The Leaders We Need | Michael Maccoby | Talks at Google

I think you all demonstrate remarkably good judgment in allocating your time for your decision to come here today. I personally believe one of the greatest challenges that we face at Google is management and leadership. I think we don't suffer for too few incredibly smart, talented, ambitious, successful people. But finding ways to get all, all of those people to work together and work to achieve common objectives is a skill. I have to say that I'm still struggling to develop and I know is shared as a concern across my peers at EMG and frankly, throughout the organization. We are truly fortunate today to have someone who is an expert on leadership issues. Indeed, I said, and I hope it's fair to say that you're really one of the founders of what has become known as sort of leadership studies. And Michael Maccabee is the author of several, several books. I know him both because of the reading that I've done of his work, but also because I know what a fine leader he is of his own household. I'm an old friend of one of his daughters, but there's nothing wrong with that in inviting him here. He still is a nationally and indeed internationally recognized expert on leadership. He's advised businesses, governments, unions and universities. He's president of the Maccabee Group in Washington, has a PhD from Harvard. I think the. We always look around somewhere. There's a Harvard thing here, although it's never nearly as dominant as the Stanford one. There it is. See, it's always in the back. He teaches leadership at the Brookings Institution and Oxford University Syed School of Business. He's here to talk about his new book, which is entitled the Leaders we need and what Makes Us Follow. I think we have. It's from Harvard Business School Press. I think we have some copies around. And of course, afterwards we'll decide whether we should send a copy to all of the people on emg. I'll let us vote on that. I think what we're going to do is Professor Maccabee is going to talk for a little while and then we're going to open it up for questions. I sincerely would ask you as he speaks. And as you think about the questions, do think about the relevance to us. This is not one of those abstract conversations. I want you to think about what are the lessons that we can learn as we continue to grow so quickly and consolidate our growth, about building organizations that have strong leaders and effective results. And with that, I'll leave it to you.

