8. THE DREAM
The Way to do is to be.
—Lao-Tzu
Over the next several months, I kept reflecting on my experiences in Europe and with the ermine up in the mountains. I couldn’t talk with anyone about these experiences; I had a hard time even comprehending them myself. I continued to have similar experiences involving the loss of boundaries where my sense of identity expanded to include God and the entire universe. I had been taught to pray since early childhood, but this loss of boundary between God and me was too much to comprehend. I went to a close friend, who was one of Houston’s best known psychiatrists, to see if he could assure me that I wasn’t going off the deep end. I told him the whole story—all of what had been occurring over the past year or so. He chuckled and gave me the assurance I needed. He also gave me some books that described this type of experience, and I discovered how it is central to every major religion, including Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. This helped me feel more comfortable with the phenomenon, but I still couldn’t fully comprehend the mystery of it. I knew there was a new awareness growing within me, and I felt deep down there was much more to come.
Over time, I began to feel that the organizing principle of the universe is “relatedness,” and that this is more fundamental than “thingness.” It kept occurring to me that this new understanding is what’s missing in how we think about leadership. We’re always talking about what leaders do—about leadership style and function—but we put very little emphasis on the being aspect of leadership.
My experience in Europe reading Fromm’s The Art of Loving led me to read Fromm’s next book, To Have or To Be. Fromm’s thesis could be summed up by the two quotes that appeared at the introduction to his book:
The Way to do is to be.
—Lao-Tzu
People should not consider so much what they are to do, as what they are.
—Meister Eckhart
Fromm explains that Being is a fundamental mode of existence or orientation to the world, one of aliveness and authentic relatedness. It has to do with our character, our total orientation to life; it is a state of inner activity. For the first time in history, he argues, the physical survival of the human race depends on a radical change of the human heart. This is a call to service that will take great courage—to leave what we have and move out, not without fear, but without succumbing to that fear. It is a call to redefine what is possible, to see a vision of a new world and to be willing to undertake, step-by-step, what is necessary in concrete terms to achieve that vision.
A few weeks later, as I was reading everything I could find on the subject of leadership, I received a pamphlet in the mail with a simple essay inside written by Robert Greenleaf. It was a thin little pamphlet, only thirty-seven pages long, with a burnt orange cover, entitled The Servant as Leader. I wish I could remember who sent it to me because I owe that person an eternal debt of gratitude. The moment I saw the words “Servant as Leader,” they had an enormous impact on me. The very notion of servant leadership was absolutely stunning to me, and I couldn’t put it out of my mind. It was as if someone had suddenly cleansed my lens of perception, enabling me to understand what I had been struggling with for so long; at the same time, it was as if a memory of long ago was being reawakened. With his words, Greenleaf took me by the hand and opened a pathway for me to territory I’m still experiencing to this day, some nineteen years later.
Greenleaf attributed the idea of servant leadership to Herman Hesse’s book Journey to the East. The narrator of the story is on a journey with a band of men, looking for enlightenment (a journey probably intended to symbolize Hesse’s own, Greenleaf pointed out). Leo is the servant who does the group’s menial chores, but who also sustains them with his presence, his spirit, and his song. The journey lasts for years, and all goes well through all kinds of travail until Leo disappears. The group finds they cannot make it without Leo. They fall into disarray, they become lost, and the narrator almost dies. After years of wandering, the narrator finally finds Leo and is taken to the order that sponsored the journey. There, Greenleaf says, he discovers that Leo, whom he had first known as servant, was actually the head of the order, its guiding spirit, a great and noble leader. Leo, by the quality of the inner life that was expressed by his presence, had served to lift the group up and make their journey possible.
In this essay, Greenleaf takes a fundamental stand and sets forth a new framework through which we can understand the underlying dynamics of leadership. The essence of leadership, says Greenleaf, is the desire to serve one another and to serve something beyond ourselves, a higher purpose. In our traditional way of thinking, “servant leadership” sounds like an oxymoron. But in a world of relationships, where relatedness is the organizing principle of the universe, it makes perfect sense. In that orientation, servant leadership seems like a very potent and natural way to think about leadership. This, I began to realize, was a critical piece to the puzzle I had been struggling with for so long.
Everything in me was saying I had to get away to digest all that had been happening to me and to understand what was trying to emerge. So, armed with these ideas, in early 1977 I took off for a couple of weeks and went to the mountains again, this time to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, to deliberately practice the art of solitude and to consider all that was before me.
It was late spring—to me the most beautiful time in the mountains, a time of birth and renewal. I stayed at a private condominium that lay high up the western edge of the ski area (which at this time of year was closed), within a few minutes’ walk of some unimproved property I had purchased during the previous ski season.
