Warren Bennis

[Ursus]

Warren Bennis is the author of one of the reviews of Laura and Malcolm Gauld's book The Biggest Job® We'll Ever Have (Scribner, 2002).  His review states:

"From my fifty years of studying leadership, one single factor stands out: character. It is only character that counts in leadership and maturity. The Hyde Schools know how it's learned and developed. The Gauld's book incarnates with eloquent and moving language how Hyde achieves its miracles."

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Warren Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Business, USC, Author of Managing the Dream[/list][/list]
See HERE for pertinent previous discussion.

The following piece appeared in Compass, a publication of The Center For Public Leadership, which functions under the auspices of the John F. Kennedy School of Government and Harvard University.

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Present at the Creation
Warren Bennis and the Rise of Leadership Studies
Taking a then-nonexistent field -- "leadership" -- and making it his own is just one of Warren Bennis's landmark contributions over a career that has spanned 50 years and counting

By James O'Toole
This article appeared in 2005

IN THE SUMMER OF 1973, a covey of frustrated social scientists in Aspen, Colorado, were huddled together in unfruitful discussion about why companies often make their employees miserable and unproductive, when a voice came from the back of the room: "Have you considered the effects of a corrosive corporate culture?"

We turned to discover that we were being observed by a well-tanned, youthful, middle-aged man with a brilliant shock of white hair. Attired in fashionable tennis togs, he seemed to have stepped out of the pages of The Great Gatsby and into our little circle of ill-kempt academics.

He proceeded to beguile us with an outpouring of imaginative ideas -- all expressed in perfectly polished sentences, I must add -- designed to encourage us to think beyond the boundaries of our narrow professional world and to rethink what we thought we knew. In a mellifluous baritone voice, he asked us to consider how bureaucracy stifles people, why compassionate leaders are so rare, and what would be needed to create a healthy fit between corporate culture and the values of employees (all this in 1973, mind you). The flow of radically new ideas kept coming as if from some vast reservoir within his lithe frame.

This apparition in white, this Warren Bennis, was doubtless the most creative articulate, inspiring (and nattily dressed) scholar we ever had met.

But that was just a typical day for Warren in a 50-plus-year career of reconceptualizing how scholars and practitioners think about organizations and leadership. "He has an unparalleled ability to get a general audience excited about academic research, and at the same time to inspire academics to reframe their basic concepts," says management guru Edward Lawler. After observing him closely for more than 30 years, I believe this ability to change how others think begins with his own manifest willingness to challenge himself, to try out new ideas, and, indeed, to recreate himself.

Authoring--and reauthoring--a life

Warren often speaks of the virtue of "self-invention." Early in his own life he felt the necessity of creating a role for himself other than the one into which he was born. Because everything about Warren is so elegant and refined, those who meet him often assume that his was a privileged Brahmin upbringing with attendance at a tony Eastern prep school, perhaps topped by an Ivy League degree.

In fact, he was born into a working-class Jewish family, went off as a teenager to fight (and be wounded) in Germany as a foot soldier in World War II, and then attended Antioch College on the GI Bill (supplemented by a half-time job).

But when he says he reinvented himself after this humble beginning, he doesn't mean he created a character that is false or inauthentic. Just the opposite: "When you write your own life, you have played the game that was natural for you to play," he says. "You have kept your covenant with your own promise."

And what a promise Warren's turned out to be. One of the first to notice his potential for greatness was Douglas McGregor, who was appointed president of Antioch in Warren's sophomore year. McGregor, the father of humanistic management, became Warren's tutor, then friend, and eventually colleague and champion when they later found themselves together on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Warren, who would too soon be called on to deliver the eulogy at McGregor's funeral (he died at age 58), has described his mentor as "a born innovator, a born experimente ... If there was anything he was trying to overcome or destroy, it was the institutional habit of talking about the virtue of democracy while running affairs autocratically." With those words, Warren could have been describing his own character, beliefs, and behavior, his "root effort" over a five-decade career "to make organizations decent and human places" in exactly the way McGregor advocated and practiced.

You now may be assuming that Warren took his MIT doctorate in psychology, sociology, or some other cuddly social science. His degree is actually in hardheaded economics, and his teachers included Nobel-Prize winners Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, and Franco Modigliani. Warren could do his math. Nonetheless, he grew uncomfortable with MIT's quantitative approach to social science, "with its belief that all certifiable truths about human behavior could be predicted with scientific certainty. I wasn't sure about that then and am even more dubious about it today," he recalled in 1993.

So, with his freshly minted economics doctorate, Warren reinvented his academic career. He migrated across the river to Boston University, then down river to Harvard, and then back to MIT, where he mixed with, learned from, and ultimately joined forces with a hearty band of heretics who were following McGregor's attempt to reinvent management studies with a humanistic bias. Among them: Herb Shepard, Erving Goffman, Norbert Wiener, Carl Rogers, Edward Schein, and Abraham Maslow (Warren would deliver Maslow's eulogy, too).

