Think Outside the Building

INTRODUCTION

TAKING LEADERSHIP TO A NEW PLACE

Irritation and impatience were a constant background noise as I wrote this book. I had spent too much time at dinner table conversations accompanied by fine whines—the complaining cry, not the chardonnay. On both social media and in face-to-face conversations, I heard people whining about an almost endless number of complex, divisive, and seemingly unsolvable problems and then grumbling about an absence of bold, imaginative leadership to fix them.

Only ostriches could fail to notice that the world is full of scandals, crises, disasters, and warnings of more catastrophes to come—not to mention hurt feelings, real losses, greater stress, and a diminished sense of opportunity. I sometimes poured the whines myself. But as a generally upbeat and optimistic person, I wanted less whining and more doing. If there are big problems, I thought, then we shouldn’t just sit around and complain about them. We should mobilize more people to think bigger and differently about how to engage in positive action.

That is why I wrote this book. It reflects a search for new possibilities for positive change. I want to show more people how to innovate and drive change that can reshape current institutions and stimulate the creation of new ones. It is a manual for moving leadership to a whole new level.

Turning Whines into Works: The Basis for Advanced Leadership

Too many people get set in their ways. They prefer routine tasks and the comfort of the status quo to the risk of innovation. But passivity is depressing, and grumbling without a goal for change turns people into victims. In contrast, doing something, almost anything, is energizing. Taking actions to address big challenges, however small the steps seem at first, can whittle the seemingly impossible down to manageable size. Positive actions can generate a sense of purpose that provides meaning to life—and improves health too. Positive actions can start changing the culture by showing people new possibilities. Grab people with exciting demonstrations, and their hearts and minds will follow.

Over many years of focusing on leadership and change, I’ve seen outstanding examples of people with courage and imagination. These innovators and entrepreneurs are motivated to break convention and think outside their professional buildings to take on big problems with new approaches. As the late, great management theorist Peter Drucker liked to say, every problem is an opportunity for an entrepreneurial solution. I tell the stories of many of these role model leaders in this book. But the issue is that there just aren’t enough of them. Time and time again, I have also observed that the skills for changing culture and social institutions are woefully underdeveloped. Even people at the top of their game in businesses and professions who thought they could take their expertise and apply it to a big problem such as climate change, racial justice, gender equity, or health disparities often fell on their faces, despite all the good intentions in the world.

To open new pathways and light the way, I’m offering this book as a source of inspiration and a guide to action. I want it to awaken a sense of purpose for an augmented kind of leadership that can make a difference in the world.

I distill the best lessons from my years of researching, consulting, teaching, and walking the talk by not just observing others but by doing it myself. My work included cofounding a bold social innovation aimed at deploying a new leadership force for the world. In late 2004, Rakesh Khurana, Nitin Nohria, and I wanted to take a shot at filling the leadership gap and identifying underutilized leadership skills. We started envisioning a new stage of higher education, one that would target experienced leaders transitioning from primary careers to their next years of service. Imagine that: we thought we could get accomplished people off golf courses and into college courses.

It was an audacious goal in other ways too. We felt that all the big problems, whether in health, education, communities, or the environment, couldn’t be solved by any one profession or discipline alone. So we had to get all of Harvard involved—every single field and school—a daunting outside-the-building, silo-busting goal.

In this book, I describe the natural history of innovation and change through the eyes of dozens of other leaders, accomplished or aspiring, including challenges, effective practices, obstacles, setbacks, and celebrations. This is not just theory. We lived through every one of them ourselves.

The Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI) was in operation by December 2008 with our first cohort of courageous pioneers (including a former astronaut who became head of NASA). This 2009 group would devote a calendar year to the program, as did others since. On my watch as chair and director for fourteen years, over ninety top faculty members, over twenty staff, and over three hundred other experts contributed to this new education for new leadership. By December 2018, ALI had proven its concept, accumulating nearly five hundred ALI fellows and partners in ten cohorts, moving from pilot project to permanent entity, and is still growing.

The critical test was what the renewed leaders did afterward. Many fellows took on big, important problems and opened new pathways for improved lives worldwide—the estimate from surveys was that perhaps one hundred million lives were touched by fellows’ innovative social purpose projects in the first ten years. ALI fellows started over one hundred new entities, products, or services, some of them making a profit. Others joined existing social change organizations to help transform or grow them, and a few ran for public office.

What Is “Advanced” About Advanced Leadership?

