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- [00:01]
A
Good evening, everybody. My name is Professor Michael Cox of the Department of International Relations and one of the directors, with Arne Westad of the new center for Diplomacy and Strategy here at the LSE called Ideas. Don't ask me what it stands for because I don't know. Leadership, we are told, is necessary in any endeavor, perhaps critically at the international level more than any other. Indeed, there is at least one school of thought which insists that at the end of the day, all history is biography and all international politics is really the result not of deep structures, but of what leaders say and do, don't say and don't do. Thus it is argued. Who could imagine World War II without Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin? Who could think of the end of the Cold War without Gorbachev, Reagan, and indeed Mr. Thatcher, who, moreover, could conceive of the Iraq War in 2003 without President Bush and Prime Minister Blair? Tonight, our guest speaker, Professor Nye of Harvard University, an old friend of this institution, explores these complex issues in his lecture, the Power or Powers to Lead. Also the title, not coincidentally, of his new book, which we are delighted to launch here tonight under the auspices of the International Relations Department, Ideas, and not to be forgotten, because it's right behind Jo, the Grimshaw International Relations Club. It is not simply a drinking organization, I can assure you. It is actually one of the oldest organizations in. In the university, which has been going since the 1920s. Joe Nye, of course, has a formidable academic reputation, having published many books over several years, though perhaps his most famous to date have been Power and interdependence, published in 1977, a landmark contribution to liberal IR theory, and his 2004 book, Soft the Means to Succeed in World Politics. Indeed, the term itself, soft power, I think, has almost now become part of the language of international relations. Joe has also been active in public life in the Carter and later the Clinton administrations. And I always go to people's Wikipedia entries. One, because if they don't have one, they shouldn't be on this stage, and secondly, because I always find complete inaccuracies there which I always like to then repeat to a large audience like this. Anyway, Joe's Wikipedia entry tells me, Joe, that you were the North American Vice Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, which was defined by them as highly controversial. They also mentioned, you remember, the Bilderberg Group, which I used to think ran the world, but that doesn't seem to be controversial at all. But anyway, we shall find out many more things tonight from Professor Nye of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Jo, you are welcome once again to the LSE to give the lecture this evening on behalf of Ideas and IR and the Grimshaw Club. Joe Nye.
- [03:22]
B
Thank you, Michael. It's very nice to be back at lse. I have many friends here, and we've always had the highest regard for the lse. At the Kennedy School where I now teach, we find it. We regard it as a. A sister institution. So it's a real pleasure to be back here. I'm going to talk to you about my new book, the Powers to Lead. But I want to keep my talk brief enough that we have good time for Q and A. I can always hear myself talk. I can't always hear you talk. So perhaps out of selfishness, I want to make sure I hear something from you. So I will try to give you a brief, brief approach or explanation of leadership that's described in the book. But beyond that, we'll rely on your questions and answers. If I look at the issues of leadership, one of the reasons I wrote this book is I felt that when I tried to teach the topic of leadership, I couldn't find a short book that was both analytic and readable. There are lots of short books that were readable, but not very analytic. Attila the Hun, who Stole My Cheese sort of things. And there were a lot that were very long and analytic and totally unreadable, written by people in organizational behavior. And so I decided I'd try to write one that could be short, analytic and readable. But even more, I wanted to do it because I thought it was important to take the concept of soft power, which I originally had invented in the context of international relations, and apply it to leadership and power in all contexts, not just in international relations. And I think that if one looks at the problems of American foreign policy, but more broadly than that, part of our problem is that we think of leadership, leadership and power in a truncated way. We don't think of power in a broad enough way to be able to really make the right decisions about leadership or foreign policy. Let me give you a couple of points that organize this, and then I'll illustrate them in more detail. People often refer to power or leadership without speaking, specifying the context, and that often makes what they say wrong. So it's common in the international relations field to say that country A has 10,000 main battle tanks. Country B has 1,000 main battle tanks. Country A must be 10 times stronger than country B. That might be true if the battle is in a desert, but not if it's in A swamp, as the Americans found out from the so specifying context is extraordinarily important when you're discussing power. Specifying context is also very important when you're trying to understand leadership. The best way to illustrate this is with the case of Winston Churchill, one of the great leaders of the 20th century, who in January of 1940 was regarded as a washed up backbench MP and by June of 1940 was the leader of the moment, great heroic leader. Nothing changed in Churchill. What changed was the context that Hitler drove British forces into the sea and the man who was regarded as too much of a cowboy to lead in January was the hero of June. So specifying context is important for understanding power and leadership. The other thing that's important as you try to understand leadership is you can't lead without power. But all too often people use a truncated sense of power when they talk about this. They think of power as being command, control, essentially hard power only. So in my terms, if power is the ability to affect others to get the outcomes you want, then there really three ways you can do it. You can do it with sticks, coercion, or with carrots, payments, or with attraction, which is to get others to want what you want. And those first two I call hard power, and the third I call soft power. Now that's become