Every morning I would get up just before daybreak, have juice and fruit, stretch, and take a long, slow run in the mountains. After returning for a shower and breakfast, I would make my way up to the property and spend the day there writing and thinking. Once there, I felt completely alone, as if on the top of the world. The property was surrounded by greenbelt and natural forest and had a kind of eagle’s nest feel to it, being the highest point in the immediate area. Off to the east, the view was directly up the ski mountain, and below to the west, I could see the entire Yampa Valley and all that lay beyond for forty or fifty miles. It was a spectacular place to be that spring, there among the wildflowers and tall pines and firs.
By the time I left the mountains, I had a basic outline for an institute that would develop servant leadership. Eventually, I would call it the American Leadership Forum. It would be patterned in some ways after the well-known White House Fellows Program, but it would encourage linkages among different sectors of society and the rising generation of leaders in a community or region. It would heighten their sense of public responsibility, and it would enhance their capacity to lead in a pluralistic society where no one would ever be “in charge” again. The overarching principle of the organization would be one of servant leadership, serving with compassion and heart, and recognizing that the only true authority for this new era is that which enriches participants, and empowers rather than dimishes them. It would encourage “transformational leadership”: leadership of strong commitment and broad visionary ideas. It would be creative leadership rather than reactive leadership. It would be leadership with the capacity to imagine a great community or a great region and the capacity to help make that greatness happen. It would embrace the notion that we don’t have to be bound by our current circumstances, but that we can literally choose the kind of community, the kind of world, that we want to live in.
Bringing the Leadership Forum to reality would require a search for hidden talent. I felt there were hundreds of world-class leaders, men and women of the successor generation, younger people who were just a step away from the top. It would be our task to encourage them to see their larger purposes, to see their special destinies in life, and to reach for that which was truly worthy of them. We were on the threshold of a new era, and we had to shape it to the highest purposes and the highest values we could. Above all, we had to strive to understand the meaning of kindness and love, “the perfect and visible principle of all life.” I remembered these words from Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and the last words of Jonathan’s teacher, Chiang, as he disappeared in a flash of brilliant light: “Jonathan, keep working on love.” That became my overall quest in life and the very bedrock on which the American Leadership Forum was to be founded—the idea of service to and compassion for others. The idea of servant leadership. The idea of helping others in their struggle to break free of their limits. It became my personal mission to share with others something of the truth that was unfolding before me.
I held the idea of the American Leadership Forum close to my vest for about six months. It was such a large dream that I was afraid to tell anyone because it seemed so grandiose. I almost felt ashamed that I could even imagine myself doing something like this.
A year later, a client and very close friend of mine, Tom Fatjo, came to see me. Tom, the founder of Browning & Ferris Industries (better known now as BFI), was an accountant who was also a great entrepreneur. He had come up with an idea about the way that solid waste and trash could be handled. After devising the system, he bought a garbage truck, and then got up at four o’clock every morning to ride on the back of the truck and pick up the trash in his neighborhood to test his system. Out of his idea has grown one of the largest solid waste management firms in the world.
Tom came to my office to share his dream with me about an executive development center that would be located in Houston and would be dedicated to helping business executives and professionals achieve a more productive quality of life. As he shared his dream with me, it encouraged me to feel that I could tell him about mine. He was able to take this risk, and now I was, so I did. I gave him a copy of my plan, and he took it home with him.
A couple of days later, he came back and told me, “Joe, I think this is an absolutely outstanding idea. It’s something the country needs, and it’s something our community needs. It’s a very large dream, but I think it can become a reality. However, there’s a fatal flaw in the plan that you’ve laid out. You’ve got yourself acting as chairman of the executive committee, but you’ve got someone else in there acting as the chairman and chief executive of the entire operation. You’ve got someone else in there actually making it happen. You know, Joe, this is your dream, and if you’re going to make it a reality, it’s going to have to be you that does it. You’ve to be out there on the point, and you’re going to have to devote 100 percent of your energy and 110 percent of your commitment to make it happen. And if you don’t, you can just forget it. You’re going to have to leave the law firm, quit the practice of law, and dedicate every ounce of energy and every minute of time that you have, or it just won’t happen.”
As the words were coming out of Tom’s mouth, I knew that he was telling me the truth. What he was saying was absolutely correct, but I didn’t have the guts to leave the practice of law and to take all of the attendant risks. I had promised my partners that I would go to London to open our new law office, and I used that as the excuse. I told Tom that the timing was wrong, and I simply couldn’t do it.
He looked at me and said, “Whenever you’re ready, let me know. I’m going to help you.” In fact, a few years later, Tom was the person who gave me the crucial help I needed.