Groundbreaking work in organizational development and leadership studies

Through exposure to these and many others who collectively constitute a Who's Who of 20th-century social science, Warren found his true self, his calling, and ultimately his place among them. His first product was a coauthored volume, The Planning of Change (1961), which crystallized the nascent field of organizational development, drawing together the latest social science thinking about how to transform static, authoritarian, and bureaucratic institutions into vibrant, creative, and democratic workplaces. The phrase "change agent" was introduced in that volume and, three editions later, the book is still the bible for those involved in organizational transformation.

Soon thereafter Warren made his mark with the publication of articles about democracy and leadership that would subsequently prove to have been remarkably prescient but, in the short term, established him as the most broad gauged--and literate--social scientist of his generation. For example, his 1964 Harvard Business Review article "Democracy Is Inevitable" (coauthored with Philip Slater) sang farewell to "great men" even as Brezhnev and Mao lived, arguing that they and all tyrants like them were doomed to the dustbin of history, that democracy would spread throughout the world, and, moreover, that corporate tyrants would and should suffer the same fate--and the sooner the better.

He followed this up in short order with several pieces that predicted bureaucracy itself was doomed while offering a thoughtful, human-centered alternative (the articles would appear bound between covers as Beyond Bureaucracy). He and Slater then produced The Temporary Society (1968), accurately forecasting the unsettling, virtual-organization world we live in today, and earning him a reputation for being a "futurist" after his friend Alvin Toffler drew heavily on his work in the bestselling Future Shock.

Oh, I almost forgot: along the way, Warren somehow found time to develop an interest in a then-nonexistent field that he would ultimately make his own--leadership--with the publication of his "Revisionist Theory of Leadership" in Harvard Business Review in 1961. Challenging the conventional wisdom that humanistic leaders are "too soft" and, hence, ineffective, he showed that such leaders not only are capable of making "tough" decisions, they are better for their organizations over the long term than "benevolent dictators." It seems Warren always has been busy "revisioning" things.

From academic leader to mentor of the next generation of leaders Warren's career as a guru was successfully launched by the mid-1960s, but as Tom Peters writes, "Curiosity invariably gets the best of Warren Bennis." It wasn't enough for Warren to write about leadership, he needed to test his hand by actually doing it. So he reinvented himself as an academic administrator, first as a provost at SUNY Buffalo (1967-1971), and then as president of the University of Cincinnati (1971-1978).

As Warren is the first to admit, he is by nature better at theory than practice. Nevertheless, he had some notable achievements at both institutions. He helped Buffalo get through the terrifying period of campus unrest in 1970 by advocating, in the spirit of Doug McGregor, sane, non-confrontational policies toward a temporarily insane studentry. He then saved Cincinnati financially by guiding the then-quasi-private university to safe harbor as a state institution.

Characteristically, Warren would work a 14-hour day as president, and then stay up most of the night writing about what he was learning about university administration: witness his still controversial The Leaning Ivory Tower (1973) and The Unconscious Conspiracy: Why Leaders Can't Lead (1976).

Then, with several careers behind him, Warren took time out to consider his next reinvention. But nature intervened in the process by way of an admonitory heart attack in 1973. Clearly, his days of burning the candle at both ends were over. As he lay stricken in a bed in Windsor Castle (he does have a flair for the dramatic), he decided he could be most useful in his next life by synthesizing all he had learned about organizations in his previous lives, and putting that knowledge and wisdom at the ready disposal of the next generation of leaders. As soon as he was healthy, he headed for sunny Southern California and its eponymous private university, where he has been in residence now for 25 years and running.

You have to remember that Warren has been a legend since before he was 30. In the mid-1950s, he had been the most visible part of the most controversial movement ever to hit the typically staid world of business organizations: so-called human relations, invented by Kurt Lewin, and notably (or notoriously) put into practice as "T-Groups" at the National Training Laboratories in Bethel, Maine. T-groups took many forms, but the basic idea was to bring managers together in small groups to resolve the conflicts and role strains that undercut effective working relationships. Originally developed to deal with racial tension in the workplace by surfacing the sources of conflict, T-groups, in their later manifestations at Esalen and elsewhere, led to frequent parodying of the process.

Rightly or wrongly, Warren's name was indelibly associated with the movement, and the last four generations of American graduate students have reveled in stories of that era, which, to them, appears to have been Social Science Camelot. Indeed, when I had the honor of announcing in late 1979 that Warren Bennis would be joining our faculty at USC, a newly minted Ph.D. whistled, "Wow, is he still alive?" In fact, Warren was 53 at the time.

And he was not just alive, he was ready to embark on his most productive career to date. In 1985, he and coauthor Burt Nanus produced the best-seller Leaders. A few years later, Warren followed up with his magnum opus, On Becoming a Leader. Today, as a result of those two volumes, Warren is globally renowned as the man who reinvented the field of business leadership.

