Wharton Leadership Digest

On April 12-13, 2007, Wharton faculty will host global business leaders at the Wharton Economic Summit: Next Moves in a Global Economy. Featuring more than 75 distinguished guest speakers, this major event climaxes the School’s celebration of its 125th anniversary as the world’s first collegiate school of business. Information is available here.

Leading up to the June 7 conference, the Wharton Leadership Digest features selected profiles of confirmed speakers.

Richard Greene, a communication coach and author, has got 100,000 American teen-agers talking. Author of the 2001 book Words that Shook

the World (Prentice Hall Press), last year he helped organize a high school public speaking competition, which brought 10 high school leaders to Washington D.C. last year to deliver original speeches before a panel of distinguished VIP judges and media outlets. The goal, says Greene, is to “revive the wonderful tradition of great oratory in this country and help young people learn how to stand up and speak from their hearts, like the greatest speakers who have touched mankind.” (Sample some of the 2006 final speeches). For this year’s content, Greene and co-sponsors have invited 100,000 young people to submit video auditions.

Greene has keen ear for oratory that leaves a mark on listeners. Whether it’s Earl Spencer eulogizing his sister, Princess Diana, Lou Gerhig offering his public farewell or Douglas MacArthur announcing the surrender of Japan, strong speeches generate strong emotion, he says. Greene has used his expertise to coach prime ministers, CEOs and other celebrities – a task that is not always easy. “The biggest obstacles are fear and ego,” writes Greene in an email to the Wharton Leadership Digest. And the biggest drivers of success? “A total, ego-less desire to learn, grow and improve.”

Not every consultant has the intellectual credentials of David Nadler. With a Harvard M.B.A. and an organizational psychology Ph.D., Nadler brings his research-based insights to help companies successfully navigate change. Yet Nadler’s expertise had a very practical genesis: the contrast between two summer jobs in college, one at IBM and one with the federal government. “The differences between the two organizations in energy and innovation were remarkable. I wondered what it would take to make the federal government more like IBM,” recalled Nadler in a recent interview. His curiosity led him down the academic path – and his entrepreneurism led him to found his own consulting firm, known today as Mercer Delta, which connects the ivory tower to the corner office by directly applying scientific knowledge to organizational design and management. Mercer Delta serves CEOs, senior executives and boards of major global corporations, government agencies and private institutions.

Nalder’s latest work has focused on corporate boards, and his sixth book, Building Better Boards

: A Blueprint for Effective Governance (Jossey-Bass, 2006,) co-authored with Beverly Behan and Mark Nadler, “bridges the gap between talk and action,” according to Xerox’s chairman and CEO, Anne Mulcahy. Nadler and his co-authors write, “By and large, the recent structural changes in corporate governance have had more to do with preventing negligence than with achieving excellence.” While staying out of jail is undoubtedly a good objective, Nadler advises and instructs boards to become “high-performance teams.”

Richard Greene and David Nadler will be speaking at the June 7 Wharton Leadership Conference. Register here for the conference.

Bill George, former chair and CEO of the Minneapolis-based medical technology firm Medtronic, is now a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School. Drawing on original research, George argues in his new book, True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership (Jossey-Bass,) that developing a new generation of “authentic” leaders is key to avoiding a repeat of ethical lapses that marked the tenures of George’s generation of leaders.

Bill George visited Wharton in late March, addressing an audience of students and professors on the topic “Leadership for the 21^st Century.” Below is an excerpt from his presentation. Knowledge@Wharton interviewed Professor George, and that interview, including a podcast version, can be accessed here.

America today faces a major crisis in leadership that spans the fields of politics, government,

business, non-profits, education and religion. Confidence in our leaders, especially in business and politics, has fallen to an all-time low. Recent surveys by the Gallup poll show that only 22 percent of Americans trust our business leaders, and even fewer trust our political leaders. That’s not just a problem – it represents the potential for disaster.

In part, the problem comes from a wrongheaded notion of what constitutes a leader, driven by an obsession with leaders at the top. In far too many cases we have selected the wrong people to lead and given them far too much power, which they have frequently abused by violating the trust placed in them as leaders. As President Abraham Lincoln once said, “If you want to find out what a man is made of, give him unlimited power and watch how he uses it.” In many cases our leaders have abused their power to serve themselves, instead of the people they are responsible for leading.