quite widely accepted in the field of international relations and analysis, but nobody has actually applied it to leadership. And that's what I tried to do in this new book. Why is that important? Well, for one thing, as we think about leaders, we tend to still have in our minds a hierarchical model left over from the industrial era, where the leader is the person at the top of the hierarchy or the bureaucracy or the factory who gives orders to the those below. If we're moving to a different world, a world of networks where leadership is not being king of the mountain, but being in the center of a circle, then we have to think much more broadly about power to include soft power of attraction. Much of our discourse about leadership suffers from what I call the big man theory of leadership. The view is that certain people who look like leaders, who are large alpha male types, are going to be leaders. And it is an ironic fact that most CEOs are in fact taller than average males. But remember, the causal arrow may go the other way, that because we think somebody looks like a leader, we make them a leader as opposed to they're actually being good at leading. And of course we know that historically some of the most effective people, for better or worse in changing history, have been about 5ft tall, and I think of Napoleon, Stalin and Deng Xiaoping. So the big man theory is historically not very accurate. There's also the question that sometimes people will say, well, whether they're big or not, there's always an alpha male, you know, in every group there's an alpha male. And people will turn to sociobiology and say, you know, we are essentially 98.8% the same as chimpanzees in our genome, and chimpanzees always have an alpha male. And so it's not surprising that that's how leadership works, works among humans. But it's interesting that anthropologists and biologists have discovered another type of chimpanzee in the eastern Congo called bonobos. Slightly smaller than the others, but just about as closely related to us. They have no alpha males, they're ruled by females. So I notice that some of you are going like this and others are going like that. But it does mean that these sociobiological explanations are not very good. In fact, what's intriguing is that there's now a tendency for some people who write in the field of leadership to want to replace the big man theory of leadership with the big woman theory of leadership. And the argument goes like this, that if we're living in a networked world, not a hierarchical world where you're in the middle of a circle and you have to attract people to you, that in fact women, whether genetically or culturally, we don't know whether it's nature or nurture, women are generally better at soft power than men. And if that's true, and this type of leadership is becoming more important, then perhaps we are going to replace the big man with the big woman. But I resist that because I think what you're dealing with is still stereotypes. You're using gender stereotypes to describe different forms of power. And stereotypes usually limit our thinking rather than expand our thinking. So what I would argue is that there are going to be many situations in modern democracies and post industrial societies where men are going to have to learn to think like women and women are going to have to learn to think like men. And the crucial question is how do they combine their hard and soft power skills in different contexts to have smart or effective strategies, and that's going to be independent of gender. So what I do in the book, and what I'll try to sketch for you briefly now, is outline three critical soft power skills that a man or a woman leader will need, two essential hard power skills and a sixth skill which is contextual intelligence. To go back where I started, or the ability to combine these into smart strategies on the skills that are most important for soft power. I argue that the number one skill is emotional intelligence. Emotional. Now, emotional intelligence is a term that psychologists have developed in recent years. You all know what IQ is, I suspect, which I've jokingly referred to as the ability to do well in the French school system of 1890. But when psychologists try to ask how much of success in life is accounted for by IQ as a measured in Stan Trubinet tests and so forth, it turns out to be about 20%. A lot of that other 80% or good chunk of it is what psychologists call emotional intelligence. And that emotional intelligence is the ability to master your emotions so that you can relate them to other people and attract them to you. And I use an illustration in the book to, to dramatize this, which is the time when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was introduced to President Franklin Roosevelt. Holmes, an old man who served in the American Civil War, met Roosevelt and was asked, what do you think of the new president? And his comment was famously second class intellect, but first class temperament, which is another way before the psychologists invented the term of saying great emotional intelligence. And if you compare Roosevelt with Richard Nixon, probably would have outscored Roosevelt on IQ tests of the standard type, but much more deficient in emotional intelligence, a man who hadn't mastered his inner demons. The second key, soft power skill, is the ability to create and promote a vision which is a picture of the future that draws others to you to accomplish something that you want to see accomplished. And a good example here of a successful president to use American presidents again would be Ronald Reagan. Reagan was probably not cognitively as skilled as, let's say, Richard Nixon, but Reagan had an extraordinary capacity to portray a picture of the future which drew people to him and drew Americans together. So Reagan essentially would be an exemplar of somebody who had a great deal of soft power based on his capacity to promote a vision. The third key soft power skill skill is communications. And when we think of communications, we often think of rhetoric, the ability to speak. Well. Woodrow Wilson said that the first task of a good leader is rhetoric, and he practiced his rhetoric. But a better or more interesting example might be Martin Luther King. If you think of the way Martin Luther King used the cadences and vocabulary of the African American church to reach beyond that community, to pull a larger group of people together. It was really a case of brilliant communications in the rhetorical sense. But it would be mistake if we leave the concept of communications at rhetoric alone. Because