THE FOCUS

The FOCUS Volume XVIII

identity “ I want people who succeed in the marketplace and also reflect our purpose – this goes to the soul of our company.”

Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, Chief Executive Officer LEGO System A / S

THE FOCUS Identity Volume XVIII Publisher Damien O’Brien Egon Zehnder International AG Editor-in-chief Dr. Ulrike Krause Project manager Markus Schuler Editing Brigitta Palass (senior editor), Andrew Blechman, David Leser, Scott London, Tom Varian English language editing Paul Boothroyd Production Anzinger | Wüschner | Rasp, Munich Art direction Markus Rasp Editorial office Egon Zehnder Corporate Communications corporate.communications@egonzehnder.com www.egonzehnder.com Editorial board Edilson Camara Dr. Johannes Graf von Schmettow Greig T. Schneider Rajeev Vasudeva Catherine Hongxia Zhu © 2015 Egon Zehnder International AG

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Editorial

“Functional skills and past successes alone no longer suffice. It is becoming increasingly clear that what really counts is the human element.”

Ask what constitutes good leadership today and there are no easy answers. One thing is for sure: as performance predictors for top leaders, functional skills and past successes alone no longer suffice. It has become increasingly clear that what really counts is a less easily defined human element comprising character and mindset as well as the ability to engage, inspire, and persuade diverse stakeholders.

Which brings us to the question of our self-perception, or in other words, our identity.

Admittedly, we are on tricky ground here. Philosophers, psychologists and sociologists have all attempted to define and describe this elusive beast. They have looked carefully at how the alignment of our outward appearances and our inner make-up takes shape, how consistent this needs to be, and to what extent it can tolerate change.

The common ground in all of their findings is that our identity depends to a critical extent on our values and convictions. At this point, it becomes evident why the identity of a leader is so decisive for their leadership qualities. Marissa Mayer, for example, who took the helm at Internet giant Yahoo in troubled times, never set out to become a CEO but was always driven by a desire to change things for the better.

It is remarkable how large numbers of emerging leaders demonstrate this will to shape events and assume responsibility from a very early stage – in many cases long before they take on a leading role. In THE FOCUS Dialogue, Jillian Ellis, U. S. Women’s National Soccer Team head coach and newly crowned World Cup winner, and Mark Thompson, President & CEO of The New York Times Company, talk about delighting in competition and challenges. At the same time, though, they underline the importance of remaining firmly grounded and retaining a capacity for self-examination.

The impact of the woman or man at the top as a role model cascades deep into the organization. Strive Masiyiwa from Zimbabwe, for example, founder of the telecommunications group Econet Wireless, has witnessed how strongly the self-image of the leader at the helm can influence the underlying system of values and culture of a company. “It is amazing how organizations can adopt the persona of the leader,” says this determined opponent of corruption.

When, in search of the essential core of our personality, we ask ourselves “who am I really?” the response is rarely unequivocal. The different roles we play often call for conflicting identities. In response to this dilemma, leadership expert Stewart Friedman advocates the integration of our professional and personal lives as the only way for leaders to “bring varied and complex dimensions into harmony and achieve optimum outcomes.”

Our own identity, though, is of course defined not only by the way we see it but also by our allegiances and the boundaries we choose to draw. In the age of the Internet and globalization, we enjoy greater liberty in this respect than ever before. Essayist Pico Iyer, a U. S. resident who was born in the UK to Indian parents, puts it this way: Our sense of belonging depends “less on our passports than on our passions.”

With this in mind, I wish you inspiring reading.

Damien O’Brien Chairman, Egon Zehnder

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Contents 1 Editorial

Leadership insights

4 “Every year we throw away the trophies and start all over again.”

An interview with Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, CEO LEGO Group

40 Demystifying change Robert Kegan, Lisa Lahey, and Jens Riedel on hidden commitments that work against fulfilling a leader’s key development goals

12 Harmonizing life’s domains Stewart D. Friedman on how tradeoff thinking limits leaders’ potential 16 “Always be conscious that you are setting a tone and a value system.”

An interview with Strive Masiyiwa, philanthropist and founder of Econet 24 Food for thought Information philosopher Luciano Floridi on the CEO as a mastermind narrator 28 “As a leader you’re there to create a safe space for other people’s talent.”

U. S. Women’s National Soccer Team head coach, Jillian Ellis, and Mark Thompson, President and CEO of The New York Times Company, on leadership, teamwork, and resilience

44 How do I look?

Boudewijn Arts and Neeraj Sagar explore the nature of authenticity in leadership – and beyond 48 Never hide Karoline Vinsrygg and Andrew Roscoe in conversation with thoughtleader Binna Kandola on identity and harnessing the power of a genuine diversity of ideas 52 Be careful what you wish for James Martin and Salvatore de Rienzo on the alignment of personal identity and professional development

56 “It was a case of getting focused on what we could do, and then instilling a sense of pride.”

An interview with Marissa Mayer, CEO, President and Director Yahoo! Inc. 66 In search of self Philosopher Julian Baggini explores the misconception of an immutable identity 70 Panel Leading figures describe the tran­ sition that had the strongest impact on their leadership identity 72 The shifting nature of home Why passions are more important than passports – tireless traveler Pico Iyer on global minds 76 Unlocking hidden capacities How the iconic Esalen Institute prepares a new generation for the challenges of twenty-first century leadership

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Strive Masiyiwa, ranked this year by Forbes Magazine as one of the ten most powerful men in Africa, kindly hosted our meeting at his London home. He was just back from a trip to the United States where, in 2014, he attended the U. S. - Africa Leaders’ Summit. As our interview underlines, the summit theme of “Investing in the Next Generation” remains close to the heart of this prominent entrepreneur and philanthropist. Page 16

Barely a week before the FIFA Women’s World Cup, U. S. Women’s National Soccer Team head coach Jillian Ellis somehow found time to meet with New York Times Company President and CEO Mark Thompson. Watching over the dialogue in the boardroom of The New York Times Building were photos of legendary visitors to the news­ paper’s offices, from Churchill and Kennedy to Einstein, many with personal dedications.

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The Yahoo campus where we met with CEO Marissa Mayer was everything you might expect it to be, complete with beach volleyball facilities (in use during our visit) and popcorn machines. From the architecture and landscaping to the interior design and the cafeteria, the spirit of the company was evident at every turn – with banners and visuals providing ongoing recognition of Yahoo’s 20 th anniversary. Page 56

4 THE FOCUS Identity Interview

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Interview

“ Every year we throw away the trophies and start all over again.”

The LEGO Group, the world’s most renowned toy company and arguably the world’s most famous brand, has been providing children with a source of fun and wonder for 83 years now. Founded by a Danish carpenter in the midst of the Great Depression, the company has gone from manufacturing wooden toys to producing a whole array of plastic construction toys, based on the famous interlocking bricks. Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, CEO since 2004, talks with THE FOCUS about the family-owned business, the soul of the company and his own unique personal trajectory.

Photos: Benne Ochs

THE FOCUS: Under your leadership, over the past decade the LEGO Group has gone from the brink of insolvency to being the world’s most successful toy company, with record sales and profits.

Only yesterday, your company announced 15 percent global sales growth year-on-year (DKK 28.6 billion). How do you feel about this?

Jørgen Vig Knudstorp: I feel very proud and also very privileged. I don’t think many CEOs get ten consecutive years of pure organic growth. I also feel extremely humble because this shows us the global strength and appeal of the brand.

What’s the secret x factor?

I think the x factor relates to the fundamental question of “Why do we exist?” Too many companies have a poor answer for that, or, at best, a complex one. The LEGO Group has a very simple answer. We strongly believe that play is vital for a child’s development, just as food, love and good health are. So we exist to make a material that no one else can make so well, something that sticks firmly together but is pliable enough for a two-year-old to take apart. And we’ve transformed this very simple idea into an integrated global business system and optimized it.

How do you resist complacency to keep your corporate culture alive?

Every year we throw away the trophies, we throw away any sense of self-congratu­ lation, and we start all over again. We ask ourselves: “How can we make the LEGO playing material we put in children’s hands even more exciting?” The answer to that is by re-inventing ourselves every year and then executing the system again.

I feel a huge urgency to constantly be raising our game. One way of doing that is to focus less on our financial performance and more on how motivated and creative our employees feel and, of course, how our retail customers feel. To what extent are children putting our products at the top of their wish lists and talking to their friends about playing with LEGO? Which leads us to a broader question: “What kind of reputation do we have? Are we a trusted company?” Because if we are trusted by the public, children recommend our products to other children, and our employees feel engaged, we are sure to succeed.

So it’s by thinking in these terms that we remove the complacency and keep our corporate culture alive.

When you assumed the position of CEO in very difficult times, you said that the LEGO Group had lost its soul. What exactly had been lost and how would you describe the soul of the company today?

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“The job defines my life. I have my family at home and my family here at LEGO, and that’s where I spend all my time.”

There are several different elements. One of them I already mentioned – the belief in play as a vital part of a child’s development. Then we have an owner who says: “What I really care about is the product – and children’s development.” So while we need to make money, the LEGO Group has a deeper purpose than that. Our purpose is to make a difference in children’s lives by giving them wonderful play experiences, and bringing this experience to every child on the planet. Money is like oxygen to a body, but none of us sit in this room to breathe the air; we sit in this room to fulfill a purpose with our lives. Making money is the entry ticket to fulfilling that purpose. In the past we had “religious” people, if you like, who believed in the purpose of what we did, but we also had “realists” who saw this purely as a business.

I wanted to combine the two in individ­ uals – people who could succeed in the marketplace and also reflect the spirit, purpose and energy of the company. This goes to the soul of our company.

So maybe the soul of your company reflects the sense of wonder that comes naturally to children …

We know from neuroscience that children are naturally curious, creative and imaginative, attributes we tend to lose as adults.

So we teach children essential skills like executive functioning – how to manage themselves and their resources – and spatial awareness. We help them learn to think systematically, scientifically and with a sense of structure. That’s why Google’s co-founder Larry Page said that LEGO bricks constituted the most important technology he’d ever encountered. By learning to build anything out of a simple material, children can combine rightbrain creativity, storytelling and design thinking with left-brain scientific structure and logical analysis. For me that’s where the soul of the company begins.

How has the identity of the LEGO Group changed over the past ten years?

It has changed a lot. We used to be seen as a bit of a basket case. Our competitors

were ten years ahead of us. Now we’ve passed them. We’ve redefined the industry benchmark by learning, in part, from other industries. Globalization and digitization have fundamentally changed the face of business and of the LEGO Group in particular. We have taken a very global approach to branding, product, processes, operations and HR, so that we’re now the most trusted brand in North America and the number two in Europe. Also the issue of responsibility and sustainability has helped shape us, because this is intrinsically related to trust and authenticity. When I look back at those crisis years I think it was actually our failure to globalize and digitize fast enough that held us back. In our own industry we are now leading the way in both digitization and globalization.

How does digitization fit in with your back-to-basics focus on the brick as the LEGO Group’s premium product?

It is still all about the brick. If the LEGO Group defines itself as a purely digital player, then we’re just another fish in the ocean. But if we can combine bricks and digitization in new ways, that’s what we will do – uniquely.

The combination of physical and digital play has been tried in the past without much success. What makes you think it can succeed?

The vital question here is: Do children want to play physically in the future? I’m one hundred percent convinced they do.

If human beings don’t move about, their brains simply stop growing. Children can’t sit still in school because their brains are telling them to move. In terms of the purely digital space we know now that the most successful and popular online game ever created is a game where people appear to be building with LEGO bricks. So is there a meaningful combination here?

I think there is. Gutenberg helped establish a revolution 600 years ago with the printing press. Today, it’s all about creative coding, which is not unlike building with LEGO bricks. And the LEGO Group is helping to pioneer systems that allow people

to view coding as putting bricks together on a screen.

How do you ensure that your 14,000 employees on three continents share the same passion for education and play?

As companies like ours continue to penetrate global markets we face a fundamental choice: Either we stay together as an integrated and unified whole or we divisionalize. We wanted to stay together as one company because we think we are one of those brands like Apple or Audi, where the product is much the same in every geography. We’re not trying to be the best local competitor, rather the best global competitor. That’s the fundamental strategic choice and from that choice follows an organizational model of global integration. This requires leaders who can think like CEOs at the top level, because they need to see the full context. They don’t just manage their piece of their world.

They see that they’re part of a whole.

What qualities do you look for in your leaders to take you in this direction?

They need to understand that they work in a system with very high interdepen­ dency. So, if you as an individual seek to be independent, you’ll struggle in this system because you’re highly dependent and you need to recognize that interde­ pen­dency and thrive on it. So you need to be a person who values synergy. You need to be able to listen to others and integrate their perspectives, but also to be confident enough to state your own position.

You need to be what some people call an integrative thinker. It’s a very tough call for a leader who may be accustomed to a different system.

What are the non-negotiable parts of your organizational culture?

What is non-negotiable is people who are willing to deal with the complexities of globalization and the interdependencies that follow from that. They need to be collaborative. They need to stick together as a group. They need to be willing to scale fast and be adaptable, because that’s how this company survives. And last but

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not least they must live the LEGO culture and spirit through their everyday working lives.

In building the LEGO Group of the future, how does diversity help deliver on your objectives?

Diversity is extremely important for two reasons: One is seeking globalization while having our roots and culture firmly based in Denmark. Because obviously if you want to succeed in a number of countries where you don’t understand the culture, you don’t speak the language, you can’t read the newspapers or the Internet, then you need more diversity in the workforce. But also when you run a coherent integrated system you need to respect functional diversity where no function is more important than any other. A professor of globalization at IMD once told me that “the most difficult diversity to introduce in any leadership is gender diversity, and if you succeed with gender diversity, it is also easier to handle other types of diversity.” So we’ve worked very hard on that over the last three years and we’ve actually made very good progress. If you want this system of integrative thinking to work, you need to be able to see things differently so you can synergize.

The LEGO Group is still family-owned.

Family firms seem to be characterized by a powerful corporate ethos, a “family gravity” that can make life hard for a non-family CEO. How do you deal with that?

Family firms potentially have special advantages that relate to the authenticity of their value statement. Because when you have an owner who is active, everybody knows that what the owner wants is what really matters. You speak with more authenticity as an owner. So when I talk to my staff I often liken our situation to Denmark where we have purportedly

“If you come in as a nonfamily CEO and you’re not willing to listen, you will get into trouble fast.”

the oldest monarchy in the world, but a constitutionally elected government as well. The King and Queen are the owners, whereas governments come and go.

To take up that metaphor, do the monarchy and the people have faith in their elected government?

In my case I think I was chosen for the job because our fundamental values align very well. I’ve become like a spokesperson for the family and sometimes join with the family to articulate where the future of the family ownership lies. So it’s a very symbiotic relationship. And that’s what I think you need to buy into as CEO of a family-owned business, the fact that families are not ordinary shareholders. They are not always primarily concerned with the traditional notion of shareholder value. What really matters might not be a financial question, it might be other less tangible things. So if you come in as a nonfamily CEO and you’re not willing to listen, or you come in saying: “Well, I’ve read the book of good corporate governance and I want to be independent from the dominant shareholder,” you will get into trouble fast. If, on the other hand, you can enter a dialogue with – or even challenge – the owning family, while at the same time being a good representative for the company, which is what the owners want, then you can have a wonderful interaction and leverage a lot of advantages from family ownership.

You spoke earlier about purpose as a core asset of the LEGO Group. How much of this is due to being a familyowned company?

I think there’s a unique spirit here thanks to family ownership, not least because of the long-term approach this implies. In our case, the family continues to be willing to take a very long-term view on certain decisions. Their view is: “Well, if we need to invest in something because we believe it’s essential for our long-term future, we will just do it because we think it is the right thing to do.”

What is also important in a family-owned company is to respect the elected management team and in my case, again, I’ve been extremely fortunate that I took over from

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Its name, derived from the Danish for “play well”, the famous “leg godt” or LEGO brick – a masterpiece of precision and dimensional accuracy – was first patented in 1958.

The LEGO Group The LEGO Group was founded in 1932 as a manufacturer of wooden toys by Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter from Billund, Denmark.

The LEGO brick was first patented in 1958 and caught the imagination of children and adults alike. After 70 years of virtually uninterrupted success, in 2003 the company began to slide towards bankruptcy after trying to ride the growing wave of computer games. In a bold move, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, the grandson of the founder, stepped down in 2004 and appointed Jørgen Vig Knudstorp as the second non-family CEO. Over the ensuing decade, Knudstorp refocused the company on its core business – the colored bricks and the imaginary world they create – resulting in a rapid return to growth. Today the LEGO Group is the world’s second-largest toy company in terms of sales and in 2014 manufactured more than 60 billion LEGO bricks.

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The interview with Jørgen Knudstorp in Billund was conducted by Wan May Ang, Egon Zehnder, Singapore, and Morten Tveit, Egon Zehnder, Oslo.

a family member – Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen – who was secure enough in himself not to spend the next ten years of his life trying to argue why he didn’t do anything wrong.

Quite the opposite. He called me only last night, exuberant, saying: “Congratulations on everything you have achieved.” And I’m thinking: “It’s actually of your making.

You invented the whole thing.”

So that is also something a family owner needs to think about: How do they give the team that they bring in the room they need to actually run the business in the best possible way? It’s delicate but I think in our case we’ve landed in a very good place.

You’ve been CEO for ten years. How do you stay motivated?

For me the motivation most days is that I’m thinking: “I should pay to be in this job.” There are so many fun moments with fans and children, plus I love the global aspect of the job – meeting people from many different cultures, going deep into China, for example, and visiting a household to see how it plays. That’s just supermotivating. The intellectual, organizational and leadership challenge is huge. But it’s also my relationship with the owner.

I don’t waste a second of my day thinking about whether I’m trusted. I don’t feel that people are suspicious of me. I feel like I have a genuine personal relationship with all of my reports. I just brought in some new members in my management team and some younger people who help us function on a daily basis. They’ve come

Jørgen Vig Knudstorp Born in Frederica, Denmark in 1968, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp studied Economics and East Asian Studies at Aarhus University before gaining an MBA in the UK and his doctorate from MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He began his career in 1998 with McKinsey and, three years later, joined the Strategy Department at the LEGO Group. In 2004, at the age of 35, he was appointed CEO of the company. Known for his modesty and playful nature, Knudstorp learnt early on how to listen to children when he worked part-time in a nursery school. Today he has four children aged between 7 and 12, two boys and two girls, whom he describes as his own “personal market research team.”

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from other big global corporations, and they say: “Wow, I’ve never seen a management team that works together like this.

It looks like you’re friends!” And that just makes for a tremendously satisfying daily personal environment.

And how have you changed personally over the past decade?

I think I’ve grown up in this job. There were a lot of things I was naïve about and didn’t see when I first arrived. I also realize how much of a life-choice this has been.

When I started I was thinking: “I’ll be lucky if I survive here for three years, but I’ll learn a lot; then I’ll work out what to do with the rest of my life.” Now, of course, the job defines my life. This is what I’ll be known for. It has certain consequences in terms of what you can – and what you cannot – do. I have my family at home and my family here at the LEGO Group, and that’s where I spend all my time. So don’t talk to me about soccer results or playing golf because I don’t have any outside hobbies. There’s just no time. And that has changed me, because that is not where I thought I would be at the age of 46.

The next question has to be: Where did you think you would be at the age of 46?

(Laughs) I had many crazy dreams. When I was a child or a young man, I wanted to be an astronaut, and I famously said to my family: “If I can be the first to go to Jupiter and never return, I’ll do it!” Then I wanted to become a movie director because I love movies. And when I finally left university almost at the age of 30, I wanted to pursue an academic career. I loved the learning, the intellectual curiosity, and I loved teaching. Students would crowd my lectures and seek me out. I still hear from many of them and the careers they pursued afterwards. And then I went into man-

agement consulting and found out that I was not an analyst, I was a people leader.

So I ended up at the LEGO Group – because I loved playing with LEGO as a child – and here I found out I was a business leader. So if you ask me about discovering your purpose in life, I’d say you don’t really know what it is until you’re there.

You’re also known to have recommended the work of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard to your students.

What were the key lessons?

Well, there are many. For example I spoke about his insight that if you think you haven’t chosen a path, you already have chosen a path. I believe that’s one of the big things – that not making a choice is also making a choice and you’d better be very conscious of that.

Kierkegaard also spoke about three stages of human existence: the aesthetic stage, the ethical stage and the religious stage.

The aesthetic stage is not about being aesthetic, it’s about pursuing pleasure and avoiding commitment. It’s about being hedonistic, egotistical and fragmented.

