pittsburgh Pirates picked up his contract. For one of the greats of the game, what could possibly be the meaning in such a degrading end to a career? He went from a contending team to one at the bottom of the standings; from the American League to the National League; from Detroit, where he had spent his whole career, to Pittsburgh, where he knew no one. Who would want to finish out an outstanding career so displaced?

But the year was 1947, the year that Jackie Robinson broke the color line by signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers and becoming the first black person to play major league baseball. All around the league, fans and opposing players treated Robinson to vicious abuse. Greenberg, a Jew, had been subjected to considerable heckling in his own career, but having become through his persistence and success a revered figure in the game, he was now playing out his days with his new team and making the very best of it. While he knew it was tougher on Robinson than it had been on him, he had been subjected to mean-spirited racial abuse, and so he identified with Robinson. “I know how he feels,” Greenberg said early in the season.⁶

Robinson and the Dodgers came to Pittsburgh to play the Pirates for the first time in mid-May. From the start, Jackie Robinson was razzed and insulted, not only by the fans, but also by some of Greenberg’s teammates on the Pirates.

Here’s the way Greenberg recalled the atmosphere that day: “Jackie came into Pittsburgh on a Friday afternoon, and the place was jammed. We were in last place and the Dodgers were in first. Our Southern ballplayers, a bunch of bench jockeys, kept yelling at Jackie, ‘Hey, coal mine, hey coal mine, hey you black coal mine, we’re going to get you. You ain’t gonna play no baseball … you dumb black son of a bitch.’”

Early in the game, Robinson reached first base. He took a lead off the base, and then had to charge back when the pitcher tried to keep him close to prevent a steal. Robinson slid hard into the first baseman, Greenberg, demonstrating the kind of aggressive play that was to make him a superstar and member of the Hall of Fame.

The crowd quieted. Ordinarily, a player in Greenberg’s position might say something aggressive in return, even cast a menacing glance. At the least, he would step back, leaving the player on the ground to get up and brush himself off. In response to Robinson’s aggressive playing that year, many players in Pittsburgh and elsewhere would have become angry, taunting and swearing at Robinson as he got himself up.

But Greenberg did none of that. In a simple gesture, he leaned over, gave Robinson a hand, and helped him up. Everyone in the stands and on both benches could not help but notice.

The next time Robinson got to first base, he and Greenberg chatted, Greenberg asking him whether he had been hurt on the earlier play, telling him not to pay attention to the razzing and inviting him out to dinner that evening.

After the game, Robinson described Greenberg as a hero: “Class tells. It sticks out all over….”

Greenberg’s gesture meant not only a great deal to Robinson personally, but also helped put the Pirates and fans on notice that Robinson was here to stay. If he was OK with Greenberg, then he must be OK.

There is no way to quantify the value of Greenberg’s gesture. A career’s worth of home runs and RBIs gave him the credibility to make a difference to Robinson, baseball, and American society. The fans and his teammates took notice because the great “Hankus Pankus,” as he was nicknamed, stood up for justice. But it may also be that his actions during his final year, playing for a losing team, gave new context and meaning for the years that went before, meaning that could never be captured by statistics that merely measured all the home runs and RBIs of a career.

Measurement is an extraordinarily useful tool. We don’t mean to diminish its utility. Three quarters of the courses at the school where we teach are based on measurement: cost-benefit analysis, economic analysis, policy analysis, financial analysis. The same is true in medical schools and business schools. But measurement is simply one artifice among many that cannot capture the essence of what makes our lives and organizations worthwhile.

If you buy into the myth of measurement, what happens to you after being in a job for twenty or thirty years? After becoming a big and important person with a big and important role, what happens when you lose that role? You are likely to think the next job, the next form of your work, has to be just as “big and important.” Otherwise, it isn’t worth doing; otherwise, you cannot find yourself. Having bought into the myth of measurement, you cannot define new modes of loving and care, giving and mattering, unless they can be measured in the same terms as your previous work. We all know people who shriveled up inside after retiring or leaving a career because they could not find the big next thing to do.

Fortunately, some people escape this trap.

Ron’s father, Milton, was considered one of the ten living masters of his craft—neurosurgery. He designed surgical instruments used by brain surgeons around the world. Directly and indirectly, he saved thousands of lives.

When Milton retired, he returned to one of the activities that he loved in his youth—stargazing. But finding the range of books on stargazing unsatisfying, he decided to write a book of his own.⁷ Written with children in mind, Milton dedicated the book to his seven grandchildren, which of course included Ron’s two kids, David and Anni.