another thing that we've known from a variety of studies is psychologists tell us that a large part of our communication, perhaps more than half, is non verbal and non verbal communication is extremely important for effective leader. An important soft power skill. And there I think it's worth remembering the case of Mahatma Gandhi, who was not a very good speaker, but was brilliant in nonverbal communication. If you look at Gandhi, the young lawyer dressed in a suit and tie, having come down from the Inns of Court, and compare that with Gandhi of the 1930s dressed like a peasant, slowly, slowly organizing a salt march to the sea, drawing people to him. It was a brilliant case of nonverbal communications. So having the capacity to communicate, communicate in both those dimensions, rhetoric and non verbally is I think, another very important soft power skill for a male or a female leader. But you also need hard power skills. And there I identify two as particularly important. One I call organizational skill. And by that I don't mean simply putting boxes on a chart and so forth. I mean the capacity to manage the information flows and reward systems of an organization so that you can get things done. And I think the question of organization is particularly important. If you want an illustration of understanding the difference between the two Bush presidencies. To go back to my earlier point of view about genetics, you won't find two presidents more genetically similar than the two Bushes. And yet I would argue that Bush 41 had one of the better foreign policies we've seen in the last half century, and Bush 43 has had one of the worst. How do you explain that? And it's also particularly interesting that Bush 43, the current president, has a master's in business administration from, of all places, Harvard University. But if you look at the behavior of the two men, you'll find that 41 was a very good organizer. And 43 isn't 41 dealing with some of the same strong personalities. People like Cheney and Powell and others used Brent Scowcroft as his national security advisor to make sure there was always a flow of information which was including unfortunate or dissenting information. He was at the center of all forms of information. He didn't fall into the emperor's clothes trap of thinking that as his courtiers told him that he was dressed beautifully and every leader is surrounded by courtiers. So knowing how to measure and organize information flows is extraordinarily important. Bush 43, even though he prided himself on his MBA, basically did not organize his National Security Council very well. Condoleezza Rice didn't play the role that Brett Scowcroft played. Cheney and Rumsfeld formed a back axis in which Rumsfeld got two bites of the apple through Cheney. Cheney, while Powell was cut out. And the Deputies Committee, which organizes meetings of the principals, is described by those who participated in as having broken down. And it's not too surprising then that Bush 43 did not have the organizational skills to run an effective foreign policy. The other hard power skill that I think is particularly important for a leader is what I call Machiavellian political skills. And that's the ability to size up people's likes and dislikes, their wants and their needs, their fears and their hopes, and to play upon that to form minimum winning coalitions to get things done. Now, sometimes that can take the form of bullying. And if you, you look at a case like Lyndon Johnson, he was extremely able in these Machiavellian political skills. If you read a book like Robert Caro's book the Master of the Senate, you'll see a description of a man who really knew how to use these different strengths and weaknesses of others to put together coalitions to get things done. Johnson was famous as a large man for towering over others. There's a great picture in Cairo's book of Johnson with Senator Pastore, who was a smaller man, with Johnson sort of leaning over, drooping over him and intimidating him. And that was typical of Johnson. But it doesn't, again, to go back to what I said earlier, depend on sheer physical size. An interesting case that I might cite for you is Admiral Rickover, who was the father of the American nuclear Navy, which was famous for doing the extraordinary engineering feat of having no accidents with nuclear propulsion systems in these ships. And Rickover you might think of as well, he must have been like Johnson, a great big tall alpha male. No, he was a very small man, near the bottom of his class and Annapolis. But he had two extraordinarily important hard power skills in the Machiavellian sense. He knew how to make alliances and recruit resources from the Congress outside the chain of command of the Navy. And he also knew how to bully people into setting standards of immaculate, perfect engineering. And the net result of that was a lot of young naval officers, very talented naval officers, went to work for Rickover not because he was a nice man to work for. He wasn't. But because they believed that his bullying was for a cause they deeply believed in. So as my friend Rod Kramer at Stanford Business School says, there's a difference between a bully and a bully with a vision. So if you think of. If you think of these three skills, these three soft power skills, and these two hard power skills, then it comes down to contextual intelligence. How do you know how to combine them? How do you know when to use which? And the world is replete with examples of people who have an approach to leadership in one field and who think they can just transfer it to another and then find that they fall on their faces because it's different context. And one can think of chief executive officers who are good at running a company, but then go in to be a cabinet minister in government and turn out not to be very good at it because they don't realize how much more broadly dispersed power is in the context of government. Or you can think of government officials or cabinet ministers who then go to run a university, who fall on their face because they think they can give orders. And not realizing that in a university, as in many nonprofits, the hierarchy is absolutely flat. There's nothing you can do with these people. They're hopeless. And in that sense, what you can do is attract them. But you can't order them, you can't command them. And if you try to command them, you may undercut the soft power that you need to attract them. So in that sense, the contextual intelligence is the understanding of how to use which skills at which times. And it requires an understanding of culture. And every