On a cold February day in Springfield, Illinois, three years ago, a young US senator announced he was going to run for the presidency.
The country and the world faced huge challenges, he said. “We know the challenges . . . We’ve talked about them for years . . . What’s stopped us from meeting these challenges is not the absence of sound policies and sensible plans. What’s stopped us is the failure of leadership . . . “
Now that he is president, Barack Obama knows how difficult it is to bring about successful change. But that does not make his earlier diagnosis wrong. In fact, it was shared by the authors of a working paper produced by three Harvard Business School professors 18 months before he launched his campaign to win the White House.
In an article called “Moving higher education to its next stage”, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria analysed the failure of corporate leaders to come up with solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems.
There was usually no shortage of analysis, they said. But, when it came to offering solutions, “we often know more about what than how and who. There is an intellectual gap around solving an emergent class of high-profile problems that cut across sectors” they wrote. Knowledge from “many professional fields” has to be pulled together to find answers.
Leaders rise to the top of their organisations. They may be really good at what they do, within that context. But ask them to work across sectors or disciplines, take them out of their comfort zone, and they find that, to their surprise, the results are often not very good. “The things you want to be changed don’t want to be changed by you,” as Prof Kanter puts it. The bottom line is we are failing to develop leaders who are up to the challenge of grappling with the world’s most urgent problems.
This realisation drove Prof Kanter and colleagues to launch Harvard University’s Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI). This involved unprecedented collaboration between different faculties at the institution. The schools of business, government, law, education and public health were among the first to come together to devise a new, year-long program of education for experienced leaders, many of whom were leaving their organisations after two or three decades, in search of new challenges. The inaugural program (with 14 executives attending) ran last year, and the second (with 22 on board) is now under way.
Fellows, as participants are called, attend seminars and lectures, and can also attend any other Harvard course while they are in residence. The ALI year also includes “think tanks” – two to three day sessions on specific issues, as well as week-long field trips (“immersions”) to gain first-hand experience in the locations affected by particular problems. The unique part of this programme is the inter-disciplinary element: the coming together of usually discrete faculty members, working with seasoned executives who in turn come from a wide range of backgrounds.
Executives are sought out and selected by Harvard to join the program. The idea is that, at the end of the year, fellows commit to leading a project that tackles a big, multi-faceted problem that they would not have been able to resolve in their former corporate role. Their leadership skills should have been enhanced and possibly transformed.
While conventional leadership may be found in a single organisation, advanced leadership emerges, Prof Kanter says, where “problems and issues spill over boundaries, goals are not clear or conflicting, pathways haven’t yet been established, stakeholders are politicised, and no one is clearly in charge”.
The “third stage” of education, offered by the ALI, deals with that other big question of the moment: what does the capable, experienced 50- or 60-something executive, who wants a change, do with the rest of his or her life? Should all that ability, and potential, go to waste? It is too soon for them to retire.
In his poem Sailing to Byzantium , W.B. Yeats despaired of those younger people who, dazzled by the excitement of the day, failed to draw on the insights of their more experienced fellow citizens:
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
Maybe the answer to this dilemma lies in the university seminar room. Advanced leadership is what the world needs right now. But to develop enough of it, many imitators of Harvard’s model will have to emerge.