The name advanced leadership started out as a bit of wordplay to entice experienced, distinguished people to join a still-embryonic movement. But the intent had never been about age; the name refers to the additional skills necessary to address messy, complex systems problems. In fact, we never used the R word (retirement), even for people who are transitioning from their primary income-earning years to their next years of service; they are merely shifting their main focus, which can happen at any time in life. In today’s multicareer economy, with lower job security and more gig-economy opportunities to use spare time and a car to drive for Lyft or to rent spare space through Airbnb, people can have a portfolio of activities at any one point. Only in a shrinking number of large corporations or bureaucracies do people have long-term employment, linear careers, and a fixed date to leave completely—but even then, they might stay on as part-time consultants. And professionals—lawyers, physicians, headhunters, consultants, investors—can maintain some clients while turning their attention to projects with a social mission. They are in transition rather than gone.

But that is not the most important point. Advanced leadership refers less to a life stage than to a mode of action. It is a step beyond the kind of leadership, great or otherwise, that is exercised primarily within a single organization or field single-mindedly focused on furthering its own goals. Advanced leadership broadens the scope of leadership. It involves working beyond boundaries, across silos, and outside established structures. It stems from a sense of purpose oriented toward changing the system, whether a particular ecosystem or a broader array of institutions and expectations. It touches on skills and insights useful for entrepreneurs and innovators of any profile who are trying to solve significant problems that cut across sectors. Those are exactly the kinds of problems plaguing the world that produce barrels of whines.

A quirky analogy can help explain this difference. Advanced leadership is to leadership as Ginger Rogers is to Fred Astaire. Those famous movie dancers of another era covered a lot of territory to wide acclaim. But although Fred Astaire was a great leader, guiding the dance, Ginger Rogers was the advanced leader. As the old joke goes, she had to do everything he did but backward and in high heels. Like Astaire, great leaders can operate on well-mapped territory where they can see where they’re going because goals are clear. But advanced leaders see and tackle problems that are intractable precisely because no one really knows exactly what to do or what the direction is. There is a Ginger Rogers–like aspect in feeling extra encumbrances from tottering on the high heels of controversy and always worrying about stumbling.

When a male partner from a private equity firm said that the challenges of his project on college affordability for low-income students made him “feel like Ginger Rogers,” I knew that a new set of leaders was ready to start dancing with the stars.

This book tells the story of many imaginative, energetic men and women who create smart innovations by using advanced leadership skills. They include people whom I came to know in depth; some stories were captured in nearly fifty detailed case studies and hundreds of interviews. I observed and advised numerous others around the world exercising advanced leadership at all ages and in formal jobs, and some of their stories are told here too. I saw that CEOs and top executives in established organizations wanted to take their companies in new directions and needed advanced leadership to stimulate innovation, maximize impact beyond financial success, or address institutional problems that get in the way of business, such as a reliable food supply, the impact of climate change, the introduction of new technology, or an education system failing to produce enough skilled workers. My observations included civic leaders and social entrepreneurs working tirelessly to build coalitions to address societal and community problems that others had neglected or abandoned, such as removing the vestiges of racially insulting statues from a city or developing a new kind of high school. I worked with rising younger leaders who brought the entrepreneurial spirit to find new solutions to old problems, such as founding a service corps or helping Israeli and Palestinian youth create ventures together that could build both peace and broader prosperity.

What all of them have in common is the desire to move beyond established structures to chart new pathways where ambiguity, complexity, and conflict reign. They find new ideas and engage in new modes of action. They must think outside the building.

Exercising Advanced Leadership: Themes and Skills

Advanced leadership rests on persuasion, not the power of position. It involves hustle, not hierarchy. Innovators use advanced leadership skills to create smart innovations for societal impact—savvy, creative, and well-informed projects. These ventures take many forms and use many financial models. Sometimes they are also “smart” in their use of the latest digital tools and technology.

The chapters ahead tell the stories of numerous men and women with diverse backgrounds tackling projects to make a difference in the world. Seeing them in action illuminates essential ingredients of advanced leadership. Key lessons include the following:

Innovation and change can’t follow a fixed script. The work is more like improvisational theater, which takes shape in response to observer feedback. The leaders who define the action can stumble, fumble, hit dead ends, and even fail; the work can be improved upon at many points. Over time, ventures that once were innovations that changed institutional pathways can stagnate and get stuck inside the building. That’s the nature of institutions. But when the mission is strong and coalitions of support have been built, advanced leaders can find new ways to renew and continue the effort. Along the road to impact, projects gain power from connections across many initiatives, ventures, innovations, and campaigns, which merge to create movements and change the world. This takes leadership to a whole new place.

The Past and Future of Leadership

Advanced leadership rests on reading the zeitgeist, but I propose that it is also part of forming the mood of the times. It involves a way of working on complex, messy problems begging for innovative, outside-the-building thinking. It is an emerging worldview of direct positive action, of a creative entrepreneurial mind-set, of taking on leadership without anyone asking you to do it. This mode is critically important for addressing the problems that people care about.

