Minding Gaps

A Teachable Moment on Humility for Leaders Everywhere

At the risk of alienating some of you, I have to express astonishment at the selection of President Barack Obama to receive the Nobel Peace Prize this year. In my estimation, the president does not deserve this honor. He himself came close to saying as much this morning. He may deserve it some day—all of us can pray that every president does—but he doesn’t deserve it yet.

I believe President Obama should respectfully decline it: in part to demonstrate the importance of humility in leadership, in part to throw a spotlight on more deserving leaders, and in part to emphasize that mere aspirations are not enough for credible leadership or for civilization's most important award. Humanity needs leaders who selflessly devote their entire lives to humanitarian ideals. It is they whom the Nobel Peace Prize should recognize and honor: the Dalai Lama, for example, and Mother Teresa and Albert Schweitzer, all of whom certainly did deserve the honor they received.

To be sure, the choice of recipients for the Nobel Peace Prize has often been controversial, as much by omission as by fact. No one questions the selection of Linus Pauling, Martin Luther King Jr., Lech Walesa, Nelson Mandela, or Elie Wiesel. But such pivotal figures as Mahatma Gandhi, Corazon Aquino, Eleanor Roosevelt, Pope John Paul II, Steve Biko, Dorothy Day, Ronald Reagan, and Cesar Chavez were never so honored, while the awards to Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, Al Gore, Le Duc Tho, and some others ignited a firestorm of criticism.

Rather, it is the simple question of whether anyone on the world stage so briefly as President Obama, and whose file of achievement is so thin, should receive this award, at the expense of others who have done so much more to deserve it. Note that the deadline for nominations for this year’s prize was on February 1, less than two weeks after Obama assumed office.

The will of Alfred Nobel, which endowed the Prizes, stipulated that the award be given only to living persons. Happily, quite a few living persons are fully deserving of it.

I think first of Morgan Tsvangirai, the courageous Zimbabwe opposition leader, whom I had the pleasure of meeting on a trip to South Africa some years ago. Tsvangirai has been risking life and limb to fight the forces of oppression in Zimbabwe for a decade or longer. Earlier this year, his wife and the mother of their six children was killed in a head-on auto collision; not coincidentally, auto “accidents” are the method of choice by Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe for stifling critics of his regime.

I think next of Václav Havel, the last president of Czechoslovakia before its dissolution and the first president of the Czech Republic. As much or more than Lech Walesa and Mikhail Gorbachev, both of whom were honored by the Nobel, Havel led millions of East Europeans to revolt against their calcified oppressors and eventually to demand democracy. (He could as well be honored by the Nobel Prize for Literature: He is the author of nearly two dozen acclaimed books and dramatic plays.)

I think also of George Mitchell, the former U.S. senator who brokered a peace between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland that led to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The Troubles had persisted for generations before the accord. At the time Senator Mitchell got involved, there was no realistic hope for peace anytime soon.

I think even of Greg Mortenson, the American mountain climber who has built hundreds of schools in rural Pakistan, for girls as well as boys. Mortenson’s book Three Cups of Tea chronicles his effort. Of special note, he was so impoverished when he began building the schools that he was sleeping in the back seat of his car. Imagine, a homeless man on one side of the planet building schools for children on the other side.

There are others, too numerous to be listed. Because of their courage, a number of benighted countries with a history of violence or oppression or neglect are on the cusp of change. To paraphrase poet Langston Hughes, these brave leaders have dared the dark to stand.

To my thinking, what we have here is one of those teachable moments that President Obama is always talking about. He should think about it all weekend, and he should ask himself whether he ought to accept this award at this time. Then, on Monday morning, he should write to the Nobel Committee to say he respectfully declines the award because so many others deserve it so much more.

Now that would exemplify humility in leadership, and it would truly rise to a teachable moment for leaders everywhere. Maybe, just maybe, a few leaders would realize that leadership isn't about themselves, after all.

 

Leaders Are Not Bullies, and Bullies Are Not Leaders

Here is an interesting column by Joe Nocera, published Saturday in The New York Times, that illustrates the differences between the work of leadership and the work of management.

It focuses on Kenneth Lewis, who announced his resignation a few days ago as chief executive of the Bank of America, the bank he helped build.

I claim no special insight or perspective on the gentleman. Nocera paints a picture of a self-absorbed, defensive, aloof tyrant. You can decide for yourself.

Several of Nocera’s observations stood out for me, however.

One was the striking contrast between Lewis and his mentor, Hugh L. McColl Jr., who nurtured a small North Carolina bank into a regional powerhouse that bought the San Francisco-based Bank of America for $65 billion in 1998 and moved its headquarters to Charlotte.

McColl was and remains a natural leader who relates well to people. He created a powerful sense of purpose in employees, and they worked fingers to the bone for him. Lewis was just the opposite: brusque, belligerent, bullying. Many employees came to loathe him. No leader can expect to be universally beloved. But every leader needs sufficient loyalty such that followers will give him the benefit of doubt. Lewis didn't have that. He didn't come close.

Another was a problem of performance and purse. You know the story. On his watch, Bank of America stock lost 13 percent of its value, while rival Wells Fargo gained 53 percent. Lewis paid himself well though: Over the last three years, he took home $60 million. “He was hideously overpaid for hideously bad performance,” said one critic, Nell Minow, who monitors corporate executives and boards.

Still another was the lack of succession. Nocera observes that, in the resignation announcement, Lewis said he would remain as chief executive through the end of the year because no one is groomed to succeed him. That’s an obvious mark of a weak leader; it tells you the chief executive is fearful of any threat to his power. Every leader should know who will succeed him, and indeed should take pride in the fact he has successfully cultivated someone who is capable of stepping up.

But you tell me what you think. Perhaps you have a different perspective.

Quote / Unquote: Benjamin Disraeli on the Paradox of Leadership

 

Last week we introduced another new feature, which will appear irregularly but frequently. To be known as Quote/Unquote, it will offer a simple, noteworthy quotation on some aspect of leadership, communication, or business. In most cases we will also provide context, comment, or questions to stir discussion. Occasionally, however, the quotation will stand alone.

Our inaugural feature quoted the British novelist Charles Dickens, who presciently imagined some of the difficulties with email—140 years ago. (Scroll down to the September 11 post.) Today we quote another Brit from the same era, Benjamin Disraeli, who was both an author and a Conservative Party political leader. Not incidentally, he was also a wit; scores of his incisive quotations have survived the decades and are as relevant today as they were in the 19th century.