Before Warren, there had been academics in business schools conducting narrow studies of leadership addressed to other academics. But it was Warren who married theory and practice in a way that served corporate leaders. He was also the first to study business leaders in the context of the organizations they led. As a skilled raconteur, prose stylist, cogent observer of behavior (to use his own language, he's a "first-class noticer"), and, above all, as one who has been there himself, Warren has made his practical lessons come alive for two generations of leaders and would-be leaders of government, business, and nonprofit institutions.

He has this knack for naming things. Take, for example, the "Wallenda Factor," that trait of positive thinking found among so many great leaders: Warren coined it after observing the tightrope walker Karl Wallenda, who, at the peak of his high-flying career, never considered the possibility that he might fall off the wire, never worried that he might fail in his self-assigned task. Similarly, Warren has found vivid and simple words to convey other complex behaviors of leaders: "taking charge," "mastering the context," "learning through reflection on experience."

But his legacy and reputation would not be as great as they are if he were merely a creative artist gifted at putting the right name on things. What matters more is that he names the right things. Ultimately, leaders are drawn to Warren and his writings in search of what Aristotle called "practical wisdom." Warren cuts through the clutter of academic research, finds the useful nugget of learning, and then places it in a context that practical men and women can understand. He is unique among business scholars in his ability to do this because he is unique among them in terms of the breadth of his knowledge and the depth of his leadership experience. Chat with most b-school profs and they'll tell you about the latest arcane article in a journal you never heard of. But spend an hour with Warren and you are in the company of the wisest and most insightful of men and women, learning what the likes of Shakespeare, Beckett, Brecht, Santayana, Dewey, Margaret Mead, and Isaiah Berlin had to say about the challenging world in which leaders must operate. That's the same world in which Warren has operated, and about which he has given much considered reflection.

A still-unfolding legacy of generosity and innovation

Warren's ever-growing influence is a result of many factors, but if I had to cite just one, I would attribute it to his generosity. His greatest virtue is his greatest flaw: there is no "no" in him. Warren spends much of his day as Doug McGregor spent his, mentoring students, young faculty, and aspiring leaders. He is always there to offer sage advice, to counsel, to encourage, and to help those who are at key decision points in their lives and careers. He is, in fact, as generous as he is creative, a combination of human virtues that is as potent as it is unusual.

So how do we summarize Warren's contribution thus far? In the words of the distinguished writer Philip Slater, who has followed Warren's career for more than 40 years, "To my mind, he is the seminal thinker on leadership and organization. He sounded the death knell of the bureaucratic model and laid the groundwork for the revolution in organizational theory and practice sweeping the world today." Ed Schein, professor emeritus of MIT's Sloan School of Management, adds: "In the field of leadership research, which has been beaten to death for well over 50 years, Warren's is the only voice of innovation, both in terms of how to study leadership and in terms of the conclusions one can reach about it."  Of course, it is too soon to say what Warren's greatest contribution ultimately will be. He is only 80 and, last time I checked, he was busy reinventing himself for his next career. -¦·¦-

JAMES O'TOOLE is a research professor at the University of Southern California's Center for Effective Organizations and the Mortimer J. Adler Senior Fellow of the Aspen Institute. He is also the author of Creating the Good Life (Rodale, 2005).

[Ursus]

Here's an interview with Warren Bennis first published in 1998 in Management Skills & Development Magazine, which I believe is based in the UK.  Their website does not appear to have been updated since 1999/2000, but appears to have been nonetheless kept on-line for some reason or another (perhaps due to its hosting a nest of copious pertinent links? I am really guessing here...).

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Management Skills & Development  | First Published in Management Skills & Development magazine
INTERVIEW WITH WARREN BENNIS

Stuart Crainer interviews Presidential advisor, author and leadership guru, Warren Bennis.

Perpetually tanned, with a shining white toothed smile, Warren Bennis appears the archetype of the Californian popular academic. To many he is simply the regular Presidential adviser who brought leadership to a new, mass audience. But, there is more to Bennis than that. His lengthy career has involved him in education, writing, consulting and administration. Along the way he has made a contribution to an array of subjects and produced a steady stream of books including the bestselling, Leaders, and most recently, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration.

Now in his seventies, Bennis was the youngest infantry officer in the European theatre of operations during the second world war. Returning home, he went to Antioch College as an undergraduate and fell under the influence of his mentor, Douglas McGregor, creator of the motivational Theories X and Y. Later, McGregor attracted Bennis to MIT.

From being an early student of group dynamics in the 1950s; Bennis became a futurologist in the 1960s. His work - particularly The Temporary Society (1968) - explored new organisational forms. Bennis envisaged organisations as adhocracies - roughly the direct opposite of bureaucracies - freed from the shackles of hierarchy and meaningless paperwork.

With the torrent of publications and executive programmes on the subject, it is easy to forget that leadership had been largely forgotten as a topic worthy of serious academic interest until it was revived by Bennis and others in the 1980s.

Bennis' book, Leaders, was a huge success. In it he argued that leadership is not a rare skill; leaders are made rather than born; leaders are usually ordinary people -- or apparently ordinary -- rather than charismatic; leadership is not solely the preserve of those at the top of the organisation -- it is relevant at all levels; and, finally, that leadership is not about control, direction and manipulation.