The aesthetic stage then gives way to the ethical stage, which is about sense of duty, of working for family and society, of making firm commitments and showing a capacity for self-examination. The religious stage is about faith in one’s true purpose and a response to a higher calling, to God if you like. I think when you look at a business, or you look at a person, we can modernize Kierkegaard a little and speak of four dimensions: The physical, the social, the mental, and the spiritual.

How do these dimensions relate to the world of business? What were you trying to tell your students?

For a company the physical is – in Kierke­ gaard’s terms – the aesthetic: It’s the ani-

To watch a video interview with Jørgen Vig Knudstorp please visit www.egonzehnder.com /the-focus /video

mal in all of us, the unreflective part, and in a company this is the financial performance. The social dimension in a company is its culture. It’s about the relationships that are fostered within the corporate culture. How we get along with each other?

Do we trust each other? Do we speak openly? Do we give each other room? This is very important because this is our fam­ ily, these are our friends. That’s what Kier­ kegaard would call your ethical life.

The mental dimension in a company is its capabilities. In a person, it’s your intellectual life: “How do you think about issues?” Finally, the spiritual translates into what Kierkegaard called the religious dimension, which is: “What do you believe in? That’s a company’s purpose. What’s your direction? How do you scrutinize your own actions and take responsibility? What is your higher calling?”

We all have these dimensions inside ourselves and students of business need to see themselves in this multi-dimensional way. If they only see themselves as a finance person they’re not going to be successful in business because they’re not a whole human being.

You talked about making choices that defined you. After ten years as a business leader, what choices will you be making for your own future in the next decade?

I think the journey that the company’s owner and employees are on is so long that the agenda is already set out. Making the LEGO Group a truly global leading player in the business of play, and at the same time integrating and fully digitizing the business system to expand the purpose of the LEGO brick … that’s what I’m going to be doing for the next ten years.

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Harmonizing life’s domains How trade-off thinking limits leaders’ potential

by Stewart D. Friedman

Illustration: Paul Davis

By conducting “intelligent and inclusive experiments” leaders at all levels learn how to replace work / life conflict with work / life harmony, and so infuse their work with strengths, assets, and energy from every part of their lives.

For nearly three decades, my life’s work has been to help people find ways to bring the often warring aspects of life into greater harmony. Toward that end, my research has focused on a fun­ damental misconception we all have about the “costs” of success. Many people believe that to achieve great things we must make brutal sacrifices; that to succeed in work we must focus singlemindedly, at the expense of self, family, and society. Even those who reject the idea of a zerosum game fall prey to a kind of binary thinking revealed by the term we use to describe the ideal lifestyle: work / life balance.

My research has shown that there are ways for everyone – from the managers of sales teams, to executives in government agencies, to computer engineers, to HR specialists, to coaches – to achieve professional success without always having to sacrifice the things that matter in their personal lives. Indeed, we’ve found that the opposite is true: sustainable professional success results from meaningful investments in the rest of life.

Pursue true success When leaders look in the mirror, few see exactly the person they want to be. The image is distorted

by inner contradictions. The powerful CEO despairs that he cannot do more for an aging parent …

The renowned scientist fears she is losing touch with her spirituality …

The idea that “work” competes with “life” ignores the fact that life is actually the intersection and interaction of four domains: work; family; community; and self, which is the private realm of mind, body, and spirit. Of course, no one enjoys complete contentment in all the corners of life, all at the same time. But conflict and stress are not inevitable. Harmony is possible.

It starts with moving past the notion that one must trade off the different parts of life, each against the rest. Instead, you can choose to see work, family, community, and self all working together – much like a jazz quartet. Different pieces come to the fore moment to moment, but over the course of one’s life, all blend together to create beautiful music.

Tom Tierney, one of the successful people I’ve studied who lead lives that are fulfilling, excels at harmonizing life’s domains. Even while serving as CEO of Bain & Company, Tierney never went into the office on weekends. He set that time aside for his family. Tierney was there to support fully both of his sons as they worked to develop skills and achieve significant impact in their commu­ nity. Tierney also takes excellent care of his physical health and dutifully attends to his inner well-being through activities such as journaling on a regular basis. While striving in the business world and serving his various communities

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throughout his early adult life, when he reached his mid-forties, Tierney shifted his emphasis and left Bain to form The Bridgespan Group, an organization that provides strategic consulting and leadership development services to philanthropists, foundations, and nonprofit organizations. This move was the eventual fulfillment of an idea he had envisioned early in his adulthood and took years to realize, small steps at a time. Tierney has actively honored all parts of his life, and so enjoys the fruits of true success.

Be real, be whole, be innovative What separates such individuals from many of their highly talented but less contented contemporaries? Three things.

The first key is to be real; to act with authenticity. You have to know what you stand for, where you’ve come from, where you’re going, and why.

The second key is to be whole: to act with integrity, striving for an inner sense of oneness, as contrasted with the fragmentation inherent to trade-off thinking. “Integrity” stems from the Latin “integer,” which means whole or complete. Acting with integrity demands respecting that you are a person who plays a number of important roles and practicing the skills that enable you to do so purposefully.

The third key is to be innovative, to be con­ tinually experimenting with how you get things done, challenging the status quo to find new ways of doing things that are better not just for you or your business, but for all the different parts of your life.

Leaders can master these keys to true success by experimenting intelligently and inclusively.

To watch a video interview with Stewart D. Friedman please visit www.egonzehnder.com /the-focus /video

Experimenting intelligently means realistically foreseeing and managing risk. Experimenting inclusively means clearly communicating how trying something new will tangibly benefit those who might reflexively resist the innovation.

For example, an executive may tell his colleagues and team: “I’d like to try something, just for the next month or so. I’ll go offline on Tuesdays from 3 p. m. until the end of the day, because I’m pretty sure if I use that time to take care of some other things that matter to me, you’re going to see improvement in my results that you care about. I’m going to be less distracted and more focused, which means I’ll be able to deliver more value when I am working. Would you support me trying that for a month, to see how it goes?

This executive has effectively removed the primary reasons those around him might oppose his initiative. The proposal envisions an outcome desirable to all; defines the experiment within clear, non-threatening boundaries; and shares control – he has invited people to help assess the success of the experiment.

These same characteristics can also help reduce one’s inner resistance. The executive will feel less guilty about trying out this idea because he knows the intent is to help others as much as himself. Further, the upside is significant while the downside is small. He has effectively disarmed the voice in his head that says doing something healthy for himself is either too selfish or too risky.

Liberate your leaders Even intelligent and inclusive experiments may be resisted in organizations with a heavy command and control orientation, but in such settings, leaders can always find ways to personally model the value of being real, whole, and innovative. Further, within their span of control, leaders can encourage others to appropriately experiment with integrating the various parts of their lives. The successes realized by such leaders and their teams can trigger a kind of grassroots culture change, creating a bit of space for more people to honor and draw strength from who they are outside of work.

Experience will demonstrate that harmonizing (rather than trading off) work and the rest of life need not threaten organizational performance or business success. In fact, leaders may soon be able to quantify rising productivity, improved talent retention, and significant reductions in healthcare and operating costs, as they and their

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Stewart D. Friedman Stew Friedman is the Practice Professor of Management at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the founding director of both the Wharton Leadership Program and the Wharton Work / Life Integration Project. His most recent book, Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life (Harvard Business, 2014), is a Wall Street Journal best-seller. He also wrote the internationally best-selling Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life (Harvard Business, 2008).

Friedman has advised many private- and publicsector organizations, including the U. S. Departments of Labor and State, the UN, and two White House administrations.

people attain increased clarity of mind, enhanced psychological and physical energy, and a growing love for their lives – including the very significant portion spent at work.

With those very outcomes in mind, savvy organizations will get out front, building intelligent and inclusive experimentation into leadership development to help liberate their leaders from trade-off thinking. Such exercises become all the more powerful when thoughtfully surrounded by assessment, feedback, and coaching support, which is the essence of how we learn leadership and cultivate it over time: Try something, surround it with data, and build in accountability and support as you learn through challenging experiences.

Leadership coaching can help developing leaders identify their core values, starting with the crucible episodes – the three or four episodes in a leader’s life history that shaped his or her values and beliefs. How did you come to be the person you are, in terms of what you stand for, what you are willing to fight for? Coaching can then propel developing leaders to gaze forward, helping them to expand and integrate their vision: It’s fifteen years from now … What are you doing? What impact are you having at work, at home, in the community? Who have you become? How are you different from who you are today? Encouraging leaders to share this kind of content in an intimate group of peers, where they can hear what other developing leaders are saying, creates even greater insight into what matters most.

No less important, leadership development can encourage leaders to identify their key stakeholders across all parts of their lives, then clarify mutual expectations. Leaders ask their important life partners: What do you expect of me and what do I expect of you? Coaching can help leaders prepare for and process those stakeholder dialogues, which should include conversations with the dozen or so most important people at home and in leaders’ communities, not just the most important people at work. Stakeholder dialogues across multiple domains provide valuable experience in thinking systematically to bring varied and complex dimensions into harmony to achieve optimum outcomes. This, of course, is a hallmark of outstanding executives.

Finally, leadership development should challenge rising executives: Go out and do something that’s going to have a positive impact on your work, your home, your community, and yourself.

(Note: it’s not “or” but “and.”) Coaching can help developing leaders ensure these experiments are intelligent and inclusive.

As leaders repeatedly experiment in pursuit of what I call “four-way wins,” they come to see themselves as scientists in the laboratories of their own lives, consciously and deliberately taking actions they hope and expect will be useful for themselves and the people around them, and learning as much from failure as from success.

Over time their knowledge accumulates and they become skilled not only at adapting to change, but at shaping it, while infusing their work with strengths, assets, and energy from every part of their lives.

16 THE FOCUS Identity Interview

Interview

“ Always be conscious that you are setting a tone and a value system.”

Strive Masiyiwa, philanthropist and founder of Econet, speaks with THE FOCUS about determination, fundamental beliefs, and the responsibilities of African business leaders.

As a global business leader, African philanthropist, anti-corruption activist, and mentor to thousands, Strive Masiyiwa is a vibrant example of someone who has little doubt about what motivates him, what he hopes to accom­ plish, and what sort of example he wants to set for others along the way.

His is a character forged by struggle and perseverance against corruption, and shaped by a deep faith that guides him on the world stage as he looks to bring about positive change to his home continent. We had the pleasure of speaking with Masiyiwa in London during a brief pause in a schedule bursting with business and philanthropy interests.

Photos: Jørn Tomter

The Focus: You recently suggested that people should stop considering Africa as “exotic” and see it more as a place for doing business …

Strive Masiyiwa: Africa is indeed open for investment. This does not mean we don’t need aid in other things. But when you come to Africa to do business, it makes sense to evaluate the opportunity in the same way you would evaluate an investment in Asia, or an investment in Latin America or Europe. That is what we do as a company.

On the other hand, there are some very real challenges in Africa. Is doing ­business in Africa about turning these problems into opportunities?

There are challenges everywhere, Africa included. And keep in mind that Africa is composed of 54 sovereign nations. Yes, we have the challenge of Ebola. But not in the whole of Africa; it is a problem in three very small African countries. So ­Africa has its challenges, but it is not a country; it is a continent. Africa has the same contrasts, it has the same challenges as any other continent, and if you go

there knowledgably, do your homework, do your work, you can mitigate risks – and you can find opportunities. As a serious businessperson looking to enter the market in Africa, you have to know the differences in identity between South Africa and Nigeria, between Egypt and Morocco. Otherwise, you’re going to get yourself into big trouble.

Clearly Econet has a major advantage there. Given the global scale of your ­operations, would you still describe Econet as an African company?

For sure. We are very much an African company with a global perspective, much like Apple is an American company with a global outlook. We look at the ­opportunities globally, but we have very specific knowledge of the African continent, and we take advantage of that.

How have your African roots shaped your mission and philosophy as an entrepreneur?

I come from telecommunications, which is my core interest and my core business.

So I was very fortunate that my skills and knowledge of the industry coincided with

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18 THE FOCUS Identity Interview

the revolution in the technology, and we were able to do some pretty spectacular things as an industry, which I think others will find difficult to duplicate. When I ­entered this industry back in 1993, the vast majority of the African population – 70 percent or more – had never heard a telephone ring. Today, 70 percent of Africans own a phone. That is a revolution.

So as an entrepreneur, my philosophy has always been about reaching out to meet the needs of people. What do people need, and how we can respond to those needs?

From there, everything takes care of itself.

And I make a distinction between what people want and what people need. It is great when you can give them what they not only want but also need, because someone may want a piece of jewelry, but they may not need it. At this stage, I am more inclined to respond to needs.

What innovations are coming out of Africa that are also relevant on a global level?

In Africa, a company such as ours often has to innovate out of necessity. As we have to do things from scratch, we have managed to leapfrog traditional tech­ nologies. In general, African companies demonstrate far greater adaptability to technological change than companies in some developed markets. Consequently, you will see companies come out of Africa that will be world champions thanks to this practical approach to innovation.

As an African, do you feel leaders in the private sector there have specific responsibilities?

That is very much the case. When you do business in Africa, you must also be cognizant of the fact that Africa is a young National Healthcare Trust Zimbabwe’s work with mobile healthcare clinics in Zimbabwe (above). The Higher Life Foundation (founded by Strive Masiyiwa and his wife Tsitsi Masiyiwa) plays a pivotal role in education and healthcare support in countries where Econet has operation in Africa.

Another area of Strive Masiyiwa’s engagement: deployment of Liquid Telecom Fibre as a part of building Africa’s ­digital future (pictured below).

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c­ ontinent. Sixty percent of the population are under the age of 30. It is a continent of young people looking for employment opportunities, looking to be inspired.

This can be a dividend for the world; it can also be a major problem for the world.

We are right now at that juncture where we can choose. Soon, we will not be able to choose. So those who are in leadership positions must always be aware of this.

I believe that, as a business leader, I must dedicate as much time as I can to showing young people the way, because there aren’t a lot of successful African business leaders for them to look up to – yet. It is a much greater burden for us than, say, for my colleagues in Europe, because you have had 200 years of corporate leaders that people can evaluate and look at. We have maybe fifty years by comparison, and far fewer role models from whom young people can try and learn something.

What would you say is your specific contribution to closing the leadership gap that exists in Africa?

When others look back at my business ­career one day, I hope they will see that I sought to emphasize the need for a boundary between business and ­politics – that you don’t go into politics so that you may prosper in business.

Or use your business to advance politics.

In my case, for example, I don’t fund ­political parties. I always keep a clear line.

I also want people to be aware that leadership in today’s world is not just about ­political leadership. There are many types of leaders – business leaders, religious leaders, cultural leaders. When we recognize this, we are stronger as a society.

When too much focus is placed on the

man in office, the president or the prime minister, then you have unreasonable ­expectations of this one person. When are we going to learn that if you do that, you’re only going to be disappointed?

And I don’t think it’s only an African ­phenomenon. We all put too much emphasis on political leaders.

I think we’ve got to draw from a broader spectrum of leadership. Archbishop ­Desmond Tutu is a great moral leader, but he is not in politics. And he knows where the dividing line is. When religious leaders start declaring themselves politicians as well – that’s when we encounter problems. We need to be aware of where the dividing lines are. Otherwise people will go into business or politics with the intention of advancing the interests of their family or their tribe or ­region. Then we run into trouble again.

So I try to carry that message; to say that there is a place for business leaders at the table in the conversation about how we take our societies forward – but as business leaders.

You were able to get all of Africa’s major mobile operators together in one room to create an SMS campaign in r­ esponse to the Ebola crisis.

Yes, and it wasn’t easy because we are fierce competitors! We organized a summit of leading business people from the African continent, meeting in Ethiopia – 37 African businesses were represented.

All the mobile operators were there, and we were fired up to do some good together. Everyone pledged to give at least US $ 1 million. And so, in a half hour, we raised more than US $ 30 million.

To raise additional money, we decided to

Econet Wireless is a privately held diversified telecommunications group offering products and services in mobile telephony, broadband, satellite, solar, and fiber optic networks, and has recently begun revolutionizing how Africans bank and pay for products with their mobile phones.

Econet has operations in 17 African nations as well as in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Strive Masiyiwa founded the company in 1993 after winning a five-year court battle against Zimbabwe’s state-owned telecommunications monopoly. This victory is seen as pivotal in the opening of the African telecommunications sector to private capital, as well as setting an important business precedent in Africa for ­entrepreneurs and investors alike.

“It is amazing how organizations can adopt the persona of the leader, even when that leader is not conscious of that.”

talk to all of our customers and ask them to donate via their phones. Our SMS ­campaign is taking place in 39 countries.

This has never happened in Africa before. We have 66 African celebrities, from NBA All-Star players to soccer players, singers, and dancers, and political celebrities. They recorded messages encour­ aging people to make donations. It is the biggest crowd-­funding campaign in ­African history.

This initiative – Africa Against Ebola – appears to be a new vision for African cooperation, as well as a model for leadership coming from the private sector.

The private sector is very much leading the way in response to the threat of ­Ebola. We now have a special foundation led by business people that funds over 1,000 healthcare workers from a dozen African countries to respond to Ebola.

Hopefully, we’ve created a template that will empower Africans, so the next time they won’t feel that they need to wait for people from the West to come and solve the problem. Yes, we still need them.

But now we can partner and solve some of our own problems.

20 THE FOCUS Identity Interview

Strive Masiyiwa was born in Zimbabwe in 1961. He was still a child when his family fled to Zambia as the colonial-era government began to crumble and the nation descended into civil war. Masiyiwa attended university and graduate school in the UK, returning to Zimbabwe as an entrepreneur with a background in electrical ­engineering. With a now-legendary determination, he eventually won a telecom license that would form the basis for Econet, one of Africa’s most successful companies. Strive sits on the board of The Rockefeller Foundation and on the US Council on Foreign Relations Global Advisory Board. He has been named by Fortune Magazine as one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders. As one of Africa’s most prolific philanthropists, Masiyiwa supports charities that are directly responsible for 40,000 orphans at any given time in the African countries where Econet has operations.

How much would you say your com­ pany is influenced by your personality, by your identity as an entrepreneur?

Well, because I am the founder and I am still around, my identity clearly plays a role in the company. But you always want to limit that, because you want an insti­ tutional identity. A leader must set the tone on things like values. It is amazing how organizations can adopt the persona of the leader, even when that leader is not conscious of that. We’ve seen banks, even very old banks, with a new leader that is overly ambitious and cuts corners, and before you know it, the whole bank acts like a cowboy.

As a leader, you must be always conscious that you are setting a tone, that you are setting a value system. At the same time, in a multicultural environment, you are not regimenting the behavior of the ­other people in their personal lives, so it is a very subtle thing. But you do want to allow a persona to emerge around the organization based on values.

What do you offer the talent you want to attract?

One of the things that I have always said to our people is: When you join Econet,

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The interview with Strive Masiyiwa in London was conducted by Xavier Leroy, Egon Zehnder, Johannesburg, and Ulrike Krause, THE FOCUS.

you join voluntarily. You join because you passionately believe that you are being led somewhere; that you are going to change something; you are going to make a difference. And our work in philan­ thropy, in education, in health care – it helps them to set a compass; to see that we are working towards something which makes our world a better place, and that they, too, can contribute in this way. I only spend 50 percent of my time on business. The other 50 percent, I am pursuing my philanthropic objectives. And our people know this.

Christian values seem to be of great importance for you. Did you make them part of your corporate philosophy as well?

It is my personal philosophy. You can’t make it a corporate philosophy because we have people of many faiths in our ­organization. However, if you live your values, other people can see whether they are good or bad. I think fundamental to what I believe is the importance of compassion. We look after more than 40,000 orphans. Everybody – our customers, our employees – know that. And if those are Christian values, then that is great.

Looking back, how important was the five-year litigation process you went through to get the telephone license in Zimbabwe? How important was it for the DNA of your company and the confidence of the people working for you?

It was extremely important, because one of the core things that came out of that was that everybody knew I was fighting a battle against corruption. I could have solved that problem in one day by just agreeing to say, “Okay, I can accommodate this, I can accommodate that,” and it would have been over. And the people knew that. But I stuck it out. I went through the courts and fought the battle. It said to people, “Hey, you can stand up for what is right. You can say no to corruption.” Africa needed to hear this message very loud – that it is possible to be in business, to do it with zero tolerance for corruption, and to be successful.

And we didn’t just fight the battle here.

We fought an even tougher battle in ­Nigeria. It took even longer. We went through courts, arbitrations and so forth, and ­people could see for themselves that you could go to court in Nigeria and win. Yes, you can win! You can go to the

judges. They are good judges, fair judges.

There are legal systems in these countries that need to be tested. They are important to the sustainability of real business.

