Tomorrow’s Leaders Will Combine Inspiration, Introspection

Warren Bennis, the eminence grise of USC management professors, has never run a corporation. But he is a sought-after expert on leadership and has written a dozen books on the subject, including “On Becoming a Leader,” “The Unconscious Conspiracy: Why Leaders Can’t Lead” and “Herding Cats: Bennis on Leadership.”

Driven by a lonely childhood to seek what he has called “power and potency” in his life, Bennis taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University and Harvard University before becoming provost at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1967 and, later, president of the University of Cincinnati. In 1980 he came to USC, where he teaches and does research and writing. He continues to consult with corporate leaders and politicos.

Bennis, who turns 75 in March, has just finished what he calls an “intellectual memoir” with the working title of “The Future Has No Shelf Life.” He recently spent several weeks in London, a favorite destination, on a trip that dovetailed with an invitation to lecture at the University of Exeter in western England. On May 6, USC plans to celebrate Bennis’ career with seminars and panels.

Q: How will organizations of the future differ from today’s?

A: In a very broad sense, organizations are going in some strange way to resemble universities and research institutions, filled with bright, self-absorbed, byline-oriented, interesting, highly individualistic knowledge workers, such as professors, journalists, scientists and information technologists. More and more it will be the capacity of leaders to harvest human capital that will make them succeed or fail. You see it all over Europe. We are moving much more toward not just a knowledge worker society--a term Peter Drucker used 25 years ago--but toward investor workers, people who bring in ideas that will really change the world.

Q: What traits will leaders have to have to succeed?

A: The new leadership will consist of a few things. They will have to understand and practice the power of appreciation. They will be connoisseurs of talent, more curators than creators. They’ll have to have what I guess is called taste, or that capacity not just to pick terrific people but to pick people who are better or brighter than they are. Most organizations have two neglects: One, there is really a lack of true acknowledgment and appreciation, plus there is not enough time for reflection. Knowledge workers especially need to be understood and acknowledged because work is so important to us. Leaders will have to be great listeners.

The second thing is that they have to keep reminding people of what’s important. They will be skilled at keeping the passion quotient high. For example, I don’t think it’s Jack Welch’s terrific strategy [at General Electric Co.] that will mark him as a great CEO of the last half of the 20th century. What he’ll be remembered for when he retires in 2001 is for energizing and mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people across a wide portfolio of businesses toward constructive activity. When I’ve talked to Welch, as I often have, I thought there would be only cinders left in his chair. He should be called Gen. Electric, he’s so intense. He really keeps that passion quotient high by reminding people what’s important. When people forget why they’re doing work, it becomes a drudge. Inertia and entropy set in.

There’s another thing that I think will be increasingly important in Y2K and beyond. Let me put it in a bit of a negative way. Senior executives get derailed because they lose perspective. They stop learning. They stop understanding what’s going on in their business landscape and they forget to look for or don’t take into account the significant inflection points that would affect their businesses--changes in demography, technology, the regulatory climate, taste and sociology, fashion. Habits of success [can be quite] deadening. Look what happened to Eckhard Pfeiffer of Compaq Computer. He stopped surfing his competitors’ Web sites. Dell and Gateway were eating his lunch. Where was he? Wallowing in success, not listening to his own people.

Terrific leaders maintain perspective by not being afraid of listening to bad news or reflective back talk. You have to give credit to Welch and Andy Grove of Intel, who encourage people to give them reflective back talk. There’s a saying: Minds, like parachutes, work better when they’re open. CEOs who are making it have their eyebrows continuously raised in curiosity. They are confident and curious. They approach the world as, “My God, I can still learn something.”

Q: What about these high-flying Internet companies? Is theirs a solid corporate model for the future?

A: Suffice to say, five years ago, the Amazon was a river in Brazil. Ten years or even five years ago, who ever bought anything on the Web? Last year, there were $43 billion in sales in e-commerce. In 2003, one projection is that it will be $1.6 trillion. I think it’s going to be more, actually. It’s really a split between [age groups]. I was talking to young people at the University of Exeter and asked how many of them had bought anything over the Internet in the last few months. These are young CEOs coming back for their MBAs. All of them had, and not just books. It’s as inevitable to me as globalization. The organizations are going to look nonhierarchical and be project-oriented. This can also mean giants like AT&T;, very agile, with lots of great groups working within them on time-limited or finite projects.

These companies won’t be parliamentary democracies. We have CEOs, chief operating officers, chief financial officers, chief information officers, chief technology officers . . . and, in England, even a chief growth officer. I don’t think the titles will disappear. But to keep their people they will have to treat the good ones like volunteers because, if they’re unhappy, those workers can walk.

The social contract is different. How do you maintain enough trust in a “24-7,” turbulent, temporary society? How do you keep people devoted to the task and give people developmental opportunities? The only thing that will keep people in the job is not stock options, but that they get a kick out of it.

I spoke to a hot Silicon Valley company where the average age was 29. Work had lost its meaning for many of them. I call it “affluence malaise.” That’s where this idea of keeping alive the passion quotient comes in. If work loses its meaning, then it’s just by the numbers.

Q: What makes a leader great?

A: I don’t think a leader can be great unless there’s a symbiosis between the leader and the led. They have to be intimate allies. Everything I’ve observed about leadership over the last 45 years is that leaders are made great by their people and their people are made great by leaders. The great example of that is Martin Luther King Jr. His rhetoric and oratory got a lot of his followers into useful mischief that landed them in jail. He felt he had to join them there to have integrity. You can’t have a great leader without a great group that provides interaction and support.

Q: What about baby boomers? So many of them seem to want to make a killing and retire early. They would otherwise be in the management pool.

A: I get so many mixed signals. Some are going to stop at age 50 and do charitable work. Some are retiring at 40. Others are healthy and will go on for many years. Take Bill Gates of Microsoft. He is 44 and doesn’t need to earn more money, yet he claims to be excited by his work and is democratizing knowledge. I think work can still be an exciting thing. It’s almost part of our wiring to do something. Besides, I haven’t seen many happily retired people. I think most are failing at retirement. Maybe organizations will learn how to harvest the wisdom they’ve retained.