Benjamin Disraeli was twice the prime minister of England during the reign of Queen Victoria. An intimate friend of the monarch, and the only person of Jewish heritage ever to serve as prime minister, Disraeli intuitively knew that compelling leadership is a kind of spiritual transaction between the leader and the led. Moreover, he understood and appreciated a paradox of leadership: that leaders must follow, and followers must lead.

In one of his most famous remarks, Disraeli said:

I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?

 

Take a moment to think about that. Now, ask yourself these questions:

• What exactly do you think Disraeli is driving at?

• Is he suggesting that leaders should abdicate the responsibility of leading?

• Is he calling for anarchy or a kind of mob rule?

• What relevance, if any, does Disraeli's remark have for leadership in business generally? For leadership at your level (enterprise, division, department, team) more particularly?

• Should leaders be more humble than prideful? Why or why not?

• Why should, if at all, leaders follow the people they are nominally leading?

• Doesn’t that undermine the leader's role?

• In a modern organization—a large business enterprise, or one of its divisions, or one of its operating teams—what would this look like and sound like?

• What would be its practical impact?

Strategic Communication: Getting Back to the Basics

I couldn’t agree more with Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff. Every corporate CEO and every communication consultant and practitioner should think hard about Admiral Mullen’s message, too. It would do business a lot of good.

I’m referring to the admiral’s recent essay on strategic communication. Published in Joint Forces Quarterly, a military journal, the essay is a broadside on facile, fast-talking communication. Mullen is naturally concerned with communication seeking to promote American military and foreign policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But as you read his essay, think in terms of corporate communication. Try to distill the admiral’s thinking to your own business challenges. It will be well worth your while.

Let me pause for a note on terminology. Admiral Mullen and I define “strategic communication” differently. We have our own mental constructs for it, too, and they bear heavily on our thinking. I have long championed strategic communication as a systematic key to authenticity and credibility, whereas Mullen scorns it as so much propaganda. So we’re coming at the issue from quite different points of view, but we’re both striving for greater authenticity and credibility. That's the important thing.

Having said all that, I find the admiral’s thesis compelling. Indeed, in spite of our differences over terminology, his argument is actually in complete alignment with my own thinking.

Before proceeding any further, you should read the essay in full. It’ll take only five or ten minutes.

Now as you can see, Mullen delivers a blistering attack on the use of verbal and visual messages that are out of synch with reality on the ground, and he is critical of mass communication as a substitute for genuine, sincere relationships. He writes: “Our messages lack credibility because we haven’t invested enough in building trust and relationships, and we haven’t always delivered on promises.”

Mullen goes on to define good communication as “having the right intent up front and letting our actions speak for themselves. We shouldn’t care if people don’t like us; that isn’t the goal. The goal is credibility. And we earn that over time.”

A little further on, he writes: “Most strategic communication problems are not communication problems at all. They are policy and execution problems. Each time we fail to live up to our values or don’t follow up on a promise, we look more and more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we are.”

Years ago, I had a mentor who stressed that the secret to good communication was doing the right thing and getting caught at it. To me, that is strategic communication. In the admiral’s view, it’s good leadership. The semantics aren’t as important as the judgment, and Mullen’s judgment is exactly right.

It is indeed a matter of getting back to the basics. Whatever we call it, let’s get on with it.

The Power of Purpose

Business leaders can derive one more lesson from the life and times of the late Senator Edward Kennedy. It is the power of purpose.

Kennedy stumbled upon his own purpose—a lifetime in the United States Senate, noble as that is—only after a disastrous campaign for the Democratic presidential campaign in 1979 and 1980. A single moment in time forced the issue.

That moment came in a nationally televised interview with CBS correspondent Roger Mudd. I’m sure you can find tapes of the interview on YouTube, but anyone who watched it can remember the moment clearly. Indeed, those who remember watching the interview know exactly what I am talking about.

Mudd asked Kennedy a simple question: Why do you want to be president? It was a slow softball pitch, the kind of question any politician hopes to be asked on national television. He should have had a quick, incisive, memorable response.

Instead, he stumbled. He hemmed and hawed. For long, silent seconds, millions of Americans watched in disbelief. He didn’t have an answer.

By the time he did begin a response, people were listening intently to see if he had anything of substance to say. It quickly became clear he did not. The meandering response eventually amounted to a litany of platitudes about the glory and blessings of America. As one, undecided voters came to the conclusion he was running for president because his older brothers had run for president.

Now, in fact, Kennedy did have a compelling cause for his candidacy. Historians tell us that President Carter, the Democratic incumbent, had promised Kennedy to pursue health care reform and had not done so. Kennedy was running to put health care back on the table.

But anyone watching the interview with Roger Mudd didn’t hear that. All that television viewers saw and heard was a politician from a family of politicians who couldn’t answer the simplest question about the purpose of his campaign against a fellow Democrat for the highest office in the land.

What does all this have to do with business? Plenty.

Every one of your stakeholders—employee, customer, investor, banker—needs to know your own unique business purpose. They need to know why you are in business. Moreover, this purpose must meet the needs of your core stakeholder: your customer. Thus, your stated purpose for being in business cannot be to make money, although everyone knows that making money is essential to any business’s survival, let alone prosperity and growth. Rather, your unique business purpose must speak to satisfying your customer.

If you are a mid-level manager or a front-line supervisor, the same thing holds true. You may not be in a position to define the purpose of the enterprise, but you are in a position to interpret and apply the purpose to the work your team does. Here again, that interpretation of purpose must go to the reason your customer walks in the front door. Never forget why the customer needs you.

Notice I use the word unique. Just as every company needs a unique selling proposition, your purpose must be unique. Most companies have a mission statement that serves as a statement of purpose. But few such statements are compelling. In fact, most sound like one another. Resorting to boilerplate rhetoric doesn’t work. A compelling purpose must capture the difference you bring to the marketplace.

Once you and your organization have defined your unique purpose, you must articulate it with clarity, cogency, and continuity. It should be simple and to the point, and it should be repeated endlessly. Your customers should associate it with your company, and your employees and investors should know it.

Then, let your purpose drive your business. Let it drive your policies, your budgeting, your staffing, your marketing, your leadership. Any decision of substance should trace back to your unique purpose.

For discussion, ask yourself:

• Telling the truth, does your mission statement sound like every other company’s?

• What exactly do you do for customers that no other business can do?

• What exactly do you do better than almost anyone else?

• Why should a customer prefer doing business with you?

• How do your internal systems (budgeting, staffing, controls) reflect your unique business purpose?

• How does your purpose ensure your growth?

The Power of Stories, and the Power of Redemption

The airwaves this morning are filled with remembrances of Edward M. Kennedy, the liberal lion of the United States Senate who died late last night at the age of 77.