Leaders involved 90 of America's leaders, including Neil Armstrong, the coach of the LA Rams, orchestral conductors, and businessmen such as Ray Kroc of McDonald's. They were right brained and left-brained, tall and short, fat and thin, articulate and inarticulate, assertive and retiring, dressed for success and dressed for failure, participative and autocratic, says Bennis. The link between them was that they had all shown 'mastery over present confusion'. Bennis' message was that leadership is all-encompassing and open to all.

From the leaders, four common abilities were identified: management of attention; of meaning; of trust; and of self. Management of attention is, says Bennis, a question of vision. Indeed, he uses a definition of leadership as: 'The capacity to create a compelling vision and translate it into action and sustain it.' Successful leaders have a vision that other people believe in and treat as their own.

Having a vision is one thing, converting it into successful action is another. The second skill shared by Bennis' selection of leaders is management of meaning -- communications. A vision is of limited practical use if it is encased in 400 pages of wordy text or mumbled from behind a paper-packed desk. Bennis believes effective communication relies on the use of analogy, metaphor and vivid illustration as well as emotion, trust, optimism and hope.

The third aspect of leadership identified by Bennis is trust which he describes as 'the emotional glue that binds followers and leaders together'. Leaders have to be seen to be consistent.

The final common bond between the 90 leaders studied by Bennis is 'deployment of self'. The leaders do not glibly present charisma or time management as the essence of their success. Instead, the emphasis is on persistence and self-knowledge, taking risks, commitment and challenge but, above all, learning. 'The learning person looks forward to failure or mistakes,' says Bennis. 'The worst problem in leadership is basically early success. There's no opportunity to learn from adversity and problems.'

The leaders have a positive self regard, that Bennis labels 'emotional wisdom'. This is characterized by an ability to accept people as they are; a capacity to approach things in terms of only the present; an ability to treat everyone, even close contacts, with courteous attention; an ability to trust others even when this seems risky; and an ability to do without constant approval and recognition.

While Bennis was mapping out potential futures for the business world, he was confronting realities as a university administrator at SUNY, Buffalo and as President of the University of Cincinnati. He found that his practice disappointed his theory -- a rare example of an academic putting his reputation where his ideas are. He is now based at the University of Southern California where he is founder of the school's Leadership Institute.

Do you ever feel that you have been trapped in a pigeonhole labelled leadership guru?
W.B. Yes, to some extent. But it is probably a trap of my own making. My first major article came out in 1959 and was on leadership. Since 1985 most of my work has been in that area. You build up some sort of brand equity and there is a degree of collusion between that and the marketplace -- people say leadership, that's Bennis. It makes life a little simpler.

So why move away? After all, you have said that you have been thinking about leadership almost as long as you have been thinking?
W.B. Leadership has become a heavy industry. Concern and interest about leadership development is no longer an American phenomenon. It is truly global. Though I will probably be in less demand, I wanted to move on. In fact, the work behind my latest book, Organizing Genius, takes me back to my early roots. The book was actually born forty years ago when I became interested in how networks of gifted people have changed the world. My early work was on small group dynamics, more a classical area of social psychology. I moved from there to T-Groups, sensitivity training and then into change in social systems.

What is the difference between the groups you study and teams?
W.B. Teams has a Dilbertian smell to it. Everyone is talking about teams and there is a lot of bullshit written. I'm not sure how useful it is to business people. I think you can learn more from extraordinary groups than the run of the mill. None of us is as smart as all of us. These are exceptional groups with great intensity who have belief in their collective aspiration. The groups are a series of vivid utopias whether they are Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, the group behind the 1992 Clinton campaign, Lockheed's Skunk Works or the Manhattan Project which invented the atomic bomb.

Which of the groups in your book really struck a chord with you?
W.B. My favourite is the Manhattan project because the consequences were so huge. Morally it was a disaster. I was in the war and on August 6, 1945 I was on patrol duty in Heidelburg. I was talking to an enlisted man who said that we'd unloaded a super bomb in Japan. Now we can have our lives back, he said. We were all set to go to Japan.

Do great groups require great leaders?
W.B. Greatness starts with superb people. Great groups don't exist without great leaders, but they give the lie to the persistent notion that successful institutions are the lengthened shadow of a great woman or man. It's not clear that life was ever so simple that individuals, acting alone, solved most significant problems.

So, the John Wayne or Indiana Jones type of hero is a creature of the past?
W.B. Yes, the Lone Ranger is dead. Instead of the individual problem solver we have a new model for creative achievement. People like Steve Jobs or Walt Disney headed groups and found their own greatness in them.