Our entire system of capitalism, in which I believe so fervently, is based on trust – trust in the corporations and institutions that serve us and in their leaders. Through our legal system, society has granted corporations enormous freedom and power to make money for its owners while serving its constituencies and benefiting society as a whole. If we in the business community violate that trust, we risk losing those privileges and destroying the very system that has made the American economy the most vibrant and enduring in the history of the world. Witness the 2003 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, hastily passed by the U. S. Congress in thirty-one days in response to the crisis of confidence created by the fall of Enron and other companies. Violating the public trust risks the loss of capitalism’s freedoms.

For business leaders, trust is the vital fuel that makes our system function effectively. If our customers do not trust us, why would they buy our products? Physicians implanting life-saving Medtronic defibrillators in their patients have no idea of whether these products will work perfectly to save their patients’ lives, so they have to trust Medtronic to ensure their quality. The same is true for every consumer who buys a new automobile, computer or television set. Employees trust their corporate leaders to build successful businesses that will provide good jobs, sound benefits like health care, and retirement plans. Investors trust corporate leaders to provide fair returns on their investments. And the public trusts corporations to act in the public interest. When leaders violate that trust, they put our entire system of capitalism at risk, as well as the lives and livelihood of their customers, employees, and investors.

My Harvard study of authentic leaders included 125 leaders whom we interviewed. They provided us with some brilliant insights into what has enabled them to be successful and how they developed into authentic leaders. In their interviews, they were remarkably open and candid in sharing their life stories, personal struggles, failures, and triumphs. Our field research represents the largest in-depth study ever undertaken about how business leaders develop.

These 125 leaders are a diverse group of women and men from a wide array of racial, religious, socioeconomic backgrounds and nationalities. They cover the full spectrum of leaders’ life spans, ranging in age from 23 to 93. Within the group, 28 percent are females, eight percent are racial minorities, and twelve percent are international citizens. Half of them are CEOs, and the other half includes an array of non-profit leaders, mid-career leaders, and young leaders just starting on their journeys.

In the past fifty years leadership scholars have conducted more than one thousand studies attempting to determine the definitive leadership styles, characteristics, or personality traits of successful leaders. None of these studies has produced a definitive profile of the ideal leader. Thank goodness. If scholars had produced a cookie-cutter leadership style, people would be forever trying to emulate it.

Kevin Sharer, who is currently chairman and CEO of Amgen, saw the downside of GE’s cult of personality in the 1980s while working as Jack Welch’s assistant. As he said, “Everyone wanted to be like Jack, but leadership has many voices. You need to be who you are, not try to emulate somebody else.”

The reality is that no one can be authentic by trying to be like someone else. There is no doubt that you can learn from the experiences of others, but there is no way you can be successful trying to be like them. People trust you when you are genuine and authentic, not an imitation. As Dr. Reatha Clark King of General Mills told me, “If you’re aiming to be like somebody else, you’re just being a copy-cat because you think that’s what people want you to be You will never be a star with that kind of thinking. But you might be a star – unreplicatable – by following your passion.

After interviewing these 125 leaders, we believe we understand why previous studies have not been successful: Leaders are highly complex human beings, who have distinctive qualities that cannot be sufficiently described by lists of traits or characteristics.

In reading the 3,000 pages of transcripts from these interviews, we were startled to see that these leaders did not identify any characteristics, traits, skills or styles that led to their success. Rather, they believed their leadership emerged from their life stories. By constantly testing themselves through real world experiences and by reframing their life stories to understand who they are, they unleashed their passions and discovered the purpose of their leadership.

I vividly recall my interview with Dick Kovacevich, CEO of Wells Fargo, who has established the most successful track record of any commercial banker for the past twenty years. When I asked Dick what made him so successful, he surprised me with his answer. Instead of lauding the bank’s success, he spent twenty minutes telling what it was like growing up in a small sawmill town in western Washington, where no one had ever gone to college. Dick said he learned to lead not at Stanford Business School, where he graduated at the top of his class, but on his hometown athletic fields and at the corner grocery store where he worked from age eleven to eighteen. Every day Dick played sports for three hours, raced home to grab a sandwich, and then worked three hours in the grocery store. Sports taught Kovacevich that “a group of people can perform so much better as a team than as the sum of their individual talents.”

In Wells Fargo he has attempted to recreate the local bank from his hometown, making Wells Fargo the most client-friendly bank wherever it operates. At the corporate level he has surrounded himself with talented executives who build the bank’s individual businesses, while he acts as quarterback of the team, much like he did as an all-state football player.