His 47-year tenure in the Senate is one of the longest ever. Beginning in 1962, he was in the forefront of legislation on social, health, and education issues. Objectively speaking, it is no exaggeration to say that America is a different society because of his work.

I have no special insight or homage to offer on the late senator’s behalf. Many others will fill that need quite ably. I do, however, want to take note of a couple of things that could easily be lost in all the encomia.

First, we would do well to observe the power of stories here. It is only mid-morning as I write, and already I have heard fifteen, maybe twenty stories about something that Senator Kennedy said or did, and that, until now, only a handful of people knew. Think back to the last funeral or memorial you attended, and you will recall the same thing. Eulogies are, after all, stories.

Storytelling is a uniquely powerful forensic device, and it is especially useful for the work of leadership, which depends on a connection to large numbers of people. In the human psyche, narrative has always been a key social dynamic that knits people together. For thousands of years, our ancestors told stories around campfires. That predilection for stories is alive and well today in every John Grisham novel and every Mad Men episode. Every business leader should master the art of telling quick stories to illustrate and buttress an observation or argument.

In the case of Edward Kennedy, laudatory stories are told not just by fellow liberals and Democrats but also by conservatives and Republicans. They seek to capture the essence of the late senator’s personality, compassion, and wisdom. It is important for us to see that, in eulogy, these stories actually become the remembered person. We recall the story, and it is thus that we recall the person.

Second, this is a good place to observe the power of redemption. We live in a society that values any accountability over any forgiveness. Woe to the politician, celebrity, or business executive who commits even the slightest sin. Pass the hatchet, we want his head.

As a young senator, Kennedy had an infamous test of his own character. He didn't measure up. He acted with grievous irresponsibility, and a young woman died as a result. In today’s political culture, he would be forced to resign at the very least. Kennedy survived politically, however, and he went on to storied decades of service that, on his passing, are celebrated by the likes of Trent Lott and Orrin Hatch, two of the most conservative figures of our time. Hearing the tributes today, one finds a theme of profound redemption.

I have a friend who, as a plant manager for a major corporation, suffered through an embarrassing incident with the company’s CEO. My friend offered his resignation the next morning, but the CEO wisely refused to accept it. “If you think I am going to let go of a key executive who just went through a valuable learning experience, you will just have to think again,” the CEO declared. “You are more valuable to this company today than you were yesterday.” The plant manager went on to another ten years of successful service with the company. I personally worked with him throughout that decade, and I can attest to his growth and contribution to the company.

We need to rediscover redemption as a cultural verity; we need to redeem redemption itself, at the very least when hypocrisy is not bringing authenticity into doubt. None of us is as good as the crowd wants us to be, and indeed none of us is as good as the face in the mirror wants us to be. The issue should not always be one of accountability. Some times, we should focus instead on the opportunity to learn and grow. Certainly we all have that need.

Then, when we are old and gone, our friends and fellows will tell stories of our learning and growth, and we can smile from the other side.

Rhetoric and Political Debate

Here is a brief and fascinating discussion of the rhetoric involved in the debate (here in the United States) over health care insurance and policy.

(For the benefit of our readers outside the United States, President Obama was elected largely on public support for extensive change in health care. Since the election, however, opponents have managed to whittle away at his support by using emotionally charged phrases to describe the legislation.)

The link features Jason DeSanto, a senior lecturer in communication at Northwestern University. He appeared this evening on a Chicago public-affairs television program to discuss the rhetoric around health care—in particular, phrases like “death panels” and “socialized medicine.” The clip runs about 7 minutes.

One observation that DeSanto makes is especially intriguing.

He asserts that the “the real discussion is the rhetoric.” So important is language to our construction of reality, he maintains, the words and phrases that political rivals use in debate actually define our perception of the issues at stake. In a real sense, the policy debate isn’t so much the difference of perspective and opinion but rather the very rhetoric of communication.

The implications for business leaders are profound. If, as a leader or agent of change, you are not mastering the rhetoric around change, it will very likely master you. You cannot bring about change without the energy of communication in your sails. By further inference, if you complain that change is impossible, the real question may well be your inability to use rhetoric to energize the change you seek.

“We live in a world of words,” DeSanto argues. Language “frames our view of the world. That’s what language does.”

I recommend two books for further reading:

• Don’t Think of An Elephant by George Lakoff (a Democratic Party-affiliated consultant)

• Words That Work by Frank Luntz (a Republican Party-affiliated consultant)

Both are excellent, and business leaders can derive a great deal of insight from them.

By the Numbers: The Truth on Nonverbal Communication

Last week we introduced a new regular feature, By the Numbers, of the Minding Gaps blog. We’ll start each week (or most weeks, anyway) with a statistic that is noteworthy, alarming, misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We’ll accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. Today, we present data on nonverbal communication that many otherwise intelligent people believe is true—but isn’t.

Over and over, in books and journals and speeches and videos and websites, some of the most well-known and widely respected experts on communication make the same error. Unintentionally, but nevertheless irresponsibly, they casually misunderstand, misinterpret, and misrepresent certain research data on nonverbal communication and body language.

They get the data correct, but they distort and exaggerate its significance. Their mistake is so common, the misstated information is all but a cliché. Even more troubling, perhaps millions of otherwise intelligent and discerning people have just accepted the mistake at face value, and they repeat it as gospel. So the error, like a viral pathogen, grows and grows into a disease of misinformation.

Everywhere you turn, you read and hear about Albert Mehrabian’s research on nonverbal communication. Mehrabian, it is said, found that only 7 percent of a message is conveyed verbally—through words. The other 93 percent is conveyed nonverbally—38 percent by tone of voice and 55 percent by body language.

Before I go any further, for the benefit of readers who only glance at the first few paragraphs of an essay like this and then move on, I must state with perfect clarity that the foregoing description of Mehrabian’s research is false. It is wrong, and anyone citing the data in such a way should stop and correct what they have previously stated. That’s a lot of experts.

It’s impossible to list all the authors and publications citing Mehrabian’s work in error. Brian Tracy, who has few peers among professional speakers, makes the error in his popular book Speak to Win. Tonya Reiman does likewise in a website on body language. So does Carol Kinsey Goman, an author and consultant, in her recent book The Nonverbal Advantage. Peter Block’s otherwise masterful Flawless Consulting cites the data in error. Daniel Goleman refers indirectly and wrongly to the study in his classic work, Emotional Intelligence. The list goes on and on, and it includes some very good company indeed.

