The $500B University

In the context of some strategy work we’re doing for one of the leading schools of public health, I’ve found myself thinking about the 20-30 year evolutionary paths of major universities more broadly.  With returns on assets and capital campaign successes even significantly lower than what we’ve seen in recent years, Harvard should amass an endowment that reaches $500B in today’s dollars by 2030.  That represents a net worth as great as the largest private enterprises in the world.  Yale, Princeton and others will presumably not be very far behind.

It is my belief that concentrations of assets will fundamentally change the nature of the role that the largest universities play regarding issues of global concern.  The pressure to change tax treatments of universities will inevitably grow, well before any endowment hits $500B, and in order to address those pressures, universities will need to expand their spheres of concern and learn to make different kinds of promises of broader public relevance.  The changes could be even more significant than those that result from the rise of truly massive private foundations, such as Gates today.

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The Mindset & Skillset to Start from Scratch

One of the current Marshall Scholars reached out to me as an alumnus to ask for support for a new political organization called Vote from Home.  I couldn’t make their fundraising event, but reached out to two of the founders, Marc Gustafson and Ross Baird, to get their story.  With tongue a little bit in cheek, they shared:

Vote From Home started because we couldn’t get a burrito shop going.  A few of us Marshalls were walking through the Oxford University Parks one day, talking about how much we missed Mexican food.  We came across a guy who runs a crepe van in the parks.  We thought, “Surely it wouldn’t be too hard to start this.”  And after talking with him through the minutiae of getting a license alone, we thought it would be hard.  But we did come away from that with a resolve that whatever we put our mind to, we wanted to try (as an entrepreneurial venture) and do (because we thought we could).  Now, the three of us talked about Obama almost daily.  We had all, living abroad, taken a serious interest in foreign policy, and Obama’s position on that, as well as his other substantive ideas, got us interested in doing what we could to get elected.  So a few of us went out to dinner and talked about what we could do.  I had done serious research on voter turnout in undergraduate; Marc had worked extensively on the Dean Campaign, and a few others had various political experience.  Finally, we settled on the strategy of absentee/early voting as an untapped resource to drive turnout, and a new law in Ohio (combined with Ohio’s strategic importance and the fact that a couple of us had Ohio roots)  led us to try out this strategy here. 

There is a certain very learnable skill here: asking the practical questions needed to figure out how an idea becomes reality, figuring out what size bite to take of an idea (large enough to matter, small enough to maximize the odds of getting off the ground), building a coalition to launch something that has enough different skills to be formidable and not so many people as to be unwieldy.  We have an opportunity to better educate people — at school or in organizations — about more of these basics.  That education, and the permission it implies, could unlock tremendous entrepreneurial potential.  And potentially change the outcome of an election….

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Leadership Development: A Calling, Not a Profession?

Two experiences in the past couple of days underscored a theme aligned with the comments I’ve made about the “new HR.” 

Over the weekend, read Jennifer Reingold’s excellent piece on Bill Campbell, the leading leadership coach in Silicon Valley, who applies his own combination of sports wisdom, executive experience, common sense, and learnings from having observed more first-rate companies than almost anyone else in the tech scene.  Bill is clearly someone whose calling as a leader and whose calling as a coach are of a piece.

Today, had the opportunity to meet Charlotte Sibley at Shire Pharmaceuticals, until recently their SVP of Global Business Research, and now their head of Leadership Development.  Charlotte is a serial market research function builder (Pfizer, BMS, Millenium, Pharmacia, etc.) and truth teller, in an industry where the stakes for each product make it particularly challenging to tell the truth.  She gave a wonderful speech  as the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association Woman of the Year this past year.  Charlotte had a clear, no-nonsense view of what leadership development needs to accomplish at Shire at this pivotal moment in their evolution.

In large business today, we have an almost-irresitable urge to professionalize everything.  It is not clear that leadership development is an endeavor that fits this model well.  Yes, there is room for specialized expertise.  But there is an even more important need for deeply experienced leaders to scale up their commitment to develop others.  They can use the best of the methdologies out there — but those are purchasable.  What can’t be bought is the wisdom & credibility that comes from having forged one’s own way. 

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Launching People Who Launch Experiments That Matter

I was recently catching up with Leila Chirayath, who left Katzenbach Partners about 18 months ago to launch Samasource, an innovator in the field of socially responsible outsourcing.  Leila’s early focus is on building a stronger market for offshore capabilities in Kenya.

I was excited to see the Katzenbach alumni community rallying around Leila’s early-stage venture in ways that were in no sense planned from the center.  From Leila’s note to me:

The Katzenbach alumni community has been incredibly helpful — Brooke provided input on a zero-draft definition of “ethical outsourcing” that we’re using to convey the social impact of what we do, and Michael Dawson helped me interview a couple of CTO candidates and think through some early challenges. Thanks to an introduction Michael made, we launched a partnership with oDesk  — a major milestone for an organization as small as ours.

One of my aspirations for our firm is that ultimately we have as great a decentralized an impact on the world, through connections among the people who spend time with us, as a first-rate small college.  The great firms of the past have certainly met that standard — and to think of our impact over a time frame of decades, through the lives & ideas of hundreds (eventually thousands) of people whose life courses are in some way altered for the better by what they have learned and experienced with us, is a good counterbalance to the urgencies of the moment.

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A Working Definition of Leadership

Reading Joseph Nye’s new book on leadership as pre-reading for the US-Japan Leadership Exchange and reflecting on the definition of leadership.  Many of the definitions I’ve seen don’t feel like they pin down the phenomenon finely enough.