Kovacevich’s story is just one of hundreds we heard from our interviewees. The stories covered the full gamut of life’s experiences. One of the most powerful came from Starbucks’ founder Howard Schultz, whose father’s loss of his job and health care benefits from slipping on the ice led Schultz to create a company like Starbucks where his father would have been proud to work. For Schultz, Starbucks is about a creating a community of empowered employees and satisfied customers.

Chinese-American Andrea Jung, now CEO of Avon Products, was a rising star at Neiman-Marcus as executive VP in her early thirties. She decided she did not want to spend her life selling high-fashion designs to upper class women, so she resigned without another job. Joining Avon Products and later becoming CEO, she changed the mission of the company from selling cosmetics to the empowerment of women. Under her leadership Avon has gone from 1.5 million to 5.5 million people working for the company and achieving economic independence and success through their efforts. She and Schultz have remained true to their life stories to fulfill their personal missions and enhance the lives of tens of millions of people.

Most of the leaders we interviewed have been profoundly shaped by crucibles in their lives. These traumatic experiences enabled them to realize that leadership was not about their success or gratification, but rather about serving other people and empowering them to lead. In my experience – perhaps oversimplified – you can separate all leaders into two categories, those for whom leadership is about their success and those who are leading to serve others. The latter group finds inspiration in their life stories and the crucibles of their lives to make the transformation from “I” to “We.” The former group never makes that transition. Although many of them disguise their intentions with “we” language, their actions under pressure often reveal they are out for themselves.

One of the most moving crucible stories came from Novartis chairman and CEO Dan Vasella, whose early life traumas of spending a year in a sanatorium at age eight and the subsequent deaths of his sister and his father motivated him to become a compassionate physician who could lead a global healthcare company that could help millions of people every year. Oprah Winfrey talked openly about her experiences of being sexually abused, starting at nine years old. Reframing her experiences enabled her to become not just a television celebrity, but a caring leader whose mission is to help people take responsibility for their lives.

In my case it took a series of crucibles before I learned that my mission was not to become CEO of a global company, but to build an organization that could help other people through its life-saving products. In my teenage years, I was trying so hard to be a leader that I lost seven elections in a row. Thanks to a caring group in my college fraternity, I learned that my ambitions and selfish ways were blocking my ability to use my leadership gifts. Understanding that was the easy part; much more difficult was developing into a leader that truly cared about serving other people. In my mid-twenties the back-to-back deaths of my mother and my fiancée brought me to the depth of loneliness that caused me to explore deeply what life is all about. But it was not until I “hit the wall” in my career at Honeywell in my mid-forties that I finally recognized the deeper purpose of my leadership. It was not just to be CEO, but to join a unique company like Medtronic whose mission was to restore people to full life and health. Had it not been for the counsel and advice of my wife Penny, my close friend Doug Baker, my men’s group, and my couple’s group, I might never have come to that realization.

All of these very human stories lead to the unmistakable conclusion that we need a new kind of leader to lead our institutions in the 21^st century – a leader who can empower and inspire others to lead. The 20^th century vision of a leader who commands the troops to follow him over the hill to build his glory is dead – or it should be!

Coming out of two world wars in the 1950s, we idolized all-powerful leaders like General George Patton, in spite of their evident flaws and abusive tendencies. We dichotomized leaders and workers, with the latter being mere cogs in the wheels of production. As a nineteen-year-old industrial engineering student in the 1960s, I used my stopwatch to study the motions of 55-year-old machine tool workers. Then I gratuitously advised them on how to become more efficient, without ever asking them how to make their work more effective and meaningful. That was the nature of the assembly line in those days. In the last two decades of the 20^th century we developed a national obsession with the all-powerful charismatic leader at the top.

It is high time that we cast off these images of the all-powerful leaders on top who dominate their subordinates with power, intimidation, and a directive style. We do not need leaders who treat the people as a cost of doing business rather than the basis for the business’ success. No longer can we tolerate leaders who increase earnings by eliminating what has made the organization successful, while they personally reap hundreds of millions in compensation. Employees, customers, investors, and the public at large have every reason not to trust these vestiges of failed 20^th century leadership.