On Halloween night, soon after the book’s publication, Ron’s parents were visiting. The children went out trick-or-treating with an old family friend, Rick Stemple, a music teacher who used to room in their house during his student years. At the end of a lively evening, as Rick was about to leave, Ron decided to give him a copy of his father’s new book as a gift. As the family all crowded around, Rick thumbed through the book and then turned to Milton and asked him for a pen. Milton smiled, thinking about what he would write as he autographed the book for Rick.

Rick took the pen, but he did not hand the book to Milton. Instead, he got down on one knee, opened the book to the dedication page where the names of the grandchildren were listed, and asked David and Anni to sign the book.

Ron looked over and saw tears come to his father’s eyes as he watched his young grandchildren sign their names, in their one-inch-high script, on the dedication page. After forty years of clinical medicine, with all of the lives he had saved, nothing for Milton could compare to the meaning of that moment.

The Form Doesn’t Matter

Just as measurement will distract you from truer appreciations of life, the form of your contribution is far less important than the content. In Shakespeare’s last great tragedy, King Lear, Lear himself is caught up in the role and forms of the royal court, so much so that he rejects Cordelia, the sincere daughter, finding her expressions of love too simple and sparse. Misled by pandering and pretensions of love, he bestows his kingdom upon his other two daughters. When Lear finally comes to his senses, he asks, “Where have I been? Where am I?” But by then it is too late: He loses both the kingdom and Cordelia.⁸

How are we to keep from making Lear’s mistake, only to discover too late the difference between form and substance?

Early in his career, Ron worked at the Life Extension Institute, a health care facility in New York City that provides physical examinations for top business executives. He talked at length with many corporate presidents and vice presidents who looked back as they approached their late fifties at having devoted themselves to “winning in the marketplace.” They had often succeeded remarkably, yet many were having difficulty making sense of their lives in light of what they had given up. They felt troubled, and some had begun to wonder if it were possible to create for their businesses a greater sense of mission. Some of these top managers described, with insight, the risk of questioning corporate purposes. They had seen predecessors and colleagues who, upon expressing the desire to bend the organization to larger social purposes or even create customer value, were “bumped upstairs” to the board—put out to pasture where they could be “visionaries on their own time.” In the meanwhile, the company would recruit or promote the next hard-charging star in his or her forties with a single-minded focus on the bottom line. Often the cycle continued, from generation to generation.

These people felt “cheated.” They had kept their eyes on the prize all right, and had reached the goal, only to find it wanting. The accomplishments for which they had sacrificed seemed empty. They were living with the discomfort of the growing gap between the goals that had been driving them and the aspirations that would make their lives worthwhile. They began to distinguish between form and substance, and many were now looking for the latter.

More recently we have come to know young high-tech billionaires who are asking themselves the same question but far earlier in their lives. What for? These folks are lucky, not just because they’ve made their money early on, but because they’ve discovered the essential questions early on.

When young people begin thinking about professional life, the world seems full of options. They believe that the newspaper ads will yield dozens of interesting and meaningful jobs. As they get older, chance, seemingly random events, friends and family, an inspiring teacher, an immediate job opening—all determine much of what people choose to do. And before long, they often become wedded to that choice and married to a professional role.

Typically, that choice works well for a while, maybe even a long while. Then, sometimes, a crisis hits. You might feel like you’ve been knocked off your horse. Perhaps you have reached the end of the line in a successful career, or you’re a doctor and the structure and values of the health care environment have changed around you. Maybe your company has been taken over by a huge conglomerate and you are pushed aside. Perhaps you’re actually fired from your job, or you’re secure but something is gnawing away at you inside, suggesting that this is just not right for you, or enough for you, even though it has put food on the family table for twenty years. Or you’ve stayed at home to raise the kids, and now your nest is empty. Perhaps you lose reelection, or your boss does, and you are out of a job.

People experience disorientation at those times because they’ve mistaken form for essence. They’ve come to believe that the form of the work is what makes it important. They have identified themselves as their roles: I am the mayor, I’m a stay-at-home mom, I am a business executive. They confuse the form of their participation in life with the essence of its meaning and purpose.

If the essential ingredient of meaning in life is the experience of connection and contribution, then part of the magic of life in our organizations and communities lies in the human capacity to generate many forms for its expression. Meaning derives from finding ways, rather than any one particular way, to love, to contribute to the worldly enterprise, to enhance the quality of life for people around you.

In his best-selling memoir, Tuesdays with Morrie, author Mitch Albom recounts his visits with his mentor, Morris Schwartz, during Schwartz’s last year of life. At one point Schwartz asks, rhetorically, “You know what gives you satisfaction?” “What?” responds Albom. “Offering others what you have to give.”