Okay, thanks. Well, it's a pleasure to have a chance to meet you all and see the legendary Google Headquarters. Oops. You put that in my pocket. Okay, let me start out. Why write another book about leadership and there are really literally thousands. The answer is because I felt that all the books I read about leadership and I looked at some of the best ones, that they're all written from a point of view, as though there was just one kind of follower. And if you did this and that, they all follow. When in fact, I could see very clearly in all my experience, 30 years of work. I started out, my first book was based on studying high tech industries in the 70s. First company I studied was Hewlett Packard, then IBM, intel, these companies. And then I worked with the big companies like IBM and AT&T and began to see the shift, beginning with knowledge work from the industrial framework. And I also began to see a difference in people. We've gone through a huge historical shift that we're going through right now. I sometimes think if we were all living in the Renaissance, we wouldn't be turning to each other and saying, hey, you know, we're in the Renaissance right now. But I think that we are in a period of change that is perhaps as great. When you think of the Renaissance, you think of the invention of the printing press, the invention gunpowder, exploration. Also capitalism began. The banks began. A new group of people began to take the leadership. Not the old princes and warriors, but people who were thinking with their heads, starting banks, investing, et cetera. Now, what are we going through right now as we look at the. The world you're in, which you're in, the point of creating this new world of not just information, but knowledge creation. And we're dealing with an explosion of research in genetics and nanotechnology. And we're dealing with a global economy that has not existed before, which produces relationships and the need to collaborate across boundaries that never happened before. Certainly the bureaucratic framework of the industrial world does not fit the reality of the knowledge world that we're all in. But furthermore, the people, and I think probably most of you, are not the same as the people who grew up in my generation, where 70% of the families in the United States and Western Europe were headed by a single male wage earner. Women were home, children grew up seeing. Daddy represents the world of work and leadership. Mommy represents caring. I go to work. All the managers at HP and IBM were men. The relationships were all kind of relations. Father, son, et cetera. The big companies like AT&T, you couldn't get to the top unless literally you wore a 42 long suit. And I also worked with Ford. Ford you had to be small because Henry Ford was small. But people were just cloning themselves in management. And what we were seeing was a personality, what I call a social character that was raised and socialized to fit the bureaucracies that were the main sources of wealth creation in the society. But today we look literally, there are more families in this country headed by a single woman than there are those traditional families of daddy running them. And the dominant family structure is two wage earners, two careers. Kids grow up today in daycare centers. Often their relationships with their parents are totally different from the past. As a matter of fact, studies are showing more and more that kids in the affluent part of society begin to see their parents more like servants than leaders. You know, take me here, take me there. So on. Parents come home exhausted after a day. One Harvard professor of pediatrics said, parents aren't even disciplining their kids anymore because they come home exhausted and they want their kids to be their Prozac. And the kids are learning at a very early age how to negotiate with their parents, how to play on their guilt. I hear some nervous laughter. We all know this. So what are these kids like when they get to work? Well, what we're seeing today are. We're seeing a totally different social character emerging. I call it the interactive, as opposed to the bureaucratic. The bureaucratic fit the world of the great bureaucracies in the industrial world. The interactives fit the world of knowledge, work, collaboration. However, and I'll come back to this, some people said this generation of interactives is probably more connected and less related than the former generations, which becomes a problem more because connection doesn't mean relationship, doesn't really mean knowing. And one of the great challenges for leadership, it's very clear, you'll see in the book. I've gone through all the major theories of leadership that we've been reading and teaching in school. They all fit that industrial bureaucratic world. They don't fit this world. I mean, if you. They're all about how to manipulate followers and make them. And you see these leaders who are still bureaucrats getting up in big conferences and saying, people follow me. Rudy Giuliani and Jack Welch and others, they're in these conferences and they say, people follow me because I have passion, integrity, and deep values. Well, that's fine. We like that. But if they're not taking us any place we think we need to go, all that integrity and passion and so on isn't worth much, right? I mean, today, what interactives want to know, what's the purpose of what we're doing. And if somebody. We don't really want to follow anyone, we're willing to collaborate. We want to be collaborators with people who have a clear, good purpose, who are credible, transparent, open. That becomes. And in the book, you'll see as I look at examples both from companies and also from the health care industry, where I studied the best examples of health care, where you're dealing with technical, professional, and that's whether it's engineers or physicians. It's the same basic point. Nobody's going to follow just because somebody is charismatic and is a father figure, like in the past. They're going to follow because they're persuaded that this is worth doing, for example, in medicine, that it's worth looking at pathways rather than everybody doing their own thing in terms of how they treat the same illness. That makes a huge difference. We get together and look at what really works, not what we were taught in a particular medical school. And I've seen one of the problems of this, of course, is that we see often that the leaders are from the bureaucratic age and the interactives are coming in. And I show examples where really talented interactive teams just reject and eject a leader who's a bureaucrat, even though they say, technically he's fine, we're not going to work for this guy. Mitre Corporation, which does the systems work for the DOD and FAA outside of Washington. I worked with them for a number of years. And today, I think similar to Google, probably, teams can stay anywhere they want to work together. They can be at home, they could be somewhere else working together. And when I said, well, what about motivating managing? The CEO said to me, they motivate each other. Nobody will stand for somebody on their team who is not getting results. I first saw this, oh, a number of years ago. I was working with AT&T and I was in a business service center in Atlanta. And one of the. I came to one of the service technicians, a union member named Penny, and I was told that Penny personally controlled a $50 million account with one of the companies. The company didn't want to talk to the account executive, didn't want