organization has a culture. LSE has a culture. King's has a culture. Harvard has a culture, Britain has a culture. You have to the culture of the group to be able to figure out how to work within it. The other point that you need for contextual intelligence is understanding of the distribution of power that I mentioned a bit earlier. You need an understanding for flows of information that I mentioned. You also need an understanding of timing, of knowing when to act and when not to act. Sometimes it's more important than not to make a decision than to make a decision. And having that sense of when is a little bit like the surfer who, as a wave approaches, the skilled surfer knows that if she steps up on the board before or too early, she'll fall off. And if she steps up on the board too late, she'll miss the wave. And that sense of being able to have a feeling for timing is an essential part of contextual intelligence. If you think of political leaders who have contextual intelligence, I've always been impressed by Dwight Eisenhower. He went from being a general with a great deal of hierarchical power to being president of Columbia University with absolutely flat structure and only soft power to being President of the United States and a very successful president. And that's a good example of somebody who was able to work in three very different contexts and adapt his leadership skills to these contexts. Or another example to take it from the business world to illustrate contextual intelligence would be Jeff Immelt, who is the chief executive officer of the American General Electric, a huge multinational spread all around the world. And Immelt was once asked, when do you decide to make a decision? When do you decide that, you know, you're just going to cut through the quick and get it done? And he said, after we've had the discussions, I sometimes say, all right, we're going to just do it this way because I'm the president. He said, I do that about 12 times a year, 12 times in this vast multinational corporation. He said, if I did it 18 times a year, year, I'd lose my best people. If I did it three times a year, the company would fall apart. That ability to know the difference between 3:12 and 18 rests upon contextual intelligence as I've described it. Now, why does this matter? Why should we worry about it? The answer is because if we go about thinking of leadership and power in the truncated way that is typical, the big man, the command, the hard power approach, we're going to get the wrong types of leaders and they're going to be doing the wrong types of things. I would submit that American foreign policy over the last seven or eight years has rested much too much on hard power alone. Without an adequate attention to soft power, I think that's been costly to us. I also think that if one thinks about leadership in a democracy or in post industrial societies, we have to get away from this image of the leader as the boss who tells us, and to realize that most of us are what I call leaders from the middle. Almost all of us have somebody above us, somebody below us, somebody on each side of us. And it turns out that you can't lead that person above you with hard power. You have to lead them with soft power. And the people on both sides of you whose cooperation you need, but to whom you cannot give orders, you also have to attract and even those who are your official subordinates. If all you do is give them orders rather than recruit them to your vision, you're going to get much less success from their efforts. So we've got to learn to think, think more clearly about leadership in the middle. Leadership in our societies is broadly distributed, and what's more, it can be learned and it can be taught, just like piano Playing can be learned or taught. Some people will always be better than others, but nonetheless, you can move most people an octave or two with lessons. And in that sense, if we're going to have effective leadership for a networked world, for a post industrial world, we've got to understand two things that are very different from the way they're usually treated now. We've got to understand power in the sense of including all the aspects of power, hard and soft. We've got to understand the importance of context and the critical nature of contextual intelligence. Until we do that, we're not going to get political leaders we need. And the leaders we get are often going to be doing things that we don't want done. So that's the purpose that I had in writing the book, to basically take the concepts of soft power, which I had originally invented or developed in relation to international relations, and try to relate them more broadly to the concept of leadership overall. And what we need for leadership is in today's types of democracies. Let me stop there. I've tried to restrict myself on good behavior by skipping over all kinds of juicy tidbits, but maybe some of that will come out in the question period. But I really do much more enjoy listening to people not only ask questions, but also issue rebuttals. So have at it. Your turn.
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A
Okay, everybody, you can now go out, repeat that lecture and get yourself a better job.
- [30:13]
B
Okay, I suggest we.
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A
We're going to have about 20, 25 minutes for Q and A. So quick cues and extended tip bits. A's, I think. Okay, can I take the first question? I'm bound to be biased. I'm going to ask one of my colleagues from the international relations partner, Professor Buzan, and then I'll come forward. I'd still be biased to Dr. Alan Sked of International History. There you go. That's leadership for you. Just not terribly emotionally intelligent either. I revealed too much. Barry, over to you.
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C
Thank you for your biases, Mick, and thank you for the little lecture. Professor and I.
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B
Two questions.
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C
One is that you, all of your six factors are, as it were, personal qualities, and therefore, two questions about that one. How would you fit charisma into your list? Is charisma somehow a consequence of all of these other things, or is it an independent variable of its own? And the second question, since you raised context as being important, what about all of the social context factors? I mean, think of the ongoing popularity of dynasticism in one form or another. Does social context matter? And who in a sense is allowed to lead regardless of their personal qualities.
