He established his reputation with two books written early in his career—Organizations, co-authored with Herbert Simon in 1958, and A Behavioral Theory of Firms, co-authored with Richard Cyert in 1963—which are considered classics in organizational studies. During his career he has been a professor of psychology, political science, management, sociology, and education. In addition, he has written eight books of poetry. Though primarily an academic, he was by no means an Ivory Tower recluse. Among his many outside activities, he established and chaired the Citigroup Behavioral Sciences Research Council and was a director of several companies.

While James March is not a household name among business executives, he is highly regarded by management gurus: in a “gurus’ gurus” list, published by the Harvard Business Review in December 2003, he emerged second, behind only Peter Drucker.

March admits that he gets more enjoyment from playing with ideas than selling them. It is said that he began his classes at Stanford each year by saying, “I am not now, nor have I ever been, relevant.” He tries not to give advice on any practical matters. (In the course of our dialog, he joked that the only advice he gave to people is to “produce children.”) However, that did not stop him from offering advice to his good friend John Reed, then CEO of Citicorp, not to proceed with Citicorp’s merger with the Travelers Group.

March does not like to be called a guru or master. He sees himself as a teacher and taught Organizational Leadership from around 1980 right up until his retirement. This was highly popular among undergraduate and graduate students alike and was unusual in that its required reading included classical literature such as War and Peace.

March may have retired but his legendary teaching lives on in work based on his lecture notes for the course: a book entitled On Leadership (2005) and two films, Passion and Discipline: Don Quixote’s Lessons for Leadership (2003) and Heroes and History: The Lessons for Leadership from Tolstoy’s War and Peace (2008), both conceived, written, and narrated by March.

When I met him at his Stanford office in June 2008, the 80-year-old March was entertaining, incisive, and exceedingly enlightening.

In order to talk about leadership, we have to recognize the fundamental issues in leadership are no different from the fundamental issues in life. The fundamental issues in life are probably better discussed in great literature than they are in social science. So in my leadership course we would read some well-known books, including Othello by William Shakespeare, Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, and Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes.

I told my students that there are several decisions you make very early in your life that will affect your chances of becoming a leader, and will have more impact than anything else we know about.

The first decision you make is who your parents are. The second decision you make is where and when you will be born. And the third decision you make is what your sex will be. Once you’ve made those decisions, you can account for as much variance as we can account for. Otherwise everything is a lot of idiosyncratic things.

In most of the Western world at least, the conventional justification for great action lies in the great consequences of the action. You act because you expect good things to happen as a result. That consequential logic runs through all our teaching, all our speeches, banners, posters, all the histories we write.

But for the most part, it is not true. Most people will discover that it’s very difficult to accomplish great things. They cannot justify their lives in terms of the great consequences of their actions.

Quixote is important primarily because he reveals a second way of justifying great actions, which is really quite different. Quixote does not care about consequences. What he cares about is being a proper knight. In some way the most important sentence in that novel is “yo sé quien soy”: I know who I am. Because he knows who he is, he does things.

He says, “What would a knight do in this situation? Then I’ll do it.” He is in love but for no other reason than that is what he has expected of a knight errant. So it’s an attitude that says you don’t justify great actions by expecting great things. You justify great actions because that is what is appropriate for the kind of person you are.

That is a vision that has its limitations, but it is a very important thing for great leaders.

Quixote has chosen a socially constructed identity. He didn’t construct it. He just tries to live up to it. That’s true of most of us. We have identities we try to live up to. They are not invented by us.

On one hand, it would be very bad to abandon that completely. On the other hand, I think they should have a balance between that and an identity-based conception. So in this culture, with these people, I push them as far as I can to Quixote. If they went all the way to Quixote, I would probably push them back the other way.

Thus, in other cultures, I could imagine taking a different position. I once wrote a paper called “The Technology of Foolishness.” When I spoke about this once in a conference, one of the participants, who was from the former Yugoslavia, came to me and said, “Please, when you come to Yugoslavia, don’t give this talk. We have enough foolishness.” I think he may have been right. So it is a matter of balance.

Joy is one of the most profound human emotions and expressions. I think we all want to seek that in our lives. It makes leadership too intensely serious to ignore joy, to ignore the properties of enjoyment in these activities.