How would you describe the leaders of great groups?
W.B. He or she is a pragmatic dreamer, a person with an original but attainable vision. Ironically, the leader is able to realise his or her dream only if others are free to do exceptional work. Typically, the leader is the one who recruits the others, by making the vision so palpable and seductive that they see it, too, and eagerly sign up. Inevitably, the leader has to invent a leadership style that suits the group. The standard models, especially command and control, simply don't work. The heads of groups have to act decisively, but never arbitrarily. They have to make decisions without limiting the perceived autonomy of the other participants. Devising and maintaining an atmosphere in which others can put a dent in the universe is the leader's creative act.

But isn't this unrealistic? Not everyone is designing the first atomic bomb or inventing some incredible breakthrough. For most groups the stakes simply aren't that high.
W.B. True. Most organisations are dull and working life is mundane. There is no getting away from that. So, these groups could be an inspiration. A great group is more than a collection of first-rate minds. It's a miracle. I have unwarranted optimism. By looking at the possibilities we can all improve. With T Groups in the fifties people said it is not real life. But it shows you the possibilities.

Do you see yourself as a romantic?
W.B. If a romantic is someone who believes in possibilities and who is optimistic then that is probably an accurate description. I think that every person has to make a genuine contribution in their lives and the institution of work is one of the main vehicles to achieving this. I'm more and more convinced that individual leaders can create a human community that will, in the long run, lead to the best organisations.

But when you were a manager, running universities, you found that your theories failed to match reality.
W.B. When I was at the University of Cincinnati I realised that I was seeking power through position, by being President of the university. I wanted to be a university president but I didn't want to do it. I wanted the influence. In the end I wasn't very good at being a president. I looked out of the window and thought that the man cutting the lawn actually seemed to have more control over what he was doing. One of the failures of contemporary organisations is that leadership doesn't remind people about what is important. Yes, there are jobs from hell but in a lot of jobs people seem to have no idea why they're doing it. There is organisational entropy. One of the facets of power and influence which has been totally ignored is the power of appreciation. The power of appreciation is not often understood or talked about. To appreciate the work someone else is doing, you have to abandon your own ego.

What do you see your role as in the future?
W.B. I am voraciously curious. People who cannot invent and reinvent themselves must be content with borrowed postures, secondhand ideas, fitting in instead of standing out. At the age of 72 I would like to open more doors for people.

By Stuart Crainer

[Ursus]

This article was among the links noted at the end of Warren Bennis' Wikipedia page.  That link is no longer functional, as Leader to Leader has reorganized their website, and I can not find the article in their current lineup.  This copy is from a 2004 version of their website on Wayback.

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The Myths of Leadership
[li]At the heart of every Great Group is a shared dream. All Great Groups believe that they are on a mission from God, that they could change the world, make a dent in the universe. They are obsessed with their work. It becomes not a job but a fervent quest. That belief is what brings the necessary cohesion and energy to their work.
[/li]
[li]They manage conflict by abandoning individual egos to the pursuit of the dream. At a critical point in the Manhattan Project, George Kistiakowsky, a great chemist who later served as Dwight Eisenhower's chief scientific advisor, threatened to quit because he couldn't get along with a colleague. Project leader Robert Oppenheimer simply said, "George, how can you leave this project? The free world hangs in the balance." So conflict, even with these diverse people, is resolved by reminding people of the mission.
[/li]
[li]They are protected from the "suits." All Great Groups seem to have disdain for their corporate overseers and all are protected from them by a leader -- not necessarily the leader who defines the dream. In the Manhattan Project, for instance, General Leslie Grove kept the Pentagon brass happy and away, while Oppenheimer kept the group focused on its mission. At Xerox PARC, Bob Taylor kept the honchos in Connecticut (referred to by the group as "toner heads") at bay and kept the group focused. Kelly Johnson got himself appointed to the board of Lockheed to help protect his Skunk Works. In all cases, physical distance from headquarters helped.
[/li]
[li]They have a real or invented enemy. Even the most noble mission can be helped by an onerous opponent. That was literally true with the Manhattan Project, which had real enemies -- the Japanese and the Nazis. Yet most organizations have an implicit mission to destroy an adversary, and that is often more motivating than their explicit mission. During their greatest years, for instance, Apple Computer's implicit mission was, Bury IBM. (The famous 1984 Macintosh TV commercial included the line, "Don't buy a computer you can't lift.") The decline of Apple follows the subsequent softening of their mission.
[/li]
[li]They view themselves as winning underdogs. World-changing groups are usually populated by mavericks, people at the periphery of their disciplines. These groups do not regard the mainstream as the sacred Ganges. The sense of operating on the fringes gives them a don't-count-me-out scrappiness that feeds their obsession.
[/li]
[li]Members pay a personal price. Membership in a Great Group isn't a day job; it is a night and day job. Divorces, affairs, and other severe emotional fallout are typical, especially when a project ends. At the Skunk Works, for example, people couldn't even tell their families what they were working on. They were located in a cheerless, rundown building in Burbank, of all places, far from Lockheed's corporate headquarters and main plants. So groups strike a Faustian bargain for the intensity and energy that they generate.
[/li]
[li]Great Groups make strong leaders. On one hand, they're all nonhierarchical, open, and very egalitarian. Yet they all have strong leaders. That's the paradox of group leadership. You cannot have a great leader without a Great Group -- and vice versa. In an important way, these groups made the leaders great. The leaders I studied were seldom the brightest or best in the group, but neither were they passive players. They were connoisseurs of talent, more like curators than creators.
[/li]
[li]Great Groups are the product of meticulous recruiting. It took Oppenheimer to get a Kistiakowsky and a Niels Bohr to come to his godforsaken outpost in the desert. Cherry-picking the right talent for a group means knowing what you need and being able to spot it in others. It also means understanding the chemistry of a group. Candidates are often grilled, almost hazed, by other members of the group and its leader. You see the same thing in great coaches. They can place the right people in the right role. And get the right constellations and configurations within the group.
      [/li]
[li]Great Groups are usually young. The average age of the physicists at Los Alamos was about 25. Oppenheimer -- "the old man" -- was in his 30s. Youth provides the physical stamina demanded by these groups. But Great Groups are also young in their spirit, ethos, and culture. Most important, because they're young and naive, group members don't know what's supposed to be impossible, which gives them the ability to do the impossible. As Berlioz said about Saint-Saens, "He knows everything; all he lacks is inexperience." Great Groups don't lack the experience of possibilities.
[/li]
[li]Real artists ship. Steve Jobs constantly reminded his band of Apple renegades that their work meant nothing unless they brought a great product to market. In the end, Great Groups have to produce a tangible outcome external to themselves. Most dissolve after the product is delivered; but without something to show for their efforts, the most talented assemblage becomes little more than a social club or a therapy group. [/li][/list]
New Rules for Leaders
[li]Provide direction and meaning. They remind people of what's important and why their work makes a difference.
[/li]
[li]Generate and sustain trust. The group's trust in itself -- and its leadership -- allows members to accept dissent and ride through the turbulence of the group process.
[/li]
[li]Display a bias toward action, risk taking, and curiosity. A sense of urgency -- and a willingness to risk failure to achieve results -- is at the heart of every Great Group.
[/li]
[li]Are purveyors of hope. Effective team leaders find both tangible and symbolic ways to demonstrate that the group can overcome the odds.[/li][/list]There's no simple recipe for developing these skills; group leadership is far more an art than a science. But we can start by rethinking our notion of what collaboration means and how it is achieved. Our management training and educational institutions need to focus on group development as well as individual development. Universities, for instance, rarely allow group Ph.D. theses or rewards for joint authorship. Corporations usually reward individual rather than group achievement, even as leaders call for greater teamwork and partnership.