Because if you have property, you want to know that it can be protected. You shouldn’t be expecting to have it protected by the big man in office called the president. There has to be a system; there has to be a judiciary; there has to be rule of law.

Given that corruption is still such a widespread phenomenon in Africa, isn’t it a challenge to watch over that internally as well, to make sure that nothing like that happens in your company?

Yes, it is true. Everybody must watch out for that. And it isn’t just African companies. We have seen this with big global

“What people don’t appreciate about corruption is this: Corruption takes two. It is not a onesided affair.”

22 THE FOCUS Identity Interview

brands around the world. There will always be ambitious people who want to cut corners. And as a leader, you must send the signal that, “Yes, there are big bonuses to be earned here if you are ­successful. But if you pay bribes or cut corners or do things that can hurt the brand, then you will also pay a big price.”

What people don’t appreciate about ­corruption is this: Corruption takes two.

It is not a one-sided affair. If you have said upfront, publicly: “I am opposed to corruption,” it is amazing how few people come to you asking for bribes. But if you are quiet about it and just hope they know, you will get a lot of people asking you.

With me, it is amazing how over the years they have come to say: “Oh, that one! He is crazy. He’ll never pay us.” And I like that, you know? So say it loud before they come!

Every corporate leader around the world should make a statement around cor­ ruption. Everybody should step up when they take over a company and say, “I am against corruption.” So, if you employ 77,000 people, let everyone know that you are against corruption. If you employ two people, let them know that you are against corruption. And remarkable as it may sound, we will get rid of it.

One part of your philanthropic efforts involves extensive investments in education …

When I started my business, the big crisis was another pandemic – HIV / Aids. And

it was creating millions of orphans.

I thought to myself, “These orphans will become child soldiers, and they will hurt us in the future if we do not educate them.” So I threw myself into the edu­ cation of orphans. But orphans become adults, and we realized that amongst these youngsters, some of them were incredibly brilliant. So we began to push these youngsters to continue their studies. We have had graduates of Oxford, Cambridge, the finest universities in the world. If they want to do a PhD, then we will help them fund these studies.

We are also focusing more on skills training. We have a whole program to teach young Africans coding, so that maybe some of them will create the next Alibaba or the next Apple. We are also developing online training programs for primary and high-school students so that they can train using smartphones and SMS platforms, so we can broaden the base of ­education programs across the continent.

And we are purchasing tablets so that an African student at a university in Lagos can have access to the same sort of ­material as someone at MIT or Stanford.

We have started a pilot program aimed at 100,000 students in Zimbabwe, and plan to roll it out across Africa.

Africa suffers from considerable brain drain. Is that among the problems you are attempting to address – top talent leaving the country?

“When you do business in Africa, you must also be cognizant of the fact that it is a continent of young people looking for employment.”

It is a reality of our times. The biggest export out of Africa is not diamonds or gold or platinum; it is skills. You only need to look at the remittances. There is more money being sent home by Kenyans than the Kenyan economy makes from tourism.

Zimbabwe’s income from remittances is greater than from all its mineral resources.

I would not be surprised if that were the case across the entire African continent.

But the challenge is not in trying to stop people leaving – but in trying to create opportunities at home that enable them to stay. That is the challenge for entre­ preneurs and policymakers. We’ve got to make Africa exciting and interesting.

That is how we will reverse the exodus.

And that is what we need to invest in – not in building walls around Europe or putting patrol boats in the Mediter­ ranean. We’ve got to create employment opportunities in Africa itself.

To watch a video interview with Strive Masiyiwa please visit www.egonzehnder.com /the-focus /video

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24 THE FOCUS Identity Food for thought

25

The CEO as a mastermind narrator If you are not telling the story someone else will tell it for you

by Luciano Floridi

Illustration: Paul Davis

The opportunity to persuade is precious. By skilfully shaping a narrative, a CEO can offer an authoritative account of current facts and future goals and bring relevant audiences on board, thus increasing the chances that the desired future may become reality.

A CEO is a crossbreed of a philosopher and an artist. Like a philosopher, a CEO must enjoy tackling open problems that are constrained by facts and figures but that cannot entirely be answered by either (call them challenges). And like an artist, a good CEO must be creative, in order to devise innovative solutions that are feasible for the business, fruitful for the shareholders, and acceptable to the stakeholders. This is clearly a demanding task. Merely timely tactics won’t do, certainly not in the long run. The best long-term strategy is to develop a successful vision within which open problems can become meaningful and solvable.

Such a vision is not a prediction about a determined future. Rather, it is a statement about how the present can be changed into a desirable future.

This means that a great top executive must have a whole story in mind about how things are currently going and how they could be improved, not

unlike a chess master. And sooner or later this powerful story becomes indistinguishable from the person who is telling it. The narrator becomes the narrative. So the questions whether and how far such a narrative can or indeed should be communicated to the world are much more complex than just thinking about public relations or advertising.

Into the infosphere Let me focus on “whether” first. When it comes to social media, there seem to be three basic assumptions circulating among top executives who are not digital natives. That there is a clear divide between offline and online, with genuine, authentic communication occurring only on this side of the screen, where people can shake hands in person. That any narrative, any story-telling, is at worst a distraction and at best a PR preoccupation.

And that online story-telling is even more irrel­ evant, something to be left to kids and geeks. In any mature information society, these three assumptions are dangerous misconceptions. First, the online / offline divide is exactly what the social media have rendered anachronistic. In the last

26 THE FOCUS Identity Food for thought

decade, the world has moved “onlife”, with people organizing a meeting on Facebook and facebooking the meeting they are having, seamlessly. Nobody goes online anymore, we are always on, and the world of business lives in the infosphere 24 / 7. Second, in the infosphere, if you are not telling the story then you are one of the characters.

By this I mean that if you do not write the narrative, someone else will write it for you, and the outcome is likely to be much less pleasant. Third, it follows that story-telling – presenting the narrative of a vision – is becoming vital in the world of business. This is an important point that requires some unpacking. By skilfully shaping a narrative, a CEO is able to influence people’s minds. The opportunity to persuade is precious, for a CEO can offer an authoritative account of current facts and future goals, and bring a relevant audience on board, thus increasing the chances that the desired future may become reality. Of course the risks should not be underestimated. In a world constantly bombarded by all kinds of media, people remember four things: the utterly bizarre, the very silly, the remarkably smart, and the oddly silent. The first two need no explanation in terms of risk. The third is equally obvious: every communicator wants to be remembered for having said something clever. So better avoid merely repeating bits of news that becomes old in no time anyway, and predictions, which are always risky unless they are trivial. What readers want are insights, comments on current affairs, ideas they have not found elsewhere, a perspective that casts new light on a topic of interest, an answer to a widespread question. In short, they want to participate in the mental life of the CEO through some valuable content. This may seem unpleasantly intrusive, but it has a great advantage: a personal communication is more compelling, the public can relate more easily to a human

figurehead, and, within limits, there may be fewer legal risks and liabilities in offering some good ideas. It is the fourth point that is most problematic, because silence is a powerful form of communication, and sometimes it can be very loud, particularly if its source is influential and expected to engage. People will remember it. So it needs to be used judiciously. Not expressing one’s position on a relevant issue, being absent among the important voices debating a specific development involving one’s own business, or, even worse, being explicit about one’s unwillingness to comment upon some relevant events, even when publicly asked: these may all be very damaging forms of communication that can undermine confidence in a CEO. So keeping quiet is a risk that a top executive can hardly afford to take. Which means that presenting a convincing narrative is really the only strategy to avoid being caught between the embarrassingly bizarre or silly on the one hand, and the awkward silence on the other.

CEOs should communicate the vision that iden­ tifies them.

Disseminating vision Consider next “how far” such communication should go. I am not talking about the occasional op-ed in a newspaper or magazine, or an interview for a TV channel. I am talking about a digital presence in social media. A CEO’s identity is his or her vision, which is disseminated as a narrative that unfolds through time in small communi­ cation episodes. Should such a narrative be made public through a Facebook page, a blog, or a Twitter account, for example? The answer is another cautious yes. Cautious because three more problems lie ahead. One may miscommunicate.

If done inadvertently, it is better to acknowledge the mistake and apologise as soon as possible.

If done deliberately, it is vital to reconsider this strategy immediately. Never lie. Truth tends to bubble up, sooner or later, especially when billions of people are online and watching. Next, one may communicate poorly. Obscure analyses, indirect messages sent between the lines, petty comments, trivialities … such bad narratives are more dam-

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Luciano Floridi is director of research, and professor of philosophy and ethics of infor­ mation, at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. He is a member of the Google Advisory Council on the Right to be Forgotten. His latest book is The Fourth Revolution: How the Info­sphere is Reshaping Human Reality (Oxford University Press, 2014).

aging than silence, and we have already seen how bad silence can be. Finally, one may fail to communicate despite having promised to. Social media are insatiable beasts: once unleashed, they must be fed content on a regular basis, even when one has little or nothing to share, or they will bite back. They can bear some repetition but not silence. A semi-abandoned blog, Facebook page, or Twitter account is worse than no communication at all. They look unreliably careless.

Photo: Ian Scott

Constant engagement The phrase “Chief Executive Officer” has been used since the 19 th century. CEOs have had two hundred years to refine the best communication practices in a world of mass media that, for a long time, did not demand dramatic change.

Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Andrew W. Mellon, J. P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller didn’t tweet, and neither did Abraham Lincoln. Things are very different today. Barack Obama does, and so does Bill Gates. Top executives should not under-

estimate the importance of being present on social media. It is an opportunity that is worth all its implicit risks. Leadership is changing significantly due to the scope, speed, and spread of communication. Today the old model of delegation of decisional power, given once and then exercised for a specific amount of time, is being replaced, both in politics and in business, by a constant engagement with all the parties involved; and this, in a global age, means potentially with the world itself. Leaders are expected to share the vision that identifies them, and to do so in an open-ended, continuous conversation with social media through a regular narrative that, in the end, represents both who they are and a strong voice for the companies they represent. This is a time-consuming, sensitive commitment of paramount importance. It cannot be improvised, and a CEO should probably rely on a highly professional team that can be trusted to curate, at the right time, through the right digital media, with respect to the right issues, and in the right manner, the flow of information that ultimately shapes the long-term identity of the CEO’s leadership and company. It is only a matter of time before the 21 st century will witness the emergence of Chief Executive Communicators, who will be as important as the trusted lawyers in whom the CEO confides.

28 THE FOCUS Identity Connecting leaders

“ As a leader you’re there to create a safe space for other people’s talent.”

World Cup-winning U. S. Women’s National Soccer Team head coach, Jillian Ellis, and Mark Thompson, President and CEO of The New York Times Company, on leadership, teamwork, and resilience.

What does it take to lead a team to victory on a playing field that’s rarely level and where global developments are constantly shifting the goalposts? U. S. Women’s National Soccer Team head coach, Jillian Ellis, and the president of The New York Times, Mark Thompson, discuss the need to blend patience with impatience, the importance of self-belief, and the role of star players in their different arenas.

Photos: Cyrill Matter

Mark Thompson: With just a few days to go before the women’s World Cup, I can’t begin to imagine the kind of pressure you must be under, particularly on a game day when everything is decided within the pressure cooker of ninety minutes!

Jill Ellis: I think the game-day situation is what you live for – that’s the adrenaline rush. Pressure means for me that there is an expectation, and that’s what I thrive on. I love having expectations. I think that’s why you go into coaching, because you’re naturally competitive and you’re drawn to leadership.

Thompson: Yes, people who don’t like stress, who don’t like high-tension moments, and who don’t like conflict, don’t end up doing jobs like ours, so there must be something in our makeup which gets us here.

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30 THE FOCUS Identity Connecting leaders

“It’s really important to define roles and respon­ sibilities and expectations, because otherwise you can have eleven individ­ uals on the field.”

Jillian Ellis

Jillian Ellis Ellis is widely considered one of the finest soccer coaches in the world, and having just won the World Cup with the U. S. women’s team, she is very much at the peak of her profession and career. She was born in 1966 in Portsmouth, England, where her father John Ellis was a longtime soccer ambassador for the British government, and founder of a U. S.-based soccer academy where Jillian’s brother still coaches. She achieved tremendous success at the head of the UCLA women’s soccer program and served in various capacities for the U. S. Soccer Federation before becoming head coach in May of 2014. Prior to that, she twice served as interim head coach for the USA. As someone so active in youth soccer development, Ellis has the personal distinction of coaching many age group national teams for the United States and therefore at one time or another, coached almost every woman currently on her team.

Ellis: I think leading is also about having a very clear sense of your own identity, of your values, and of what you want to achieve.

Thompson: But don’t you think the nature of leadership is changing – becoming less autocratic? I grew up in another era of newsrooms, with screaming and shouting – what we once considered leadership behavior. And that stuff doesn’t work anymore. People don’t want weak leaders; they want clarity, but they definitely want the relationship to be one of mutual respect. Millennials and collegeage kids quite rightly won’t put up with a lack of respect.

Ellis: Well, we still have some pretty autocratic coaches out there, but I think players today – and they are mostly Millennials – are more educated about the game. For me, coaching today is a lot like parenting – it’s being able to throw your arm around someone, and it’s also being able to kick them in the tail a little when they need a push. It’s about empowering them and helping them believe in what they’re doing. I think leadership now is about connecting, about that human touch. It’s the human element of leadership that matters most.

For me, leadership has three dimensions: it’s about connecting with my players and understanding the fabric of the people I work with. It’s also having a direction, a focus of where you’re taking this team. And the final thing is that I’m always humble enough to keep coming back to self-reflection, fine-tuning, honing, taking the things I like and moving forward. Those are the three key elements of leadership in spearheading a team towards a chance to win a World Cup.

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Thompson: I suspect that the casting of a team of management leaders has quite a lot in common with the way coaches think about their team on the pitch: negotiating the balance between a brilliant maverick, the great team worker, and the culture of the team itself …

Ellis: For me, managing those mavericks or outliers can be as simple as putting them on the bench – that’s a good technique for getting their attention. Or it can be giving them more responsibility to try and get them to buy in, for instance by putting the captain’s armband on a player to show them that they’re not just responsible for themselves – they’re responsible for the whole. But ultimately everybody wants to be on this team, and so they have to understand what it takes to be a part of it.

Our fitness coach likes to quote Sir Dave Brailsford and his philosophy of the “aggregation of marginal gains.” I love that because it refers to the constant need to refine and improve, and the difference that details can make. I don’t know if that’s similar to your world, but in soccer

the most minor details can affect success or failure.

Thompson: That’s true. Sometimes success comes through a breakthrough – like in 2011 when The New York Times launched a digital subscription model which has made a huge difference. Much more typical, though, is trying to figure out a way of doing twenty things, each of which brings maybe just a fraction of a percent of gain, but which together can be transformational. So you need both approaches in mind: you need the big breakthrough but also the relentless pursuit of those marginal gains.

Ellis: My players are high achievers by nature, so they want somebody who can help them get to the next level. Sometimes it’s about pushing, and sometimes it’s pulling, but it’s a question of finding a strategy – and how you communicate that is critical. It’s always about trying to expand their comfort level. They’re constantly looking to the next tournament, the next game, to improve. For me as a coach, it’s about helping them acquire

Wall of fame: Portraits of prominent visitors reflect the proud heritage of The New York Times.

“If you’ve got the right talent, you’ll probably succeed. So a very big part of my job is trying to make sure we’ve got the right talent.”

Mark Thompson

32 THE FOCUS Identity Connecting leaders

the necessary skill set. That’s part of the leadership that I have to offer.

Thompson: Another thing that I’ve learned – and I learned this the hard way by making the mistake of trying to do everything myself – is that a lot of what a leader does, at least in my arena, is to create a safe space for other people’s talent.

So in a way, you’re there to clear the room for them, so they can do their best work.

Ellis: Absolutely. I spend a lot of time watching other coaches work, and what I’ve learned is that they all have coaches per line, making sure that every individual has an opportunity to connect with a staff member. Because the amount of detail involved in this job and the scale of the expectations means you have to trust those around you. Delegating is a big quality in leadership, which means building trust, letting people perform, and supporting them.

Thompson: And yet, we all have such big expectations of those around us, as well as of ourselves. It’s something of a paradox, isn’t it? Because having patience with people is important, but impatience is also very important …

Ellis: I’m not a naturally patient person in my everyday life. I do have very real expectations, and I won’t lower those in terms of where I want to go. But I’m also patient in getting people through a process to try and achieve something. When you’re building something, you have to recognize where you’re headed and understand that there are steps that you need to take in order to get there.

Thompson: Here at The New York Times we’re in a middle of an enormous structural change in our industry. Fundamentally our consumers are changing their behavior, consuming news in ways which are very challenging for the organization. And yet, many people’s first instinct is to freeze up like a rabbit in the headlights, because the necessary change is so daunting.

So part of what we have to do is be impatient and drive people towards change. But you’re right in saying that once you’ve set a course, you’ve got to let people travel that road for themselves.

The 52-story New York Times Building on Eighth Avenue in midtown Manhattan was completed in 2007 to a design by Renzo Piano.

“Coaching is a lot like parenting, it’s being able to throw your arm around someone and it’s also being able to kick them in the tail a little bit when they need a push.”

Jillian Ellis

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“Leadership often is not memos or strategy documents; it’s wandering around talking to people, trying to catch people before they fall, trying to spot who’s in the groove and who’s not.”

Mark Thompson

34 THE FOCUS Identity Connecting leaders

Ellis: It’s also about confidence and preparation. There is a process in place, but my job is making sure that all the pieces understand how they work together. On game day, it’s just about tweaking things and giving specific tactical in­ formation, but it’s all the preparation that gives me confidence – the whole buildup in making sure your players are ready for every scenario. That’s the stage at which we’re patient in terms of making sure that they truly understand their roles.

And then they have to execute under very real pressure.

Thompson: It’s interesting that you talk about confidence. I think confidence for a team is an outcome of a number of

things. Success is really important. It’s very hard for a group of people to feel confident when they take one knock after another. So you’re looking for ways in which they can be successful and for moments of real success. And the celebration of success is important – taking a moment to reflect on success – which, believe it or not, is not such a strong tradition in the media sector. We’re pretty good at worrying ourselves silly about the future, and not always good at reflecting on how much we’ve already achieved. But I’d say that personal confidence, personal resilience and – this may surprise you – cheerfulness are really important qualities.

People always assume that senior leaders

of companies should be great strategists and incredibly intelligent and thoughtful about analyzing their business. In many ways, though, resilience and cheerfulness matter more than intelligence in terms of giving other people a sense of a center of confidence which they can join.

Ellis: I’d agree. When I was a younger coach, I often heard players say: “My coach doesn’t believe in me. I don’t have confidence.” But I’ve always thought that what counts is innate self-belief. A few years ago, in a different role, I asked several of the players on this current team: “What are the three or four qualities that helped you get to where you are?” What they all had in common was the self-belief or grit that I believe allowed them to get to this level. So as a coach it’s about getting them to espouse my belief in them, so that they can find their own inner confidence and believe that they can do it.

Thompson: But when a game starts, the coaching with all the strategy and the planning comes to a full stop. Then it’s the players who have to make the split-second decisions on the pitch. And you’re standing on the sidelines, watching … I don’t know how you bear that.

Ellis: Part of it is about selecting the right players – players that make the decisions, players that have that self-belief and confidence. I naturally recruit and retain those types of players. But it’s also about empowering them so that on game day, they can make those decisions. Our training environment is very much a simulation of game day in terms of expectations and quality and the things we do. We try and simulate that as much as possible, so on game day they make their decisions.

Thompson: I guess you could say that in business, every day is game day. There are real transactions, real activities, and people on Wall Street keeping score every

“Players that make the decisions, players that have self-belief and con­ fidence, those are people that you want in your squad.”

Jillian Ellis

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Mark Thompson Thompson has risen quickly through the ranks of journalism to hold two of the most prestigious jobs in the English-language news world. Born in England in 1957, Thompson graduated from Oxford and soon joined the BBC. He worked in a variety of jobs there, and earned the distinction of being Editor of the Nine O’Clock News at the age of 30. Thompson was appointed to the top job – Director General – in 2004, where he stayed until accepting a new role at The New York Times in 2012. During his tenure, the BBC revamped its website, increased its digital offerings, and introduced technology that allowed viewers to watch programs on digital devices. Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the family-owned New York Times, hired Thompson not least due to his familiarity with digital strategy and implementation.

The dialogue between Jillian Ellis and Mark Thompson was facilitated by Henry Topping, Egon Zehnder, New York and Ulrike Krause, THE FOCUS.

day. But we also go through periods where the team comes up with a new set of ideas, maybe some new products to launch or innovations to put into effect.