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B
Okay, Joe, good questions. And as a great admirer of Barry Buzan and your writings, I would expect that. Great. I. I have a. I think the concept of charisma is a very problematic concept. When Weber first developed it in 1920, he argued it with authority, which was present in the individual, in the person. But then he goes on, when you look carefully and says, but you can lose charisma and you lose charisma if your followers no longer see you as charismatic, well, obviously that becomes circular. It's a little bit like China and the mandate of heaven, you know, how do you know the emperor has the mandate of heaven? Because he's the emperor. How do you know he's lost it? Because he's lost it. And there's a circularity in charisma which is quite difficult to pin down. And it's been there right from Weber's original invention of the term. When political scientists have tried to invent scales for measuring prisma ex ante, they can't do it ex post. Everybody says so and so was charismatic. What it turns out to use, charisma is a term we use to refer to certain characteristics which some people have and others don't have, which makes them more attractive. And in that sense, for example, there have been studies that have shown that a candidate running for election who is physically more attractive than other candidates, measured by an independent set of panel of judges, is worth Something between 8 to 10 points of votes in an election. Now, is that charisma? Well, not necessarily. I mean, that's not quite what Weber meant by charisma. It does mean that there are dimensions of people's personality and appearance which can make them more attractive, but it does. It doesn't predict whether it'll be effective or not. John Kennedy was charismatic, we all agree. He actually didn't even get 50% of the vote. So at least half the people didn't see him as charismatic. I think the. So I talk about charisma in the book as a shorthand, a popular shorthand for a personal magnetism which can contribute to a person's attractiveness or ability to attract. And particularly it is affected by their emotional intelligence. People who are emotionally intelligent are often better able to promote a sense of charisma. But I'm very leery of explanations that rest on charisma alone, because it turns out to be depends on three things, depends on certain traits of the individual and the needs of the followers in a particular context. And it can vary. So the book actually Kind of debunks charisma or at least reduces it to that term. On the question of social context, tremendously important. Why have there not been more women leaders in history? Because in most social contexts, women have been discriminated against. Social context makes a huge difference. And one has to understand social context as part of that larger point I made about contextual intelligence. So essentially, it's a huge interesting question that I could do another hour's lecture on it, but thanks for the question.
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A
Okay, Alan, over to you. Alan Scott.
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D
Well, Barry, got two questions.
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A
Maybe I can ask two, but no, no, no, no. I do describe it.
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D
Leadership.
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A
You'll have one.
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D
Well, the first one I wanted to ask was among the qualities you mentioned in leadership, and you seem to be talking more about leaders who are already there. You didn't mention willpower or ambition. I mean, people have got to become leaders. And some are characterized mainly for the willpower. Mr. Thatcher, for example, some people in power, like our present prime minister here, said to be hanging. He's hungry for power, he's ambitious. Ten years of player, he's still hanging on to still become prime minister. It's said that Hillary Clinton might be hungry and ambitious in a way that Obama isn't during this presidential election. So how do you just willpower, ambition, the need to be hungry enough to get the leadership and then do something with it?
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B
Well, to be effective as a leader, you have to have power and you have to have some ambition for power. In other words, if somebody merely wants to sit back and be a scholar, they may wind up being a thought leader, but they're not going to move people into action. A lot depends, though, on whether that power of that ambition is coupled with what I call emotional intelligence. We all know people who wear their ambition on their sleeves, and we become distrustful. So that ability to know yourself and to master your emotions so that your ambition is married to an ability to attract rather than repel others is crucial. I think it's interesting just to take the example you gave of Clinton and Obama. I think Hillary Clinton had a very hard job essentially fighting against a Jewish gender stereotype, which meant that she often acted tougher. She therefore became Mrs. Hard Power and left soft Power to Obama. She also characterized herself as experienced and Obama's inexperienced and experienced means you're from the old world and Obama. Obama was then left with the new world, the world of hope for the future. So in a sense, because she was fighting against. Both of them are ambitious. But because she was fighting against a gender stereotype I think she boxed herself in in a way that made her ambitions less attractive. She didn't use the soft power that she could have had.
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A
There's a gentleman up there.
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B
Please.
- [37:41]
A
Yeah, no, the one. Yeah, just please. Yeah.
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B
The question was partly answered. I was going to answer to ask if you can give estimates of the powers to lead of the current presidential candidates, both sides. Well, I think, yeah.
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E
McCain as well.
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B
Yeah. One of the things that's most interesting about this year's presidential race is all three candidates are senators. That hasn't been true for about 40 years or more, or if probably longer than that. And one of the things that's just of mass senators is they've never run anything much bigger than a Senate staff, which is 100 people or so. So how will they react when they're running an executive branch of several million? And we have to then look at the way they have these other skills that I mentioned to get some judgment of that. I think, you know, McCain has the. He's a man who knows himself, who went through a horrendous experience as a prisoner of war, who's his own person. He's a genuine person. On the other hand, he is going to be the oldest candidate we've had and may have less attractiveness or appeal to very young people. Obama is almost the other end of the spectrum. He's a man who is one of the youngest candidates. Not the youngest, but one of the youngest candidates. We have very little experience in foreign policy compared to McCain or even Clinton. But notice that he has an extraordinary contextual intelligence which grows out of the fact that he has an African grandmother, grew up in Indonesia, went to Harvard Law School, became editor of the Harvard Law Review, and went back to work with a poor area in the southern part of Chicago. That gives you a feeling for other people in the rest of the world, a contextual intelligence, which I think may help to explain why he's run the campaign he's run, which I think has been a very successful campaign. I happen to think all three of these candidates are impressive. I think we're lucky that the final three were very good. I have a preference for Obama, but I admire all three.