Leadership in this new century must change precisely because the nature of people in organizations has changed. People today are more knowledgeable about their jobs than their bosses are. They are demanding meaning and significance from their work, and are not willing to toil away just for someone else’s benefit. They want to lead now, not wait in line for ten to twenty years until they are tapped for a leadership role.

Why shouldn’t they expect and demand this level of respect and meaning? Why shouldn’t you?

I would like to offer a new definition of successful 21^st century leaders. They are authentic leaders who bring people together around a shared mission and values and empower them to lead, in order to serve their customers while creating value for all their stakeholders.

From reading the press these days, one gets the impression that most of our leaders are greedy people who are out to feather their own nests. For all the negative publicity they generate, I am pleased to say such leaders these days are the exception, not the rule. There is an entirely new generation of authentic leaders stepping up to lead our organizations. These leaders recognize the value of bringing people together around a shared mission and values and empowering leaders at all levels. In particular, I am impressed with the group of leaders that have stepped into top roles since the fall of Enron, such as Jeff Immelt of GE, Anne Mulcahy of Xerox, A. G. Lafley of Procter & Gamble, Sam Palmisano of IBM, Andrea Jung of Avon, Kevin Sharer of Amgen, and Ann Fudge of Young & Rubicam, as well as non-profit leaders like Wendy Kopp of Teach For America and Nancy Barry of Women’s World Bank.

Let me make this prediction: successful organizations in the 21^st century will be those that get the best out of people by motivating them with an inspiring mission and empower people at all levels of the organization. This is why for-profit organizations like Target, P&G, Best Buy, J&J, GE, Wells Fargo, Amgen, and PepsiCo are so successful and are able to sustain their success, year after year.

I wrote my new book, True North, to answer the question, “How do you become an authentic leader?” The answer is that it takes years of hard work and development. The key is knowing the True North of your internal compass, and then preparing to stay on course in spite of the challenges and seductions that cause so many leaders to go astray.

Your True North represents who you are as a human being at your deepest level. It is your orienting point – your fixed point in a spinning world – that helps you stay on track as a leader. Your True North is based on your most cherished values, your passions and motivations, and the sources of satisfaction in your life. When you follow your True North, your leadership will be authentic, and people will naturally want to associate with you.

Discovering your True North takes a lifetime of commitment and learning. Each day, as you are tested in the real world, you yearn to look at yourself in the mirror and respect the person you see and the life you have chosen to lead. As long as you are true to who you are, you can cope with the most difficult circumstances that life presents.

In reality, other people will have very different expectations for your leadership than you have for yourself. You will be pressured by external forces to respond to their needs and seduced by rewards for fulfilling them. These pressures and seductions may cause you to detour from your True North. When you get too far off course, your internal compass tells you something is wrong and you need to reorient yourself. It requires strength of character, courage, and resolve to resist these constant pressures and take corrective action when necessary.

When you are aligned with who you are, you sense coherence between your life story and your leadership. As psychologist William James wrote a century ago, “The best way to define a person’s character is to seek out the time when he felt most deeply and intensively active and alive; when he could hear his inner voice saying, ‘This is the real me.’”

Can you recall a time when you felt most intensely alive and could say with confidence, “This is the real me”? When you can, you are aligned with your True North and prepared to lead others authentically. In my own case I had that precise feeling the first time I walked into Medtronic in 1989 and felt I could be myself and be appreciated for who I was and what I could contribute.

Becoming an authentic leader is a long journey that takes hard work on your part, just as it does to become a virtuoso violin player or a champion athlete. As GE’s Jeff Immelt told us, “Leadership is one of those great journeys into your soul. It’s not like anyone can tell you how to do it.”

In studying leaders who have failed, I realized that their failure resulted from their inability to lead themselves. As we discerned from our interviews, the hardest person you will ever have to lead is yourself. When you can lead yourself through the challenges and difficulties, you will find that leading others becomes relatively straight-forward.

It may take a lifetime to gain complete awareness of yourself, but your self-knowledge can be accelerated by honest feedback from others. In his mid-thirties Doug Baker, Jr. was a rising star at Ecolab who had taken over the company’s newly acquired subsidiary in North Carolina. Through his early success, Baker had become arrogant and self-centered. Then he got some tough feedback from his subordinates that told him all of this and more. Baker calls getting the unexpected criticism “a cathartic experience.” He explained, “It was as if someone flashed a mirror in front of me at my absolute worst. What I saw was horrifying, but it was also a great lesson. After that, I did a lot of soul-searching about what kind of leader I was going to be, talked to everyone on my Ecolab team about what I had learned, and asked them for their help.” Baker’s self-awareness is a critical factor in the success he is realizing since becoming CEO of Ecolab nine years later.