Then, like you, we try to anticipate and simulate, test, experiment, and then deploy. So it builds up to a kind of climax when we’re actually sharing something with our readers. For example, the re-launch of The New York Times Sunday Magazine. Maybe these moments are our game days.

Ellis: How do you measure success in what you do? The scoreline means it’s blackand-white for us, but for you, I imagine, it’s very nuanced at times.

Thompson: In some ways there’s a very simple way of looking at our success. Are our total sales over a year increasing or decreasing? And are we profitable? As our business changes, very profitable forms of print revenue fall away and we have to offset that by finding new sales. We’re trying to create new businesses, but can we make our new businesses successful and manage costs? So you could say that our top-line sales and operating profit are like your scorelines.

Photo: Flickr

36 THE FOCUS Identity Connecting leaders

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“I do have very real expectations, and I won’t lower those in terms of where I want to go. But I’m also patient in people getting through a process to try and achieve something.”

Jillian Ellis and Mark Thompson walk past “Moveable Type,” an installation by artist Ben Rubin and statistician Mark Hansen in the lobby of The New York Times Building, in which words and phrases drawn from the newspaper’s database flash out and fade.

But there’s much more to it than that. One very real question for us is: are we still attracting the best talent? With journalists, the answer is that we still have an incredibly strong position. But we also need some of the best computer scientists and software engineers in the world. How good are we attracting that talent? Because, exactly like in your business, if you’ve got the right talent, you’ll probably succeed, and if you haven’t got the right talent, nothing else you do will work. So a very big part of my job is trying to make sure we’ve got the right talent, and in particular, the right leaders.

Ellis: We’re constantly searching the landscape for new players. Like in your situation, the type of people we’re looking for are those with very special qualities. There are a lot of good soccer players out there, but what unique skill set do they bring to the table that can help push us on a little bit further? The challenge for me is that I’ve inherited a very successful team, so now how do we build on the excellence that’s already established – which is probably similar to where you’re at.

Thompson: The problem is that most organizations, most human beings, don’t like change. The tendency in organizations is to underestimate the amount of change required and therefore to underestimate the extent to which they need new people with new skills. We need hundreds of people in our newsroom who’ve got quantitative skills, who understand how to market and develop audiences for stories, as well as to write them. That’s a very different skill set, and one question for us is: can we work with the great talent we’ve already got, which is existing talent with existing skills, and can we help them gain the new skills that they need?

It’s very important you don’t give up on your existing talent; you’ve got to give

Jillian Ellis

them a chance to show what they can do.

Ellis: It’s a constant cycle for us, too. Ultimately, if you can survive in our environment and do well, you belong, regardless of whether you’re coming out of college or you’ve been on the team for ten years.

The interesting thing about the culture and the climate on our team is that our existing players welcome the younger players in. They recognize that new talent can help them be successful, so there’s no an­ imosity and the existing squad will help bring along the younger players.

Thompson: It sounds like you’re at a very interesting point now with the team, which is made up of some extremely experienced players and some very fresh talent. And how those two groups work together is obviously critical to the team’s success.

Ellis: It is. And sometimes it is all about blending them – whether it’s bringing them together as roommates, or getting the older players to act as mentors. Going to this World Cup, I know that I need some experience for that first game, because for the younger players, it will be their first time there. So applying leadership and experience to mesh them together is very important for our success.

Thompson: One interesting thing that’s happening to us is that newspapers used to be a very stable industry and everyone could just do what they do in their own area of the paper. So the newsroom would do the news, the sales department would sell advertising, and the guys in the print works would make the paper. And they didn’t have to have very much to do with each other. But it’s not like that anymore. This may sound crazy, but over the last couple of years we’ve been experimenting for the first time with much deeper teamworking. So, if you’re creating a new product, you’ve now got not just

a great journalist and editor, you’ve also got a graphic designer, some engineers, people from marketing and advertising – all working together to create something.

It’s like a new set of muscles; the organ­ ization is really just learning about that.

Ellis: So everybody has a common goal and needs to have a stake in it now. The synergy is critical, right?

Thompson: That’s it. And we have to contend with a very star-driven culture.

Trying to align that with effective teamwork, so that there’s some give and take and respect for other people’s contributions – that’s a very big challenge for us, but very much what you must have to live with all the time.

Ellis: It’s about allowing those outliers, who maybe don’t want to conform to the team, to have their individuality, but also about how much you are willing to give to keep them. You need to allow the special qualities to shine, but it’s also really important to define roles and responsibilities and expectations, because otherwise you can end up with eleven individuals on the field. But the beauty of our sport is that one person can’t do it alone – it’s a combined effort.

To watch a video interview with Jillian Ellis and Mark Thompson please visit www.egonzehnder.com /the-focus /video

Photo: Getty Images /Peter Stuckings

Borobudur, constructed between the 8 th and 9 th centuries, is one of the most important Buddhist temple complexes in Southeast Asia.

Our cultural identities

Irina Bokova, born in Sofia in 1952, is a Bulgarian politician who has been Director-General of UNESCO since 2009. She is the first woman to hold this position.

The world’s great cultural heritage sites tell us who we are, who we were, and where we are going. This is why Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO, calls for their preservation. Not merely as testimonials to religious faith or architectural achievement, but because they show us that our cultural identities are always expressed in the plural – and span the entire globe.

“Our identity is our way of seeing and meeting the world,” wrote the Italian author Claudio Magris. Identity is to a large extent forged by the transmission of language, values, aesthetic sensibilities, spiritual beliefs, and social practices; by families, peers, and communities; embedded in the cultural heritage shared from past generations. Cultural heritage helps reinforce our sense of belonging, providing a basis to engage in a dialogue with others. It also reminds us that each of us carries not one, but many identities, that we share in the heritage of all humanity. Heritage opens the book on the complex web of cultural cross-fertilization that has marked human creativity since the dawn of time. The archeological site

of Palmyra, for instance, standing at the crossroads of several civilizations, married Greco-Roman techniques with local traditions and Persian influences. To live together in our globalized world, we need this message more than ever.

Today we see violent extremists in Iraq and Syria seeking to impose a different and narrow vision of identity as a monolithic value based on self-isolation. They destroy monuments, they burn books and loot archeological sites, and they persecute populations, erasing all forms of cultural diversity. They destroy heritage precisely because culture is a stark and tangible reminder that there is no “pure identity” and that we always benefit from dialogue.

Our heritage speaks to that part of us all which yearns for something greater, and this is the freedom fanatics want to eliminate. The more people lose contact with their heritage, the more they are vulnerable to false narratives of identity. This is why UNESCO considers the protection and sharing of culture as an ethical imperative of our time.

The more cultural heritage is under attack, the more we need to share the wisdom and knowledge it carries.

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Leadership insights Demystifying change When developing leaders falter, probe for “hidden commitments” page 40

How do I look?

Authenticity – or the way others see us page 44

Never hide

A conversation with diversity thought leader Binna Kandola on identity page 48

Be careful what you wish for On the alignment of personal identity and professional development page 52

40 THE FOCUS Identity Leadership insights

Demystifying change

When developing leaders falter, probe for “hidden commitments”

by Robert Kegan, Lisa Lahey, and Jens Riedel

The core of being an executive is making choices, yet senior leadership development often overlooks a vital dimension of how leaders actually make choices. A leader’s “hidden commitments” can create an “immunity to change” and drive behaviors that work against fulfilling the leader’s key development goals. The solution, the authors suggest, starts with sketching the individual’s immunity map – an innovative tool developed by Harvard University’s Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey. Fortifying traditional senior leadership development with immunity maps can help leaders to quickly identify and resolve unseen inner conflicts, and so more rapidly fulfill their leadership potential.

Scientific research has arrived at two important insights which, considered together, point to an irony of organizational life – and a wealth of opportunity.

On the one hand, science has revealed that adults are far more capable of lifelong learning, development, and change than was long believed. Sustained “neural plasticity” in the human brain allows adults to continually retrain their brains to work in new and different ways. In other words, it is within your power to significantly reshape who you are throughout adult life.

Equally valid research reveals a potent counterforce: adults can unwittingly undermine their own pursuit of change. Even as they hold a sincere commitment to move in a new direction, they apply much of their productive energy to hidden competing commitments that compel them to essentially do the opposite.

The result is an innate and unseen “immunity to change.” For example, a manager who recognizes that she must become a better delegator to earn a desired promotion may nevertheless continue to exert excessive control because, deep down, she believes her team may not perform well, and this will reflect poorly on her. Alternatively, she may believe that her team will perform so well, she will be marginalized. The unspoken commitment to prevent a damaging underperformance by her team (or to avoid losing her indispensability) subconsciously trumps the spoken commitment to delegate more authority.

Another manager may drag his feet on a showcase project he is genuinely thrilled to lead because he silently fears that

success in the current endeavor may earn him responsibility for an even tougher project that he could not handle. Hesitation in the present subconsciously protects him from an envisioned future embarrassment. In such cases, what appears to be willful refusal to change or an inexplicable failure to perform actually stems from an unseen standoff between the leader’s stated commitment and a hidden competing commitment to protect himself from some imagined, impending loss.

The good news? Organizations can readily counter the involuntary, negative effects of an immunity to change. By doing so, they unlock fresh reservoirs of leadership and performance potential. Understanding immunities to change is vitally important for effective leadership development and for retaining valuable leadership talent.

Beyond skill or will The core of being an executive is making choices – often, highly consequential choices. As such, senior leadership development must help rising leaders understand how they actually make

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choices, which includes exploring their unconscious mental frameworks. Traditional leadership development rarely addresses these powerful hidden forces that so frequently hinder leaders’ growth and ability to move in new directions.

The curricula of most leadership development programs do evolve as leaders advance toward executive roles. Early leadership development is weighted toward technical knowledge and skills.

Fledgling leaders learn their function and build the skills required to do their jobs. In contrast, by the time leaders are poised to tackle more senior roles, they have already demonstrated command of the requisite technical knowledge and skills.

At this point, what the leader knows and can do are mostly a given. The critical variable becomes who the leader is. As such, senior leadership development appropriately focuses more on the personal traits of a leader – including his belief system and his mental map of himself and the world that surrounds him.

This evolutionary approach is very effective, as far as it goes. However, when promising leaders act in ways that appear bafflingly inconsistent with their stated goals, traditional leadership development offers few useful answers. Most organizations will ask: “Is this a question of skill or will?” Sometimes the obstacle can be found and remedied at those levels. Other times, you may

find that the leader possesses both the skills required to make an important change and a sincere will to do so – yet mysteriously remains stuck. This is when you should probe for an immunity to change, which is yet another profoundly important dimension of who the leader is.

Exploring leadership personality Leaders need not engage in lengthy psychoanalysis to gain penetrating insight into their hidden commitments. Using a tool called the immunity map – which much like an X-ray, reveals what exists beneath the surface – a skilled advisor can quickly help leaders identify internal obstacles and determine how to approach them to bring about new results. The immunity map is firmly grounded in sound psychological theory and is the product of many years of research in real work settings across business, government, and education. It was shaped with the participation of a wide range of leaders – CEOs, senior managers, commissioners, superintendents – who had the courage to look deeply within for hidden truths.

Over the past year, we have jointly explored how immunity maps might fortify traditional senior leadership development.

The results are encouraging. This framework has proven easy to apply and very effective in practice. Surfacing leaders’ hidden commitments consistently yields breakthroughs in their capacity to adapt and grow.

This example of an immunity map, drawn from Kegan and Lahey’s book Immunity to Change: How To Overcome It And Unlock The Potential In Yourself And Your Organization (Harvard Business

1 Visible commitment

2 Doing / not doing instead

3 Hidden competing commitments

4 Big assumptions

To being more excited and inspired in my work by connecting more with my own passions, and trusting more my own distinctiveness

I work at things I am not that interested in (because I feel I must).

To being well regarded by those who evaluate me

I work in ways that are more routine, more established (because I feel that is what is expected).

To not running any reputational, social, economic risks

I assume my safest route to success is to perform exceptionally well in ways that are expected and well established.

To not looking unsuccessful To not pushing an unknown / unproven trail

I assume that if I am not highly regarded I will be a failure.

42 THE FOCUS Identity Leadership insights

Press), reveals how one junior executive’s subconscious competing commitments were effectively preventing him from blossoming into the kind of bold, dynamic senior leader his organization needs him to be. While his actual behavior (“doing / not doing instead”) contradicts his explicit, visible commitment – it serves his hidden commitments very well. As long as it is sustained by unquestioned “big assumptions” any change of the actual behavior is very unlikely.

In dialogue with a developing leader, a trained and trusted advisor can use this simple four-column framework to probe two or more levels deep into the personality governing the leader’s choices. When leaders discover what a powerful force their unseen competing commitments truly are, they tend to be intrigued, then excited about the opportunity to resolve frustrating inner conflicts and realize professional and personal growth.

Leaders first articulate a visible commitment – something they clearly want to achieve because they recognize it is vital to their continued success and advancement. As illustrated in the sample immunity map, a rising executive’s column 1 commitments may be quite personal in nature. This is entirely appropriate as many keys to executive success are, in fact, personal.

The leader next identifies obstructive behaviors. What are they doing/not doing that works against fulfilling the column 1 commitment? Instead of regarding these behaviors as things that just need to go away, we see them as valuable information that can be mined to gain a deeper understanding of how the leader actually makes choices. This deeper understanding is realized when leaders explore and identify the motivating forces behind their obstructive behaviors – the vitally important hidden commitments.

Finally, the immunity map invites the leader to delve one level deeper to surface the big assumptions behind the hidden commitments. These unspoken and often unconscious assumptions are the ultimate source of the anxiety shaping the leader’s obstructive behaviors, and so can be the gateway to substantial, lasting change and great leaps forward in the leader’s development.

through his or her life. This psychological system of countervailing forces is geared to selfpres­ervation. However, when our immune system rejects new material (whether it is a new organ or a new belief) that we actually require to heal or to thrive, it can put us in danger. In these instances the immune system is no less focused on protecting us. It is just making a mistake.

It does not understand that it must alter its code.

It does not understand that, ironically, in working to preserve us, it is actually putting us at serious risk.

Fortunately, misguided immune systems can be overcome. Too constricting an anxiety-management system can be replaced with a more expansive one. To overcome an immunity to change, leaders stop making what they now understand is actually a bad bargain: their immune systems have been giving them relief from anxiety while creating a false belief that certain things are impossible for them to do, when in truth their visible goals may be completely attainable!

Leadership advisors help leaders to systematically consider their hidden beliefs, then replace false or overly restrictive beliefs with new beliefs. This work proceeds at whatever pace the leader can accommodate, but quite often leaders can redraw their immunity systems within a few months, bringing their big assumptions more into harmony with their visible commitments.

The goal is never to destroy a leader’s immune system, which is an essential part of who leaders are and so must be acknowledged, honored, and healthily incorporated into each leader’s development pathway. Rather, the object is to help leaders see how they might consciously modify their psychological immune systems to continue to provide essential internal protections, while also permitting the accomplishment of their stated goals.

Redrawing immunity systems

The case for innovation

The immunity X-ray offers a schematic representation of the way a person is handling not an acute or episodic anxiety, but a constant, if unrecognized, anxiety running continuously

The case for integrating this innovation into senior leadership development is compellingly clear.

Focus on achievement

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“Where traditional approaches fall short, addressing immunity to change may well prove effective, largely because an immunity map zooms in on the root causes of the presenting problem.”

Worldwide, VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) makes leadership increasingly difficult. Why compound the challenge by allowing executives to remain hobbled by inner conflicts that could be resolved with relative ease? Immunity maps provide a powerful new option for removing major obstacles to leaders’ growth and advancement without contradicting any of the other methodologies commonly applied in senior leadership development.

In economic terms, many organizations report that their investments in leadership development fail to resolve performance issues or meaningfully accelerate leaders’ growth. Immunity maps can reveal a crucial missing piece in the puzzle of why change is so difficult. Where traditional approaches fall short, addressing immunity to change may well prove effective, largely because an immunity map zooms directly in on the root causes of the presenting problem.

Thoughtfully building this practical tool into senior leadership development can tangibly improve return on your development investment, as leaders will consistently develop faster and stumble less often.

Helping executives resolve hidden commitments will also help companies retain their best leadership talent, because leaders with minimal inner conflict experience less negative stress and feel more content and fulfilled by their work lives.

For all these reasons and more, thoughtfully integrating immunity to change into senior leadership development can be a game-changer – for developing leaders, and for the companies they will lead.

Robert Kegan is the Meehan Professor of Adult Learning and Professional Development at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, and co-author of Immunity to Change: How To Overcome It And Unlock The Potential In Yourself And Your Organization (Harvard Business Press, 2009). His thirty years of research and writing on adult development have contributed to the recognition that ongoing psychological development after adolescence is at once possible and necessary to meet the demands of modern life. He is the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and awards. His seminal books, The Evolving Self and In Over Our Heads, have been published in several languages.

Lisa Lahey is Co-Director of Minds At Work, a professional services firm serving businesses and institutions around the world; and faculty at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. She teaches in executive development programs at Harvard University and Notre Dame, and is regularly asked to present her work throughout the world, most recently in China, Kazakhstan, and New Zealand. Her co-authored books, How The Way We Talk Can Change The Way We Work (2001) and Immunity to Change (2009), have been published in many languages.

Lisa has been on the faculty of the World Economic Forum’s Davos Conference. Her work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times Sunday Business Section, Oprah Magazine, and Fast Company.

Jens Riedel is a partner in Egon Zehnder’s office in Berlin, Germany.

He conducts executive search projects, management appraisals and supports the development of senior leaders in defining development agendas and as an executive coach. One key finding of his PhD dissertation on executive coaching was that conflicting goals are the most common issue that needs to be addressed in coaching. He also co-leads the Risk Management segment of Egon Zehnder’s global Financial Services Practice.

44 THE FOCUS Identity Leadership insights

How do I look?

Authenticity – or the way others see us

by Boudewijn Arts and Neeraj Sagar

“I’m actually quite different but I only get to be myself once in a while,” says the character Ada in a play by the Austro-Hungarian writer Ödön von Horváth. People presenting themselves differently from the way they really are – or feel themselves to be – is not just a contemporary phenomenon. Misrepresen­ tation of personality – whether the person involved is playing power games or acting out of weakness – is a theme as old as humanity itself, the stuff of dramas from antiquity to the present day. In today’s Internet age anyone can use this virtual stage to present themselves in various guises at whim: they can entirely reinvent themselves as an imaginary person with the attri­ butes of their choice – not just the external characteristics but the inner disposition, too. Yet at the same time the Internet’s unsparingly ubiquitous presence is what brings real or perceived human misdemeanors into the public arena. On the Web, the supposed failures of personalities in positions of responsibility – in politics, business or social institutions – create instant news, attracting global condemnation in a matter of seconds.

In many people these developments generate a feeling – and it is often just that, a subjective response – of no longer being able to trust the elite groups who lead our societies. This loss of trust has been compounded by numerous political and economic crises – and heightened by the sheer speed and intensity of the changes sweeping through almost every sphere of contemporary life. Uncertainty reigns, creating a growing desire for things that are genuine, predictable, reliable. In an ever more complex and confusing environment, people want rules and direction and in both their social and professional environments they are looking for reliable leadership – leadership that provides orientation, marking out a clear pathway through challenging times.

The quest for authenticity

Especially in uncertain times – in times of change and crisis – people look to leading figures to provide an anchor and a sense of direction.

Can authentic leadership deliver on these expectations? We take a closer look.

The buzzword here is authentic leadership. Scarcely any other leadership attribute is currently more widely debated and regarded as so desirable. Yet opinions vary as to what precisely constitutes authenticity, truth or genuineness in a position of responsibility – whether this is the jovial politician, the senior executive who’s able to show emotions or even weaknesses now and then, or the blustering corporate patriarch. Because what is perceived as undisguised and genuine depends not only on the sender of such psychological messages but also on the receiver.

Moreover, requiring of a leader that they should simply “be themselves” seems to us rather naïve. Who really knows, after all, exactly who they are? And in any case leadership roles in particular are bound up with certain expectations around image and behavior – expectations that are clearly different from those prevailing within, say, a family or a sports club.

As we see it, authentic leadership needs to fulfill three key parameters.

— It must be founded on the vision and values of a leading figure.

— It must be consistent with the identity of the leader in question.

— It must be sustainable and reliable.

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“Authentic leadership renews and strengthens the ‘psychological contract’ between the company, its leaders and the employees.”