Now common sense tells you the data cannot be true as described. If true, you would have no trouble communicating in a foreign land without knowing the local language, for 93 percent of the intended meaning would be clear. You could watch television without the sound. You wouldn’t bother listening to talk radio or a podcast. A game of charades would be over in seconds.

You would dare not sign a contract, as only 7 percent of the mutual commitments would be on paper. Historic documents and speeches like the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Gettysburg Address would be almost meaningless. Laws would be unenforceable. Email? You certainly wouldn’t go there. And why would you ever read a blog like this or surf the Internet? Why, indeed, would you bother reading anything? Mehrabian's research itself, which he published in two books, would be unintelligible!

The fact is that words account for much, much more than 7 percent of a message. While tone of voice and body language undeniably carry some meaning, they rarely account for nearly as much impact as words. Indeed, many other aspects of nonverbal communication—such as punctuality, patience, courtesies, logic, attentiveness, inquiry, creativity, relevance, authority, accuracy, wisdom, sincerity, depth, research, etiquette, dignity, and interpersonal regard—are vastly more important than posture and a handshake.

The research itself was legitimate. Albert Mehrabian, now retired, was a professor at UCLA when he conducted two studies in the 1960s. The studies were quite modest, and their scope was very narrow. He found that, in personal relationships, a message of emotional commitment could easily be confused by conflictive vocal tone and facial expression. That’s the extent of his findings. Period. End of story.

In the decades since, his findings have been repeatedly construed more broadly. Today his name is virtually synonymous with the urban myth that words generally convey only a tiny fraction of meaning. Mehrabian himself has been frustrated by the misrepresentations, and also by the extrapolated meaning. He counts those two studies as a minor part of his decades of academic research, and he is quick to point out their narrow scope.

Just last week, in an interview on BBC Radio 4, “More or Less” host Tim Harford asked Mehrabian whether words accounted for only 7 percent of meaning. “Absolutely not!” Mehrabian replied emphatically. “Whenever I hear that misquote or misrepresentation, I cringe. . . . It should be so obvious to anybody who would use any amount of common sense that that’s not a correct statement.”

Mehrabian cited an everyday example of giving directions. “If I were to tell you that the pencil you are looking for is upstairs in the desk drawer of the bedroom, three drawers down, I couldn’t do that nonverbally,” he told Harford. “I mean, I could try to point, but that would hardly locate the pencil, whereas I could do that very precisely with words.”

He concluded: “There’s no question you can’t extrapolate my findings to communication in general.”

So there. Have we cleared things up? I certainly hope so.

Memo to "experts": Stop saying this!

 

What We Can Learn from "12 Angry Men"

Housebound with a mid-summer head cold—a hacking cough and a raw throat—I spent the weekend gargling with warm saltwater and watching old movies. Thankfully, the cable networks obliged me with a marathon of Henry Fonda classics.

They were some of his gems, for sure: First he was a principled presidential aspirant in The Best Man (directed by Franklin Schaffner, 1964) with Cliff Robertson, Shelley Berman, and Lee Tracy. Then he played an innocent man, falsely accused as an armed robber, in the true-life story The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956) with Vera Miles as his disturbed wife.

Next, in Advise and Consent (Otto Preminger, 1962), Fonda portrayed a controversial presidential appointee, with Charles Laughton and Walter Pidgeon as cantankerous old warhorses of the U.S. Senate. Finally, he took the role of parolee Tom Joad in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940).

In some of his best roles, Fonda often portrayed wise but embattled leaders. You can learn a lot about leadership from watching these movies.

To my thinking, no film captures the challenge and opportunities of leadership better than 12 Angry Men, especially the original 1957 black-and-white movie, based on the play by Reginald Rose, directed by Sydney Lumet, and starring Henry Fonda and a cavalcade of other stars: Martin Balsam, Ed Begley, Lee J. Cobb, Jack Klugman, E.G. Marshall, and a half-dozen more.

This taut drama—from start to finish, it runs only 96 minutes—is set entirely in a sweltering jury room of the courthouse in a big American city. The story itself is thrilling, and the acting is masterful. But best of all, 12 Angry Men is a case study in Socratic leadership—in other words, leadership by means of asking provocative, probing questions that compel people to rethink their assumptions and beliefs.  

As the story opens, all but one of the jurors hastily fall in line to convict the defendant, a young Puerto Rican, on charges of murdering his father. Juror No. 8, played by Fonda, is the lone holdout.

The jury’s deliberations take us through an astounding and seismic shift. One by one, the other 11 jurors feel compelled to revisit and re-examine their initial judgment through the lens of their own character and the crucible of their own lives. The harder the life, the harder the re-examination.

The movie is all about leadership through effective communication. Indeed, many organizations use it to facilitate discussion around these issues. (One shortcoming is the exclusively white male cast. At the time this movie was filmed, U.S. trial juries were commonly so selected.) I strongly recommend viewing it.

When you watch the movie, notice that Juror No. 8 has no official authority beyond that of the other jurors. He isn't even the foreman. Yet he persuades his peers to reconsider. That is a good reminder that leadership doesn't require a title.

Then observe that the strength of his argument arises not from overbearing, omniscient certitude but rather from intellectual humility. What he doesn’t know is every bit as important as what he does know. His earnest reservations, rather than his earnest presumption of guilt, give energy to his argument and cause the other jurors to think more critically. His rhetorical technique consists largely of questions. We term this approach “inquiry-led dialogue.” It comes to leaders as a counterintuitive but powerful tool.

Writing about 12 Angry Men as an instructional device for business leaders, John K. Clemens observed:

“Persuasion—convincing strangers to consider new perspectives, new insights, new goals—is a fundamental, challenging task of leadership because it requires a deep investment of personal character, mental stamina, and a capacity for emotional insight perfectly balanced with the ability to reason. Logic and abundant feeling combine to persuade.

“What’s tricky about persuasion—and it’s this point that 12 Angry Men clarifies so thrillingly—is discerning the difference between getting others to think as you do, an obnoxious and risky use of power, and getting others to investigate themselves to discover common truths and facts—truths that transcend preference, prejudice, fear, and competitive jockeying. The courtroom drama, as a result, is usually a loud wake-up call as well, a reminder that there are such common truths.”

I have watched 12 Angry Men dozens of times, owing to the fact we use it in a workshop on leadership communication. Even today, I continue finding more nuances and insights on leadership with each new viewing.

In our workshops, we spoil the plot beforehand; we want everyone to watch the movie for its underlying insights more than for the drama of its plotline. So we encourage participants to be on the lookout for both the use and the effects of listening, accountability, reasoning, humility, open questions, and especially empathy.