“You sound like a Boy Scout,” Albom observes, and that starts Morrie off again.

“I don’t mean money, Mitch. I mean your time. Your concern. Your storytelling. It’s not so hard…. This is how you start to get respect, by offering something that you have. There are plenty of places to do this. You don’t have to have a big talent.”⁹

Whatever vehicle you use is less consequential than realizing the continual possibilities for service that will surround you, right up until the end of your time. Morrie Schwartz continued to contribute even as his life ebbed away, teaching Albom how to die at the same time he was teaching him how to live.

Fundamentally, the form doesn’t matter. Any form of service to others is an expression, essentially, of love. And because the opportunities for service are always present, there are few, if any, reasons that anyone should lack for rich and deep experiences of meaning in life. The most common failing, perhaps, is Lear’s failing: We get caught up in the form, and lose sight of what’s essential and true.

When Jimmy Carter left the White House a defeated and depressed man, his renewal took forms of service that no one would have imagined for a former president of the United States. He began in a tangible, straightforward way: building houses for poor people with the organization Habitat for Humanity. He then began to build upon his Camp David success, in which he had negotiated the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement in 1978, by exploring ways to help communities and societies resolve their conflicts. Those efforts broadened to a variety of initiatives to serve emerging democracies. Now, many years after leaving the White House, Carter has made an undeniable contribution to people. To try to compare it to his record in the White House would be to miss the point completely. Deeply rooted in a personal philosophy of loving service, his capacity to create new forms of meaning is an inspiration for anyone in the midst of change.

Few roles are more mesmerizing than occupying the White House. But even less glamorous forms can be just as seductive. When people came to see Marty in the Massachusetts governor’s office to explore opportunities for work in state government, they often had great difficulty imagining a way to contribute professionally other than through the form to which they were accustomed. They could see themselves heading a state agency, but they could not imagine themselves volunteering in a state hospital. Finding meaningful work became easily confused with all of the accoutrements of the job—access to the governor, title, salary, status, or size of the office.

Of course, these aspects of any job matter, not only because they are fun, but also for the leverage they may give in mobilizing action. But frequently, it’s not the instrumental import of these forms and trimmings that matters to people as much as the symbolic import. The forms become a misleading proxy for the value and essence of what we do. As a consequence, not only do people lose sight of the essential opportunity, but they also allow their experience of self-worth and meaning to get tied to the wrapping, rather than the gift.

When Jerry Rice temporarily retired from the National Football League as one of the greatest wide receivers ever to play the game, he started a foundation for kids. To raise money, he gathered a group of his buddies from the NFL and formed a basketball team that played exhibition games around the country. Ron watched one of these games while on vacation with his family, marveling at the fun these men were having playing fairly good basketball against a state all-star team, lighting up the eyes of countless kids, and raising money. Jerry looked tired, to be sure—they had played three games in three cities in two days, and he clearly missed the thrill he had known as a pro player since he soon returned to the NFL. But he also looked pretty proud of the transition he had made and the meaning he was producing, in contrast to so many of his athletic colleagues who appear thoroughly lost for decades after leaving the limelight.

Having purpose differs from having any particular purpose. You get meaning in life from the purposes that you join. But after working in a particular discipline, industry, or job for twenty or thirty or forty years, you begin to be wedded to that specific purpose, that particular form.

When you lose that purpose, that specific form, you think you have no meaningful options. We know a seventy-seven-year-old man, Bennie, who can retire with full salary and medical benefits. He’s been in the same job for forty years. He no longer has the strength to do the tasks that go with the job. He refuses to quit, he says, because he does not know what he will do with his days.

Bennie fears retirement because he can’t redefine the purposes in his life. Minus the form, he thinks he will lose his source of meaning. But what Bennie really has lost is something that he probably once had as a child: a sense of purpose. Children have generative power. They create meaning as they busily connect with whatever is happening. But grown-ups often forget that ability. They tend to lose that playful, adventuresome, creative generativity by which they can ask themselves: What’s worth doing today?

The vehicles we find for meaning obviously take some tangible form, and certainly that form matters in significant ways. Some jobs suit your interests, personality, skills, and temperament; others do not. The point here is not to diminish the importance of finding forms and taking roles that personally gratify you, but simply to rekindle that youthful capacity to imagine a host of possibilities. Then, when you are forced to compromise, or when you suffer a deep setback, you can recover your natural ability to generate new forms of meaningful expression.

. . .

Exercising leadership is a way of giving meaning to your life by contributing to the lives of others. At its best, leadership is a labor of love. Opportunities for these labors cross your path every day, though we appreciate through the scar tissue of our own experiences that seizing these opportunities takes heart.