The ultimate example of leadership behavior of this kind – a role model that moved people everywhere and inspired global admiration – was Nelson Mandela. His vision of the multiethnic state of South Africa, the rainbow nation, was based on values such as equality, forgiveness between apartheid’s victims and perpetrators, and cooperation. This leadership inspired a renewed dynamism within Mandela’s own nation – and created an inspirational vision for other nations, too.

Authentic leadership inspires identification Because authentic leadership inspires identifi­ cation. In a business context it fosters team spirit, nurtures employees’ sense of pride in their company, and generates loyalty and a willingness to be involved. It renews and strengthens the “psychological contract” between the company and / or its leaders and the employees. This implicit contract is ultimately more important, in terms of impact, than any formal contract of employment. It contains the mutual unwritten expectations and obligations connecting employees, managers and the business itself. When sustained by relationships of mutual trust, this contract lays the foundations for a healthy and successful organization. A key leadership goal in this context is to inspire other people to take action. Nowadays successful business leadership no longer works via orders and obedience; instead it is based on the voluntary participation of those being led – which in the business en­ vironment means the employees. Any manager who does not operate persuasively and credibly in this setting, who comes across as weak or incompetent or fails to keep promises, will quickly run into problems. Because then the implicit contract is violated, weakening the motivation, loyalty and commitment of the team and ultimately leading to their resignation – be it internal or actual.

But what exactly does “authentic leadership” mean? Well, let’s start by pinning down what it isn’t. It isn’t a method. Particularly in a business environment, employees generally have a very sharp instinct for when a show of “authenticity” from a manager is mere posturing. And in crisis situations such artificial façades are the first to collapse. Real authenticity characterizes a person’s whole attitude to life, which of course has

a crucial impact on a successful leadership style. Or as a highly regarded family entrepreneur once put it: “Someone truly striving to work and live in a calm and self-guided way, drawing on their inner strength and insight, will come across as authentic.”

Consistency is a defining attribute of authentic behavior.

Authenticity is all of a piece: the walk matches the talk. Authentic individuals are self-aware, but also remain true to themselves in difficult circumstances, sticking to their beliefs under pressure and acting accordingly. They are self-determined, with an intuitive feeling for what’s right and wrong – and they follow their intuition. A high degree of inner independence helps them in crisis situations – even when they have to take unpopular measures and see them through.

The components of authenticity An independent personality of this kind acts in ways that are determined less by external influences and trends than by their own identity. A few years back, American social psychologists Michael Kernis and Brian Goldman identified four key criteria for an authentic personality on the basis of their research: Awareness – Authentic individuals have developed an indepth understanding of how their own personalities work; they know their strengths and weaknesses, the feelings and motivations that drive particular modes of behavior. Self-scrutiny has brought them to a place where they can experience and influence their own actions and behaviors consciously.

Unbiased processing – Authentic people are honest with themselves and work to achieve a self-assessment that is as realistic as possible. This also includes taking on board and processing negative or unpleasant feedback from their envi­ ronment.

Behavior – Authentic behavior reflects an awareness of the true self, including a willingness to accept and work with negative aspects of the personality, rather than denying their existence.

Relational orientation – Authentic individuals have a clearly defined core set of values and consistently operate in relation to these values. They set priorities for themselves and stick to them – even in situations where this might prove disadvantageous.

In leadership terms this means that a leader stands by his or her decision, refusing to make compromises in order to secure short-term personal gains. It is through this aspect of authenticity that leaders can deliver on expectations that they should provide guidance to their teams.

The last of these attributes in particular stands out as crucially important in the business environment. Authentic behavior is often linked with personal identity (“Be yourself!”), yet in a management context this is far less important than the link with a personal system of values. On the one hand, how some-

46 THE FOCUS Identity Leadership insights

one sees their own identity will change over the course of time and as a result of their experiences. On the other, by no means all facets of the individual personality are called into play in a professional context – indeed in some circumstances this might even prove a hindrance. Values, motivations and attitudes, by contrast, form the deeper foundation, the core of the individual personality, and are less subject to change.

They provide the compass for personal and professional decisions; they form the basis of integrity and reliability. They make an individual predictable – in a positive way – and ensure that others will accept and value this individual’s leadership role.

A key leadership competency The ability to act authentically and to be perceived as acting authentically by those around you therefore meets all the criteria of a key leadership competency on an ethical and emotional level. At Egon Zehnder we have been investigating and assessing these competencies for many years. In our experience, individuals with outstanding potential regularly score very highly on three key characteristics: they possess strategic vision, they are results-oriented and they proactively shape change processes. So where does the capacity for authentic leadership fit within this context? Our conclusion is that it clearly performs an overarching, integrative function. Because it is only when a high potential can convince his or her team, fire their enthusiasm for common goals and guide them to take the necessary action, that he or she will be able to develop his or her specific competencies to the full. And the more this individual is perceived not just as highly qualified but also as trustworthy, reliable and a person of integrity, the more successful he or she will be.

Here we have touched upon another key aspect of authentic leadership. Authenticity and authentic action also require from leaders in particular the ability to see themselves as others see them. After all, image and self-image do not necessarily always agree. Someone who perceives themselves as being and acting authentically might be perceived by those around them merely as disagreeable, or as an ineffective waverer who is not up to the job.

“The more genuine the better” is not a surefire recipe for success. Especially for someone in a leadership role, parading all their moods and doubts openly, or even indulging in public selfcriticism – be it justified or not – is likely to make their colleagues and co-workers doubt their fitness for the role. The key principle here is not

that an executive has to say everything he or she thinks – but that what he or she does say should in every case be true.

Because every leadership role brings with it certain expectations. This, indeed, is one of the characteristics that define an effective manager: the ability to adapt to various environments without denying their own identity in the process. They present themselves differently to employees than to shareholders or clients or within the executive team. This has nothing to do with dissimulation. According to the specific environment and agenda they send out different signals: in the executive suite – confident, effective, powerful; among employees – understanding, encouraging, supportive. All of this remains authentic if every role contains elements of their true-self, founded on their personal core values. Situation-appropriate behavior is a sign not of self-compromise but of social competence.

Indeed Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, organizational experts at the London Business School, emphatically urge leaders to keep their authenticity under control. They should build it up carefully, they say – and deploy it carefully, too. Authenticity in leadership, in their view, only works when it is first and foremost rationally driven.

Reconciling self-image and public image A 360-degree feedback program, properly integrated within an organization’s management development system, offers an effective way of achieving optimum congruity between selfimage and public image in a business context. Managers can use this feedback on how others perceive them to develop their understanding of their own personality. Frank discussions with friends and family can yield further assessments of an individual’s public image, helping them to ensure that their authentic personality and values are coming across effectively.

Any decision-maker in the public gaze must keep a watchful eye on the impression they make and the image they present, and think carefully about the messages they aim to send out – without abandoning the gold standard of authentic behavior that remains consistent and true to their personal principles. The key is for each individual to find the right role, to stand by their convictions, and to resist the imposition of any alien values.

Boudewijn Arts joined the Firm in 2001. Based in Singapore, he leads Egon Zehnder’s global Chemical and Process Industries Practice and provides a full range of services from executive and board search to management appraisals and leadership consulting. boudewijn.arts@egonzehnder.com

Neeraj Sagar joined Egon Zehnder in 2006. Based in Bangalore, he leads Egon Zehnder’s Industrial Practice in India and works closely with Indian and multinational manufacturing organizations across India and the region. neeraj.sagar@egonzehnder.com

Photo: pixeltale /Marco Antonio Delgado

In an early example of the benefits of artificial intelligence, when the human elements of the rebel alliance in “Star Wars” were at their wits’ end, their robot companion R2D2 often helped by deploying his superior skills in X-wing spacecraft repair or hacking into the Empire’s computer network.

Could artificial intelligence challenge our identity?

Intelligence has always been at the core of human identity. To date, though, the notion of a superior intel­ ligence has been restricted to the realms of science fiction. Now, Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom has put forward the idea of superintelligence – a man-made form of brain power that surpasses the capabilities of the human mind and which would call human identity into question as never before.

Imagine we had artificial intelligence (AI) that matched human intelligence. We’re not there yet, but imagine we were. Then think about the next step: a hypothetical future computer capability – I call it superintelligence – that will surpass us. We are, of course, the ones who create these machines, but it is possible for one thing to create another that is smarter than its creator. Right now we are a long, long way from that stage. I’m not even arguing that human-level AI is imminent. But it does look consistent with the laws of physics. Basically, we as humans are a computational structure currently running on a biological wetware principle. I think the same computation could be implemented on some other substrate. If that is a physically feasible technology, then superintelligence might develop quickly. If we had superintelligent technologies, a whole vast space of things that today are best regarded as science fiction might become a reality. And they would be beyond our control.

Just consider how we already create things that are beyond human control – like organizations and states that take on a life of their own, as it were. But superintelligence raises some very distinctive challenges:

In general there are three categories of challenge.

First we have the inert category: a boulder just sits there until we remove it. We take dynamite and blow it up. The next, more challenging level is when you have a biologically evolving system, like bacteria. We might develop a new antibiotic and for a while really make a dent in the bacterial population. Then, over time, they evolve resistance to our drugs. They can adapt to our actions.

Superintelligence is a level beyond even that. It can anticipate and predict things that we will do and then plan in advance to avoid or overcome them. Bacteria don’t predict that we will hit them with antibiotics and take steps to prepare their defenses. They just wait until we hit them and then they evolve. With superintelligence, you have foresight. AI has always been in that category, because no matter if you are waging war or just playing chess, the other side is always trying to figure out your next move and how to defeat it.

One danger inherent in superintelligence is the extinction of the human race, because in some of the scenar­ ios the superintelligence would become very powerful.

It’s not that it would hate us or exploit us. It’s just that it would have some arbitrary goal. Quite possibly the ultimate aim of such a system would be to realize that goal to a maximum. Which could lead to a world in which there are no humans. I think it would be prudent for us to do some of the hard work now. A proportion of our mathematical and computer science talent should be focused on this problem to figure out the solution ahead of time.

Nick Bostrom, born 1973, is Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and recently made the top 15 of Prospect magazine’s World Thinkers list. In his papers about existential risks for humankind he invariably dares to think the unthinkable. His latest book, Superintelligence, has been read by science luminaries including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, who have subsequently issued stern warnings about the dangers of artificial intel­ ligence.

48 THE FOCUS Identity Leadership insights

Never hide

A conversation with diversity thought leader Binna Kandola on identity

Identity could be the royal route to truly meaningful diversity – or a significant obstacle to making it work. For three decades distinguished business psychologist Binna Kandola has been working on the issues of diversity and inclusion and the central role that identity plays in achieving them. Harnessing the power of genuine diversity of ideas and perspectives is challenging, he says, but for self-aware leaders it is well within reach.

The Focus: What do you see as the relation between our identities and the roles we might seek in our professional lives?

Binna Kandola: Over the course of time, we have defined roles not just in the professions but in the wider society as well. But these definitions arose historically; they’re not inherent in the roles themselves. Think, for example, of roles that are often taken to be primarily male or primarily female. I recently read an editorial from a 19 th-century newspaper asserting that women were unfit to do a particular job. And the job was nursing! Now, however, nursing is often seen as a female role. So identity and role do seem to be inextricably linked – especially in terms of gender – in the minds of many people. But there is actually no inherent connection between identity and role.

In many countries, only about five percent of CEOs are women and the ranks of senior executives are largely male. With so few role models, is it possible that women simply find it difficult to connect their identities to these roles?

Role models are critical. I think if you can see people succeeding who are like you, you are more likely to remain in an organization: This is an organization that will welcome me and value me for who I am. But numbers are not enough. A government department where 40 percent of the senior roles were held by women asked us to assess how those women experienced the organization. We found that they were actually quite miserable, because they were left out of important discussions and generally not included in steering the department. They talked about that dissatisfaction to their women friends in lower levels of the department, and those women told us that they were not going to apply for senior jobs.

What about government initiatives in many countries to put more women on boards?

I applaud the efforts to increase the number of women on boards and in leadership positions, but I resist the notion that once some magic number is reached we can cease to worry about it. This is probably the third time in my working career that I’ve seen people pay attention to gender. Then it slips off the agenda. Inclusion will continue to be a challenge, no matter what the numbers may look like. And it will be up to organizations like yours to keep the spotlight on it.

The biases that stand in the way of inclusion are often unconscious, even normal to a certain extent. Does the practice of mindfulness – of non-judgmental focus on what is occurring in the present – apply here? Can we at least be mindful of what is likely to be biasing our view and use that mindfulness to suspend judgment?

Being self-aware is one of the most important things you can do to bridge differences. To business people with a bias for action, self-awareness may seem passive, but being aware of your own behavior is definitely an action. If you are in a meeting, ask yourself who you tend to address yourself to. If someone comes up with a good idea, do you agree only when someone who resembles you restates the idea? These are patterns of behavior to recognize, to be aware of as they are happening. And we can do this. It’s known as meta-cognition. We have this wonderful abil­ ity to be able to think about what we’re thinking about.

If we do have this ability and the goal is to create a sustain­ able culture of diversity – and by that we mean genuine deep-level diversity of thought, not just diversity of gender,

49

Binna Kandola A business psychologist and co-founder of Pearn Kandola, Binna Kandola has spent the past 30 years working with public- and private-sector clients on some of the most challenging problems of organizational effectiveness.

Through his work, his research, and his books he has had a profound impact on public policy and on organizations of all kinds, and today he is one of the most prominent voices in discussions of diversity and unconscious bias. With his wife Jo Kandola he recently co-authored the critically acclaimed The Invention of Difference: The story of gender bias at work, which demonstrates that gender inequality stems not from biology or evolution but from social constructs and practices. His previous book, The Value of Difference: Eliminating bias in organizations, begins with the premise that to make organizations more inclusive we first need to understand what drives human behavior. Currently a visiting Professor at both Leeds University Business School and Aston University Business School, he has served on numerous professional and governmental committees devoted to equal opportunity.

ethnicity, and so on – then might each indi­ vidual’s genuine identity hold the key?

The concept of identity is certainly central. But I would offer two qualifications. First, you often hear in organizations the expression “bringing your whole self to work.” I like the expression, but you can’t bring your whole self to work. There are simply some aspects of everyone that they do not want to bring to work, aspects of identity that would simply be inappropriate. But the idea of not having to hide behind a screen has a lot of merit; and, as your question suggests, it points beyond obvious differences to genuine inclusion.

Second, in organizations that lack a common purpose, identity can be destructive. In that situation, diversity will actually create problems as people stubbornly cling to their unique points of view with nothing to temper them or bring them together.

One rarely hears it said that diversity can create problems. Diversity is usually presented as a purely positive and desirable condition for organizations.

We know that diversity can bring benefits to a team; but there is also a downside to greater diversity. People who work in the diversity field often don’t mention that, for obvious reasons. But the research is quite clear. Diversity generates more

“Unless the necessary degree of openness exists within the majority, you will smother any kind of individuality.”

creativity, but it also generates more tension because you have genuinely different points of view rooted in different identities.

Whether that tension will produce creativity depends on the identity I present to the team and the extent to which people on the team, in the moment, are prepared to listen.

Clearly, a large part of the responsibility for creating deeplevel diversity and inclusion falls on the leader of the organization as well as leaders of teams throughout the organ­ ization. To extract the real value of diversity of thought you must be able to manage both the tension and creativity you mentioned, an ability we look for when we assess leaders.

What the research seems to indicate is that a leader’s expec­ tations become a self-fulfilling proph­ecy. Leaders who believe that diversity and in­clusion will produce tangible benefits behave in a way that is consistent with that belief and, as a result, reap the benefits. Leaders who believe that diversity and inclusion will not produce benefits behave in a way that excludes people. When the benefits fail to materialize, those leaders use that fact to justify their initial skepticism about diversity.

How should team members react when they are faced with a leader who disdains diversity or who does not listen to other ideas, other voices?

When a leader lacks self-awareness, team members are responsible for providing feedback, to point out that the leader is not paying much attention to ideas coming from some of the members of the team. Providing that feedback can be a real challenge. The leader may be offended, may bluster, and deny the behavior. However, the research indicates that such feedback, even when done very tentatively and politely, can be enough to get leaders to begin questioning their behavior and become more self-aware. But the team members must have the courage to provide the feedback.

In a sense, you are saying that leaders should be more openminded in order not to exclude possibilities and ideas from all sources. Is there a danger that too much inclusiveness could cause deliberations and discussions to drag on endlessly, never reaching closure?

50 THE FOCUS Identity Leadership insights

A client of ours has just conducted some research that speaks to that very question. Some very senior leaders underwent a diversity and inclusion program; a comparable group of leaders did not.

The client then compared the performance of the two groups. They found that decision-making was faster among teams led by people who had been through the program and were seen as inclusive leaders. That result is counterintuitive. We would expect that the leader would spend a great amount of time eliciting opinions from each team member, trying to give everyone equal air time, and withholding his opinion in order not to short-circuit debate. But in fact what happens when everyone feels included is that discussion proceeds much more naturally and efficiently.

People feel free to agree, disagree, or criticize and to get to the point. They don’t have to tiptoe around the leader or other powerful members of the team and they are confident that they will be heard, unlike on teams that lack inclusiveness.

And the client found that the inclusive teams not only made faster decisions, they made better decisions.

Is there a tension between fitting in and maintaining your own individuality? In our work with large organizations we often find two diametrically opposed approaches to onboarding people who might be said to differ from the dominant culture. One approach assures the new hire that it takes some time to learn the ropes and to fit in. The other approach immediately encourages the new hire to tell the new company what she knows that they don’t know.

Being treated as an individual is something you have to earn by demonstrating to people that you can deliver on things for them. In the 1950 s, the social psychologist Edwin Hollander developed the idea of the “idiosyncrasy credit.” The basic principle is that once you have been accepted by a group and you deliver on things for them, the more idiosyncratic you are allowed to become. So if you have some edges on your personality but you have delivered for the group, people are likely to say things of you like “you have to take him as he is, but he does get things done.”

If you haven’t delivered and you’re just a “spiky” character who is unpleasant to be around, team members likely will not see what you bring to the organization, apart from trouble.

But couldn’t “spikiness” be as much a characteristic of diversity as race or gender and the like, and couldn’t it be a more reliable indicator of genuine diversity of thought on a team than, say, gender or ethnic balance?

You can have a team sitting around the table, and they can look very diverse on the surface. But in

A video interview with Binna Kandola can be found at www.egonzehnder.com /the-focus /video

terms of the way they actually operate, they’re quite uniform.

They all agree with the leader; they engage in groupthink; they go along to get along. Interestingly, of the institutions that experienced difficulties in the recession, Lehman Brothers, which precipitated the crisis, was in superficial terms the most diverse.

They had diversity in terms of visible characteristics, but they all thought the same way.

How do we make sure we really see and welcome the indi­ vidual who is significantly different?

First, unless the necessary degree of openness exists within the majority, you will smother any kind of individuality. You have to be open, to reach out and ask what that person’s uniqueness in terms of experience, personality, or background will bring to the organization. And you have to listen mind­ fully to the answers.

I would argue that some very recent public disasters were caused, in part, by an inability to listen to other people. My colleagues and I have looked at three such situations: the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Lance Armstrong cycling scandal, and a group of hospitals where mortality rates were inordinately high. In all three cases, we found a climate where people did not feel they could speak up. That is a lack of inclusion. People were not able to be themselves and say, “Actually, what is going on in this organization is wrong.” So you run real risks when you fail to create that deeper level of inclusion.

Second, leaders must frame diversity in a genuinely positive way.

They must make it clear that diversity and inclusiveness are important not merely as a matter of policy, but because it is good for business, it is the right thing to do, and we are determined to harness it more effectively. People will feel that the organization is something that they want to be a part of, something they can identify with, regardless of where they come from or who they are.

The interview with Binna Kandola in London was conducted by Karoline Vinsrygg and Andrew Roscoe, Egon Zehnder London.

Roasted avocado with pseudocereal from scorched milk, kiwicha, and highland algae

Virgilio Martínez, born in 1977, is the most prominent creator of contemporary Peru­ vian cuisine. His Central Restaurante in Lima occupies 4 th place on the S. Pellegrino ranking of the world’s best restaurants.

Cuisine with identity When a chef realizes that his country offers him ocean, desert, jungle, and mountain peaks, he has no choice but to become a naturalist. So Virgilio Martínez travels to the most remote corners of his native Peru. He climbs thousands of meters and draws upon the hidden treasures of an overwhelmingly rich nature to create his own avant-garde cuisine.

In Peru we have the Pacific Ocean, the desert, the Andes and the Amazon River Basin. What does this mean for a chef? The natural landscape shapes our identity. It tells us what we can create and what we cannot. Within the endless variety of this space, each ecosystem has its own characteristics that define it. The food that we make here cannot be categorized by season, but by elevation – every few steps, the biosystem changes. Three to four times a year, we travel the landscape of Peru to collect new materials and see what we can learn from nature. I find in­ spi­ration on the road, and I aspire to share it with my guests.