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A
Thanks very much, gentleman. Up the top there, please, sir.
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F
So the book is supposed to be readable and short and analytic, but presumably also supposed to be persuasive and didactic and instructive.
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A
Is that your publisher?
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B
My former colleague.
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F
You know as well as I do that many books are of that kind on leadership. Tend to use interesting cases, not just to illustrate the lists, but also to make an argument about what is it that someone should have done differently and from which we can draw some insight. So I wondered if you could do that, and particularly perhaps with the case that you mentioned in your own lecture, that of Colin Powell, who in many ways had, I presume, many of the kinds of skills that you've enumerated, but yet who seems to have failed to have the kind of influence that generates the adverse outcomes that you criticize. So how would you use that case in order to push your argument forward?
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A
Thank you very much.
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B
Colin Powell was. Is an effective leader. He was not effective in the context of the Bush 43 administration. If you go back earlier, Powell was a very effective leader in Reagan and Bush 41. I think one of the reasons that Powell was not so effective in 43 was that he was regarded as a potential political threat. In other words, from the point of view of the people around Bush 43, Powell was one of the few people had his own political base. In other words, if Powell had used that base, it could have hurt the president. And I think they never fully trusted him. And I think he didn't do enough to bring about to overcome that lack of trust. Perhaps he couldn't have done it. The interesting question for Powell was, should he have resigned? And in the American tradition, it's fairly rare. The British tradition is somewhat blank, common. But the last chapter of my book is about ethics of leadership, and I raised this question of whether Powell should have resigned or not. There's a great problem. For if we are mostly leaders in the middle, there's a problem that Albert Hirschman summed up in the title of his book, Exit Voice and Loyalty. When do you do which? Powell defined his role as loyalty. His voice was not as effective as it should have been, and many people think he should have exited.
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A
There's a lady down here in green, please. There's a woman here. Okay, if there's more hands going up, I'll pick you up there.
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B
That's right.
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A
Pass it on to the chap at the back. Just over here. Over here, yeah, please.
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F
Thanks.
- [42:51]
G
I teach on the Leadership and Organizations course in the Management department, so I can see the book finding its way onto the revised reading list for next year. So thank you for that. My question would be, what do you see as a topic that you expect or you anticipate or advise that I should put on the syllabus in the next revision? Because almost everything you said is something I'm nodding along to that we teach, and it's very core leadership theory. A lot of it. Not necessarily as you were saying, it's new, it's coming from other fields. But what would you say as the next topic for the syllabus and. Or your next book topic?
- [43:30]
B
Well, I do think that context and contextual intelligence and how you develop it is crucial. A lot of times psychologists will do tests on leadership experiments and what they'll do is they'll give 200 students a green card and 200 students a red card, randomize them and tell you one thing or the other. They don't remember that the context is students in a laboratory. And what they wind up concluding may have nothing to do with leadership in Zimbabwe or in a Los Angeles Angeles street gang. So learning this difference of context is often skipped in organizational behavior courses or even if you have studies in OB about company A and company B. Well, company A and B are both companies. They're walls and boxes and hierarchies and so forth. That might not tell you much about leadership on the Internet. What about open source source communities and how do you. What role does leadership play in open source in the web 2.0 where user content is generated from below peer to peer. Totally different approach to leadership than what you have from the usual OB or psychic type studies and so forth. I'm very conscious of this because one of my sons is a CEO of a Web 2.0 company called LinkedIn, which is sometimes called Facebook for grown ups. And it's. And he has helped to educate me about this. But we have. If we're living in an increasingly networked world, you have to do a lot more teaching and studying about how does leadership work in those kinds of networks, perhaps?
- [45:24]
A
That was a very subtle question, Joe. She was actually asking do you want a job? Do a semester abroad for you? Yeah, a gentleman in black out the back there. Yeah.
- [45:33]
B
Thank you. Within the skill of contextual intelligence, you identified the requirement of timing. Can timing be taught and learned? And if so, how? Thank you. Well, I think there's a. This goes to the larger question of how you teach leadership. And the American army has a trilogy they use called be, no do and know, spelled K, N, o, w. And B means to understand yourself so that you can understand your development of emotional intelligence. No, it's the part that goes to your question, which is you can do case studies, you can read history, you can ask how of other people succeeded or not succeeded. And do, of course, is experience. And what the military says would do is always do what they call an after action review. How well, have I done? Why didn't I do better? What could I do better next time? But I think the question of timing is very important because there are points at which a leader may need to wait in a situation get right. If you make the decision now, you take the burden off the followers and you may need to let the followers realize they have a problem before they're actually going to follow you. So if you go in and say, here's the solution, and they say, ah, yeah, he solved that one, we can go back to business as usual. Sometimes it's very important, as my colleague at Harvard, Ron Heifet says, to give the work back to the people. To essentially not solve their problem for them to essentially say, okay, you came in with this problem, how do you propose to solve it? And let them stew about it for a bit. And that's a question. You get that sense of timing from be. No do. From the studying of others experience, but also from your own experience of doing after action reviews as to. Gee, maybe I shouldn't have answered that so quickly.