As you watch it, pay special attention to Juror No. 8's ability to discern the behavioral signals of people—their often subtle but very real concerns, needs, orientation, and disposition. This is what we mean by empathy. Researchers have hypothesized—and found evidence to support—a positive correlation between this cognitive “sixth sense” and effective leadership. In short, leaders who are more empathic are better able to reach the fulcrum of their followers’ judgment.

Then ask yourself these questions:

1. What did you notice about the styles of communication among the jurors? Which styles were most effective? Least effective?

2. How would you describe Juror No. 8's leadership style?

3. In addition to Juror No. 8, who showed leadership credibility and how? Who didn’t?

4. Who showed respect, honor, and trust for others? Who didn’t? How did it appear as visible behavior? Did it weaken or strengthen leadership? What were its benefits? Its costs?

5. Who showed empathy? How did it appear as behavior? Did it weaken or strengthen leadership? What were its benefits? Its costs?

6. How would you describe the leadership of the nominal leader, the jury foreman (Juror No. 1, played by Martin Balsam)?

7. What assumptions did some of the jurors make? In what ways did these assumptions demonstrate the presence or lack of respect, honor, and trust?

8. Whose courage grew as the deliberations wore on?

9. Contrast the perseverance and persistence of Juror No. 3 (played by Lee J. Cobb), Juror No. 4 (played by E.G. Marshall), Juror No. 8 (played by Fonda), and Juror No. 10 (played by Ed Begley). What do you learn about courage?

10. Who nurtured dialogue? Who relied mainly on lecturing? What was the difference in their impact?

How Do You React to Criticism?

What's your instinctive reaction to criticism?

Do you instinctively seek to accept, learn, and evolve?

Or do you instinctively tend to reject, deny, and retaliate?

Too many managers do the latter, and that is a big reason they are unable to lead.

I am flabbergasted at the reaction of Horizon Realty Group—a corporate landlord you undoubtedly had never heard of until now—to a tweet from one of its tenants. The tenant had apparently used Twitter to invite someone to visit her in spite of her "moldy apartment."

The tenant had all of twenty contacts on Twitter, and her comment was preceded by the @ sign, which confined its distribution to a subset of those contacts. For sure, the tweet would have been lost to the annals of Twitterdom if Horizon Realty had just ignored it.

It didn’t. Instead, it filed a lawsuit seeking $50,000 in damages. Now the tweet and its criticism have been the subject of news coverage around the world. A local newspaper here has published excerpts from news dispatches in Asia, Australia, Africa and points beyond. Hundreds of thousands of people have heard criticism of the plaintiff that they wouldn't have otherwise heard.

Apart from the self-inflicted damage and lousy public-relations counsel that the lawsuit represents, it raises another serious question of how anyone should react to criticism.

Almost always, the dumb thing to do is dispute or deny it. Fighting will change no one’s mind, but it will call vastly greatly attention to the criticism. You want an echo chamber for the criticism? Suddenly you’ve got it.

Almost always, the smart thing to do is to look at yourself differently and learn what you can from the criticism. It may not be what you want to hear, but it is very likely what you need to hear. You will grow from the experience, and therefore you will be larger.

Seize Those Teachable Moments

 

Nine or ten years ago, my daughter was getting report cards from middle school that, shall we say, were not bringing pride to the family name.

She was a bright girl. That very year, she had built her own computer from scratch. But here she was getting Cs and Bs. Worse, her 8th grade teachers were saying that if only she would submit her homework assignments and study for tests, she would be doing just fine.

Of course, whenever I asked her about pending assignments or exams, she would say there was nothing due or coming up. Then she would go back to her computer games and fantasy baseball league.

You can imagine my exasperation. Perhaps some of you have been there yourselves.

So one weekend morning in the middle of winter, I roused her from bed and told her that we were going for a ride. She had no idea where or why. I promised her a hamburger for lunch afterward, and I told her to bundle up for the cold.

We drove down the Kennedy Expressway and into Chicago, and then we headed east on Addison to Wrigley Field, home of her beloved Chicago Cubs. The ballpark is situated in the middle of a North Side neighborhood and bounded by city streets: Clark and Addison behind the grandstand, and Sheffield and Waveland along the outfield bleachers.

It was a windy, overcast Saturday morning. As much as my daughter loved coming to ball games in the summer, she was not exactly thrilled to be here in winter. Snow was piled high. The players’ parking lot was plowed, so that's where we parked. “C’mon, button up,” I told her. “We’re going for a walk.”

In hooded parkas, we bucked the billowing wind and walked around the entire stadium to Waveland Avenue, alongside the left-field bleachers. There we stopped.

I asked her to take a good look at the empty street, the sidewalk, the firehouse over there, and the apartment buildings lining the block. “During games, this street is barricaded,” I explained. "When one of your favorite players hits a home run out of the ballpark, it bounces on this street, and all the neighborhood kids go scrambling after it.”

Then I went for the moral of the story: “Those players who hit the home runs, they didn’t just wish they could do it,” I continued. “They had to practice and practice and practice. They didn’t play computer games all day and all night. They practiced hitting baseballs, and then they practiced more, and then they still practiced more so that one day, they could hit the ball onto Waveland Avenue.”

Not that my daughter had aspirations to play professional baseball. But she had already set her sights on college. From now on, I explained, she and I would have a new code phrase to make sure she was doing her homework and studying for tests.

The goal was to hit a project or a test “onto Waveland Avenue.” And every evening, I was going to ask her whether she was prepared to hit the next ball onto Waveland. If she wasn’t, it was back to the books.

By now we were both shivering in the cold. We walked back to the car and went to get that hamburger.

I have good news to report. My daughter’s grades turned around dramatically. “Waveland Avenue” became our new token of excellence. She breezed through high school, and she has since graduated from college. Now, in three weeks, she will enter law school.

Yesterday afternoon, to celebrate her latest milestone, my daughter and I took in a ballgame at Wrigley Field. This time the weather was sunny and warm, with a gentle breeze off Lake Michigan and temperatures in the 70s. The Chicago Cubs obliged us with a 12-0 slugfest over the visiting Houston Astros.

Best of all, as if by special request, one of the Cubs slammed a home run clear over the left-field bleachers and bouncing onto Waveland Avenue. My daughter and I looked at each other, raised our hands, and high fived.

Leadership and the Internet

I want to share with you a fascinating presentation by Clay Shirky, which I found on ted.com.

It takes about 16 minutes, and it just may change your view of how organizations and their leaders will communicate with their people in the decades ahead. I recommend you devote the time to watching it. Then come back.