The key to your values is not what you say you believe in, or even how you behave when things are going well. You really find out what your values are when you are under pressure or things are not going your way.

Today Jon Huntsman is the successful founder of Huntsman Chemical, leader of a 73-person family, and a bishop in his Mormon church. In 1973 he was a young staffer working for President Nixon’s notoriously powerful chief of staff, Bob Haldeman. One day Haldeman directed Huntsman to carry out an undercover sting operation involving illegal immigrants designed to embarrass a Congressman opposing Nixon’s initiatives. At first, Huntsman went along with the game, calling the plant manager to give him instructions. He recalled, “There are times when we react too quickly and fail to realize immediately what is right and wrong. This was one of those times when I didn’t think it through. After fifteen minutes, my inner moral compass kicked in and I told the plant manager, ‘Forget that I called. I don’t want to play this game.’” Huntsman recognized that rejecting the orders of the second most powerful person in the country would be viewed as disloyal and his White House career would be over. “So be it,” he said, “I quit in the next six months.”

It is not surprising that leaders like promotions, bonuses and pay increases, and recognition from their peers and the media. But if these motivations dominate their passions, they are at risk of derailing, sooner or later. Authentic leaders recognize their intrinsic motivations like helping others, making a difference in the world, and building organizations with purpose and meaning. The important thing is not to deny your extrinsic motivations, but to balance them with intrinsic motivations.

Kevin Sharer was a rising star at General Electric at age 41, general manager of its satellite business, and on Jack Welch’s “high potential list.” When the search firms proposed to Kevin that he join MCI with a faster route to the top, he jumped at the opportunity, leaving Welch unhappy with his sudden departure. Once at MCI, Kevin learned quickly that the COO was in line for the top slot and didn’t welcome the new hotshot from GE. His “know-it-all” attitude didn’t help either, especially when he proposed reorganizing the company. Sharer’s crucible at MCI proved invaluable to him: caught up in the glamour of being a rising star, he was brought down to reality and forced to recognize what really motivated him. When the opportunity to become COO of Amgen, a chastened Sharer recognized the importance of Amgen’s work in saving lives. He earnestly studied biology and the biotech business for seven years before becoming CEO. By then, he was able to balance his extrinsic motivations with the intrinsic satisfactions that Amgen’s mission provided him.

An essential element of staying focused on your True North is to build a support team that can help you stay on track. Your team starts with having at least one person in your life with whom you can be completely open and honest. It could be your spouse, best friend, mentor, or therapist. In my case, that person is my wife Penny, who is largely responsible for whatever success I have enjoyed. She keeps me on track, especially when I get caught up in selfish desires. Your family and your best friends also help you stay grounded, especially when you most need their help. Having a mentor who can give you straight feedback can be invaluable.

I also believe in having a support group of your peers with whom you can share openly and who will be there for you when you most need them. I have been blessed with having a men’s group with whom I have been meeting every Wednesday morning for the last thirty years, as well as a couples group that Penny and I helped form twenty years ago. These two groups of people, most of whom are here today, have been there for me – and I hope I for them – when I most needed their support. When Penny was diagnosed with breast cancer eleven years ago, they were there to support both of us through the difficult times that followed.

The reality is you cannot wait to build your support team until you are facing difficulty. The time to do it is now, because long-term, deep relationships and shared life histories take decades to build.

Every leader I know is facing the challenges of meeting all their commitments in life – their jobs, their families and their communities as well as preserving time for their personal life. I can assure you, this isn’t getting any easier. The work week seems to be increasing, just as the demands of families, friends and communities are rising. How do you stay grounded with all the pressures coming at you? I think the key is maintaining your integrity by being the same person in all these environments, and not letting your leadership commitments at work pull you away from the fullness of life. This isn’t easy, but it can be done by making choices and setting boundaries, and not selling your soul to your job. If you don’t do these things, you may become a shooting star that burns out long before you have the opportunity to fulfill your leadership dreams.

Finally, when you understand the passions that emanate from your life story, you will discover the purpose of your leadership – in other words, your True North will become clear. I learned that when I made the decision to leave Honeywell and join Medtronic.