The pace of change might seem impossibly fast now, generating confusion and anxieties, but it seemed that way to our recent ancestors too. For a century or more, observers have said that change is speeding up. As a result, in the decades after World War II, planned change became a discipline intended to manage transitions and upheavals. In 1969, leadership guru Warren Bennis wrote that change was the biggest story in the world he saw then.¹ Fifty years ago, he delineated just about all the issues the world still faced in 2019. His list is like old whines in new bottles: the environment, racial and gender disparities, impoverished communities, fears of technology, and dysfunctional politics. Leadership emerged as a key factor in whether change could be tamed.

An interesting thing happened along the way from then to now: the study of leadership tracked the times. It started as “great man” (yes, overwhelmingly male) histories of monarchs, generals, tyrants, presidents, and prime ministers. Governing or its overthrow were at the forefront for audiences relishing tales of wars, battlefields, and huge historical events. Another wave was added as leadership became something that chiefs of any kind were supposed to exercise, and business CEOs became the heroes, some of whom wrote their own books about how they transformed this or that company. Riding that wave, leadership was soon said to be a career asset for anyone, with a burgeoning advice genre for aspiring corporate ladder climbers or start-up founders. Leadership theory moved from the art of war to the art of business-building.

What’s next? I think it is the positive and democratizing force of advanced leadership, which looks beyond single organizations and heroic commanders to wider systems. This approach is sorely needed in my home country. Many analysts have decried the loss of social capital in America since the 1950s, as Robert Putnam did in his famous book Bowling Alone. Technology appears to have increased that social isolation, enabling people to retreat to their screens rather than talk with the people around them, as Sherry Turkle showed in her book Alone Together.²

But the situation is perhaps not so grim. I think that a swelling force of advanced leaders could create new versions of engagement and new clubs of people united in a quest for a better world. Although people might bowl alone rather than in leagues, they start projects and raise money together, and not just in fancy homes and hotel ballrooms. I’m struck by a story I was told about how cattle ranchers in rural Montana, who lived far apart, drove long distances to host or attend spaghetti dinners to raise funds to help any member of their community who was in trouble. Whatever their political views or ethnic differences, the ranchers took responsibility for improving their corner of the world.

In the nineteenth century, French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about a self-organizing America. That’s the same spirit that New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said makes politics still work, even in troubled times. It’s what award-winning social entrepreneur Alan Khazei called “big citizenship.” It’s the activism that Report for America journalists are finding in small communities that don’t usually make the national news.³

For every trend we whine about, there’s often a countertrend that can provide the basis for new kinds of action. As many Americans appear to retreat into homogeneous enclaves full of xenophobia and tribal “my group first” sentiments, some so-called left-behind communities illustrate the opposite of the hostility and divisiveness they are assumed to foster. The fading, mostly white town of Lewiston, Maine, for example, found its economy revived and community renewed by an influx of black Somali immigrants. That was not without problems, to be sure, but it is an example that says that racial tensions and fear of strangers are not inevitable. Rewriting the past to emphasize those American values, which encourage leadership from anywhere, would be a good basis for creating the future.

Major established organizations are showing their ages—not to mention their roles in numerous scandals and abuses that were covered up in once-revered buildings, including universities and churches. Institutions cry out for rejuvenation through innovation. New starts can come from the actions of advanced leaders who take responsibility for finding a better path. As more castles crumble, establishments will have to share power, and buildings will have to open to the streets. In some cases, this is literal; the streets are sites for protests and rallies. Those modes can sometimes help start movements for change but can also fizzle (consider Occupy Wall Street or Arab Spring), and they can turn into angry crowds that emphasize destruction rather than showing new models. The way to avoid letting chaotic mobs seize control is to pitch inclusive tents and build purpose-fueled villages outside the castles of our era.

When more people flex their leadership muscles and find the courage to take on big problems, they exude the optimism of activism. That positive energy can be contagious and can unite us in new ways. By undertaking the daunting yet meaningful task of making a difference in the world, advanced leaders can transform the lives of many people—including their own.

Mobilizing for positive institutional change should be the responsibility of aspiring and accomplished leaders everywhere. If we think of ourselves as spectators or consumers, imbibing fine whines without doing anything about the problems, then we abdicate leadership to possible demagogues. But if legions of people get involved, I’m hopeful that outside-in or bottom-up renewal can overwhelm top-down toxicity. When the national gets ugly, the local can be beautiful.

This book offers a wake-up call, numerous inspiring stories, and a field guide for the journey toward leadership with significant positive impact. It’s high time that the journey begins.

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