I think it’s OK for a leader to say “This is just wonderful!”—particularly if that joy is in the experience and not in the trappings, the crowns, the salaries, and so on, but in the intrinsic property of the job, the chance for creativity, and the opportunities for accomplishing things. I think nothing is worse than seeing a leader who is tired, who feels totally overcommitted, and has no sense of pleasure in what he is doing.

When he negotiated the merger between Citicorp and Travelers, I told him I thought it was the craziest idea that he’d ever had, and it was dumb.

I liked his response to me. He said he appreciated my kind advice. You know, we were pretty good friends, so he was willing to listen to me, but he didn’t change his mind.

When the merger did not go well and I reminded him of that conversation, he said he thought the merger was in fact good for the stockholders, but bad for the company.

I have been impressed by Bill Gates’s willingness to try to do good with his fortune through the foundation. I think he recognizes to some extent that this fortune does not belong to him. He senses that society has produced it. In that way I have a more positive feeling about him than I do about Jobs. But I am very reluctant to say anything about people I really don’t know well.

So why does this happen? Why do people in organizations not know how to learn? Why do organizations sometimes not learn well?

There are some specific things we know which probably can help. The one that fascinates me is the extent to which we stop experimenting with new things too quickly. In a sense we learn too fast. We switch from an activity that is not doing well to another activity sooner than we probably should. In a world filled with noise and external distractions, an activity that appears to have poor outcomes might very well turn out better than we think.

Managers are often operating under considerable pressure to show results very fast. Learning requires experimentation and some longer time horizons. If top management gave a little longer time horizon to managers, and managers were a little slower to make inferences from small samples, they might get a little more useful learning from experience.

I have a granddaughter who was learning Hebrew, and she did well. When I congratulated her teacher on doing a very good job, she said, “I found a jewel, and I polished it.” That’s the way I feel about my students. They are jewels. My role is simply to polish them a little bit. After all, I will be forgotten, and they will be there.

Then you can be very critical about particular writings, or particular statements. You say: “That’s something you wrote and I am going to tell you that’s garbage. That doesn’t mean you are garbage.” But in order to get that difference across, you have to establish a kind of a relationship that fundamentally says, “I am on your side.”

My job is not to tell people what the right answers are, but to remind them that the answer they have at the moment is not the whole answer. So I am often saying different, perhaps contradictory, things to different people.

I grew up in Wisconsin, which is in the middle of this country. When you go from Wisconsin to the East Coast, you go from one kind of a culture to, in most respects, a higher culture. When someone from Wisconsin goes to New York, for example, they are humble, but they believe at the same time they are probably smarter than the people with whom they are dealing. So it’s a genuine humility but combined with a genuine self-confidence—“I know I’m just a small pebble on the beach, but I’m a very tough pebble”—it’s that kind of feeling.

It does depend on the context. Of course, you develop your own context.

That said, I think leadership is a useful organizing term. But it’s useful mostly to tell people: “Look, the way you are thinking about this is not the right way.”

There are some phenomena associated with leadership. We know a fair amount about what happens when people are given formal positions of authority, and what they do, how that changes them. We know a little bit about how one participates in groups in order to lead people to reach a decision.

We may know some things about the problems in balancing personal life and public life. That’s a big, important thing for leaders. And we know some things about tradeoffs between unity and diversity, between exploitation and exploration. Those are also useful to leadership.

So a lot of things are relevant to leadership, but don’t explicitly talk about leadership, and that’s the direction I would go.

I once wrote a little piece in which I pointed out one of the problems for leaders is they live in a world that demands clarity, clear goals, clear understanding and precise senses; but the world they live in is unclear and paradoxical, and so on. They know that. So they live in a world in which they have to speak one way and live another way. And that becomes intolerable for many people.

The point of that article is that leaders should read poetry, because much of the time poetry sees something through two lenses. Life is both confused and clear. Individuals are both admirable and despicable. Two things are going on simultaneously and you have to be able to see them both simultaneously, not in order to resolve the conflict but in order to see it as an essential element of life. I am not sure I’ve persuaded many leaders to read poetry as a result, but I think it might be good if I did. Or you did.