May You Lead in Interesting Times:
Leadership and Transformation

February 15, 2002
Franklin County Chamber of Commerce

Good morning. It is a pleasure to be here with you today to try and address the ever-challenging topic of leadership and what is required of transformational leadership in interesting times. The subject of leadership has been of interest to me for sometime—even perhaps before I was aware of it as a focus of research or study. So, when your president, Ann Hamilton, approached and asked if I would be willing to address the Chamber on the topic of leadership, I was pleased to do so—although I must admit that as the printing deadline for today’s program approached, she had difficulty soliciting from me a title for today’s remarks. When pressed, finally, I remembered the ancient Chinese curse about living in interesting times. Suddenly I realized how pertinent an adapted title would be: leading in interesting times.

For just a moment, think back over the past decade for global and local examples of how the world has changed. Perhaps the single word that characterizes the changes that have occurred is TRANSFORMATIONAL. We have undergone global transformations of a multidimensional kind—from orbiting cosmonauts returning to countries different from the one from which they were launched; to seismic upheavals recasting the military balance in the Pacific; from economic recessions to societal depressions; from the easy affluence of the eighties to the more cautious frugality of the nineties; from a relative sense of security within our nation’s boundaries to a level of anxiety never before experienced on what we have called the "home shores;" from a general sense of predictability to a random environment where chaos is more the pattern to be discerned; from a secure sense of our 401k’s to the unsteadiness of the post-Enron pension landscape. And at the University, from a loose federation of three campuses to a five-campus system supported less well by the day! Not to mention the warp-speed changes in technology that have challenged the dictionaries and spell-check systems to keep pace with the terminologies aging as rapidly as they are learned. Imagine trying to explain such changes to someone who had been held captive for the period of such flux and exponential change—a reality, you will recall, for families such as the Andersons, the Sutherlands, the Waites—remember them? On the one hand those names seem to belong to a long ago era, but on the other, we know that it is only because of the number and scope of the changes occurring in the past decade that we think much more time had to have elapsed.

I mention all of this change to make the point that the tasks of leadership are multidimensional, for as leaders, as you know, we must first comprehend the changes ourselves, then explain the significance of that change to the people we represent or lead—groups for whom change can sometimes be a difficult concept to apply to oneself. Although change has become common in its occurrence, I believe we must have uncommon leaders for these extraordinary times—leaders who can transcend the constraints of tradition, all the while understanding the potential of that legacy to empower new futures. Uncommon Leadership.

Leadership—as a topic of interest and as a daily practice—has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Not that I necessarily set out to do this or that, or to become this or that, but in retrospection, in describing my inclinations, preferences, and accomplishments, I find evidence generally of thinking long-term; of thinking in terms of relationships and larger contexts; of emphasizing values, principles, and motivation; of influencing beyond my immediate responsibility; of managing conflicting circumstances and needs; and of thinking always of vitality and renewal.

Reflect for a moment on yourselves as leaders. What is it you "intend" or mean when you characterize yourselves as leaders? Or what is it you think others mean when you hear them describe or refer to you as leaders? It is likely that some part of that definition will have to do with a process by which you persuade someone to aspire to objectives, goals, or values that you believe to have worth. How ever it is that you define yourselves as leaders, I am confident that in reflection you also think of certain obligations you have needed to fulfill. I shall mention just a few: goal-setting; motivating; affirming common values; assisting in the rediscovery of the values appropriate to present realities; managing—in the sense of priority-setting and planning, organizing and institution building, keeping the system functioning, agenda-setting and decision-making, and exercising political judgment; achieving a workable unity; preserving trust; explaining (leaders find the words—I will elaborate on this in just a moment); serving as a symbol; representing the group; fostering renewal. You might also want to add to this list: sharing information; sharing power; building confidence in others; removing barriers; finding the resources necessary to support the efforts and aspirations of various constituents; resolving conflicts that stifle action. No wonder you sometimes feel tired! For elaboration on any of these tasks, let me refer you to the work of John W. Gardner (Excellence or Self-Renewal for good discussions on the characteristics of leaders), a man whose extraordinary abilities have served the nation and the national and international agendas of three presidents and as many universities.