Power of the Mission
IT'S no accident that topping both lists -- the principles of Great Groups and the traits of group leaders -- is the power of the mission. All great teams -- and all great organizations -- are built around a shared dream or motivating purpose. Yet organizations' mission statements often lack real meaning and resonance. Realistically, your team need not believe that it is literally saving the world, as the Manhattan Project did; it is enough to feel it is helping people in need or battling a tough competitor. Simply punching a time clock doesn't do it.

Articulating a meaningful mission is the job of leaders at every level -- and it's not an easy task. In Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, Glendower, the Welsh seer, boasts to Hotspur that he can "call spirits from the vasty deep," and Hotspur retorts, so can I, so can anybody -- "but will they come when you do call for them?" That is the test of inspiring leadership.

I learned firsthand how critical a sense of mission -- or its absence -- can be to an employer. Several years ago, I had an assistant who handled the arrangements for my speeches and travel; at night she did volunteer work for a nonprofit, self-help organization. Her work for me was acceptable but perfunctory. It was clear that she was much more involved and committed to her unpaid work. Frankly, I was jealous. I came to resent the fact that I was not getting her best efforts; after all, I was paying her and they weren't. We talked about it, and she was very honest about the fact that it was her volunteer work that had real meaning for her; there she felt she was making a difference. So you can't expect every employee to be zealously committed to your cause. But you can accept the fact that part of the responsibility for uninspired work lies with the leader.

Great Groups remind us how much we can really accomplish working toward a shared purpose. To be sure, Great Groups rely on many long-established practices of good management -- effective communication, exceptional recruitment, genuine empowerment, personal commitment. But they also remind us of author Luciano de Crescanzo's observation that "we are all angels with only one wing; we can only fly while embracing one another." In the end, these groups cannot be managed, only led in flight.

[Anonymous]

Excuse me for being crude but, who gives a fuck about walter bendass?  He is just another of the cavalcade of conslutants that will comment on leading organizations when the only thing that thay have ever led was their organization that tell people how to lead.   I have had the gamut of these asshole from the Peter Principle to the 12 habit of Highly Compulsive Mormons.  To me they are all just snake oil salesmen

Deep Packed Chockya

[Ursus]

Excuse me for being crude but, who gives a fuck about walter bendass?  He is just another of the cavalcade of conslutants that will comment on leading organizations when the only thing that thay have ever led was their organization that tell people how to lead.   I have had the gamut of these asshole from the Peter Principle to the 12 habit of Highly Compulsive Mormons.  To me they are all just snake oil salesmen

Deep Packed Chockya

Love your "crudeness," DP, it pretty much mirrors my own deep seated sentiments.  I'll tell you why I "give a fuck," though...