Here it is.

Now, after viewing it, think about the implications for leadership and change in your organization. In particular, ask yourself:

• Haven’t “the many” always been talking to “the many”—albeit more slowly? What exactly is changing? How will that affect leadership?

• What does viralism, to coin a word, hold for the future of leadership?

• What are the implications of Twitter and Facebook, in particular, on leadership messaging in your organization?

• How will gaps between the “official truth” and the “ground truth” of your organization become even more problematic?

• How can we harness the power of viral communication to enhance directional change and control chaotic change?

"You Are What You Think About"

Earl Nightingale died twenty years ago, and yet the wisdom of his message is as relevant and timely today as ever.

Nightingale created the art of motivational speaking and, in the golden years of radio, brought it to the masses. His commentary was broadcast regularly on WGN Radio, Chicago, whose signal was (and is) strong enough to reach two-thirds of the nation. Millions of people read his books, listened to his broadcasts, and took his advice.

Here is an excerpt from perhaps his most famous talk. Set aside eleven minutes and view it in its entirety. Then devote some more time to thinking rigorously about its message, and apply it to yourself. I am doing just that for myself.

On the Importance of Tom Watson, a True Champion

If love, like youth, is wasted on the young, as Sammy Cahn wrote, so perhaps is sport. Yes, everyone savors the thrill of victory. Yes, everyone feels the sting of defeat. But only the properly aged among us can bask in the warmth of an ever-flickering candle of one more time, just one more time.

For anyone of a certain age or better, watching 59-year-old Tom Watson on the final holes and then in the playoff of the British Open at Turnberry, Scotland, today was to indulge in a little reverie. Watson had earned his first Open championship in 1975, years before some of the other professional golfers of today were born. But here he was again, where he wasn’t supposed to be. Hadn’t he graduated to the senior tour a decade ago?

In the end, Watson squandered a one-stroke lead on the 72nd hole to end the four rounds in a two-way tie. Then, in a four-hole playoff, he drove into the rough and finally lost to Stewart Cink. The victor is a relatively unheralded American, but he is no youngster himself. Winning his first major championship today at the age of 36, Cink is already three years older than Watson was when he won the last of his eight majors, 26 years ago. Nevertheless, the story of the day belonged to Watson, still in the hunt after all these years.

“It would have been a helluva story,” Watson said afterward. “It would have been a helluva story, but it wasn’t to be.”

The spectacle took me back to a triathlon in St. Petersburg, Florida, several years ago. I was competing in the 40-something age group. Having swum a mile in Tampa Bay and ridden the 25-mile bike course through the streets of old St. Pete, I was running strong only a couple of miles from the finish line.

My legs still felt fine, and I was thoroughly enjoying the experience when a pretty young woman, probably half my age, pulled up alongside me. For a few minutes, our banter made me feel as if I were in my 20s again.

Then she casually remarked, “You know, when my dad gets to be your age, I sure hope he is in your shape.” Her well-intended words were like a brick wall in my path. Could I actually be older than her dad? Nah. You don't think, do you? Suddenly I felt like walking, or crawling. My legs slowed. She sprinted ahead at the same pace we’d both been running a few seconds earlier.

Age, it seems to me, is permission to reflect and appreciate in ways we couldn’t, or just didn’t, when we were rushing headlong into life. Tom Watson seems to know that intuitively. Reflecting aloud today in the clubhouse after the last hole, he asked himself what impressions or insights he would take away from the week’s experience. He thought a moment and answered: “A lot of warmth, a lot of spirituality.” It was scarcely the answer of a brash young man.

The ageless golfer is a gentleman who knows what it means to be a gentleman. He has always let his integrity do the heavy lifting of inspiration. Almost 20 years have passed, but no one should forget his courageous decision in 1990 to resign from a Kansas City country club after it refused membership to a Jewish couple. He explained his reasoning only privately, but when the club reversed its policy, he rejoined immediately and publicly. There was no loud grandstanding, and yet there was no mistaking the message.

Stewart Cink won the British Open today, and my hat is off to him. He deserves to be congratulated. But in my book Tom Watson is the real champion. Thank you, Mr. Watson, for a marvelous weekend of golf, and thank you for the splendid example you continue to give to us all.

Walter Cronkite (1916-2009)

Everyone old enough to remember Walter Cronkite feels the same way about his passing. We all have lost a favorite uncle. Had he gone into politics, he might have been elected president, but he was content to stand on the sidelines of history, and tell it as it was.

His voice was the voice of authority in a period of tumult. It was the voice that interrupted “As the World Turns” to tell us our president was dead. It was the voice that described what was really happening on the streets of Chicago in August 1968. And it was the voice that happily cheered the safe return of the Apollo 13 astronauts after they had told NASA a quarter-million miles from home: “Houston, we have a problem.”

Here was a man so trusted by people across the political spectrum that things weren’t the way they were until he said they were. The Vietnam War was still winnable until the day Cronkite said it wasn’t; and when Cronkite said as much, Lyndon Johnson remarked in the Oval Office: “If I have lost Cronkite, I have lost America.” Five years later, the Washington Post’s crusading reports about the Watergate break-in were belittled and dismissed until Cronkite said they shouldn’t be. Then it was Richard Nixon’s turn to bemoan the loss of America’s great chronicler and arbiter.

What can leaders learn from the newscaster identified in a 1972 poll, and then immediately recognized by everyone, as “the most trusted man in America”?

• Let people know the truth. People want straight talk. They don’t want happy talk or sweet talk, and they don’t want fast talk or double talk. They want to know how things really are. Treat people with respect and dignity, and they will deserve it. Never talk down to people.

• Let yourself be an example of equanimity in a world of anxiety. Be calm. Cronkite never lost his temper. Today, every other television personality—from Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on the right to Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann on the left—seems unwilling or unable to keep his cool. In politics and in business, leaders who lose their temper almost always lose respect. Having squandered that, they are left to rely on exaggeration, shouting, intimidation, and fiat.

• Let yourself see for yourself. Decades of reporting from the front taught Cronkite to go and have a firsthand look. He knew it was a fool’s errand to make up your mind beforehand and then pick and choose which facts to believe. Leaders must learn to recognize and respect the truth. Your preconceived notions just may be wrong. Indeed, they probably are.

• Let the tone of your voice reflect your disposition. When the news was good, you knew it was good just by Cronkite’s voice; and when it was bad, you knew it was bad for the same reason. Night after night, Americans sat down to dinner and knew how things really were.

