CHAPTER 2
Warren Bennis: Generous Leadership
Warren Bennis is University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Business Administration and Founding Chairman of The Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California. He has written or edited some 30 books, including the bestselling Leaders and On Becoming a Leader, both translated into 21 languages. The Wall Street Journal named him as one of the top 10 speakers on management in 1993 and in 1996. Forbes magazine has referred to him as the “Dean of Leadership Gurus.”
This most famous and respected of leadership gurus—and the only one with real experience of leading a large organization—has in his time taught other luminaries such as Charles Handy; has acted as consultant to four US presidents; and was one of the youngest infantry officers on the European front in the Second World War.
However, when I met this short, amiable elder, he did not consciously carry these various auras with him into our conversation—although they shone, sometimes spontaneously. Rather, he brought to it a very youthful heart. He perfectly epitomized “neoteny,” a term from the field of biology referring to the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood, which he had used to describe elder leaders in his book Geeks and Geezers. Or in Chinese tradition, he had chizi zhi xin, “a heart of a newborn baby.”
It is hard to believe that the man I met in May 2008 was an 83-year-old with a lifetime of accomplishments behind him. He had just finished his regular workout when he arrived for our appointment in a hotel near the beautiful beach of Santa Monica, California. If he is youthful in appearance, he is more so at heart. Though he has authored or co-authored so many books, he talked passionately about his next three! He regretted that he knew little about China and was hoping for some recommendations about Confucius from me.
In a word, Bennis is still looking forward with a heart of a newborn baby.
A Generalist with a Leadership Brand
Liu: How do you like the word “guru?”
Bennis: It’s overused. I once heard someone say that people who use “guru” don’t know how to spell . . .
Liu: . . . charlatan?
Bennis: You heard that. That’s the reason I think some people reject the word “guru.” But it is a big compliment to be called a guru. It really means you show the light, to use its Hindu meaning. However, it is used rather indiscriminately.
Liu: You said Charles Handy [a former student of Bennis’s] thinks of himself as a philosopher.
Bennis: He is, actually. If you asked Charles, “Do you like to be called a management guru?” I could predict his answer.
Liu: How do you think of yourself? Philosopher? Thinker?
Bennis: Me? I think I am more of a generalist.
Liu: A fox, as you’ve described it [see box].
Bennis: Yes, very much. My career’s been very long. I have been active, you know, more than half a century. I wrote my first article in 1954. My first book, which was co-authored, was published in 1961. It was called The Planning of Change, which was almost arrogantly titled, saying that you could plan change in a world with such turbulence and chaos. More recently I’ve been “branded” as a leadership guru. I prefer not being a “brand.”
The Fox and the Hedgehog
Originating in a fragment attributed to the Greek poet Archilochus, and elaborated by the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, the metaphor of the fox and the hedgehog refers to two kinds of intellectuals. Foxes, such as Aristotle, Shakespeare and Goethe, know many things, pursue various ends at the same time and see the world in all its complexity, but never integrate their thinking into one overall concept. Hedgehogs, such as Plato, Nietzsche and Proust, on the contrary, know one big thing and simplify a complex world into a basic idea that unifies everything.
Among the leadership authors included in this book, Warren Bennis and Howard Gardner have written explicitly about the contrast. Bennis has a balanced view of the two: “Hedgehogs, at their best, produce Darwins; at their worst, pedants. Foxes occasionally can claim an Einstein or an Oppenheimer but more often are dilettantes.” Intriguingly, both Bennis and Gardner think of themselves as foxes and share a secret admiration for the hedgehog. Bennis wrote, “I’m clearly a fox with a sneaking admiration for the hedgehog,” while Gardner admitted, “I am a fox that would like to be a hedgehog.”
An Old Dog with New Tricks
Liu: I know you are writing poetry now. Will you publish, as James March does?
Bennis: I have published some poems, back in 1979 during a hospital stay in London. But I still want to write a play. I’ve got three more books in mind right now which I want to tell you about. None of these has been started, so I haven’t actually framed them yet.
One of them will be what the publisher would like to call A Warren Bennis Reader. But I don’t think that will be the final title.