• I think that -- to many a concerned, but perhaps not overly discriminating, parent -- noted accolades from Warren Bennis lends a credibility and weight to The Biggest Job and, by association, Hyde School, that is undeserved and misleading.
  
  
• I find Bennis' associations with Werner Erhard, as well as Bennis' promulgation of est most revealing about just where Hyde School is coming from.

I am reminded of the somewhat incredulous response posted by a Guest when it was brought out that Vanda Mikoloski received her belated Diploma despite the information that was out there regarding her being an enthusiast of Landmark Forum (Werner Erhard's "next thing" coming off the heels of est), not to mention the involvement with J.Z. Knight and the Ramtha cult that both she and her brother were then involved with.

If Hyde REALLY was an institution genuinely concerned about the well-being of its kids, not to mention the alleged "high standards" of character it claims are prerequisite for a diploma with an origin of HYDE emblazoned on its vellum, don't you think that those involvements might have been a matter of some "concern?"

If The Biggest Job® We'll Ever Have REALLY was about raising your kids up to be responsible and psychologically healthy and productive members of society, would they be using a quote from an est spokesman to help sell their book and lend it an aura of respect?

There is an inordinate amount of disconnect going on if you try to take Hyde at face value, and apply its so-called standards to its own conduct.  It is a cult trying to masquerade as semi-mainstream, no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

[Anonymous]

Oh so this guy has connections to E.S.T  I get "it."  So Warren X Bendass is not just an ordinary conslutant he is a wingnut.  

Rock on Mr Bear

[Ursus]

From an entry in Keith Ferrazzi's Blog "Never Eat Alone" (more business/networking newage sewage, in case you're wondering):
 
=========================== ===========================

Dinner "Alone"
From Mark Goulston

Keith was out of town recently and so I had to "eat alone" as a dinner guest of Warren Bennis, who was hosting his long time friend Werner Erhard, founder of est and the Landmark Forum, at The Hump restaurant in Santa Monica.  It went so well that Werner invited me to join him and other friends for dinner the next night.

All in all, eight hours with Werner, his partner Gonneke, Steve Zaffron (CEO of Landmark's consulting arm), Dave Logan (a brilliant rhetoretician), and my colleage Jeffrey Schwartz (one of the pioneers in the neuroscience) was like having a prefrontal schmorgasbord. I was about to follow some of Keith's building intimacy questions, but Werner beat me to the punch.  His approach was to have us sit at a circular table and never talk to the person next to us as it would exclude the others.  He then had us introduce ourselves in any way we chose, but implied that the more memorable the introduction, the better for everyone.

I was able to give a copy of Never Eat Alone to Werner who enthusiastically latched onto it.

Posted by Leona Barad on March 26, 2007 |

===========================

Select Comments (minus the Viagra spam):


A most enlightening post. Interesting to find out that Werner Erhard still hangs out with Gonneke Spits Warren Bennis Steven Zaffron - but what was his purpose for visiting Santa Monica, California, and why have a dinner at the airport?

The food probably wasn't as good as when Gonneke Spits and Werner Erhard (going as Werner Spits ) dined at Ristorante Pappagallo in the Cayman Islands -

http://www.chaine.ky/Menu_Titanic.htm
Their meal simulating last meal on the Titanic

http://www.chaine.ky/Menu_OrientExpress.htm
"Christmas and Induction Dinner"

http://perso.orange.fr/eldon.braun/awareness/door2.html
More info on these individuals, from Pressman's book, OUTRAGEOUS BETRAYAL.

http://lgattruth.blogspot.com

Posted by: lgattruth | Mar 27, 2007 9:26:40 AM
===========================
veryy
veryy
nice
thankss...

Posted by: evden eve nakliyat | Mar 30, 2007 2:39:43 PM
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Interesting re the circular table, Mark. In a marketing course in grad school, a group of us were seated at a circular table and the interaction between people was graphed. The LEAST interaction was between people sitting next to each other!

Posted by: Howard Tucker | Mar 31, 2007 6:17:31 PM
===========================
Sounds like you were hardly eating alone. What was your memorable introduction?

Posted by: Paige Kearin | Apr 3, 2007 9:12:41 AM
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thanks for your informations.very good informations..i will read all the time this blog.again thanks...

Posted by: evden eve nakliyat | Apr 7, 2007 4:13:09 AM
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Precious work.

Best of blog

Posted by: oyun77 | Apr 7, 2007 12:48:01 PM
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Very nice blog, good work.

Posted by: minik leydi | Apr 7, 2007 12:49:53 PM
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Very nice blog, good work.

