Transcript
A (0:00)
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.
B (3:21)
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.