to talk to the manager. They wanted to talk to Penny. Penny was invited to all the meetings. I said, penny, can you do this all by yourself? He said, well, I'm better on voice and data. What do you do about data? Well, Annie over here, she's great on data, so she's creating her own team. I said, do you need a manager at all? Of course. She said, why I said, why? Well, I need somebody who's going to tell me what the new products are pricing, company strategy, I need to know those things. But think about the difference between that and all these ideas of the leader and the manager. Now, let me just say one thing as a footnote. If you can scare people enough, you can scare people enough, then they regress to a kind of childlike state and you get what Freud called transferential attitude of idealization of the father figure, who's going to protect you. And this was of course, the strategy of the bush campaign in 2004. As I point out, it was very explicit to scare the hell out of everyone, ratchet up the color coded threat level. I talked to somebody, Homeland Security, I said, who determined what level it was going to be. He said, don't tell anybody, it's the president. So I mean, but you could do that only so far because if you're going to be this kind of idealized figure and you turn out to be inept, the transference becomes very negative. It's the bad parent. I'll say, by the way, also just as a footnote, that one of our problems today is that the images we have, these paternal images, of course don't fit in a world where women are leaders and women are managers and so on. And what you often get, as I describe here, one CEO, Lydia Thomas, who was just retired CEO of Noblis, which is another technical company, said to me, yes, I often have to say to people who come to me, I say, I'm not your mother, I'm not your mother. Maybe I can be your friend, but I'm not your mother. Now what happens often is when people expect a woman to be a motherly and she turns out to be very straightforward and rational and so on, they turn her into the wicked witch. She's not the fairy godmother, she must be the wicked witch. And what we lack in our culture is good kind of prototypes or figures of strong women. I think Margaret Thatcher benefited from the fact that Britain had Elizabeth I and Britannia in their history. And in this culture we're lacking those models of women. So Hillary or. What's her name, who went to jail, Martha Stewart, Martha Stewart, et cetera. I mean, they turn out either to be wonderful figures or wicked witches. It's very hard to get an image or a prototype in between. So. Let me just summarize where we are. One of the implications and one of the things I found as I wrote this book is that the definitions we have of a leader and I Think this is important to keep in mind, really don't fit the world we're in. I looked through all the definitions that I could find in all the major books. For example, one is a leader is a visionary. People often say leader is a visionary. Now I. I'm a trained psychoanalyst and I've seen some visionaries in mental hospitals who are certainly not leaders. Another definition that often say, well, they set the agenda, they evaluate all these things which we know today teams can do without any kind of leadership. Another definition, James McGregor Burns, which is a book on leadership which has some wonderful examples of good leaders in the past. But he says there are two kinds of leaders, transactional and transformational. And the transformational all change people to a higher level. Now, does that mean that Hitler and Mao were not transformational? I think if they were very transformational, but it was not to a higher level of values. So again, there's really only one definition of a leader which is unassailable and it's too simple for many academics. But when you think about it, it's not simple. Like many seemingly simple things, it's actually complex. And that is a leader is someone people follow. Think of it. Can you think of anyone that no one follows who's a leader? It's impossible. So the really interesting question is why do they follow you? How do they follow you? Where are they taking you? And what we see when you begin to look that way. You see, leadership always implies a context. And just to give a simple historical illustration, I think we would all recognize Winston Churchill was the indispensable leader of Britain in World War II. Why? His lion like qualities, unmovable, sure of himself. People could totally depend on him. Thrown out of office the minute the war is over. Why? Because people didn't want that kind of person. They wanted someone who could compromise, who could create consensus, who could bring people together in. Changing Britain. Now, what does a leader need today if he's going to work or she's going to work with interactives like Google people. And I would say and that you can be very interested in what you think about it. I think that one of the things that is lacking and crucial is developing the ability to understand people or what I call personality intelligence. That more and more studies show that if we look at global teams and so on, the technical stuff is much easier than the human side. And I've worked in a number of different cultures and seen how important it is to understand not only people's social character, but the different personalities and how they fit in the roles. Now, I know the study shows that 80% of people 37 or under who are technical professionals have grown up playing these multimedia video games in which how many people here play multimedia media video games or have Quite a few. And you know, and those you put together, you put together your own team and you don't need a leader. And you feel, people even feel you get results. People who play these games even feel leadership is evil. However, we're not playing games. We're not creating a second life avatar. Sometimes we have to be right here in reality and we have to know each other. Now there are different kinds of intelligence. And I'm going to finish by describing some of what I mean by personality intelligence. I have a chapter, by the way, talking about who we need to be president in terms of really beginning to understand not how they. This fight about how people define each other, which is really a kind of a warfare. You know, Obama's not strong enough. Hillary's secretive and lying or she really knows what she's doing. We'll hit the ground running. And Obama's event, you know, we have the, this did Carrie Ann, he was a flip flopper. It's a very primitive way of looking at the personalities. And we need a much fuller understanding of personality, both of our leaders and the people we're putting and working with and putting in key positions. And I see four elements of personality, intelligence, intellectually, but the intellect alone isn't enough. Understanding people is a matter of both the head and the heart. And I want to describe what that means and what it means to develop. And I think intellectually, intellectually, if we really understood people well, we'd have to be like the great writers. I mean, nobody. It's interesting when you think about this, how far we have gone with science and technology in the last five or six hundred years. How much development, how much innovation. And then ask the question, are we really better at understanding people than Shakespeare? Are we better at understanding people than Cervantes? Are we better than understanding people? Tolstoy? Seems to me our psychology in general has gone backwards