Developing yourself as these leaders have done is not an easy task. It is a marathon, not a sprint, to gain self-awareness, solidify your values, balance your motivations, build your support team, integrate your life, and understand the purpose of your leadership. As you do so, you will find that leading others is relatively straight-forward. By being authentic and true to your beliefs, you can unite people around a common purpose and set of values and empower them to step up and lead. That’s what the best 21^st century leaders are doing, and the reason why their organizations over the long-term far outperform organizations led by people still operating in the 20^th century mold.

An example of just such an empowering 21^st century leader is Marilyn Nelson, CEO of the Carlson Companies. When Nelson took over leadership from her father, she recognized the culture of Carlson had to change dramatically if it was going to succeed in this century. She decided to reinvent Carlson as a company that cared for customers by creating the most caring environment for its employees. To build the new culture, Nelson went on a personal crusade to bring her message of empowerment to Carlson employees around the world. In her personal interactions she carried with her the memories of her daughter’s tragic death in an automobile accident years before as she vowed to “give back and make life better for people.”

When we examine organizations that are led by empowering leaders, we realize that we do not have a shortage of leaders after all. In every organization there are many, many leaders just waiting for the opportunity to lead.

My advice is, don’t wait to be asked. You can step up and lead right now. Your organization will be far better off because you did. In thinking about whether to take on the leadership challenges, ask yourself these two simple questions:

Many people are hesitant to lead because they fear failure, criticism, or think they are not capable. My plea to you today is to overcome these fears, for there is nothing more fulfilling than leadership. You are capable of leading, and the experience is well worth any risks you may take or criticism you may endure.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows the triumph of high achievement and who if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Are you prepared to enter that arena, to dare greatly, and to spend yourself in a worthy cause? If you are, in the end you will know the triumph of high achievement and you will experience the fulfillment of leadership.

You will know the joy of working with a passionate group of people toward shared goals, of confronting challenges and overcoming barriers, and of leaving a legacy to the world through your leadership. There is no satisfaction in your professional life that can compare to this sense of fulfillment.

If leading a team can be challenging, then leading a team through smoke and fire is doubly so. “Confusing, dangerous and ambiguous conditions” are the hallmark of wildland firefighting operations, where leaders often “face morally difficult decisions alone, unable to receive guidance from a chain of command,” according to a new leadership directive from the Wildland Fire Leadership Development Program, part of the National Interagency Fire Center, a federal agency based in Boise, Idaho.

The document, available here, “captures all the fundamental concepts of our leadership development program in one place,” explains Jim Cook, chairman of the leadership program, which trains firefighters at all levels of management. Printed in a 70-page, 8”x 5” format, the document can be slipped in a firefighter’s pocket.

Why should a firefighter carry a leadership guide rather than a practical guide to fighting fires? “As with many endeavors, the tactics of firefighting are not rocket science,” says Cook. “The art of making things happen on fireline is making confident decisions under arduous conditions, and that’s what takes leadership.” According to the leadership development program’s website, leadership factors have contributed to a number of firefighting disasters over the years – and contributed to a number of important successes.

The new leadership document includes multiple real-life stories of crucial fireline decisions to inspire and edify those who do battle each year with one of nature’s most fearsome forces. Below are two such stories excerpted from the document:

After hearing that fires had broken out in the Placer Creek area in northern Idaho on August 21, 1910, Edward Pulaski, a local forest ranger, came to the firefighters’ aid, bringing food and medical supplies to nearly 50 crew members there. The men did not realize it, but they were situated on the edge of an impending firestorm, and Pulaski was about to lead them from certain death.

Soon after Pulaski arrived, strong winds fanned flames toward the group. Nearby trees exploded into flame. Some of the men panicked and started to make a run for it, but Pulaski stopped them and maintained order, promising the men that he could get them out safely if they would stick with him.

Pulaski had been working this land for the past two years, blazing trails and cutting fire lines; he had an intimate familiarity with every contour of the area. His comprehensive knowledge enabled him to devise an ingenious plan of escape.

With thick smoke choking the area, Pulaski directed each man to grasp the shoulder of the man in front of him so the group could stay together. Pulaski led the group through the forest, restraining anyone who tried to bolt, eventually bringing the group to an old mine tunnel. Although some balked at going in, Pulaski adamantly insisted that the tunnel was their only hope of survival.