I think it’s strange that people today are suddenly discovering the virtues of regional and organic cuisine. We’ve always eaten that way in Peru! It’s what I learned growing up. My family always cooked with the old recipes, according to traditions that have been handed down for generations. We have strong ties to nature, and I see this as the foundation on which my alta cocina is built. So when I travel, I become a kind of anthropologist, so­ ciologist, and naturalist. To understand my roots and who I am today, I have to explore the wealth of our gastronomical heritage with all my senses.

There were times when fine restaurants in Peru imitated the cuisine of London, Paris, Buenos Aires, or New York. In the meantime, I have traveled so much in Europe, Asia, and North America that I know how the top restaurants there work. Of course I can learn from them, but it is even more important for me to know the traditions of my own country – from its shorelines, mountains, and river basins. And because I never stop exploring, I don’t need to use tricks or show off with my cooking. Our guests see exactly who we are. They taste it in our food. And I in turn know that it is a privilege to cook in this country. Just think of the 3,800 types of potatoes we have in Peru – and I myself am only familiar with 400 of them! Many of them don’t even have a name. It is unbelievable, a preindustrial world full of incredible raw materials, reminiscent of a distant era of human history.

How do you confront this rich cultural heritage; how do you approach it? With thankfulness and curiosity. You can never stop learning new things. We aren’t the first and won’t be the last to take on this challenge. Every generation stands on the shoulders of the last.

At the same time, I am aware of what I am adding to this bounty, how I can enrich and refine it – through my craft and my avant-garde cuisine. By craft, I mean everything that defines my identity as a chef and allows me to lend my own signature to the food we serve: the analytical skills to understand my environment, a lot of empathy, and a great deal of hard work.

When I unite every­thing I have with what the earth offers me, I reach the highest level of expressiveness.

52 THE FOCUS Identity Leadership insights

Be careful what you wish for

On the alignment of personal identity and professional development

by James Martin and Salvatore De Rienzo

“Be careful what you wish for – you just might get it” – a phrase that, arguably, sums up the perspective we work from when talking to senior executives about their development. Which might seem rather strange at first glance. After all, the people we work with are all highly successful individuals – intelligent, capable, typically with at least 25 years of business experience and a dynamic track record of promotion within their field. When we ask what they’re looking to do next, it’s no surprise that most say they aim to move up to the next level, or into a position of greater scope and responsibility.

Nevertheless, even the simplest follow-up question – “why do you want that?” – can be illuminating. The immediate response is often the obvious one (“it’s the next step forward”) – yet if we keep asking “why is that important for you?” this can prompt the executive to think in ways he or she may find revealing. If we also ask them to reflect on what they’re aiming for – how the position they aspire to will differ from the demands of their current role; what they will have to do in order to succeed in that position; what this will cost in terms of intellectual and emotional effort, as well as impacts on their personal life – we find that very few have thought the matter through in detail.

Taking a deep look at identity

Deep understanding

is crucial for leaders to explore what really drives them as individuals when embarking on professional development.

All of which highlights how crucial it is for leaders to explore their own identity and develop a deep understanding of what really drives them as individuals when embarking on professional development. Otherwise previously successful executives may take the next step forward and find they are deeply unhappy – with the corollary of lackluster performance and disappointing business results.

53

Motivation

is often subconscious and largely beyond the reach of change or influence.

It also helps to explain why so much of the effort invested in personal development actually yields little fruit. Taking a close look at executives’ personal identities, at how they see themselves, is an important part of any leader’s role. Yet most personal development meetings between business leaders and the talents under their supervision focus exclusively on the more tangible parameters – past experiences and successes; knowledge, skills and competencies to be developed – while rarely touching upon the aspiring leader’s inner identity and motivation. These aspects are regarded, more or less, as a private matter. And because they are not talked about openly, the individual’s own self-image, and how this image is evaluated externally by their line manager, can sometimes lead to serious misjudgments. An outstanding team player, for example, doesn’t automatically make an effective team leader.

How often have we seen a supervisor suggest that a team member work on a particular issue in their personal development plan – and then found that both are still talking about that very same issue several years later? One possible reason here is that neither properly appreciates the individual’s true inner identity and the actions proposed are essentially going against the grain.

As a starting point, it is helpful to understand how identity fits into a holistic view of personality. At Egon Zehnder we use a root cause model, described in the following graphic:

Knowledge Skills Identity Traits Subconscious motivation

— Subconscious motivation. The inner core of this five-tier model of personality comprises subconscious motivations that are largely beyond the reach of change or influence. Deep down, we are all motivated by a combination of affiliation (how we like to connect with others), achievement (securing goals) and power (the extent to which we like to influence and impact events). Most of us will have all three motivations, to varying levels.

— Traits. These are deep-seated tendencies in the personality, which essentially help to cast a light on how an individual gains energy and responds to events. Most personality models are based on five factors: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. These character traits, too, are difficult to alter.

— Identity. Compared to subconscious motivation and traits, identity can be more change­ able, depending on different experiences and contexts. The development of one’s own identity is founded on two fundamental processes: self-knowledge and self-design.

— Skills. This refers to the ability to convert new or available knowledge into concrete practical outcomes. Skills increase through training and experience – and are thus readily amenable to influence.

— Knowledge. The same is true of knowledge – knowledge both of overarching contexts and specialist, expert detail. Knowledge acquisition is an ongoing leadership responsibility.

Leader’s identity

Believing in being a leader is an important aspect to really becoming a leader.

Today when we evaluate leadership potential we focus considerable attention on the indi­ vidual’s sense of identity. In order to grow successfully into leadership roles, it is most helpful for executives to have thought deeply about the challenges inherent in the position and to feel a sense of enthusiasm as a result. In short, some see themselves as leaders, and indeed acted as leaders, long before they were appointed to leadership roles. In other words, believing in being a leader is key to becoming a leader. Of course this is just one aspect of a leader’s identity – although an important one – and has to be seen as part of the overall picture.

54 THE FOCUS Identity Leadership insights

A variety of seeds

Ambitions

can stem from a variety of seeds or origins – not always helpful, some even destructive.

So why do people in general – and future leaders in particular – need to be careful what they wish for? For many of us, our various ambitions and our drive for success in life can stem from a variety of seeds or origins, and we may not always appreciate whether these motivations are helpful or destructive. More money and higher status are obvious drivers, but we can all also be motivated by wanting to please our parents, to show off to friends, or to fill a gap elsewhere in our lives. For the highly competitive and achievement-oriented individual, it might simply be the need to increase a personal “score.” For some, the drive to succeed may simply have become an unhelpful habit that they no longer question.

A number of factors can make discussions about identity problematic in a professional context: — Many executives may feel there is only one acceptable answer to the question of what they want to do next: further promotion. They may fear that revealing the truth might mean losing status, losing influence within the organization – and perhaps even losing their jobs.

— Second, some may be wary of asking the question in the first place. Quite likely they have already achieved considerable advancement and status. Exploring their inner identity at this point might feel like opening Pandora’s box – something just too risky to contemplate.

— Some individuals, meanwhile, are just not very self-reflective by nature. They may struggle to see the point of asking the question at all.

Medals

Instead of offering personal validation and / or growth through compensation or promotion only, it can be helpful for organizations to offer some “medals.”

Close alignment

of the role and the person­ ality of an executive is key for personal fulfillment and effective performance.

A complicating factor can be that in many organizations the only way of offering personal validation and/or growth is through compensation or promotion. To use a military analogy, companies are able to offer promotion through the ranks but they rarely have the ability to award medals.

As a result, various factors need to be in place in order to explore this topic effectively with executives. First, there needs to be a degree of trust and reassurance in the company’s commitment to the executive’s future. Being able to offer some “medals” is helpful. Second, it is often more effective to have these conversations with an external coach and trusted advisor – someone who can provide an objective standpoint and some distance from the standard supervisor-subordinate relationship. Third, it takes time. This conversation is unlikely to be done and dusted in half an hour: it may take a number of discussions over many months to help an individual understand their true sense of identity.

Yet such conversations can have a huge impact on the executive concerned: being fully aware of how they view themselves – in terms of personal values, appropriate actions and role behaviors – is the key to a centered feeling of personal stability and authenticity. How per­ suasive and credible they are, how effectively they perform and their personal sense of fulfillment all depend on the close alignment of their role and their personality. Assessing this alignment is by no means an easy journey, but it can be a very fruitful one when it addresses deeply personal questions such as: — What makes my role exciting for me? What energizes me and what drains my personal energy?

— What enhances my self-esteem – and what undermines it? How do I feel in my role, from an emotional perspective? Is anything/anybody making me feel angry, fearful, unbalanced?

What can I learn from this? When do I find myself feeling hurt? Why? When do I feel appreciated or nurtured? To what extent am I able to express my feelings? What stops me doing that?

— What would my personal “balance sheet” currently look like? What regrets do I have?

What should I have been doing differently?

— What is there in my current role that I dislike, but put up with? Will that also feature in my next role? Am I willing to pay that price?

— What personal motivations have brought me to my current role and what drives the aspiration toward my next position?

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Answering these questions can be a psychologically challenging process – sometimes even a painful one – requiring professional, confidential support. It takes courage for an indi­ vidual to step out of the “video game” of life – to make themselves the focus of discussion and – abandoning received wisdom – to lower their guard, in order to really understand if they want to move up to the next level.

Dynamic, not immutable

Dynamic phenomenon

Identity is not an immutable constant.

James Martin joined Egon Zehnder in 2000.

Based in London, he focuses on search for the HR function as well as broader talent management consulting across all business sectors. james.martin@egonzehnder.com

Identity, as we have noted, though, is a dynamic phenomenon, not an immutable constant.

As people gain experiences and insights over the course of their life they come to see themselves, their priorities and their personal sense of identity – both private and professional – in new ways. For young high-potentials at an early point in their career, for example, their whole identity may be anchored around work, performance and career progression. In their middle years executives may still define themselves to a large extent in terms of their professional responsibilities – but many are now also fulfilling private roles, as spouses and parents, for example. Psychologists have identified three key inner developments characteristic of this life phase: a re-assessment of formerly fulfilling behaviors no longer in tune with the current lifestyle; a re-evaluation of personal goals; and a re-visioning of the future – with the emphasis on finally turning vague plans into concrete realities.

In their mature years, individuals may find that their attitude to extrinsic incentives can change. Sometimes the legacy we leave behind can become the most important consideration.

Both for the individual executive and for the supervisor interviewing them, it makes sense to anchor career and development considerations within wider reflections relating to the relevant phase of life.

However, it is easy to make mistaken assumptions about others’ sense of identity and their fit for a role, even when presented with an apparently rigid self-image. For example, a potential promotion should not automatically be discounted merely because the future role and responsibilities initially appear to present a mis-match with an executive’s view of themselves.

They may be more adaptive than they appear to be at first.

Indeed, the renowned organizational behavior specialist Herminia Ibarra advises executives to see themselves as “work in progress” and to be “adaptively authentic” – constantly gaining new insights, not just about external matters, but also about themselves. Which brings with it the permission to be inconsistent now and then. “Action changes us,” says Ibarra.

Executives shouldn’t cling to their past identity but should ask themselves: How do I want to be? What’s important to me in the future? and allow themselves to develop accordingly.

And their supervisors and/or organizations should grant them the necessary time and scope to do precisely this.

Far-reaching effects

Salvatore de Rienzo joined Egon Zehnder in 2002.

Based in Milan and Rome, he is a trusted advisor in CEO succession, board performance, leadership development and executive team effectiveness. salvatore.derienzo@egonzehnder. com

The way people see themselves, their sense of identity, is not something that changes from one day to the next. This is a process that involves making mindful adjustments – trying out different roles, for example, with an open mind, in order to explore a different aspect of one’s identity. Both direct line managers and the relevant members of the leadership team have a responsibility to ensure that they support their high potentials effectively through this process.

The prize for getting it right is considerable. An executive who undertakes this journey will very likely be a more effective leader: a deep sense of personal alignment with the role will most probably make them more effective. It’s more likely, too, that the most appropriate ex­ ecutives will be promoted into those key, challenging roles – positively impacting the bottom line. Development initiatives can be focused on appropriate interventions, leading to cost and resource savings while also being more likely to yield meaningful improvements. Above all, companies are likely to have senior executives who are quite simply happier and more content in their roles – in turn yielding a multiplier effect in terms of employee engagement and wider organizational morale.

Ultimately this can be liberating for all concerned. Instead of feeling stuck in a cycle of disappointing dialogues and erroneous expectations, executives can end up feeling better understood and less stressed, while their supervisors may feel a profound sense of relief at having got to the heart of the matter.

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Interview

“ It was a case of getting focused on what we could do, and then instilling a sense of pride.”

In 2012, when Marissa Mayer was appointed as Yahoo’s seventh CEO in just five years, the giant American multinational technology company was in serious trouble. A computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence, Mayer had risen through the ranks of Google, a company she had joined back in 1999, before moving to Yahoo as the youngest woman ever to lead a Fortune 500 company.

Talking to THE FOCUS, the Yahoo CEO describes how she has set about renewing this giant of the hyper-connected world.

Photos: Jürgen Frank THE FOCUS: When you arrived at Yahoo in 2012, your ambition was to return an iconic company to greatness. What elements of its former greatness were still there, and what did you have to add in?

Marissa Mayer: There were elements of greatness across the board, but each of them needed to be amplified. I deeply believe in the loop whereby you hire the right people, those people build great products, users of the Internet respond to those products, this brings you traffic, and your revenue scales with that traffic.

Then you take the resultant earnings and reinvest in people. It’s a virtuous cycle that we’ve seen again and again across the industry. So there were great people here, but not enough of them. And there were great products here, but not enough of them.

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But you still had foundations to build on?

Yes, there was a lot of traffic and large numbers of users for whom Yahoo was still a key part of their daily lives, but we wanted to strengthen our presence in people’s lives. We’re one of the three Internet companies in the US that report more than one billion users each month, which means that at some point in time, every third person in the world with Internet access uses Yahoo. So the obvious way to grow was to start producing products that are even more relevant to our users, so that they spend more time with us.

How much creative destruction did it take to refresh your products?

When we went through the product line for Yahoo, we found there were some parts that hadn’t been touched since 2001.

So they had been around for more than a decade – which is ancient history in Internet terms. We had products that were still using the same code and the same design as they did 14 years ago. So we had to update our interface. When we originally designed and developed our interface it was cutting edge. But the world had moved on and we really needed to fix that.

Which we’ve done. And then it was about growing traffic. Part of that was obviously making the shift to mobile. Another part of it was increasing the attractiveness and usefulness of our products – which we’ve done. The revenue lines from mobile, video, native, and social have grown significantly, from essentially zero in 2011 to a billion-dollar business today. When you’ve

got US $ 5 billion in revenue, you need to build something big enough – and growing fast enough – to really matter. And that’s what our businesses in mobile, video, native, and social have delivered. It’s been quite amazing to see the company pull together behind this direction and strategy.

What about Yahoo as a company, as an employer? What did the internal process of change that you embarked upon look like?

The first thing we needed to do was change the culture, and culture is hard to change. But we needed to make Yahoo a place where I, as the chief executive, would be excited to work, and where the people who were already here would be more excited to work. Sure, I was thrilled and honored to be a part of Yahoo’s tradition but I’d never thrived in a world with high cubicle walls, so I wanted to make the culture more relational. It was about making people who were already here feel more valued, and making the people we wanted to recruit want to come and be part of our story. Being a profitable company, we have the luxury of being able to invest and so we’re able to say to people: “You don’t need to choose between the perks somewhere else and here at Yahoo because we’re going to give you perks.”

And so one of the early things we did was make the food free.

And how did people respond to that?

One reaction that I noticed was surprise.

Many people came up to me afterwards and said: “Wow, but we didn’t earn that.”

“Working here at Yahoo has been the biggest and most interesting design problem of my life.”

And I thought: “Seriously?” There had been a lot of start-ups that hadn’t been profitable but where the food was free.

I thought it was the least we could do. It was about making sure that we honored the people who had stuck with the company through thick and thin, while also making it a more attractive environment for others to join.

You took over a company that was going through a period of turbulence – how did you instill a sense of confidence in the future, despite groundbreaking changes?

I think leadership is about listening, so I spent my first few weeks doing just that.

Listening. I would literally sit in the cafeteria for two hours a day and talk to anyone willing to talk to me. And from these conversations I got a really keen sense of what mattered to people; what was working well and what wasn’t working well.

I decided then that it’s best to just put the turbulence aside, because when trau­

Marissa Mayer was born in Wausau, Wisconsin on May 30, 1975 to an art teacher mother of Finnish descent, and an environmental engineer father.

An accomplished dancer, debater, and science student at high school, Mayer went on to study Symbolic Systems at Stanford University, building computer software for her undergraduate thesis.

Known for only requiring four hours sleep a night, she turned down 14 other job offers to join Google in 1999, where she later built the design teams for the now indispensable Google products. Mayer was 37 years old and pregnant when she was appointed CEO of Yahoo in 2012. She was the youngest woman to ever lead a Fortune 500 company. At 40, Mayer still runs half marathons with her husband Zachary Bogue, a lawyer and venture capitalist whom she married in 2009. The couple has a three-year-old son, Macallister.

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matic things happen – be it personally or professionally – it’s often hard to talk about them in the moment. So for me it was more a case of setting the turmoil aside, getting focused on what we could do and what, in fact, was going right, and then trying to instill a sense of pride.

Pride is a highly subjective emotion.

How do you set about building a sense of pride in a large body of employees?

One of the things that make people proud to work somewhere is having insights into how decisions are made. But here at Yahoo there was complete mystification around how and why the board had reached some of its management decisions. So we decided to open up a weekly forum to update our people, which we called FYI, as in For Your Information – as well as For Yahoo’s Information. It was a way of saying: “Look, we’re going to give you a preview of everything that’s coming up and we’re also going to take questions from anyone who wants to ask them.” So this enabled us to start demystifying the thinking of various leaders across the company, myself included. What were our thoughts on new spaces for the company to move into – be it in the product line or in terms of actual physical spaces? Why did the menus in the cafeteria change? Who are the new hires? There were all kinds of different elements, big and small, that came up and through this process we really found a new cadence where we could maybe redact some of the financial information but, as a company, still be as transparent as possible. We even took it one step further and allowed people to file their own highlights and lowlights, and then vote them up or down. On the one hand this was a terrific governance process and on the other the board members themselves loved it because they felt they were now part of the same conversation as I’d been having in the cafeteria. It’s almost always the case that if the board talks to employees directly they will find out what is going well and what isn’t. Letting that dialogue happen really gave people a great sense that management trusted them; that the board trusted them. It helped build a sense of pride in what the company was doing. And once we started getting that momentum going on – transparency, pride, trust – it made it easier to move away from the turbulence of the past.

“One of the things that make people proud to work somewhere is having insights into how decisions are made.”

You held many prominent positions at Google, but you were never CEO before joining Yahoo. Have you changed as a person since you stepped into this role?

I don’t think so. Some people criticize me for claiming not to be ambitious, or not being ambitious enough, because I often say I didn’t set out to become CEO. I’d never said to myself “this is the role I want.”

I just wanted to make a big difference.

And during my time at Google I got to see how having great search technology was impacting on the far regions of the earth and helping change the world. Once you’ve been bitten by that bug, you want to make that kind of positive difference for users and for employees everywhere you can. I wouldn’t want to be CEO just anywhere, but this role in particular appealed to me because it was everything I’d ever done in a whole new context. It was mail, it was search, it was maps, it was news, it was mobile, it was social, it was all these things that I had worked on, but in a new context. So it was a big learning experience for me, but it was exactly the right role given my own experience. It presented me with a great opportunity to have a positive impact not only on the people at Yahoo, but also on our platform, to reach out to users and explore the full potential of mobile and its new formats.

At Google you made a name for yourself by determining how products would look and work. And when you arrived at Yahoo you hired one thousand mobile engineers and over 60 world-class computer science PhDs. You also began Yahoo’s suite of apps, including the Apple design award-winning Weather app, the News Digest app and, most crucially, Yahoo Mail which now has 225 million users each month …

I love design, and working here at Yahoo has been the biggest and most interesting design problem of my life. Everything

from my designing the logo to designing the spaces, to designing our hiring policies and practices, to designing the product line and designing revenue strategies – everywhere you look, there’s another design problem where you could say: “Okay, what are the challenges and how do we fix them?” And that’s hugely appealing to me, to work on such an incredibly large multi-faceted design problem.