Leadership is not tidy. I think it is important for us to understand that and to tolerate the untidiness that leadership is. Ultimately we find all the connections and intersections, but doing so require a patience and an insistence on the connectedness of things—despite our growing awareness of the unpredictable. For leadership, I believe, is an essentially moral act. Former president of Yale University (and baseball commissioner at the time of his death) described leadership as the assertion of a vision rather than simply the exercise of a style: the moral courage to assert a vision and the intellectual energy to persuade the community of the wisdom and validity of the vision. Leadership is what makes the vision practicable and compelling (see A. Bartlett Giammati, A Free and Ordered Space, a collection of essays written when he was President at Yale).

Language can be used to forward the vision, to undermine the vision, or to retard the vision. And in these extraordinary times, the language of leadership becomes all the more important. Let me give a few examples: During the course of a fellowship year some years ago, I had occasion to read the inaugural address of a new president at one of the southern universities. He had come from a "system" state—as we are a system state-- (where the public higher education institutions comprise a system and are regarded by the legislature as a single entity) and was being inaugurated at a university that is also part of a system. As you might imagine, there can sometimes be a great deal of dissention among the various institutions within a system--each one arguing interminably the validity of its own requests for money. In his efforts to garner the support of the university community, the new president described the enhanced cooperation among institutions in his former state saying that they, too, in his new state could enjoy similar benefits providing they all worked together. That way, he continued, they could all get a "bigger bang for the buck". Well, I thought, what an unfortunate misspeak. On the one hand (the surface message) the president was enlisting the cooperation and collaboration of his audience, but on the other (with his choice of metaphorical assertion) he was diminishing the likelihood of a ready compliance by causing such a disjuncture between a hoped for outcome and the language used to characterize the outcome--an unfortunate metaphorical reference to prostitution or to war. But, you say, that is just an expression. I say to you, so are they all, all-just expressions. To paraphrase Marc Antony, "I speak not to disprove what you speak, but here I am to speak what I do know."

The power of metaphor to obstruct our thinking is readily observable. What for example, was the relationship between the metaphor of the iron curtain and the actuality of the Berlin Wall? (Although I do not yet speak Russian, I cannot help but wonder what metaphorical significance the words Perestroika and Glasnost might have had on the removal of that barrier.) Or, from the Vietnam war, to what extent did the constant repetition of the powerful metaphor of the domino theory become easy substitutes for the more troublesome task of examining the basic issues of that war? When we talk about students-as-consumers we certainly obfuscate the underlying premise of education as we value it. Or what about this one: the metaphor of the USA as the melting pot of the world--a phrase that we used for years to describe the dream that was America only to discover now the extent to which we had, by the use of this thoughtless metaphor, nearly obscured the cultural pluralism we so highly value. If we must be metaphoric in this context, perhaps a culinary metaphor of the USA as a salad allows us better to envision the presence of many parts to comprise the whole. (I am aware of the potential disadvantages of culinary metaphors; if you prefer, a musical composition will serve as an appropriate metaphor as well.) In any case, you see, careless, reckless, or obstructive metaphors should have no place in the language of leaders who seek the cooperation of their constituents.

Do you remember learning in your elementary years that a metaphor was a figure of speech by which ordinary descriptive language was made more interesting, and so you set about using them to enhance a descriptive statement or to make a prescription more persuasive? (Metaphors of Education, William Taylor, editor, p.4) The simplicity of this proposition soon gave way to your wider understandings of the relationship between language and the shaping of our experience of the nature of phenomena. Metaphor assumes a rather central position in this context. It is no longer a linguistic decoration but a ubiquitous feature of our thinking and our discourse, the "basis of the conceptual systems by means of which we understand and act within our worlds." (P.5) T. Cohen (in "Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy," in S. Sacks On Metaphor) argues that metaphor is one way of achieving a kind of intimacy, by drawing together the maker and the "appreciator" of a metaphor. In the process of recognizing that something has a metaphorical meaning, and in trying to make out what that meaning is, "...the hearer typically employs a number of assumptions about the speaker: what the speaker believes, what the speaker believes about what the hearer believes (which includes beliefs about what the speaker thinks the hearer can be expected to believe about the speaker)". Metaphors have performed a variety of functions over time. For leaders, metaphors can function in a central way, contributing to the life, credibility, sustainability, and implementation of visions proffered.