Liu: Something like The Essential Warren Bennis, perhaps?1
Bennis: I am not sure of this yet, because there are two ways I can go about it. One is simply a collection of some of my favorite writings.
Liu: I think you have done that in Managing the Dream.
Bennis: Managing the Dream has some of them, but there has been a lot more since then. And I want to redo it.
The other way would be to do it as a leadership course, because I think a lot of people would like a textbook on how to teach leadership. So it could have a number of my articles, but articles by other people as well. It could be both a textbook and a book of readings. It’ll be very difficult to do, but it might be more appealing and more useful.
The second book, which my publisher is very keen on, is something I refer to as Project X.2 It’s not going to be an autobiography; it’s not going to be a memoir; it’s not going to be a diary—but it’s going to be a way of using my life experiences to write about leadership and life. So it’s going to be a series of essays which will capture many of the issues that the leadership literature tends to ignore or avoid: issues like envy, ambition, death, loss, sex, greed, and love.
The third book I want to do is a small book I am going to call Generous Company. It’s about the significance in leadership and life of being magnanimous, being generous, and giving back to others. This is an area not written about, but it is the key to leadership and organizational lives.
The New Crucible and an Old Epiphany
Liu: In True North, Bill George wrote about crucibles and epiphany. He told me that he got the idea from you. But it seems to me that you don’t write enough about your own crucibles and your own epiphany.
Bennis: It is true the only crucible of my own I used in my book was about my growing up in a family during the Depression. But we continue to have crucibles if we keep learning. There’s not just one. For example, the most exciting, difficult crucible for me right now is becoming old. It is scary and exciting. There is no preparation for it. How do you prepare to become old? It’s an adventure, and I try very hard to do it wisely and to learn from that.
Liu: A question Paul Ylvisaker asked you proved to be an epiphany to you, didn’t it?
Bennis: When I was at Harvard giving a talk in 1977, Paul asked me, “Do you really love being president of the University of Cincinnati?” That was a turning point for me because I realized that I did not love what I was doing. The beauty of that story is that I was a hostage to my role model. I realized that was not where my passion was. It wasn’t quite inauthentic. I wasn’t being an impostor. But I wasn’t doing something that I really loved.
When Paul Ylvisaker asked the question, I realized I was trying to be Dr. Douglas McGregor, who was my mentor. I said to myself: “No, let’s stop. I am not enjoying this. I enjoy writing and teaching.” I knew I could be OK as university president, but I knew also that it wasn’t my passion.
Five Leadership Qualities
Liu: When you told that story in Managing the Dream, you said you found one thing in common in great leaders: they love their job. And in Leaders, the book you co-authored with Burt Nanus, you said that when you asked all those leaders what enabled them to do their job, they talked about one thing: learning.
Bennis: Curiosity.
Liu: That’s a question I’m going to ask. You talk about how those great leaders share some common traits. However, in different cases, you name different traits. Sometimes you say passion, and sometimes you say learning. Sometimes you say something else. So what are those common traits or characteristics those great leaders share?
Bennis: [Laughs] I’ll name five that I think stand out.
The first one is passion. In order to be a master in anything, you’ve got to really practice and focus and you have to love what you’re doing. Reflective practice is the key to mastery.
The second is adaptive capacity, which I wrote about in Geeks and Geezers. Adaptive capacity includes learning. It includes resilience. It includes being a first-class noticer. They are all important.
A third one would be respect, being respectful. In this global age, being respectful to people who are different is not just being tolerant.
Liu: And also different from being humble.
Bennis: It’s related, I think, because being humble to me means not knowing everything. Being humble is part of adaptive capacity because if you think you are the smartest guy in the room, you are doomed. Respect is deep, which also means to listen and to really learn from whomever you’re with.
I think the fourth thing would be—Bill George emphasizes this in his book—having a sense of knowing who you are. Knowing your values, character, and your authentic being is important.
But I think we need to distinguish further between role authenticity and personal authenticity. I will do things in a role that I find difficult, such as making a decision which will inflict pain. If I feel that the role is requiring things of me which are not congruent with who I am, I cannot stay on that. The choice is: Am I going to surrender my soul and continue working with the organization? Or will I be who I am and resign?