- [47:37]
A
The gentleman in blue. And then I'll move to the lady over there. Yeah, please, sir.
- [47:41]
H
Your leadership approach reminded me a lot on James McGregor Burns transformational leader.
- [47:47]
A
So I was wondering what you would.
- [47:49]
H
See as the main difference to the transformational leader, which is about 30, 30 years old and which is not, which doesn't. I mean, and I mean this was the state of the art for the last 30 years. There's nothing bad about that. And concerning the soft power, I was wondering, you mentioned Max Weber with charisma. Max Weber is also the author mostly of our general power approach, the Heart power approach. And one could mention Hannah Arendt, who pretty much lined out the soft power approach by saying that power is never in the hands of a leader. It's always in the hands of a group. So I was wondering what the difference to your soft power approach was in terms of. Hannah Arendt, thank you.
- [48:45]
B
Thanks so much. Well, if you. James McGregor Burns book called Leadership in 1978 was indeed a classic in which he laid out what he distinguished between transformational and transactional leaders. My book differs in the sense that I criticize those concepts quite rigorously. For example, what is a transformational leader? Is it the objectives that the leader holds or is it the style they use? Burns confusion, those two things. So that for example, when Lyndon Johnson wanted to pass a law in the Senate that transformed race relations in the south, he used a very transactional style to do it. Burns can't make that distinction. Burns Also builds his norms into his definition. So Berns says Hitler was not a leader. Why? He's simply a power wielder because he doesn't transform people to a higher ethical state. When you get to a definition which you can't see Hitler as a leader, you've got a problem. So my book is actually quite critical of Burns. I admire Burns. I mean, he did a pioneering work. But my book is different. For Burns on the question of hard and soft power, Bill Arendt and so forth. There's nothing new about these concepts of hard soft power. I start the book with a pair of quotations. One from Lao Tzu, which is I guess 600 BCE, which says the best leader is the one when no one knows his name, which is real soft power. And the other is a quote from Machiavelli that it's better to be feared than to be loved. And those are two. That's an illustration that these concepts have been around in human culture forever. They aren't simply yet another iteration of it. I'm not claiming anything original about identifying this. All I've done is said if we can't name it, as with soft power, we're probably not going to study it and not going to consider it. That's the only country, I believe.
- [50:59]
A
Mr. Rice? Yeah, please.
- [51:02]
B
Hello.
- [51:02]
I
I'm interested to know where would you.
- [51:05]
B
Place dictatorships or continuing leadership? And would you at all regard dictators.
- [51:12]
I
Short term political context as leaders?
- [51:16]
B
In any. Yes, dictators can be leaders. Sometimes you can even imagine a dictator who might be a good leader. Generally because power corrupts, dictators turn out to be bad leaders. It's interesting to go back to Burns. Burns identified Mao Tse Tung as a transformational leader. Mao Zedong, I think, was a bad transformational leader. Hitler was a dictator, he was a leader. He was a bad dictatorial leader. You know, so if you can I imagine a good authoritarian leader, I suppose you could say that Lee Kuan Yew is not a dictator, but he is somewhat authoritarian, particularly in the early stages of Singapore. I think by and large a pretty good authoritarian leader. But my point in my book is just let's keep our definitional terms separate from our normative terms. Otherwise we can't make the distinctions we need to make in normative terms terms because we built them into our definitions. Can't see them.
- [52:19]
A
Okay, I got a gentleman here. Right in the middle here.
- [52:21]
F
Yeah, if you could just get it across.
- [52:22]
A
Sorry, Throw it across. Get it across. Take two or three more. Yeah, please, sir.
- [52:28]
B
Thank you.
- [52:29]
J
I was wondering regarding Your remarks about soft power in the middle or leading in the middle, having somebody above you on the side. And it shocked me as this being very Weberian in the sense that you just have a bureaucrat functioning sort of as a cog. In other words, I'm wondering whether leadership of the middle is nothing but the accurate functioning of an individual sort of in its social context. Weber would call this the ideal bureaucrat. Or maybe Horker ma, Dorna Marcuse, the Frankfurt School would look at it more as this sort of instrumentalized, functioning, functioning person that really has not nothing to do but to react in appropriate ways to those around him to fulfill certain ideas. So it actually seems to me that this isn't really leadership, but it's opposite and pretty worth. I'm curious to know your remarks.