rather than forward. And I think we can very well suffer for that. Now. There's no way to make us into great humanists understanding. And we still benefit from them. I mean, I still. If I say to you that person over there is a real Iago, you know exactly what I'm saying. If I say she's a Lady Macbeth, you know exactly what, what I'm saying. So there are elements from literature that already shape the way we see people. But seeing people has to do with seeing them in four ways. Intellectually, their identities, which, by the way, in the bureaucratic era were very tied to organization and so on. Today we're constantly reshaping identity. Identity is something we're creating. Second, of all, our social characters, I said we're in a world today where very often you've got to deal with the bureaucratic social character. You're going to find as you go to other organizations, they're not full of interactives. They're very hierarchical people in roles. It's not my job, you have to get permission, etc. Third is the personality type. And here there are different ways to look at personality type, but I've built on psychoanalytic theory of normal and creative personality. I see four major types. We are often a mix of these types, not a pure type, but they are the erotic type or the caring type, the kind of person whose main values are caring. And we find them in teachers and nursing and also many people in leadership roles. I think of the presidential candidates, Huckabee probably comes the closest to having an erotic personality. Second is the obsessive personality. That's the problem solving type of makes of. Those are the people you put in jobs where it has to do with making the processes and the systems and making sure things run. Then you get the productive narcissists. Those are the visionaries. Those are the people who want to change the world. Our most inspirational presidents have all been productive narcissists. Lincoln, Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Clinton, lbj. And they all have the same family constellation, by the way, when they grow up, which is an absent or weak father and a strong mother, every one of them. And the one candidate today who has that same constellation is Barack Obama. And he is the one visionary candidate. And these are the people who grew up because they don't internalize a father figure. It's a little different with women, but it's a similar constellation. But they don't internalize the rules, the moralistic views. If we look at our presidents who have been obsessive, take Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter, both high minded, high moralistic, but they never moved anyone. They didn't change anyone. Why? Because obsessives in leadership roles lecture at you. They tell you what you're lacking, what you have to do. You end up feeling somehow less competent. You're certainly not turned on. John McCain has that personality, high moral values, somebody you can count on. But he's lecturing at you. You know, what you get is what you see with the narcissist you don't know what you're going to get. Nobody thought that FDR was a visionary. They thought he was a kind of lightweight. Nobody thought Ronald Reagan was supposed to be a kind of a tough guy who was going to throw bombs at the Soviet Union, who thought he would spend one year studying everything about Gorbachev, go meet him one on one, throw everyone else out of the room and create the beginnings of disarmament, nuclear disarmament. It's very hard to know what these people will do, but what you can tell about them is that they create their own sense of what's right. They bring you in their internal dialogue. I don't know how many of you saw Obama here, any of you, if you read his books, he's been struggling with these questions. And he brings you in. He doesn't just lecture at you, he brings you in his own internal dialogue. And you know, he's the kind of person who's going to keep learning. And the fourth type is the marketing individual, which is a kind of extreme of the interactive personality. These are people constantly remaking themselves to fit particular constituency. We see that in Romney and Hillary also. Bush was the first of this type. And the question always was this type is who are they going to please? What's their constituency? Who are they going to be once they get in office? So, and the fourth way of looking at people is understanding their strengths, their qualities, their talents. And as a leader, of course, affirming people's strengths, recognizing and affirming. I mean, if I look back on my whole career, what I benefited so greatly from were teachers, people I worked for, who affirmed me when I was unsure is this really, can I really do this? And somebody who said, yes, you have this ability, you can do it. And that's of course, crucial in good leadership. Is that affirmation. When I think of the best definition of a leader, even though I'm talking about how we have to change it and be in the modern world, I go back 2500 years to Lao Tzu who said, the best of all leaders is the one who helps people. So eventually they don't need them. Then comes the ones they love and admire. Next comes the one they fear. The worst. Leaders let people push them around. Obviously they're not leaders. People won't trust a leader who doesn't trust them. The best leader doesn't say an awful lot, but everything he or she says is totally credible. And when they're finished with their work, the people say, we did it ourselves, and it's 2,500 years old. I have not yet heard a better definition of a good leader. But let me just end by saying I talk about intellectually, conceptually, but knowing another person is also a matter of the heart. And the heart has always been traditionally seen. If you go back to Aristotle, the Bible, in the Muslim tradition, Ibn Khaldun, the heart is where we think, where we determine what is true, good and beautiful. No amount of intellectual logic tells you what's true, good or beautiful in reality. And the heart has its own development. It's a muscle. I'm not talking about soft heart, bleeding heart. I'm talking about a courageous heart. Courage. From the French, knowledge of the heart. You go back to the Bible. King Solomon has a dream. God says, what do you want? And Solomon says, a heart that listens. A heart that listens, which is the basis of wisdom. A heart that listens. And if we're going to develop our hearts, I think we need, and I see people moving somewhat in this direction by interest in Buddhism, Eastern religions, which emphasize the sense of being clearly in reality, of being able to be here, present. But I think to add to that, we have to be able to also be in touch with our own humanity, our own deep reality. That can be meditation, prayer, but it's a way of being aware of things we'd like to repress, that are uncomfortable, that we don't want to see, including about other people. In our dreams, we often see the reality of what we think. Do you know that the neocortex is actually more active in sleep, in dreams, than it is when we're awake? In other words, we are more thinking, more asleep than awake because there's so much when we're awake we don't want to see, we don't want to believe. And finally, like Solomon, listening to others and responding, which is service, just service, being in reality, being in touch with our full humanity and being able to listen and respond. That's the discipline of the heart. So am I describing what is relevant to Google? I see some heads nodding. Anybody like to elaborate?