Compared to other Silicon Valley giants, what are the qualities that make Yahoo special and unique?

A couple of things: The first is that going back to the earliest days in 1994 we were always the guide. That’s when we were known as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” And a guide needs to inform and entertain. It needs to connect people, and when I look at what we do, that notion of being able to organize things in a guide-like fashion is something we do uniquely. Obviously there are different lenses to this – social or search, for example – but within that is a distinct personality. This comes across in everything we do, from how we design our mail, to our content and the voice that we use. It’s the notion of: “You should come to Yahoo for everything you need to know and a few things you didn’t know you really wanted to know.”

Marissa Mayer is busily transforming Yahoo into a place where everyone including the CEO is excited to work; a company marked by a relational culture that not only signals appreciation of existing employees but also helps attract new talent.

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Yahoo Yahoo was founded in January 1994 by two Stanford electrical engineering classmates who dubbed their brainchild “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” After its incorporation in 1995 it was humorously re-branded as Yahoo! – a specially designed acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.”

In the days before search engines, Yahoo was principally a direc­ tory of websites designed to help navigate the rising crest of the first Internet boom. Today, Yahoo is one the technological giants of the hyper-connected world with over one billion users, and more than 600 million of them on mobile, in over forty-five languages. Since 2012 Marissa Mayer has presided over a more than tripling of Yahoo’s share price, thanks partly to the 2014 floating of Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, in which Yahoo held a more than 40 percent stake. Yahoo’s transformation is well underway, with a dramatically expanding suite of mobile products across search, communications, and digital content, and healthy revenue streams in its growth businesses. Marissa Mayer is well on the way to transforming Yahoo into a mobile-friendly global technology company with an unequivocal vision.

Let’s talk about getting the right people on the bus. Are there values you have that are non-negotiable in your key hires, and if so, what are they?

Someone once said to me, “You don’t suffer fools gladly” (laughs). And in fact the first thing I look for is intelligence.

I value raw intelligence over experience.

I think sometimes a fresh look at something that isn’t mired in convention actually gets you to a better outcome. I saw things like that in my early days, in my career at Google News, where we just took an approach that no one who’s experienced in the news industry would ever have taken. Here at Yahoo we have a product called Yahoo Gemini, a new form of ad. Again, anyone who had worked for a long time in display or search never would have done it that way. But that was why it was successful, because our people had a fresh view.

Then I like people who are trustworthy and have a sense of integrity. That matters a great deal to me. And I also want people who possess humility, who are able to listen. One of the best lessons I ever learned

was from my mentor Eric Schmidt, who said: “Good executives confuse themselves when they convince themselves that they actually do things.” That’s very humbling, because you’ve usually got executives who are failing when they convince them­ selves that they are doing things. If you watch what good executives really do, they listen, they point in a certain direction.

And then their job is to get out of the way so the team can run in that direction.

In 2013 you assembled a “dream team” of hi-tech experts called “Moneyball” to lay the groundwork for Yahoo’s phenomenal growth in digital promotions on smartphones and tablets. And you

The interview with Marissa Mayer in Sunnyvale was conducted by Martha Josephson, Egon Zehnder, Palo Alto.

gave them a brutal deadline to make it happen. Forming this team was surely a very successful fresh approach to fostering a culture of innovation at Yahoo, both with regard to establishing a unique team spirit and at the same time creating a sense of urgency …

Definitely, but we don’t use this model too often. In my time here we’ve done four of what I call “drafts.” A draft is where you say: “Look, this is the highest-priority thing at the moment in the company.”

Then you pick the leaders for your team and you say: “Tell us who you need to help.” They can basically draft anyone from the company to come and join. In the case of Moneyball we set a six-week deadline and the overarching question was: “What should native ads look like on Yahoo?”

We didn’t know. Would it be something that generated a few million extra dollars of revenue a year, or was it going to be a billion-dollar space for us? It turned out that it was much closer to the latter. Our view was that we didn’t want to spend an inordinate amount of time on this if it wasn’t going to work. So I said: “You’ve got six weeks to build and launch it and then another six weeks to clean up the code and all the operations.” After that, anyone who wanted to stay on the project could stay, and anyone who wanted to go back to their former day jobs could do so. At that point we also promised that if Moneyball – now Yahoo Gemini – ever reached a 100-million dollar revenue rate, that is to say topped US $ 273,000 in a single day, we would send everyone and their families to Hawaii.

And what was the response?

It was amazing. We drafted three leaders and they, in turn, drafted 15 people, so that by the end we had a team of 18 working for those six weeks. They had 42 days to get stream ads launched and they launched them in 39 days. So they actually beat the deadline by three days and we gave them a small spot bonus as a reward. We were having such a great time and it was clear that they were on to something, so they recruited even more people and less than four months later they actually crossed that 100-million dollar revenue mark. Last year 300 million dollars of our revenue came from Yahoo Gemini, so it was just amazing.

How easy or difficult is it to draft people into a team that has been set such a tight deadline?

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“It's amazing to see the company pull together behind direction and strategy.”

You certainly can’t do it all the time. It’s not like a military draft where people are conscripted against their will. My view was that no one could block another person from making the list, but that anyone who did make the list would need to be really involved. And so the leaders were very direct about it: “We want you to come and be part of this. We’re going to ruin your life for the next 90 days. It’s going to be terrible. It’s going to be six, seven days a week, 18-hour days, 20-hour days. But it’s also going to be intense and fun and really fulfilling because if it works, it will be amazing.” And who doesn’t want to sign up for that pitch? Who doesn’t want to be part of something that could be truly transformational for the company?

How would you describe your personal approach to leadership?

I think I’m good with both the small details and seeing the big picture. I tend to telescope in and out so that, for example, if I have a leader I really trust, or I have confidence that a project is really on track, I’m fine with pulling way back and letting the team have a lot of freedom.

Whereas if it’s not going well and I feel the team needs my support, then I tend to telescope in much closer and tighter.

Leading through transformation also means overcoming resistance to change – from inside the company and from the outside. What is your recipe for maintaining your personal resilience?

You do need to be strong and have a sense of purpose but there are many times when I have had cause for pause, be it on an acquisition or product direction. And I wonder sometimes whether this is a gender-related trait where, as a woman, I’m more likely to stop and think: “Wait, am I really sure? Do I believe this?” But if the answer is: “Yes, I am really sure, I do

believe this,” then I don’t find it difficult to convince others. So I think that makes it easier to overcome the resistance. But more important still is having the necessary periods of introspection to think through decisions and argue with myself.

In other words, the conviction comes from deep self-examination.

Is that something you learned or did it come naturally to you?

Let me put it this way: Another great piece of advice I got once was that, as CEO, there are remarkably few decisions that you actually need to make. You can delegate so many decisions each day, although there are always a few crucial decisions that you need to make yourself.

In my case, for example, what to do visà-vis Alibaba; whether or not to acquire Tumblr for a billion dollars; how to approach the Microsoft renegotiation for Search … These were all huge decisions where I always benefited from pulling back, thinking them through and arguing the issues from all sides. “What does it look like for them? How will this make sense – either to them or to us?” It’s about thinking through all the different stakeholder arguments and coming up with what I think is a principled view.

In sum, then, since you took the helm Yahoo has mastered immense internal change while presenting a stable face to the world. Is that a fair summary?

From the outside things might have looked very stable, but yes, inside there have been huge paradigm shifts in terms of where we decided to put our energy and how we decided to assign our resources. That is what has really set us up to grow and to have a future, because even three years ago our product line didn’t suggest that. So as a company we should be very proud of this.

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In search of self

Throughout our life stories, we shape the chief protagonist – ourselves

by Julian Baggini Identity is much more mutable than we commonly imagine, shifting to match the various roles we play and the contexts in which we act. We sustain a sense of self not by always being the same, but by always adapting with integrity.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Polonius’s advice to the young prince – “To thine own self be true” – has become a self-help cliché. Yet far from being a glib platitude, these six monosyllables raise profound questions. Being “true to thine own self ” is more easily said than done.

Illustration: Paul Davis

Acting authentically In the corporate world, the idea of “authentic leadership” has been popular since Bill George’s book of the same name was published in 2003.

There is much to be said for this idea, in particular the need to align strategy, action and values.

But it seems to me that there is a philosophical problem at its heart. To be true to yourself, you need to have a clear sense of your identity – of what you are being true to. Only then can you claim to be acting authentically, in line with your core values. But how do we acquire this clear sense of identity? Who are you, really? This is a philosophical question, not a management puzzle. Our identity, common sense tells us, is a given; we each have a kind of fixed essence that makes us who we are, so all we have to do is to recognise and acknowledge it. On closer examination, however, identity is much more complicated.

First, identity is context-dependent. The same person can be a CEO, a daughter, a mother and a hiker. A person will feel, act and even think differently in the presence of siblings and parents and of colleagues in a boardroom. We all know the experience of almost regressing to our childhood selves at family reunions. Psychologists have even shown that what we remember varies according to context. Knowledge that we have at our fingertips when we sit at a desk working on a spreadsheet can be very hard to bring to mind when we are out with friends, walking in the countryside.

Second, our identities are in flux. Certain fundamental personality traits – such as introversion and extroversion – do appear to remain constant throughout life. But what we build on these foundations can change considerably over time. People move from back-room to management roles, for example, gradually taking on the identity of a leader. In private life, it is common for people to shift from identifying themselves as free-wheeling, young bons viveurs to assuming an identity as responsible parents. This implies that our identities are alterable to some degree.

Third, we can have varying attachments to our identities. Some we might feel very strongly indeed, unable even to imagine, for example, that our political or religious identity might no longer exist. Other identities we can carry much more lightly. An introverted public speaker can embrace the identity of the inspirational performer without ever feeling that it is an essential part of who he or she is. We identify with some of our identities more than with others.

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Shifting identities

Identity is, therefore, much more mutable than we commonly imagine. How can we use that to our advantage? First and foremost, we can resist falling into the trap of expectations, both our own and those of others. Too often, we assume that a particular identity is accompanied by particular characteristics, even though history shows that these assumptions are also highly variable.

CEOs, for example, have at various times been thought of primarily as micro-managers, financial planners, team leaders, autocrats, visionaries, inspirers and strategic directors. What we assume to be essential to the identity of a CEO is often just the current fashion. Any role we take on always provides an opportunity to forge an identity of our own rather than conforming to an identity already associated with it.

Similarly, we can liberate ourselves from the pressure to conform to the identity we and others assume we have. The “safe pair of hands” might decide the time is right to take a risk; the “strong leader” might spot an opportunity for some productive delegation; the “good listener” might decide it’s time to speak for a change. When we spell this out, it sounds obvious. But identity can be a beguiling trap, and it often takes a self-conscious reminder that we are not bound by it to free ourselves from its chains.

We should also remember that identities can shift with context and make the most of that fact.

Consistency is not sameness. There is no con­ tradiction between being softly spoken in some contexts and speaking forcefully in others, as long as we are not conveying contradictory messages. Similarly, a major contract might call for hard bargaining, while an employee’s request for flexible working might require as much flexi­ bility as we can provide. So we need to avoid cultivating identities that are too sweeping, such as “I am a tough negotiator” or “I am an accommodating manager”.

We must, however, ensure that there is rhyme and reason to our flexibility and that we are consciously responding to circumstances rather than simply being blown by the wind. To do this, we need to be very clear about the things that root our identity: narratives and values.

Narratives are very important for giving us a sense of who we are. The memories we retain and value are those that help us to make sense of our lives as a single story, one that may have surprising twists but that adds up to a coherent biography.

Alarm bells should start ringing if acting in a certain way doesn’t fit our personal story, because to identify with an action is to see it as part of the wider story of our lives.

Such a narrative can make sense only when accompanied by a set of values that, though not necessarily invariant, evolves coherently. Waking up each day with a different set of values would be as much of a threat to our identity as waking up each day with no memory of what we had done the day before.

Shaping ourselves

To watch a video interview with Julian Baggini please visit www.egonzehnder.com /the-focus /video

We also need to recognise that we are the authors of our own narratives, which means we get to shape the chief protagonist – ourselves. The best way is by doing. Both Aristotle and Confucius understood that the way to become a particular kind of person was to act in accordance with the character traits we desire, so that they become second nature. If we want to be more collaborative, for example, all we need do is create more opportunities for collaboration and make the effort to engage with them in the right mind-set.

Eventually collaboration becomes part of our identity.

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Julian Baggini is a writer, journalist and co-founder of The Philosophers’ Magazine. His books include Freedom Regained: The Possibility of Free Will; The Pig That Wants to be Eaten and ninetynine other thought experiments; The Ego Trick; and What’s It All About? Philosophy and the Meaning of Life.

Good leaders never allow themselves to become stuck in old ways, mistaking mutable habits for immutable aspects of identity. Take Alex Ferguson, the former Manchester United manager.

“Nobody has ever been so adept at evolving as the game evolved,” the Guardian’s Jonathan Wilson observed. The biggest change Wilson identifies in Ferguson was from a cavalier style to a much more defensive approach. Ferguson had long thought the former style was part of his club’s identity. “We always do it the hard way,” he would say. Only when he realised that this identity was not fixed could he address the team’s weaknesses.

However, when we think about the mutabil­ ity of identity, it is important not to get too carried away and assume that we can be whoever we want. Identity evolves; it doesn’t change overnight. Furthermore, it is multi-faceted, so any change needs to be in harmony with what remains the same. We need to adapt our identity with integrity. Identity is in part a construct, one that needs to cohere if it is to stand up.

Tough ethical choices provide good examples of this. For instance, we might pride ourselves on never dropping a reliable supplier. But what happens if it becomes obvious that an alternative supplier will be much more cost-effective? To act with integrity here requires some hard thinking.

You might need to adapt your self-image and see that the simple “never drop a good supplier” rule is not an integral part of your basic ethical prin­ ciples. Alternatively, you might conclude that your values require you to sustain the long-term relationship even where that is less efficient in

the short term. The dilemma presents an oppor­ tu­nity to develop your sense of identity.

The only wrong choice would be to simply try to forget you had ever had a commitment to good supplier relationships. All that would do is create dissonance – a tension between competing accounts of who we are. It is impossible to live indefinitely with such dissonance and remain healthy. For example, the former U. S. Ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, explained his resignation to CNN by saying “I was no longer in a position where I felt I could defend American policy.” The clash between personal identity and professional role may be stark, while the dissonance may be subtler, draining us of motivation.

Having a coherent sense of our own identity is crucial to psychological well-being. People work most enthusiastically and productively when they perceive a close fit between their private identity and the one they need to adopt at work.

I’ve been talking about personal identity, but as my remarks about Alex Ferguson and Manchester United suggest, they apply equally to corporate identity. If you were to re-read this article, replacing “we” and “you” with “the business” or “the organisation”, then most of it would make just as much sense. Corporate identity needs to be as flexible as personal identity, evolving with integrity by adopting the practices that inculcate the habits conducive to a successful and flourishing business.

“To thine own self be true” requires recognising that there is no single, fixed self. A clear sense of identity is based not on a conception of an immutable self but on a coherent idea of the narrative each of us is writing for ourselves and of the values that underpin it.

70 THE FOCUS Identity Panel

According to management thought leader Herminia Ibarra, the only way to grow is by stretching the limits of who you are.

Leading figures from a variety of fields describe the transition that had the strongest impact on their leadership identity.

“I had to face my fears and trust others to help us get to where we wanted to go.”

Blake Mycoskie, Founder and Chief Shoe Giver, TOMS

Today, the idea of a social entrepreneur is generally defined and understood. But when I started TOMS, this definition and career path actually didn’t exist. For me, a transition clearly happened when I changed my way of thinking about business as solely a way to earn money and profits, and instead starting thinking about giving and mission.

And how incorporating giving into business would actually make that business stronger in the long term. This did not happen overnight, and it did not come easy. I had to face my fears and trust so many others to help us get to where we wanted to go. But I realize now that it helped shape my identity not only as the Chief Shoe Giver at TOMS, but as a person who hopefully can have a positive influence on business for many years to come.

TOMS While visiting Argentina in 2006, entrepreneur Blake Mycoskie, born 1976, witnessed intense poverty and what it really meant to be shoeless. He then created Shoes For A Better Tomorrow, later shortened to TOMS and the “One for One” business model: for every pair of shoes sold, his company would donate a pair of shoes for those in need.

Today TOMS shoes are sold globally in more than 1,000 stores. In 2011, TOMS added eyeglasses to its “One for One” offering. Since 2014, TOMS Roasting has been selling coffee and in return donating fresh water to people in supplier countries.

Having been in motorsports since the age of eight, and always been in the minority as a female, there have been many stages of my professional career which have impacted on my identity. However, the move from racing for Mercedes-Benz in the German Touring Car Championship to Formula One in 2012 has had the strongest effect by far. F 1 is one of the most competitive and lucrative sports in the world, and is also male-dominated. Since transitioning to F 1 I have stretched the limits of who I am – both physically and mentally. I found my own way in a tough sport and stayed true to myself. I focus on performance, train extremely hard to be the best I can be and support the team. Gender continues to be a debate in Formula One, but my mantra is “we are all defined by our strengths and character, not by our gender” and I will continue to stand by this.

Susie Wolff is one of the few women who have graduated to the top level of motor racing in Formula One. As a child, Wolff, who comes from Scotland, would accompany her father to races and began her own career in kart racing. She made her debut in Formula motor sport back in 2000, before racing touring cars for Mercedes-Benz from 2006 to 2012. She became Formula One test driver for Williams in 2012 and when she took part in free practice sessions at the 2014 British and German grands prix she became the first woman to drive in F 1 for 22 years.

“We are all defined by our strengths and character, not by our gender.”

Susie Wolff, Formula One racing driver

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“Probably the most important source of personal development is ‘overextension.’ ” Andrea Illy, President and CEO, illycaffè

Competition changes markets. So in order to survive, companies need to continuously adapt, by changing what they do and how they do it.

Something similar happened to me and my company 25 years ago when we decided to completely rethink our quality management principles and supply chain. Another aspect to be taken into consideration is the exponential growth of complexity in the socio-economic environment. This puts a lot of pressure on delivering and requires a special attitude, known as ‘overextension.’ It means working beyond one’s own capacities and is probably the most important source of personal development. And last but not least: how to get this done by thousands of people? The answer is leadership. But can you really learn leadership? I rather think that one pursues leadership, like a utopia. You’ll never reach it but you keep trying harder. Every day. illycaffè was founded in 1933 by Francesco Illy as a small coffee roasting enterprise in Triest. Andrea Illy, born 1964, now represents the third generation at the helm of the family firm. Today, illy sells a single top-quality blend of espresso to 140 countries around the world, although the company’s portfolio also includes coffee machines, designer cups and accessories. Worldwide distribution is supported not least by a franchise chain comprising over 200 coffee bars and a network of top international baristi. illycaffé takes a strong stand on sustainability and purchases its raw materials direct from local coffee farmers in South America, Africa and Asia.

The transition that had the strongest impact on me came in 2007, in the form of a painful wakeup call. Sleepdeprived and exhausted, I fainted, hit my head on my desk, and broke my cheekbone. In the wake of my collapse, I found myself going from doctor to doctor, to find out if there was any underlying medical problem beyond exhaustion. There wasn’t, but doctors’ waiting rooms were good places for me to ask myself a lot of questions about the kind of life I was living. I had other times when I should have woken up but didn’t. This time I really did and made many changes in the way I live, including adopting daily practices to keep me on track. The result is a more fulfilling life, one that gives me breathing spaces and a deeper perspective. And as a leader, I’m much better equipped to transcend upsets and setbacks.

Arianna Huffington is an author and journalist with Greek roots. In 2005 together with Kenneth Lerer she founded the online newspaper Huffington Post, since when she has been widely considered one of the world’s most influential writers. Her political influence on US public opinion has won her the moniker Citizen Huff. Moving on from the more Republican views she expressed in the 1980 s, today she considers herself a progressive populist and in 2003 ran as an independent candidate for governor of California against Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“Doctors’ waiting rooms were good places to ask myself a lot of questions about the kind of life I was living.”

Arianna Huffington, Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief, The Huffington Post

72 THE FOCUS Identity Global minds

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The shifting nature of home

Where you come from may be far less important than where you’re going

by Pico Iyer Many-homed people

Illustration: Paul Davis

Not being given a set nationality or single passport when you’re born forces you to take conscious measures to define yourself and decide where you want to be – choices that earlier generations did not face so often.

I’ve always loved that moment in Graham Greene’s classic novel of Vietnam, The Quiet American, in which the English protagonist, Thomas Fowler, tells a French friend in Saigon that he’s been summoned back to his head office. “Home?” the Frenchman asks. “No,” says Fowler. “England.”