- [53:19]
B
Well, I don't. I. If you take a very narrow. They vary a definition of bureaucracy, you'd be right. My experience from working in three large federal bureaucracies in the US Government is there are enormous opportunities for leadership. Presidents can't give all the orders. They only have 24 hours a day. They can't spell out all the details. They said in general policy, if bureaucratic entrepreneurs didn't exist, you wouldn't get things done. And I found that in fact, there is an enormous role for bureaucratic entrepreneurship or leadership. And so I think the narrow Bay Varian approach to bureaucracy is too simple. What is interesting is how do you reconcile that with democratic theory? If the president is the only one elected, what's the right of somebody who's an assistant secretary to reinterpret the president's policy? If the assistant secretary doesn't interpret the policy, it'll probably fail. But how far can she go in interpreting the policy before she's outside of the Democratic remit? Yeah, a couple more.
- [54:31]
A
There's a gentleman here and there's somebody upstairs, and I think we're probably going to have to draw it to an end there.
- [54:35]
B
I know there's lots of other questions.
- [54:36]
E
Andy Rabin's master's student, International Relations I'm curious as to. Thank you, Professor Cox. I'm curious how you classify Abe Lincoln, who is hailed as one of the most prominent and accomplished leaders in American history, led the US out of Civil War, yet his track record before being elected president was pretty dismal. He was a failed businessman, a failed politician, a failed elected office holder. How then, how would you classify his, I guess, character traits or leadership qualities that enabled him to be so successful once in office for the first time?
- [55:11]
B
There's A very good book by Doris Hearns Goodwin called Team of Leaders or Team of Rivals. Sorry, my wife was here and she corrected me as she usually does. She's usually right. So called Team of Rivals. And what it points out is Lincoln had the capacity to take a group of people and draw out of them skills and essentially power them and bring out of them capacities to get them things done. If he'd simply given them orders or excluded them because he feared them, he couldn't have done what he did. And one of. I think the Kearns Goodwin book is particularly good because it shows that Lincoln had had the total governmental experience of two years in the House of Representatives. So anybody who says Obama can't leave because he's only had two years in the Senate, well, you know, Lincoln had two years in the House. But what Lincoln had was this amazing emotional intelligence that allowed him to take these people, attract them, and to draw out of them performances they otherwise would not have been capable of. I recommend the book.
- [56:22]
A
I had somebody up here. Who was it? Yeah, please. Yeah, I think this will be the last, actually.
- [56:26]
I
Hi, I wanted to just ask you about gender. I certainly take your point that we shouldn't say stereotype ourselves when we're engaging in leadership with regards to whether we're male or female. And we shouldn't necessarily say men lead in certain ways, women lead in other ways, but certainly expectations of others when they're judging the effectiveness of leadership is very strong and that is based on gender stereotypes. You ask why there are so few women leaders in history. If you look at your own example of Hillary Clinton, she has tried to not be stereotypically female and engaging in soft power, has shot herself in the foot and now may lose out on the presidency as a result. Obama is engaging in more soft power, but perhaps he's forgiven for that because he's seen as being part of a minority group and coming from a disadvantaged background, etc. Etc. Assertion in men is seen as aggression in women. And those kinds of issues, from what I see, are extremely powerful. So what does your book say? Does it say anything to try and navigate, assist men and women leaders to navigate their way through that when they're trying to get that balance?
- [57:31]
B
Well, there's good news and bad news. The good news is in the business world and the non profit world, there's a growing realization of the fact that hierarchies are being flattened, networks are becoming more important, and soft power is more important. There have been various studies done by somebody like Alice Eatley at Northwestern showing that women do better in that. So that's, that's the good news. The bad news is that politics hasn't caught up. And politics is where people still want toughness, macho and so forth. And that's why I think when Geraldine Ferraro, who had run with Mondale as vice president in the 80s, said a while ago that it was harder for a woman than for an African American male to become president, she was chastised for that and indeed had to resign from the campaign. I think she was right. I think it is harder to do. I think our society still, because of stereotypes, gender stereotypes, makes it harder for a woman in politics. It doesn't make it impossible. I mean, obviously market factor is a great case in point. Hillary Clinton also has come very close, but I still think that Ferrara was basically right. It's harder for a woman. And eventually, until we get rid of these stereotypes, we're not going to get leaders we need, including women leaders. So the book makes a strong case for getting rid of stereotypes and asking about skills, hard, soft, and when to use them.
- [59:07]
A
Okay. They say that the power of the leadership of the chair is to stop things, A, when you're ahead and B, when there are still people with their hands popping up all over the place and you become deeply unpopular. But I don't mind being that. But anyway, I do want to draw the proceedings to a conclusion now on a very, very high note, to thank you all for coming here on this very nice walk, warm evening for your great questions, but more particularly and importantly, to thank Joe for telling us how to lead our lives, to shape the future and how to lead departments and universities as well as states. I was going to ask you one question, which you don't have to answer. Who was the worst leader in the 20th century? But we've got so many to choose from from the 21st. Perhaps you'd better leave that to us on site. Joe, thank you very much indeed.