One thing I think at Google is that our communications are so frequently intermediated with something like email. Our communications are via email or they're via voicemail. And when you're talking about being aware and being present, I associate that a lot with face to face communication, communications and looking into someone's eyes and really being able to understand their emotion and their emotion behind what they're conveying to me. And that breaks down as you get further and further removed from Them, whether it's geographically or via medium like email. How do you maintain some of these qualities of awareness and presence when you're interacting with someone that's not next to you or interacting in a medium that doesn't afford that?

I think it's an excellent question and let me answer it first by saying there's a group at North Carolina State University that's been studying global teams in terms of projects, software, et cetera. And one of the things they find, which seems counterintuitive, is that teams do better when they're not present with each other. Now I thought about this, how can this be? Well, they said it's good to have a meeting in the beginning so they at least know each other. And I thought of two reasons why a global team would actually do better when they're not present with each other. One is often a lot of people in other countries, their English is not that good. And if you're together it's often there's a lot, there's some misunderstanding just because of English. But second of all, if you're not together, there's no leader there who you're worried about what he thinks about what you're saying. So you really are much freer in a way to say what you think now. Yes, but that's one side. The other side is there are a lot of times when we do have to meet. We're not just doing projects globally on the Internet. There are times we have to decide who are we going to put in this job, who do we trust? No amount intellectually on the Internet can tell me whether you are happy, sad, angry, envious, supportive. Those are things of the heart. I can't tell that on the Internet. And if I'm going to determine who I'm going to trust, who I'm going to work with, who I'm going to put in a big job over here. So it's really, we're talking really about being two handed. Two handed. There are things that we can do better on the net and there are things we have to do face to face. Yeah. Questions?