A working definition for “to lead” (to exercise leadership) that I’m playing with is:

To inspire committed action behind a credible promise to achieve a purpose beyond one’s easy grasp. 

I think just as Nietzsche talks about man as the animal that makes promises, a central part of what leaders do is to make promises — promises that neither they nor anyone knows the precise recipe for how to keep (”beyond one’s easy grasp”).  Leadership isn’t just the invention of possibilities: the promises must be credible.  And leadership isn’t just a gesture towards what might be (or even what in fact could be) achieved — it needs to inspire action, committed action, behind a purpose worthy of those kinds of fundamentally emotional stances.

Perhaps this definition does too much work in separating the grist of leadership from the chaff.  I’ll be curious to get some reactions to it, and see what holds water and what doesn’t.  Some other defintions I’ve skimmed might help. 

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The “New HR”? (And “New IT,” “New Finance,” etc.?)

Two people I admire, Matt Breitfelder and Daisy Wademan, just published an article in HBR  about their experience practicing what they call the “new HR.”  They describe very powerful work they are involved in that combines a few critical facets:

• Solving business problems that don’t fit any defined organizational unit well
• Engaging emerging leaders in this problem solving in a way that they learn fundamentally new skills — from seeing new kinds of problems and from working with colleagues who have skills different from the colleagues with whom they ordinarily work
• Embedding exposure to new tools in this work, so that the participating leaders get accelerated “practice field” experience with tools and techniques they can use more broadly

Almost every organization does too little of this kind of work, and Daisy and Matt are on to a form of practice that has broad and powerful applicability.  The question that their article raises for me is whether the destiny of the kind of work they do is to form the nucleus of a “new HR” or whether we should over the next decade or two see the evolution away from Human Resources as a major distinct function of our organizations.

Just as the growth of IT organizations came out of big, administratively complex, difficult to change systems that required massive numbers of people with very specialized skills to operate, the growth of HR organizations came out of a fundamentally administrative era in the development of large organizations.  Should the kind of strategic interventions that Matt and Daisy do be grouped under the same executives who are concerned with overseeing PeopleSoft upgrades and (outsourced) provision of benefits?  One might equally ask whether a Chief Information Officer with a large integrated organization makes sense ten years out, as systems built around an SAP-like philosophy increasingly give way to cloud computing, and easier-to-modify platforms like salesforce.com. 

Strategic work is inherently integrative.  Should strategic HR, strategic Finance, strategic application of Technology, and so on have boundaries between them?  Large organizations do need people to make systems coherent and interoperable, employee policies consistent, and financial statements accurate.  We are at a moment in history, however, when it is time to ask what kinds of organization can deliver both those needs for enterprise-wider order and the needs for integrating “new HR” thinking with “new IT” thinking and all the rest of the kinds of innovation that uneasily within the functional organizations we have today.

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Intelligence is Expensive

Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote a lovely piece in the Times about intelligence vs instinct.  He describes, beautifully, how intelligence is a slower, more resource-intensive way to get to the right response to one’s conditions than instinct, if there’s any way to make instinct work.  Of course what makes intelligence valuable is its flexibility to respond to unanticipated conditions.

There is a similar pattern in organizations.  If culture can make the right response reflexive, that’s a much cheaper and more consistent way to deliver results than organizational deliberation.  Strategic planners, take note!  The problem of course comes when an organization must change — but before dismissing instinct, we should all reflect on how infrequently strategic plans imply this kind of real, instinct-overturning change.

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Self Censorship

Interesting discussion with one of our practice leaders early today about releasing half-baked ideas as part of how we stay in the flow of discussion with a larger number of people in the telecom industry.  Made me think about how broad a spectrum we have among our own senior people in terms of high self-censorship — only release ideas when they REALLY stand up to scrutiny — to low self-censorship.

I personally find it helpful to associate with a fair number of people whose self-censorship is much lower than mine.  They expose me to ideas that are important earlier.  They have the courage to stake territory around a theme before there’s really a breakthrough idea.

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Last year, my fiancee Uyen and I took this whole battery of tests from Johnson O’Connor — an organization that has been measuring inborn aptitudes since the early 20th century.  One of the things they measure is Ideaphoria (roughly, generativity irrespective of quality), which they get at mostly by just making you write as many associations with a topic as you can come up with in a bounded time and then adjusting for the speed of your handwriting.  Would be interesting to know more about how this variable relates to success in different parts of business, and certainly true that one can be too high on this dimension as well as too low.

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Finding the Next 500 Great Entrepreneurs in Emerging Markets

I just had the opportunity to participate in a brainstorming session with Molly Lindsay from Endeavor, the non-profit focused on supporting entrepreneurs in emerging markets that Thomas Friedman called “the best anti-poverty solution of all.” Molly is leading Endeavor’s Where They Are Now project, looking back at the 300+ entrepreneurs Endeavor has supported over their ten years in operation and learning about the patterns of what makes entrepreneurs in emerging markets successful and how to help overcome the barriers they face. We had Chris Trimble, co-author of Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators participate to help us all think about how to look at a potentially vast number of explanatory factors and tease out from a small number of data points the variables that matter most.

Beyond underscoring the sheer human importance of accelerating the development of entrepreneurship in more countries, the brainstorm with Molly made me think about an issue that business leaders too often miss. In making investments, it is critical to state up front a thesis or rationale, some intermediate outcomes to know whether that specific investment thesis is being borne out, and to pay at least as much attention to “was the thesis true” as to “did the investment work.” So often we look only at final outcomes, and miss the question of whether events bear out the reasons behind our decisions. Many hit-driven businesses — which is increasingly most businesses — are still in their infancy in terms of learning this lesson

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