Pulaski coerced all the men into the tunnel and ordered them to lie face down just as the raging fire approached. Pulaski stood guard at the entrance with his pistol, beating back any terrorized man who attempted to leave, saying, “I’ll shoot any man who tries to get by me!”

During their five hours in the tunnel, four men died and the rest, including Pulaski, lost consciousness. After the fire passed, the men began to come around, one by one, and began to rouse the other survivors.

Discovering the body of Pulaski, still at the entrance of the tunnel, a man said softly, “Come outside, boys. The boss is dead.”

Though seriously injured – temporarily blinded, with seared lungs and badly burned hands – Pulaski survived the ordeal. He saved the lives of 42 crew members, and his leadership that day provides us a legendary example of the effect of a strong command presence.

During the summer of 1985, drought conditions prevailed across the West, setting the stage for a difficult fire season. By the end of July, firefighters had their hands full with many large fires in several geographic areas.

Initially contained at the beginning of August, one of these large fires in the Salmon River breaks country of central Idaho came back to life after strong winds fanned smoldering fuels. On an afternoon in late August, many factors were coming together to create strong potential for extreme fire behavior: rugged terrain, low fuel moisture, gusty winds, low relative humidity, and high temperatures.

After working with their crews on the fire for two days, three hotshot crew leaders watched warily as these adverse conditions unfolded. They developed a series of trigger points and plans to make sure they were several steps ahead of any impending disaster.

They first relayed their concerns to the Branch Director and the Division Supervisor, making sure the Incident Management Team (IMT) was aware of conditions on the ground.

All three leaders made a pact to communicate frequently, keeping one another apprised of changes in the fire and making sure everyone on their crews had a high degree of situation awareness.

Two of the three leaders agreed that they would keep their crews together. They determined that the safety zones that dozers had cut along the line were likely inadequate and that the “real” safety zone was a clear-cut area above them.

They tied a trigger point to the relative humidity: if it dropped below 20 percent, they would get completely out of the timber and into the clear-cut area. On the two previous days, they had observed the fire activity increase rapidly when the relative humidity dropped below 20 percent.

The leaders kept a close watch on smoke columns from two separate drainages. They observed a spot fire that quickly created a third column. Before long, the original two columns drew in the third to become a wall of fire – 200-foot flames, resembling a gaseous rolling ball. Along with the intense fire behavior, the wind shifted and increased in speed to 45 miles per hour. The relative humidity dropped to 16 percent.

The two leaders hurried their crews into the clear-cut area. They radioed a warning to the third leader, “Whatever you’ve got over there, it’s not going to be enough.” The third leader made a quick decision to go downhill and successfully moved his crew below the fire.

As the fire blew by the crews in the clear-cut area, it picked up sizeable debris and embers, scattering them high in the air. The Air Attack Supervisor, flying in a helicopter overhead, commented that he could not believe that the wind could move that kind of material that fast.

Because of the leader’s keen attention to the changing elements and contingency planning, no one in any of the three crews sustained any injuries during the blow-up. Further, no crew members had to deploy a fire shelter because all were either below the fire or well within a clear-cut area.

The leaders’ bias for action ensured the safety of their people and serves as an example of how taking the initiative can avert potential tragedy, even in the most dangerous situations.

Reproduced with permission from Leading in the Wildland Fire Service, published Jan., 2007, by the National Wildfire Coordinating Group.

Albert Einstein once observed that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Most people eventually wake up from bad or ineffectual behavior and resolve to change for the better. Then they discover that changing successfully, especially over the long-term, is difficult. Why and how people can master intentional change is the subject of a special 2006 issue of the Journal of Management Development. Serving as guest editor and contributor was Richard Boyatzis, professor of organizational behavior at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management. Boyatzis includes his own article in this special issue, “An Overview of Intentional Change from a Complexity Perspective,” which offers insights into the inner process of change.

Intentional Change Theory

Intentional change theory (ICT) is not new. As Boyatzis observes in the issue’s opening editorial, work on ICT began in the mid-1960s with studies of graduate management students at MIT. Researchers realized their methods could be applied to larger social groups; in the 1970s and 80s, they studied numerous organizational, community, and national change projects. In 1980s and later, the theory was applied to management and leadership development. In recent years, the Coaching Study Group at Case Western Reserve University, composed of a small, dedicated number of faculty and doctoral students, has advanced the conceptual and empirical underpinnings of intentional change theory, and their conceptual papers and case studies make up this special issue.