Professor McErby, thanks for coming. You know what's funny is sometimes I won't always remember the person that emails me, but I'll remember the person who beat me in a game of Wii Tennis on campus. And it's funny because you get to know, I think one thing that Google does really well is, is get people out of the office mentality and just do stuff together and collaborate. I had a question on the social status of leaders because sometimes you have leaders who are very private socially, but then you also have leaders who are well known in a social circle. What's your. You spend a lot of time around different types of leaders. What's your experience with. Are they also leaders in their social circles or is that mutually exclusive?

Well, it's interesting. Of course, there can be leaders everywhere. I have a acquaintance I met at a meeting in Sweden who's in Beijing, and he runs networks. He's got two networks running, one on Buddhist leadership and the other on Taoist leadership. And I asked him what he thought of what kind of leader. And he said something which I want to elaborate on. He said, well, I see two kinds of leaders. One is the kind of natural one who emerges, who really people trust. And by the way, as I write in the book, the University of Maryland soccer team was losing all its games and. And the coach had an idea. He gave a questionnaire to the whole team on who was the person they most trusted, who did they go to for advice. And it all turned in one person and he made him the captain of the team and they won the national championship. Wasn't the best player or anything. So what I see now in large knowledge organizations are three types of leaders that are needed. One is the strategic leader. And that can be either a visionary, narcissistic individual or it can be a team. I was asking the question whether Brim and what kind of personality Brim and Page have, because it's not so easy to see. Much easier to see Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as productive narcissist vision. You know, Larry Ellison, where I asked vice president once, how would you define find Larry Ellis? And he said, well, around here we say there's only one difference between Larry and God. God doesn't think he's Larry. So I mean, some leaders are easy to see their personality type, others less so. But we certainly need strategic leadership. Whether it's a done as a team or an individual, it has to set the direction, the investments, the sense of where the world's going, a vision of how to make it happen, partnering with others. And we need operational leaders. We need leaders who are going to create the systems, who are going to make sure there are ways that people can really work together. What do you do if there are mistakes? How do you deal with errors? How do you create a learning organization? All of these things need leadership. And third, you need the bridge builders, you need the network leaders. More and more. As we see, for example, companies like IBM and other big companies are dealing with business Customers where the customer is saying, I don't want a product, I want a solution. I worked for many years with abb. It's a big electrical engineering company. And a big metal and mining company came to us in Canada. They said, look, we've been buying power transformers from you. And so we don't want that. We want more efficient and cleaner use of energy. That's what we want to buy from you. Well, if you're selling that, you've got to bring together all kinds of different specialties to work as a team across the silos. And you need a kind of leader who is able to bridge, build, bring people together. And by the way, the best of those leaders often has no formal power because if they had any formal power, they'd be identified with one particular part of the organization. So they have the personality again. That's why it's important to understand personality. At Boeing, when they needed a leader like this for a huge software project, they said, find us a middle child in a family of seven, somebody who's used to working with conflict resolution across, et cetera. So the answer really is, in the new knowledge world, it's not one kind of leader fits all, which was true in the bureaucratic world. It's different types of leaders working as a social system.

So if there's a group in which the leadership is broken, how do you fix it?

Well, say something. What do you mean? Just a minute, what do you mean by what would that be like?