The fifth thing would be courage. I think somehow in this world, you never have the full truth about contexts, about your own biases, about what’s going to happen in the next five years. But in moments where you have 70 percent confidence in your intuition and 70 percent knowledge of the situation, you have to act.
So those are five areas. I am sure next year I will think of something else.
Generous Leaders
Liu: People give names to their favorite leadership types—Bill George names “authentic leaders,” Jim Collins names “Level 5 Leaders,” and Robert Greenleaf names “Servant Leaders.” Do you have your favorite name for your favorite leadership type?
Bennis: That’s an interesting question. Just to be a little bit different, I would say that I think generosity is a distinct mark of my work. I make a great deal of acknowledgment and of appreciation, which I think is missing in most organizations. I like acknowledgment.
You know, there’s a guy who comes to our condo every few months to “detail the car.” He refreshes it, he polishes it, he cleans out the interior. It takes two or three hours to do a car. After the first two occasions, I was getting in the car one day, going off to USC to teach, and I said, “Thank you. Looks good.” And he said, “Doc, have you really looked at your car? Take a look at it.” Then I did. I looked at his work. I realized I was being quite perfunctory.
One morning, I was on campus walking along with one of my PhD students. I saw these landscapers. They were making the campus look beautiful, but unnoted, unacknowledged. They got there at six in the morning, and had been on their knees for at least two hours. I said to them: “Thank you for making this campus beautiful, making me feel good when I come here.” I didn’t think about it. Then on my last birthday, my former student, who is now teaching leadership at a university, emailed me: “I never forget that morning. I will never forget the way you acknowledged the landscapers.”
Good leaders genuinely show appreciation, acknowledgment, and respect. In order to become a leader, you also have to have a strong ego and an appropriate amount of ambition, a sense of purpose, and be prepared to be involved in the toughest decisions that may result in people being laid off. How can you be the generous leader and yet make some of these decisions?
Liu: So you are using the term “generous leaders?”
Bennis: Yes, but I don’t know whether I’ll continue to use it.
Schultz: Showing Respect
Liu: Howard Schultz, the chairman of Starbucks, said he received some advice from you. What advice did you give him? I am curious.
Bennis: I met Howard at a conference years ago and we got to be friends. He’s a nice, easy guy. I’ll tell you one example, from probably 10 years ago. I was in my office when he called me and said, “Warren, I’ve got a question for you. Do you have a few minutes?”
I said, “Actually only a few. I have a class in five minutes.” So this phone call lasted no more than five minutes.
“So I’m facing a problem I’ve never faced before,” Howard said. “I want to make a major decision, but my direct reports are uniformly against it. I don’t know what to do.”
So I said: “Well, Howard, has your intuition, your gut instinct, been pretty good in the past?”
When he said yes, I continued: “Well, what you might do is to take your staff immediately off-site, away from your regular company offices, and give them enough opportunity to challenge you, to vent, to tell you about their qualms and reservations. Take two or three hours. You may change your mind. And they might. You may not come to an agreement, but it is important they know they’ll be listened to.”
That’s the conversation. I never followed up what happened until about five years ago, when he came to USC to receive an award. I asked him what the decision was that he’d been worried about. He said, “Whether or not we should open a Starbucks operation in Japan. And all the advice was against it. We paid a consulting firm US$5 million. They said, ‘No. Japanese drink tea. They don’t like holding a cup of latte, certainly not in public.”’ He decided to go ahead anyway.3
Liu: So basically your advice is: “You should really listen to your people. Show them that you care about their opinion.”
Bennis: Yes. That’s an example of respect. Also, guess what? You could change your mind. But ultimately, as the leader, you have to make that big decision.
Sculley: Adaptive Capacity in Action
Liu: I want to ask you about another manager, John Sculley, the former CEO of Apple. In your books, you cited him as an example of a great leader. Do you still think so? Because most people think he was a failure.
Bennis: That is a good question. I think he is a great leader in the right circumstances. When Steve Jobs persuaded him to leave Pepsi where he was destined to be the top guy, he got seduced by Steve Jobs. It’s an area that was so different from Pepsi, so I think the circumstances were not congenial to success. He is doing brilliantly now as a venture capitalist. So I think he has adapted very well.