• Let others have the credit. As a journalist, Cronkite knew that he had a front-row seat to history, and he knew that he was not a player on the stage. The most he could and should do was to create conditions conducive to history. In a 1977 interview with the CBS newsman, Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat said that, if invited, he would go to Jerusalem to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The very next day, Begin offered just such an invitation. Their meeting was the first step to the historic Camp David Accords.

• Let people see your soul. On learning the finality of the news from Dallas on that awful November day in 1963, Cronkite took off his glasses and choked back a tear as he announced JFK’s death. Through the long weekend that followed, he struggled for composure as a nation coped with its shock. He was no less and no more than a human being in a human moment.

Certainly you have your own observations. Do take a moment to share them in a comment, or send them to me at tom@arceil.com.

And that’s the way it is, Saturday, July 18, 2009. God bless you, “Uncle Walter.”

"I'm Sorry We Got Caught"?

Given their precarious hold on a dwindling readership, newspapers should do everything they can to protect their stock in trade, the one thing they have that so many other news sources lack: the presumption of credibility.

They should do nothing, absolutely nothing, that can even remotely be construed as compromising their integrity.

So when the online media portal Politico reported that the Washington Post had offered corporate sponsorships for private dinners at the publisher’s home with Post journalists and political power brokers—at $25,000 a pop, or $250,000 for a series of eleven—it wasn’t just the Post’s integrity that was for sale, it was the newspaper’s future.

Now there’s dumb, and there’s dumb dumb. Then there's dumb-da-da-dumb-dumb. Dumb-dumb!

Please pardon my flippancy. Objectively speaking, this kind of thing is dumb-da-da-dumb-dumb. Dumb-dumb. Dumb!

In today’s editions, Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth publicly apologizes to readers. You can judge for yourself the sincerity and candor of her statement. If the online comments from readers are any indication, she has a lot of hard work ahead of her to restore the newspaper’s credibility. It won’t be easy, but nothing is more important.

A Vision of Fireworks

All across the United States tonight, people will gather in public parks and preserves to watch great displays of fireworks in celebration of America's birthday.

Few people realize that these fireworks began with a vision. Just as your company may have a vision, and just as the United States had a vision (in the Declaration of Independence), our annual displays of fireworks had a vision, too.

The historian David McCullough, writing in his magisterial biography John Adams, quotes a letter that Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, the day after the Second Continental Congress approved a resolution of independence from England, on July 2, 1776. (It would be two more days before the Congress would approve the Declaration, whose purpose was to explain the resolution; and it would be an entire month before the delegates would actually sign the Declaration.)

Listen to Adams, writing to his beloved Abigail on July 3: “The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”

And so it has been.

Note also Adams's vision for the future of the United States itself: "from one end of this continent to the other" prefaced the Manifest Destiny of the Nineteenth Century, and "from this time forward forever more" foresaw the enduring greatness of the nation. Plainly, our founders knew they were doing something profound.  

Never underestimate the power of a compelling vision, fueled by the energy of vivid language, to lay the course of history for years and even centuries to come, and do not minimize the critical importance of an inspiring vision of greatness to the hard work of achieving that greatness.

A Most Unlikely Business Guru

What next?

Leadership Lessons of the KGB?

You have to wonder. Vladimir Putin, onetime spy and longtime Russian martinet, has begun writing a magazine column on management and change. The Los Angeles Times reports that his first effort appears this week.

Far from calling for fundamental and far-reaching change in a country that badly needs both, Putin rises as a contrarian.

“I’m deeply convinced that constant change is not for the better,” he writes. “Neither for business nor for people. In the end, it will be the same thing as before, if not worse.”

Of course, that stands in stark contrast to the mantra of Western business: the only thing that will never change is change itself. For twenty or thirty years, business here has been hurtling itself through dizzying changes.

But at a time when the markets are half what they were and a pink slip is almost a badge of honor, many of us long for a semblance of stability. At the very least, we would like a return to some simple basics, which I suppose would be a radical change in its own right.

Putin’s salute to stability is reminiscent of a 1998 book by a British change guru, John Macdonald, Calling a Halt to Mindless Change: A Plea for Commonsense Management. Macdonald actually argued not against any change but for a greater focus on the things that matter: vision, quality, communication, and engagement—all in the name of customer satisfaction.

I myself like to call these basics the “prime numbers” of business. You’ll recall from algebra that a prime number is an integer indivisible by any whole number other than 1 or 2. In business, we can think of prime numbers as the indivisible, basic components we often take for granted and also often lose sight of. Get them right, and the business will grow. Ignore them, and business will shrink.

Frankly, I never thought I’d see the day when I quoted Vladimir Putin in one of these blogs. But as I reflect on it, we can do worse than ask ourselves several thought-provoking questions:

• What kinds of change are counterproductive?
• What kinds of change are worthwhile?
• Is “stability for the sake of stability” better than “change for the sake of change”?
• What should we be focusing on?
• How do leaders create the right focus?
• What are the prime numbers of our business?
• What are we doing about them?

-- Thomas J. Lee

What Does It Take to Lead?

Exactly what does it take to lead people? And what do successful leaders do that unsuccessful leaders don't?

These two questions—simple in their phrasing but complex in their answers—are at the fault line of a discussion in the blogosphere this week.

The discussion focuses on CEOs, but the sum and substance of the discussion can apply to leaders everywhere. If you are attempting to bring about change through the discretionary effort of other people, in any organization anywhere, you will do yourself a favor by listening in.

After years of research on the real characteristics and abilities of CEOs, three business-school professors published their findings in an academic journal last summer. Perhaps someone, somewhere, was paying attention. But no one talked about it until Tuesday, when New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about the treatise and several hundred readers quickly fulminated in response

In a nutshell, the professors asserted that successful CEOs were more likely to be coolly analytical than fervently emotional, more likely to be aggressive and hard-charging than social and collegial, more likely to be loners than team players, more likely to be self-absorbed than self-aware. Indeed, the authors come close to saying that the post-modern executive who looks and sounds like a cheerful politician is likely to be ineffective as a CEO.

 

President Coolidge, Meet Detective Callahan

Now this portrait of a cross between Calvin Coolidge and Harry Callahan in the corner office may hardly surprise you. But it flies in the face of two decades of important work by trail-blazing thinkers such as Jim Collins in Good to Great; John Kotter in Leading Change and The Heart of Change; Daniel Goleman in Emotional Intelligence; Warren Bennis in On Becoming a Leader, and Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner in The Leadership Challenge, not to mention all those writers (most notably Robert K. Greenleaf and John C. Maxwell) who champion the magical power of servant leadership.