Let's say it's a group in Google or somewhere else in whatever organization in which there is the leadership that is established because of how the structure is set, you can't change it unless the one person who is now the leader needs to go or decides to take a different role or whatever. So if that is the situation, what internally from the group upwards or within the group can you do to still have to work within those parameters, but work in a better way that you can actually move forward?

You know, I started working on this problem a number of years ago in a couple of companies. And what we did was I got a team together and I said, let's just talk about all the functions of leadership. Let's not start with a person, let's start with functions. What is a leader? What are all things leader both to do? There were about 20 of them. Then I said, which of these things can you do yourselves as a team and which do you need to hire somebody in a leadership role to do? And that has worked beautifully. Comes very clear. There are certain things Once you look at leadership not as the person commanding, but a kind of servant leadership or value added, I'll call it value added leadership. Once you flip that around, it comes much clearer that you can work that out.

But to follow on, if I can. But don't you think, I mean, that's a vision that I think the group has to take and be accepted, right? I mean, if that is not how it is structured, then it would be a lot harder and I think a lot in Google, a lot of people are type A, so they're going to be taking on a bunch of things that another type of companies maybe they want. But I think that sometimes it's, it's a little harder to take so much on as a, as a group when you're still dependent on that particular leader who is assigned as your manager or your director or whomever it is who is actually having that responsibility. Even though maybe not focusing on the right things that, that they should be.

I mean, how do you get rid of a bad leader? How do you make a bad leader better? But let's not get rid of them all, let's just make them better. Well, you know, I always, when you ask that question, I always think of the old joke of how many psychiatrists it takes to change a light bulb. And the answer is just one. As long as the light bulb is willing. I think yes, there are many ways to help a leader and I think all leaders can get better. I have never met a leader and the best ones I've known, I mean, the only leaders who ever hired me to coach are really good leaders. But when you're dealing with one who won't listen, who has a very kind of a rigid, obsessive personality with a bunch of interactive. They won't work with him. And I give a case in there. It was a guy I met on an airplane going to England and I was editing the first chapter of the book and he was looking over and I said, well, read it. And he read it. He said, that's me. And then he told me he was running a technical team at a big company and his boss was a bureaucrat. He said all he wants us to tell him is how great he is. He never listened. He doesn't understand what we're doing. We don't need him. I'm working my team. We're collaborators. We work together. We do fine. I said, what are you going to do? He says, I'm leaving. And then he calls me up in a couple of weeks. He's left another company which is much more interactive. And he's very happy. I sent him the book. He called me up, he says, I when can I come over? I've bought four copies, I want you to sign, and so on. So this is not just theoretical. I think everything I'm talking about is extremely practical. But you don't understand it unless you're in it. I don't know.

So to follow up on that, you.

Decide to call on.

So to follow up on that over here?

Yeah.

So to follow up on that, then how do leaders get better? What are successful ways that you've seen?

Well, it all depends on. There's no one way you have to see what the situation. For example, I'll give you one CEO of a huge bank who brought me in because he's brilliant intellectually in terms of his foresight at the time. He saw the real estate bubble and all this, but he really didn't know how to work with people. He just got angry at them because they weren't as smart as he was. So he would just get furious and rage and so on. Well, what he needed to do was begin to understand who they were, what he could expect of them, what their strengths were, were how to develop, not to just get pissed off the minute that's one kind, another kind who was much more obsessive but very intelligent, so on. And he was replacing a narcissistic visionary, a CEO, and everyone saw him he had been the COO or saw him as a financial and so on and so forth. What he needed to do was become aware of what really turned him on, what were his deepest values and how he could make those part of what the company meant. And those had to do with real integrity. Learning how to make it more of a learning company, how to use very much a knowledge company. And in other words, you have to start again understanding that leader, where that leader is, what that leader needs to do. I find it much talking about changing an organization. The only way I have found that really people respond to change a whole organization is if you can show the customer's need. In other words, if you can start with what it means to make that customer not satisfy that customer, make that customer more successful and work back. That's the way to improve an organization. In other words, if I want to improve a health care organization, I'm not going to. I want to look at what does it take to make our patients the quality of their lives better when they leave here, not what does it take to improve our skill at doing operations, et cetera. Et cetera. That's all important. People, people will take care of that themselves. But to improve the organization, I need to look at what are we doing as an organization that's meaningful, that has a purpose.