As I listened and read during that fellowship year, I began to gather clusters of metaphors into certain categories such as WAR, the JOURNEY, a GAME, a BODY (or an organism, or a society). Each major category has several subcategories, which may be found in more than one major category. There is frequently overlap which adds to the richness and the potential of the metaphor. One such metaphor I have heard used in a variety of ways is the metaphor of the wave. A speaker can intend the wave as a threat to an ordered "shore"; or the wave can carry with it a sense of anticipation and anxiety; the wave has been used to describe that which brings to the coast flotsam and jetsam; and the wave can be that which re-shapes, refines, reconfigures, renews the shoreline.

I have had first hand experience (as I am certain upon reflection you will recall as well) in a variety of meetings over the last several years to observe the expansion of war metaphors (perhaps I should say, the "proliferation" or the "escalation" of war metaphors.) It was common to hear people talking about "protecting flanks", "coming under fire", "having sufficient/insufficient ammunition", "fighting in the trenches", "torpedoing issues", "zeroing in on targets", "missing marks", "preparing bullets" (when they were referring to the preparation of salient points for presentation), "marshalling forces", "being armed to the teeth", "using guerrilla tactics", "going-to-hand", "getting blown out of the water", "constituents as foot-soldiers", and so forth. The examples I have cited here were actually all used in one three-hour meeting. Over time I had observed the augmentation of such metaphors without comment; however, the accumulation for that one meeting precipitated my bringing to the attention of the group the extent to which the war metaphors were being used and at a time when efforts were being made to enjoin the university community in collaborative energies and common agenda. After that observation, members of the group seemed to make conscious efforts to observe the appropriateness of language to the specifics of the context. Watch what happens if someone "plants" a jewel or gem metaphor in a discussion

Metaphorical usage is both a reflection and a prime determinant of the intellectual framework of leaders and, hence, their actions. Observe your own use of metaphor. While I am certain you will find the presence of a wide assortment of them, you will also discern coherence among them based on the shared aspects of the different metaphors. You will also recognize immediately that metaphors have both strengths and weaknesses. The metaphors of war, for example, may sometimes more readily encourage competition of a destructive sort than cooperative efforts. On the other hand, a particular war metaphor may serve to focus on a needed aspect of leadership for a given situation.

The key determinant in all of this, of course, is the basic assumption that one makes about the nature of metaphor to shape reality for us and to be a fundamental property of thought and expression. Successful metaphors not only merge seemingly incompatible terms; they demonstrate that the maker of the metaphor has developed both a keen sensitivity to language and a strong awareness of the unity of things. We all recognize, of course, that most leaders have speechwriters and rarely have sole responsibility for the writing of their major speeches. However, we may also assume that to the extent a leader chooses to deliver the prepared speeches does that leader also subscribe to the metaphorical assertions therein. If such is not the case, then have we also been told a great deal about the qualities of that particular leader. In his On Poetics Aristotle says: "But the greatest thing by far is to be master of metaphor. It is the only thing that cannot be learned from others; and it is also a sign of genius since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars."

I encourage us all in these unusual times of flux…of exponential change to strive to be more intentional about what we say (and how we say it, of course) and the language used to convey the intended messages. Leading in interesting times requires us to pay attention with a more heightened awareness and to bring to bear on our tasks of leadership an even more polished and finely honed language to ensure our making the vision more practicable and more compelling.