Change from a Complexity Perspective

In the opening article, “An Overview of Intentional Change from a Complexity Perspective,” Boyatzis applies complexity theory to intentional change theory to illustrate how and why desired change can occur. He finds that the process of sustained, intentional change happens through a series of emergent conditions he calls the “five discoveries,” which can be briefly described as:

This change process exhibits the properties of systems best described by complexity theory. According to Boyatzis, these systems exhibit three features:

Now, let’s quickly go over the five discoveries in light of complexity theory.

First Discovery: Engaging your ideal self. When an individual comes in contact with his or her ideal self, he or she has an opportunity for change. It is important to distinguish between what the individual truly wishes to be and what parents, teachers, and other authority figures want for the individual. For example, parents may tell their daughter she should be a medical doctor—a projection of the parents’ hopes and fears—but she actually wants to be a world-class mystery novel writer. The key components of an authentic, ideal self are “(1) an image of the desired future, (2) hope that one can attain it, and (3) aspects of one’s core identity, which includes enduring strengths [that] build this desire future.”

Second Discovery: Comparing the Real Self with the Ideal and Observing Gaps. The next step comes when the individual compares an accurate, realistic picture of the self with the ideal self. A comparison of the two selves will typically reveal gaps, which sets up an internal dissonance, providing further justification for change.

Third Discovery: Self-Organizing and the Pull of Two Attractors. Through mindfulness, the individual begins a process of self-organizing by creating a learning plan or agenda. This self-organizing is likely to be an iterative and cyclical process. During this phase, two emotional attractors are likely to be set up, one positive and the other negative. The positive attractor pulls one towards the ideal self and fills one with hope. The negative attractor pulls a person into a defensive position and is likely to slow or stop the change process. These two attractors set up a “limit cycle” and establish psychological boundaries. For change to proceed, positivity needs to supercede negativity.

Fourth Discovery: Metamorphosis through Experimentation and Practice. The change to a newer self starts to become a reality when new perceptions, thoughts, and behaviors begin to take place – of these three, behavior is the most important. Behavioral changes happen through experimentation and practice. Boyatzis notes that new behaviors are most effective when they occur in a setting of psychological safety, an “atmosphere in which the person can try new behaviors, perceptions, and thoughts with relatively less risk or shame, embarrassment, or serious consequences of failure.” Those working to help followers or subordinates change would do well to establish this sense of safety and avoid negativity.

Fifth Discovery: Relationships that Enable One to Learn. The fifth and final discovery that helps change take root is the recognition of the importance of guiding and supporting relationships. These relationships “create the context within which we interpret our progress on desired changes, the utility of new learning, and even contribute significant input to formulation of the ideal.” A good network of friends and supporters reinforce the changes and provides the basis for further refinements of the ideal self, leading one back full circle to the first discovery and a new round of metamorphosis. Thus, one needs to choose one’s social networks well.

The entire change process exhibits what Boyatzis calls “multi-leveledness,” a property of fractals. What is true for a single individual who intentionally changes will be true for couples, teams, organizations, communities, countries or cultures, and, yes, even global forces. Given this scalability, the “five discoveries” and intentional change theory open up new vistas for scholars and leaders to explore.

Final Observations

Our ability to conceive of an ideal self is a consciousness that drives change. Once an individual has harnessed the vision of this higher, better self, the complex process of change has started. With the conceptual work of Boyatzis and others with the Coaching Study Group, the mastery of intentional change has become more comprehensible and achievable.

Author’s note: Mark Hanna is a free-lance business writer based in Cedar Rapids, IA. He can be reached at markhanna@mchsi.com.

Peter Drucker, one of the most influential scholars in the field of leadership of the past century, said that one of the most important lessons he had learned in 40 years of consulting and research was that “there may be ‘born leaders’, but there surely are far too few to depend on them. Leadership must be learned and can be learned.”

To that end, Auditoría Democrática Andina (Andean Democratic Audit) based in Quito, Ecuador, is hosting a conference on June 7-8 in Quito on developing leadership. ADA is an independent non-profit academic institution focused on leadership development and opinion research. Its conference, conducted in English and Spanish, is intended for business leaders, company directors, public administrators, social entrepreneurs, university scholars, and others. Conference themes include multiple intelligences for leadership, corporate social responsibility, and leadership across cultural and natural boundaries. Information on the ADA’s International Leadership Summit of the Americas 2007 can be found here.