So my question is, can anyone become a leader?

Or are leaders born or can they be made? And if they can be made, is it really, really something worth aspiring to? Good question. Some people are more natural, have quality. I mean, there are certain qualities that are genetic. There are five that psychology has shown are genetic, including agreeableness and conscientiousness and stuff like that, you know, and if you. I always think of fictionally of Tom Sawyer as a natural born operational leader. He gets everyone to paint the fence that he doesn't want to do, gets them all excited and so on. And then you have natural leaders like George Washington, who was tall, totally courageous people, just naturally trusted him, wanted to be. Well, there are a few people like that, but even those people need to learn leadership and develop themselves. I've never seen anyone who didn't need to develop themselves. Now, as the question, I've seen people become leaders. And of course I'm interested in leaders for the common good. I'm interested in leaders that people want to follow, not those that they have to follow like dictators. And we have enough of those anyway. We don't worry about that. What makes someone a leader that people want to follow? And my experience is it's because they've responded to a need. They become a leader by seeing a need others don't see and responding to it. I described the leaders. I don't know if any of you are familiar with the charter schools. KIPP, KIPP Knowledge is Power program. They have 56 schools in the country. They've been the most effective of any charter schools in the country in the inner city, taking kids, disadvantaged kids and getting them to college. And it's tremendous. You read about it in the book. But the two, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, the two guys who started this, were teachers in the Teach for America program in Texas. And they sat up one night talking about what they saw. And they said, we can help these kids. We can do it. We can create the right kind of school. And it's a very interesting system they've created that should be a model a lot of people, but it's responding to need. Whether it's Martin Luther King, Gandhi, others who are great leaders, they've responded in justice, to need, and even in business responding to a need. Bill Gates responded to a need. Steve Jobs responded to a Need. Page and Brim responded to a need and just say, we're going to be leaders. They said, we want to create something that responds to a human need, that enhances human capability. That's the great business leaders. Henry Ford said, I want to make a car that's not just for the rich that every American can own. Probably the last question.

Okay.

We'Ve been talking a lot. From the viewpoint of a leader or aspiring leader, from the viewpoint of a follower, perhaps, how do individuals better identify people that are leaders rather than people that want to lead people? Better leaders.

How do people identify what people that.

Are better suited to lead them.

How do you identify somebody you want to lead you?

Yes. Well, not want, but would be better willing to.

Yeah. Well, I think the question is, you look at somebody, what's their purpose? What value are they adding to this group? Are they going to help my development? You know, the interactive generation, the bureaucrats were in a world where it was life, often lifetime employment in big companies. Though it's very interesting, when I first interviewed Hewlett and Packard, I asked Bill Hewlett, what kind of people are you trying to hire here? He said, I'm trying to hire entrepreneurs. People think for themselves. I said, well, those people aren't going to stay here. They're going to leave. He said, fine, but we're going to treat them so well that they're going to be our customers and our suppliers. And that was what created this whole area, that attitude you look for, you ask the question, what is it that I want from a leader? Start out there. Do I want somebody that I can learn something from? Now, the other thing about the interactive age with a continual creation of knowledge, this is the first time in history where people like yourselves coming into a company know more about their work than their bosses know. That's never happened before. So what do you want from your boss? Like Penny, who I described? She wanted somebody who was really going to tell her the products, the strategy, what's happening with the company to help her when she dealt with the customer. She didn't want somebody who told her her job. She knew her job. And if she needed help, she went to Annie. So ask yourself, you know, what do I need? And the name of the book is the Leaders we need and what Makes Us Follow. So thank you very much. Enjoy this.