To one degree or another, all of them have found an emotional aspect of leadership, a common search for meaning, and an exploration of purpose and intentionality to be profoundly powerful. That is all the more true now, in a cynical age.

In his column, Brooks blithely ignored all these writers and unquestioningly endorsed the research as he summarized and presented it, which was scarcely the whole of it. Moreover, he then took liberties in a further interpretation that just wasn’t sustainable. Fortunately, many bloggers and even Thursday’s letters to the editor in the Times demonstrated that the public isn’t so easily cowed.

Beware Biases Clothed As Research 

On purchasing and downloading the entire study, I found it self-limiting in key respects, though duly decorated with pages of regressions and factor analysis. I have learned that academic studies often fall on the sword of their own design, which may well be flawed or small or both. 

First, as the study’s authors acknowledge but Brooks ignores, the research was confined to the CEOs of privately held companies with a recent infusion of venture capital or private equity. That probably biases the findings in favor of small-cap and mid-cap companies without well-defined cultures and typically with short time frames for hard returns to investors or at least positive trend lines.

Second, unless I missed something, there is no analysis of characteristics and abilities associated with poor performance. We are left to presume that the absence or opposite of the identified traits will necessarily lead to failure, but we have no data or explicit conclusions in that direction. A personal friend of mine was CEO of two high-tech companies, both of which went bust. She had the traits the authors describe in spades. Granted, that is merely singly experiential and anecdotal, but it raises a question of negative correlation.

Third, the definition of high performance presumably has only the one dimension of profitability. Nothing is said to the contrary, that I could see. It is axiomatic that every company must be profitable, but to judge a CEO's performance by that metric alone begs some pretty big questions. As Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton argue in The Balanced Scorecard, using profitability as your sole measure of success is a little like flying an airplane with only a single gauge—say, for air speed, and no indicators for fuel or altitude or location or air pressure.

Balancing the Scorecard

In the Twenty-first Century, to the chagrin of Milton Friedman and perhaps even the frustration of Peter Drucker, companies cannot focus on profitability to the neglect of everything else. Other financial metrics such as revenue growth, return on equity, inventory turns, debt ratios, and more are critical measures of performance.

Moreover, companies have many other stakeholders beyond equity investors. Apart from financial metrics, companies are judged by the quality of their products and by their treatment of employees, their service to customers, their compliance with the law, their respect for diversity and privacy, their engagement and retention of staff, their advertising and packaging, their lobbying and public policy, the safety and cleanliness of their facilities, their research and innovation, and ultimately their transparency and contribution to society. All that was true a decade or two ago, but it is especially true now.

Missing the bar on any of these metrics, and especially on several or more, is enough to send a CEO home for good, as many of them have learned over the last five or ten years. By extension, we can hypothesize that leaders must operate in multiple frames of reference.

Having watched and worked with senior leaders quite a bit, I can attest to the fact that the most successful among them are fully realized human beings. Those who aren't send powerful signals to stay away.

My guess is that the scholars who produced this research may be on the right track, but only as far as they looked. They just didn’t look very far, and they certainly didn’t think very deeply. As for the columnist, whose work I generally respect, he should have taken a little more time on this one.

The Kid I Knew in Grade School

Last week I had the rare privilege of traveling to Washington and joining in the celebration for a childhood friend, who was elected to Congress in November and sworn in Thursday. On our way to a reception in the Capitol, my head swiveled from one marble monument to another, all glistening under a cerulean sky.

Looking down the Mall from Capitol Hill, we could see past the Smithsonian to the Washington Monument. Beyond it, in the distance, loomed the Lincoln Memorial. We could practically hear Martin Luther King's baritone, still echoing from those very steps where King stood as he intoned: "I have a dream, that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood"; and we could almost see the Mall teeming with those thousands of Americans who shared that dream in 1963.

As I absorbed it all, I recalled a little history lesson that still offers an important insight on leadership for us all, regardless of whether we seek to lead in the realm of politics, or in business, or for an unnoticed cause, or in anything else.

It is just this: Think back over America's entire 230-year history, and ask yourself a single question about each decade or two: At that particular moment in our history, were we as a people blessed with genuine leadership or cursed by its absence? If we were blessed, what did the leadership look like and sound like, and where was it coming from? (Those of you living and working outside the United States can try the same exercise with your own national history. Let me know how it works.)

Here in America, in the 18th century, there was no question of our bounty. Names like Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hancock, Madison, and many others were already legendary in the late 1700s. But just a few years later, in the early decades of the 19th century, as our young nation was finding its legs, we had little true leadership. We didn't really need it.

All that changed in the 1850s and 1860s, as we faced grave moral and political issues that demanded resolution. Suddenly we again found extraordinary leadership in government, the military, and journalism—not the least of it in the unlikely profile of an unschooled, self-taught country lawyer from the Illinois prairie. In the decades that followed, leadership in the public sector lay dormant, while leadership emerged in great industrial enterprises that built and powered our cities, railroads, factories, ports and canals.

Not until the 1930s and 1940s, when the United States faced first an economic depression of unprecedented magnitude, and then a military threat also of unprecedented magnitude, did we again experience compelling leadership in government. In the 1960s, after a shorter period of relative calm, we needed and found leadership yet again: to inspire us in a race to the Moon, to enact laws on civil rights and the environment, and to extract us from an ill-conceived foreign war. In the latter, we witnessed leadership in the least likely of places: the rice paddies of Vietnam and Big Ten college campuses.

The inescapable history lesson is that resonant, courageous leadership emerges only as it is deemed necessary. When the need for leadership is not seen as clear and compelling, people will not recognize the relevance and legitimacy of the putative leadership. Consequently, no leadership will take root until those perceptions change.

And notice something else: Leaders do not unilaterally determine the need for their own leadership. Followers do. Thus, would-be leaders cannot lead for merely aspiring to lead. They can lead only because followers decide to follow. Leadership is essentially a license that leaders derive from the people they would lead.

For further reflection, ask yourself:

• Is this analysis consistent with your own experiences of leadership?

• How does the foregoing analysis apply to the events of September 11, 2001? What was the public's general perception of the U.S. president's leadership capacity as of September 10, 2001? As of September 17, 2001?

• Does the recognition of the need for leadership automatically confer legitimacy on the authority figures who are already in place? Where have you seen that to be the case? Where have you seen examples to the contrary?

• What are the implications of this analysis for leadership in the private sector? On your own leadership style?

• Under what circumstances, if any, can leaders affect perceptions of the need for their leadership? Is it legitimate to do so? If so, how? If not, what alternatives are there?

• How much time and effort do successful leaders invest in building a case for their leadership? Do you invest anything remotely close to that?