I couldn’t have put it better. An Englishman may think of England as the opposite of home, and yet may feel entirely at home in exotic and seductive Vietnam, with which he has no official connection. A typical European today, especially if she’s of student age and in a city like Paris or Berlin, may have so many places she thinks of as home that the word suggests an anthology of locations, a mix of her parents’ homeland, the culture her partner speaks for, the city where she went to school – and the one she dreams of visiting. Some of us have grown up with such a fluid and portable sense of home that we’re most at home now when mixing and matching partial homes – or in some major city that brings our homes together.

Last summer, to take one example, I returned to England, where I was born and spent most of my first 21 years. But I was seeing my hometown of Oxford in part through the eyes of my Japanese wife, and no one has ever thought of me (thanks to my Indian features) as a classic Englishman.

Then I headed back to my home in California, where my mother (sari-clad and raised in British India) lives; we’ve been officially based in Santa Barbara for almost fifty years now, but never begin to sound or think like Americans. Then I set off for Japan, the country where I truly feel at home, though I’ve been there for 27 years on a tourist visa, and never wear Japanese clothes, barely eat Japanese food and speak Japanese only as a threeyear-old girl might. My real home, I sometimes think, is an airport, or any of those modern cities – Melbourne, Singapore, Vancouver – where most of the people around me are permanently sorting through different selves, thinking of “home” as a sentence they never quite complete.

This is the way the world is going, lightningfast. There are now more than 230 million people living in countries not their own – in other words, four times more many-homed people than live in Australia and Canada combined; the number is increasing so quickly that within a genera-

74 THE FOCUS Identity Global minds

tion there’ll be more of us than there are Americans. The average person you meet on the streets of Toronto is what used to be called a “foreigner,” someone born in a very different country. Many, many of these travelers are, of course, exiles, who never wanted to leave their homes, and ache to go back home. But for the fortunate among us, it makes for possibilities our grandparents would not have recognized.

Go to the Cineplex, and you’re watching a partly Chinese, partly Hawaiian, partly English (and deeply Canadian) actor born in Beirut and partly raised in Australia (Keanu Reeves), or an actress who’s Danish and Mexican and FrenchCanadian and therefore all-American (Jessica Alba). Turn on the TV, and the world’s most famous golfer is so mixed up – Thai and Chinese and African-American and perhaps many more – that he’s devised words such as “Cablinasian” to try to describe his nationality; most of us find it easiest just to call him “Tiger.” Look at the White House, and you see a half-Kenyan man, partly raised in Indonesia, with a Buddhist sister and a ChineseCanadian brother-in-law, whose first book was as thoughtful and passionately honest a look at shifting identities as exists.

It’s hard for those born to this mingled and crisscrossing world to appreciate just how quickly our world is changing in this way. As a boy in Oxford, I never set eyes on another child with dark skin, and when my parents and I moved to California, it was years before, as immigrants from India, we ceased to be a rare novelty. When I was in graduate school, Canada’s biggest city was still known as “Toronto the Grey,” because it seemed so uniform and far from diversity. No one then had heard of “World Music” or fusion cuisine; the norm was still the life known by my grandparents, in which people were all but assigned homes, selves and castes at birth, and had little chance of escaping them. Home was less a partner that you chose than an ancestry that you inherited.

This erosion of all the hard-and-fast distinctions of old makes for any number of fresh challenges: many a young woman – if half-Korean and half-Canadian, say, and studying Spanish while on her way to a study-abroad program in Hanoi – doesn’t know what to say when people ask her where she comes from. She doesn’t fully belong to any one category, as her grandparents did, and she can sometimes feel neither here nor there. Not being given a set nationality or single passport when you’re born forces you to take conscious

A conversation with Pico Iyer – please watch the video at www.egonzehnder.com /the-focus /video

measures to define yourself and decide where you want to be – choices that earlier generations did not have to face so often.

But my sense is that such a young woman is part of a fast-growing tribe that is itself a new, floating community of its own. A half-Thai, halfGerman young man will instantly feel aligned with her, if only because they share the same questions, and the same inclusive sense of home. And out of their union will come entirely new com­ binations: the leading young American writers today mostly have names (from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Edwidge Danticat) that most young Americans can’t pronounce. For all of them, home is a work-in-progress; a collage to which they’re constantly adding new elements; a mosaic in perpetual motion.

Defining ourselves More and more of us, I suspect, identify ourselves less by our passports than by our passions; and defining ourselves by our values and our interests, what we care about, can allow us to step a little outside the divisions that nation-states and tribes enforce. I often feel I have more in common with someone who loves Thai food, or relishes the Icelandic post-rock group Sigur Rós, or who feels at home in transit zones, than with anyone who happens to share my Indian name, my English place of birth or my American passport; if you ask me who I am, I will probably begin by talking about my wife, the monastery I’ve been regularly visiting since 1991, my favorite book or film, or what inspires me, more than I’ll need to talk about

75

Photos: Scott London

nationalities. For me, where I come from is much less important than where I’m going.

Many around us, of course, are still deeply rooted; they may be living in the same house in which they grew up, and close to their grandparents and generations of forebears. But even they, very likely, are having to think anew about traditional ideas of identity and home as all the world streams into their neighborhood. Certainly, if they’re living in a typical modern city, from Hong Kong to Los Angeles to Zurich or Sydney, they’re likely surrounded by Iranian businessmen and Mexican restaurants and Indian yoga teachers and Ethiopians. Nothing remains fixed in our fastmoving new world, and even if you’re not moving, the world is constantly moving around you.

This raises questions that humans have never had to address so insistently before; it also brings problems. My sense, after 40 years spent crisscrossing the globe, is that our sense of distinctness is not going away, and the more old divisions fade, the more new ones appear. If we don’t discriminate against people so often now on the basis of their race or religion, we still treat them differently if they’re young or old, blond or brunette, from Brooklyn or Savannah or North Dakota or Beverly Hills. It’s not as if tribalism itself has disappeared as clear distinctions have; it just takes different forms.

I’m one of those people, though, who chooses to see the glass as half-full, and wants to rejoice in the opportunities my grandparents could not have known – to live in a place that feels a secret home, to define myself outside of ancestry, and

to enjoy convergences between cultures that were unimaginable when I was born. When I was at school, there were 1,250 students at my school near London, and all of them were boys. Fully 1,230 of them were white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants from the same small section of society; even the handful of Jewish and Catholic boys stood out. Nowadays, when I revisit that school, most of the faces I see seem to be Chinese and Korean and Russian and an endlessly evolving combination of all of the above. Their sentences, their dreams, the school’s classrooms all seem more invigorated, more full of shifting potential, than ever.

So I was delighted to “go home” this summer to England – and to Japan and to southern California. All those places are interesting to me in part because they’re all a little foreign. It’s wonderful to have a very fixed and certain sense of home, as most of us do when we’re asked about our faith, our loved ones, even where we live; but the world sometimes forces us to be adaptable, as it did when my house in Santa Barbara burned down one evening in a forest fire and, suddenly, I lost everything I owned in the world.

The next morning, when I woke up – the only thing I owned was a toothbrush I’d just bought from an all-night supermarket – if someone asked me, “Where is home?” I couldn’t point to any physical construction. Home would have to lie in the affections and connections and beliefs I carried round inside of me. Lacking a single, visible home, I – like so many of us now – would have to seek out new ways of making myself at home wherever I happened to be.

Pico Iyer is the author of The Global Soul, The Open Road (about the global citizen known as the XIVth Dalai Lama) and many other books exploring the new meanings of home, and the new possibilities for identity, in our mobile world.

76 THE FOCUS Identity Inspiration

77

Cultivating inner awareness, unlocking hidden capacities Founded a half-century ago on a new vision of human possibility, the Esalen Institute helped spawn avant-garde ideas and practices that have moved into the mainstream.

Today the center is building off that legacy by preparing a new generation for the challenges of twenty-first century leadership.

by Scott London Tucked away on an isolated stretch of California’s majestic Big Sur Coast about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, the Esalen Institute has been at the forefront of the human potential movement for over half a century. The ideas and practices that came out of Esalen in the 1960 s and ’70 s have influenced the cultural conversation on a wide range of fronts, from science and health to psychology and education. They have shaped how we think about relationships, what we eat, how we pray, and how we search for meaning and direction in our lives. It hardly seems surprising that the series finale of Mad Men, which just aired this spring, would depict its main character undergoing a personal breakthrough in an Esalen-like workshop set on the picturesque cliffs of Big Sur. Today many of Esalen’s programs focus on personal growth and self-development, just as they did a half-century ago. But the institute has broadened its focus and directed more of its resources and energies to social responsibility, conscious leadership, and how to engage and transform pressing global issues.

“Our mission has always emphasized both personal development and social transformation,” says Esalen’s president Gordon Wheeler.

“But we haven’t always been good at putting those ­together. We’ve done that in a more intentional way over the last ten years.”

Esalen’s CEO Tricia McEntee stresses that there has been an intentional shift at the institute “from me to we” in recent years.

The mission of Esalen is to serve the world, she says, not be a ­refuge from it. “I think there is a sense of urgency to take our personal growth out into the world to make positive change.”

Nothing exemplifies this outward shift more than the ­institute’s focus on leadership development. Esalen’s Integral Leader­ship Program, now in its fourth year, is aimed at in­ spiring and supporting the next generation of conscious leaders. The month-­long certificate program explores a range of conscious leadership skills critical in today’s world. They ­include emotional intelligence, ecological awareness, cross-­ cultural communication, conflict resolution, and self-expression.

George Kohlrieser, an organizational psychologist and ­author who has been leading workshops at Esalen since 1976, says the program is not aimed at teaching traditional leadership skills so much as learning to lead yourself. As he sees it, that is something many leaders are not very good at. “If you’re not leading yourself, how are you going to lead others, and how do you expect them to trust you enough to follow?”

The program is experiential by design. Students learn to communicate effectively, deal with conflict, and cultivate emotional insight and awareness. The emotional component is ­critical, Kohlrieser says. “I find that many leaders are confused on this question. There is a tendency to think that if you show emotions, you’re a weak leader. But unless you can understand and harness the power of your feelings in every aspect of your work, you’re more likely to alienate people than to inspire them.”

Part of the program’s appeal is that it combines traditional coursework in conscious leadership with a residential immersion

78 THE FOCUS Identity Inspiration

Michael Murphy (left) co-founded the Esalen Institute in 1962. Today the organization is led by president Gordon Wheeler (right).

experience. That includes daily movement classes, group awareness workshops, presentations by guest speakers, access to Esalen’s famous hot springs, and work in the kitchen, the cabins, the farm and garden, or one of the other departments.

The Integral Leadership Program is not so much a departure from Esalen’s original mission as a natural extension of it. When Michael Murphy and Richard Price, two charismatic Stanford ­University graduates, founded the Institute in 1962, their goal was to create a place where ­people could explore and develop their latent human capacities. Inspired by William James, ­Aldous Huxley, Teilhard de Chardin, and other champions of human possibility, they created a new kind of learning center, one devoted to self-development through practices that brought together mind, body, heart, and spirit.

Within a few short years, Esalen had become not just a flourishing institute but a leading ­laboratory of the human potential movement.

Groundbreaking thinkers, artists, psychologists,

scientists, and philosophers came to Esalen to teach, among them historian Arnold Toynbee, psychologist Fritz Perls, mythologist Joseph Campbell, philosopher Alan Watts, theologian Paul Tillich, and two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling.

There were seminars and lectures on a seemingly endless variety of subjects, many of them edgy, offbeat, and ahead of their time. On any given week there were lectures on East-meets-­ West spirituality, gestalt therapy sessions, Rolfing classes, ­encounter groups, permaculture intensives, yoga training, and workshops on Reiki and other forms of healing.

Over the past half-century, the spirit of exploration and ­experimentation has evolved. The heady days of the 1960 s and ’70 s, when Esalen was at the crossroads of the counterculture, have given way to a more low-key, reflective, and communal ­atmosphere. Today the institute offers more than 500 programs a year and continues to explore innovative and boundary-­ spanning ideas, techniques, and practices for cultivating a more complete life.

Gordon Wheeler has been leading the Esalen Institute, either as CEO or as president, for the past 13 years. A distinguished clinical psychologist and the author of several books on Gestalt psychology, he has spent much of his career consulting with

79

­ rganizations on strategic planning, values clarification, and o mission development. These skills were crucial in restructuring Esalen’s internal organization about a decade ago as well as in strengthening the institute’s overall commitment to public service.

When I meet Wheeler on a warm afternoon in March, I’m struck immediately by his easy charm and calm, unhurried ­demeanor. The conversation ranges freely and he seems equally at ease discussing psychological concepts, models of education, and the latest trends in management – often skipping between them to illustrate or drive home a point.

“Leadership training is a multibillion dollar industry around the world now,” he tells me. “What’s behind the explosion of leadership education, I believe, is the sheer complexity of the world today. Everything is interconnected and every problem has multiple dimensions. It can be overwhelming.”

Where do we find leaders who can grapple with this kind of complexity? Wheeler says we need leaders with a high degree of self-awareness and self-mastery. The Integral Leadership ­Program tries to cultivate that by giving young leaders an intensive, interdisciplinary experience, one that brings together ­personal development, emotional connection, somatics, social and group intelligence, and lifelong learning.

By integral leadership, Wheeler means an approach that ­integrates multiple dimensions of the self – heart, mind, body, spirit, and relationships with others. “These are all aspects of our whole self; they can’t be cut off from each other,” he says.

“When you develop each of those capacities, they interplay and allow you to deal with complexity more effectively.”

Relationships are a vital component – not an add-on, but an integral part of the curriculum. “Relationships are a crucial dimension of being human,” he insists. “It’s part of who you are from birth. Our brains are formed by relationships. They are hard-wired, particularly in the first year of life, through relational patterning. We’ve got to capture that whole integral vision in the training curriculum for leaders.”

Compared with the curricula at major business schools and leadership institutes, this approach may seem unconventional, even radical. But Wheeler says it is consistent with practices that have been taught at Esalen since the 1960 s – long before leadership development became the watchword it is today.

“Fifty years ago,” says Wheeler, “the whole idea of lifelong ­personal growth – the kind that integrates cognitive, emotional, and social development – wasn’t there.” That is changing. The fact that so many corporations, universities, and government agencies are sending their leaders to training programs today shows that an academic education alone does not go far enough in preparing people for the demands of twenty-first century leadership.

Perched atop the rugged splendor of California’s Central Coast, Esalen exists to serve the world, accord­ ing to its mission statement, not as a refuge from it.

We need leaders today with a high degree of self-awareness and self-mastery.

At 84, Esalen’s co-founder Michael Murphy is no longer active in running the institute’s day-to-day operations. But as chairman emeritus of the board and director of Esalen’s Center for Theory and Research, Murphy is still very much a presence at the institute. When I visit him at his home in Mill Valley, just north of San Francisco, he greets me with the hearty enthusiasm and easy wit for which he is well known.

Esalen has grown and matured over the past half-century, but Murphy stresses that its ani­ mating mission remains essentially the same – to ­nur­ture our highest human capacities and to “broaden the repertoire” of education by actively engaging mind, body, emotions, and spirit. “All of us can cultivate these hidden human reserves,” he insists. “You don’t have to be a prodigy or a genius, by common standards. We’re all coiled springs.”

In retrospect, he finds that a lot of the radical ideas that came through Esalen in the 1960 s and

80 THE FOCUS Identity Inspiration

’70 s have now been absorbed into the cultural mainstream.

Take yoga, for example. “There were probably about 20 yoga studios in America when we started Esalen. Now there are 20,000.” The same can be said of somatics – movement-based therapies like Rolfing, Feldenkrais, and the Alexander method.

“There was no field of somatics back then. Now everybody I know has had some bodywork or other.”

One of the more surprising developments today, he finds, is the growing popularity of mindfulness. Rooted in the tradition of Buddhist meditation, the practice has spread through the culture like wildfire. Mindfulness training is now as common in the executive suite and the athletic facility as it is at the retreat center. Oftentimes mindfulness is used as a means of stress-­ reduction rather than spiritual awakening. But even in its more watered-down forms, he feels that mindfulness represents a real evolutionary leap in the culture.

Some of the ideas and practices taken up in the early years of Esalen were failures, Murphy now admits. “But that’s true with all evolutionary experiments. Only a tiny percentage actually work. That’s okay. The universe is an experiment, a cosmic jazz band.” The spirit of experimentation is still alive and well at

­Esalen, but there has been a lot of “winnowing” in the public programs, he says. “A lot of lessons were learned through the mistakes.”

These lessons are a mark of how the institute has evolved. “People always assume that evolution implies linear progress,” he says, “but that’s a mistake. Evolution is never linear. It meanders more than it progresses. If you look at our culture, you can see that it’s always evolving. But along some lines it hasn’t progressed. Along others, it has regressed, or simply plateaued.” This is why experimentation is so vital to any organization – ­it opens up new pathways to growth when ­others lead astray or turn back on themselves.

It is somewhat ironic that Murphy has become an influential voice among management phi­losophers and leadership experts. Ironic because he does not profess to understand the corporate world, yet is an astute and successful businessman. Ironic, too, because he has steadfastly ­refused to play the guru role, yet has become recognized as one of the pioneers of the human potential movement.

Asked what advice he has for young leaders today, Murphy leans back in his chair and pauses for a moment. “I think you always have to build with your strengths and go to your calling,” he says pensively. “The question is, what turns you on? You can always develop the skills you’re short on. But sometimes, in developing those, you thwart other parts of yourself. What I’ve come to realize is that it’s better to fail in your own dharma than to succeed in somebody else’s.”

The idea of finding and following your inner calling was central to the work of Abraham Maslow, the humanistic psychologist and close friend of Murphy’s who taught at Esalen in the early years. Instead of focusing on the neurotics favored by traditional psychologists, Maslow studied peak performers – those who had attained a measure of what he called “self-actualization.”

One of his enduring findings was that self-actual­ ized individuals are motivated by something larger than themselves. They become mission-driven.

Murphy says this impulse is reflected in the proliferation of nonprofits and NGOs today – organizations that serve some pressing social need or public good. In the United States alone, there are now half a million nonprofits operating in the public interest. “The majority of them

Authentic leaders are guided from within. They take their cues from some purpose larger than themselves.

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Esalen offers young leaders an intensive, interdisciplinary experience that brings together personal development, somatics, emotional intelligence, and social and group awareness.

are little mom-and-pop operations – organizations of just a few people. But what an array of leaders!”

What this suggests is that authentic leaders are guided from within. They take their cues from some purpose or problem outside themselves.

The implications of this for leadership development are profound, because it means that any training not aimed at cultivating inner awareness and unlocking our hidden capacities is limited in its usefulness.

While there are other leadership institutes and business schools teaching integral leadership ­today, Michael Murphy and Gordon Wheeler both say the program is unique in bringing ­together so many different aspects of who and what we are.

“Of course it has the intellectual learning components,” Wheeler says, “but it has these other dimensions as well.”

“There are some fabulous organizations training people to do cross-cultural, cross-boundary,

peacemaking work,” he observes. “But when I ask the people who are training leaders about the embodied dimension, which is so central to learning and empathic attunement, they say, ‘Well, we don’t know how to put that in our training program – ­that’s what we come to Esalen for.’ So, we’ve developed a program that puts that in.”

George Kohlrieser sees it as a unique alternative to more traditional leadership programs and business schools where you have to “respect the boundaries,” as he puts it. Esalen cre­ ates a safe space to step out of your comfort zone and take risks.

“I don’t know of any other place in the world that offers students the same opportunities to open themselves.”

As Wheeler sees it, Esalen has always sought to push bound­ aries and explore new frontiers. The goal of the leadership ­program, he says, is not to replicate what other schools and programs are doing, but rather to broaden the training available to young leaders by spanning multiple disciplines of modes of understanding. “We are one small institute on the cliff on the edge of the western world. Our niche at Esalen is looking for the next thing, and helping it emerge.”

Scott London is a California-based journalist, photographer, and radio presenter.

82 THE FOCUS Identity

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Identity Identity – the very Latin roots of the term (čdem, the same) point to the alignment of the inner self on the one hand and our actions and demeanor on the other. Psychologists and philosophers no longer consider identity as the stable and immutable core of our personality, but as a fluid state, changing under the impact of age and experience and by no means immune to inconsistencies.

Compared to the relatively linear lives people led in the past, today we face multiple options at every turn. At the same time, the search for our own identity and for authenticity is more challenging than ever. Against this backdrop, an understanding of the deeper layers of our personality that constitute our identity is an important precondition not only for personal growth but also for successful and fulfilling professional development.