Having failed so publicly and coming back, and being successful, is an example of adaptive capacity, so I wouldn’t change my mind. Was John good for Apple? It wasn’t a good choice for him.
In this world, you will have downturns or moments where you are no longer a hero for a while. If you learn from such things, this is adaptive capacity.
An Example of Learning
Liu: Do you think your tenure as a university president was a failure or not?
Bennis: [Laughs] I didn’t realize you were going to ask all these personal questions. Who do you think you are? Warren Bennis?
Liu: You are not only a leadership guru, but also a leader. You are said to be one of the few leadership gurus that have real experience in leading a large organization.
Bennis: Although I sometimes portray myself as a failure in the stories I tell, looking back, I don’t think of myself as a failure for several reasons.
One is that I don’t think I could write the stuff I am doing now without having had that experience. I don’t feel uneasy. I feel confident when I talk about leadership. I can talk with authority, not just because I have been an author but also because I had 11 years of leading at two universities, very complex organizations. So I feel I am not just talking from my neck up, but also from my experience. That gave me confidence.
What I accomplished was important. We would have gone broke at the University of Cincinnati had I not led a drive, supported by a great team, to become a fully-supported state university. Finally I learned so much. How could you learn so much and call it a failure? I can’t anyway.
And they finally took 30 years to recognize that. I just got an honorary degree. It’s pretty late in coming [laughs]. Now even my former colleagues and board at Cincinnati think I’ve finally become a success.
Leaders vs. Followers
Liu: You once said that your book Leaders should be called Followers, and On Becoming a Leader should be . . .
Bennis: . . . On Becoming a Follower.
Liu: So leaders and followers are two sides of the same coin?
Bennis: I co-authored a book with David Heenan called Co-Leaders.
Liu: It’s about being second-in-command.
Bennis: Yes. We first wanted to call it Second Banana, and the publisher said, “Are you kidding!” He said to me, “What would you think if we changed On Becoming a Leader to ‘On Becoming a Follower?’ Do you think it would sell any copies in America?” “Followership” has been a largely neglected field, but not anymore. I wrote some stuff on “followership” a long time ago.
But I am not sure they are the opposite sides of the same coin. In general, what makes a good follower is not always what makes a good leader. The roles are quite different. In that perspective, it is not the opposite side of the same coin. To be an able follower means really to speak truth to power. It means to realize what the mission is.
Drucker or Bennis: Who Said It?
Liu: When I talked to Ronald Heifetz about the difference between leadership and management, he said, “I don’t know who originated this but, ‘leaders do the right thing and managers do things right.”’ I said I thought you had said this.
Bennis: Peter Drucker and I have both been known to have said that. I get a lot of letters asking me who originated it. I may have said it first; I don’t know and I don’t care. I don’t care who gets the credit for it. And given the fact that Peter is older, give it to Peter.
Why “Leading”?
Liu: This question is related to the difference between leadership and management. A middle manager in an organization may ask, “Why do I have to be a leader? Can I just be a manager?” How would you answer that?
Bennis: He must figure out what he wants. That is hard.
I teach a course called “The Art and Adventure of Leadership.” It is very hard to gain admission to this class. We take 40 students out of about 300 applicants. I teach with the president of my university, which makes it a big deal.
What I told my students in the last class this semester was, “Leadership is not simply like a marketing course. This is a course about life. This is a course about what you want. This is about what your purposes are, what will give you the most happiness, impact, and benefit. Whom do you want to benefit? What kind of impact do you want? And what will make you happy and lead a good life? You’re going to answer those questions. That is what this course is really about.”
So the real question for a middle manager is: How much money are you going to need? How much impact do you want to make? Who do you want to benefit? What about your subjective wellbeing? Then they’ll get a little closer to how they want to live their lives in leadership situations. And maybe they will get closer to answering that question: Do I want to be a leader?
Endnotes
1 The Essential Bennis was published in August 2009, more than a year after the conversation, and includes more than 20 of Bennis’s favorite essays, with comments from a number of colleagues and friends on different essays.
2 Bennis told the author in September 2009 that “Project X” has finally morphed into a memoir which will be published with the title Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership.
3 Starbucks entered Japan in 1996.
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