Transcript
Sally Kornbluth (0:00)
The way you maintain meritocracy and excellence is to make sure that each person you bring in, and for us this means all of our faculty, all of our staff, all of our students, we have to consistently focus on excellence. There was a colleague of mine at Duke who had a sign in his office that said, if you take a lick of the lollipop of mediocrity, you will suck forever.
David Cancel (0:21)
That's pretty good.
Sally Kornbluth (0:22)
And I always liked.
Podcast Host (0:41)
Hey everybody. We have Sally Kornbluth on the pod today. She's president of MIT and a real gem. She's had a really interesting journey. Within a year of being hired as president of mit, she was summoned to Congress and spoke alongside the president of Harvard and UPENN about all manner of things. And you probably all remember Elise Stefanik really asking her some tough questions and all three presidents not really nailing that. So we get into that in her response to it and I think her response was excellent. Neither the Harvard president nor the UPENN president made it through that crisis. She not only survived, but she thrived in it. She also is having more recent run ins with the Compact for Excellence in Higher Education that the federal government gave her, which was pretty interesting. And her reaction to that I thought was really interesting and showed terrific leadership. It was only 11 or 12 institutions that got it and I thought MIT shined on that.
David Cancel (1:42)
So she is good in a crisis
Podcast Host (1:45)
and talks a bunch about that. Sally and I talked a lot about what I refer to as sustaining meritocracy. She's got a giant organization in over 150 years. They are synonymous with excellence and synonymous with meritocracy. In the natural state of things is you kind of regress to the mean. And most companies do that. So we talk about how they keep the standards high and how they sustain it over long periods of time. I think it's super applicable to scaling CEOs. She's got a great quote in there that's stuck in my head. If you take a lick of the lollipop of mediocrity, you suck forever. I think she hits the nail on the head in that one. And then she gets into just some blocking and tackling of how to be a CEO of a large organization. Some things that I need a reminder on and hopefully they're useful to you. And lastly, we talked a bunch about how to manage how to hire a board and how to manage a board and how to get the most out of a board.
David Cancel (2:42)
I hope you like it.
