CHAPTER 1
Breakthrough to a Paradox

Great ideas, it is said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps, then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope.¹

ALBERT CAMUS

No one knows what triggers a revelation, or even an insight. Some say it is a mechanical combination of existing ideas. Others argue that inspiration comes from beyond, a luminous gift of God. Many believe dreams conspire with the non-conscious mind to dramatize fresh possibilities. Breakthroughs often come when the mind is relaxed and the doors of perception are open.

Bob Greenleaf had the revelation of his life while driving an Arizona highway, his wife at his side, with a sense of frustration gnawing at him. It happened in the unsettled October of 1968. America’s university campuses were in an uproar because of the Vietnam war, racial unrest, riots, assassinations, and the alienation and fierce idealism of youth. College presidents were worried; faculties were divided.

The charter class of Prescott College in Prescott, Arizona was entering its junior year. The school had been founded in 1966 as an experiment in the advanced educational theories of the time: experiential learning, personal development through independent living (no residence halls), open classrooms that welcomed adults with established careers and recent high school graduates, opportunities for independent study, and shared governance. Ronald Nairn, a teacher in his first administrative job, was the school’s president. He invited an unlikely consultant—sixty-four-year-old Robert K. Greenleaf—to facilitate ten days of voluntary afternoon seminars with freshman students on the subject of leadership.

Before beginning a career as consultant, Greenleaf had served as head of management research at AT&T. He retired in 1964 to found the Center for Applied Ethics and begin a peripatetic journey among the leaders of America’s universities, corporations, and foundations. Greenleaf had gray, thinning hair and a certain severe look that was softened by his devilish wit and a habit of listening intently, often responding with a twinkle in the eye rather than with words. Bob’s wife Esther was with him in Arizona. She was a first-rate visual artist, Bob’s intellectual equal, and his lifelong teacher about the practical uses of intuition.

The consultancy did not go well. Even here, in the fresh Arizona air full of possibility, there was conflict in 1968. The faculty, up in arms about the very idea of student seminars, exerted influence to sabotage the project. When the misadventure ended, Bob and Esther began the drive to their next destination in California. Bob was frustrated. He accepted the lion’s share of the blame. A natural introvert, he always welcomed the opportunity to be alone with Esther, with whom he could be quiet or think out loud. He told Esther the experience was “a total failure. I couldn’t get over to young people the notion of their opportunities to lead. Maybe I should just start to write and let it go where it wants to go.”²

Earlier that year, Bob had given a series of lectures to the Dartmouth Alumni College on the topic “Leadership and the Individual.” In them, he criticized universities for fostering anti-leadership attitudes.³ By Bob’s reckoning, universities had lost sight of their purpose, which he believed was to serve the needs of students. Worse, they tended to kill spirit, the deep impulse of the soul, the gift of ultimate mystery. Without spirit, which made life worthwhile, and without overarching goals to direct the energy of spirit, universities could be coercive, staff and students cynical, and consultants irrelevant.

The car droned westward, following the weaving the roads that would take the Greenleafs from the mile-high town of Prescott, which was experiencing its driest season in twenty years, to the moist, sea-level city of San Francisco. Both sat in quiet reflection. For Robert Greenleaf, reflection was not so much an active process of thinking about details of an issue as a mental emptying to make space for his whole self to contribute. He trusted the deep nudgings of intuition. For him, this was not a mystical approach to problems, but a practical one. Then, as had happened so many times before in his life, Bob had a flash of insight that changed things forever. He remembered the Hermann Hesse book Journey to the East, and the story of Leo. The narrator of the book described how Leo, who began the tale as a menial servant to a traveling band of seekers, was in fact the leader of the mystical order the group was seeking. Suddenly, a two-word phrase popped into his mind: servant-leader. That said it all. It described what he was trying to communicate to the people at Prescott; they should all lead by serving each other. True servants operate out of love. True leaders seek to serve those who are led. People who serve are, in fact, leaders and followers. This one paradoxical phrase seemed to sum up the goal of his entire career: to lead through service and encourage people and institutions to serve first. In fact, it described—in spite of all his personal foibles and internal contradictions—the underlying theme of his whole life.

Esther knew that this idea, like so many proposed by her unusual husband, would steep in his mind until it found the right time for expression. He treated ideas like she treated the visual images of her art, using them to strike out in certain directions to see what happened. Even though an end result is in mind, one does not block the gifts of inspiration by planning each detail in advance.

The servant-leader idea matured more quickly than most. Soon after they returned to their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Bob’s internal clock told him it was time to sit down and write. He let the words flow with little concern for academic methods of linear outlining or exposition. He called his little essay, The Servant as Leader.

Robert Greenleaf didn’t know it at the time, but from the date that seminal work was published in 1970 until his death in 1990, he would continue to write more essays—and a novel—on the servant theme. He would do more than write, though. He would teach, encourage, listen, reflect, and disseminate ideas like a bumblebee on a life-sustaining 16pollinating mission. Bob Greenleaf’s work was destined to directly affect religion, education, government, and for-profit and not-for-profit organizations and foundations. His thinking would inspire efforts as diverse as the Center for Creative Leadership in North Carolina; the Yokefellow Institute in Richmond, Indiana; the Lilly Endowment in Indianapolis; and the TORO Company in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Before his death, Bob’s ideas would advance the disciplines of management theory, organizational development, service learning, assessment theory, and leadership studies, to name just a few.

None of this activity was part of a master plan when he sent two hundred copies of The Servant as Leader to selected friends and colleagues around the country for their thoughtful responses. He was simply doing what he had always done—responding to the promptings of an inner gyroscope. He knew he had hit upon a catchy phrase—servant-leader—but could not suspect that it would allow him to turn his life’s experiences into a practical philosophy of service, excellence and inspiration for others.

His own life had embraced all the elements of a servant philosophy, plus a few darker themes. It had done so since his earliest days in Terre Haute, Indiana, a city and a state that offered glory and paradox that paralleled his own inner struggles.