Posted by: minik leydi | Apr 7, 2007 12:53:40 PM
===========================
Thank you all for the comments and enjoying the blog regarding a recent dinner with Warren Bennis and Werner Erhard. Paige Kearin (who has a great blog of her own at: http://remarkablelives.blogspot.com/) asked what my "memorable" introduction was. I introduced myself by describing a "breakthrough" moment with a highly suicidal patient where I literally went into her psychological hell and and walked out with her (see: http://markgoulston.com/articles/latime ... iles.shtml)
Apparently it was pretty memorable, because Werner invited me out to a second dinner the next night (as mentioned in my blog) and was followed by a very kind and complementary email from both he and Warren Bennis afterwards.

Posted by: Mark Goulston | Apr 7, 2007 9:15:37 PM
===========================
Thank you, Mark, for that astonishing and, for me, synchronistic post. Before tonight, I had yet to hear of Never Eat Alone or TED. I was certainly aware of Werner, being a graduate of est and The Six Day Course (at which I met my wife-to-be back in 1984), and having only last month checked up on his whereabouts (after listening to an old cassette of him speaking on accomplishment). In fact, when I was listening to a sample of Keith speaking, the thought had occurred to me that his manner had a delightful touch of Werner in it. And then to read your post.... It's wonderful to have people like all of you in "the orchestra."

[Ursus]

From: The Return of Werner Erhard: Guru II, Los Angeles Magazine, May, 1988, Vol 33; No 5; Sec 1; pg 106, Mark MacNamara, San Francisco, CA.  See this post in another thread for the full article:  http://fornits.com/wwf/viewtopic.php?t=23187&start=1

Another scholar who knows Erhard well is Warren Bennis, professor of business administration at USC. Bennis took the est training in 1979 in London: "It gave me a good sense of who I was at a critical period in my life. I had just ended my time as university president, and I was looking around for new directions."

Bennis, who during the early 1980s served as a consultant to Erhard, giving advice on organizational design and leadership techniques, felt that what the training provided in those years was a "restoration of the self": "I'm sort of a loner among my colleagues. The people I know have profited from it. I don't think it deserved the bad press it has gotten. Personally, I haven't met a person who has gone through it and not profited."

But Bennis adds that there were problems: "The bad part is the proselytizing, the phone calls you get, the language; there's something missing in the aesthetic of it. And another problem has been the dependence upon Werner himself. Which is not his problem. If you're in that kind of position, sometimes you get disciples as opposed to students."

"I have to say," adds Bennis, "that it's an incredible puzzle for me that he has acquired such a negative image among so many people. I detect a lot of hostility, and I don't understand it. A lot of my friends are Jewish, and I'm Jewish, and often they see est as a quick fix for making money from losers.

"But many of my colleagues who criticize Erhard have grown up in a deterministic environment. The world they know was created by Freud, Darwin and Marx -- all men who believed in limits. I think Erhard is talking from a different perspective, and sometimes that's threatening to people who are resigned to the death-on-the-installment plan."

[Joseph W. Gauld]

Bennis-babes' got A-one character in my book!!  He's a distinguished business man after my own heart!!  See there's certain buzz words ya gotta use to get your point across.  Words like character, integrity, higher standards, morals, leadership, ethics, courage, challenge, etc. etc. etc.  Just get yourself a good thesaurus and you'll do alright.  Jes pepper your speeches with these babies, lessee... maybe one or two per sentence.  People don't really listen that good anyway, ya just want to get across that you're one of the good guys 'cause you use them words.  Remember, a big lie is always easier to pull off than a little one, so shoot for the moon, Alice!!  And.. people'll always discount you 'bout 20%, so you wanna make sure that 80% is still a doozer!

Philosophically,
Joseph W. Gauld, The Educator and Bamboozler par excellence

[Ursus]

Incomplete but nonetheless useful timeline for Warren Bennis' career, taken from pp9-11 of a PowerPoint presentation Group Development: What Bion, Bennis, Shepard, Schutz, Drexler, and Sibbett Say About Us given at a business conference.  Pre-conference Intensive--PRED103; 40th OD Network Annual Convention; October 1-3, 2004.

OD refers to "Organization Development," a school of thought which I believe arose out of the T-Groups encounter sessions (which Bennis was involved with in at least its early days).  See HERE and HERE for some more info on T-Groups.

=================================================

Date  |  Event and Accomplishments                      

March 8, 1925  |  Born in New York, NY
1943-1947  |  Served in the military.    At 19, he was the youngest U.S. lieutenant to serve in the European theater of World War II, receiving a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.
1951  |  Graduated from Antioch College (B.A.)
1952  |  Received an Honors Certificate from London School of Economics and Political Science (Honors Certificate)
1953-1955|  Instructor at MIT
1955  |  Received his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1955-1956  |  Assistant professor of social psychology at MIT
1956-1956  |  Assistant professor of psychology at Boston University, Boston, MA
1956-1959  |  Senior research associate at Human Relations Center
1958-1959  |  Visiting lecturer at Harvard University
1959-1963  |  Associate professor of industrial management at MIT
1956  |  Published A Theory of Group Development with Herbert A. Shepard
1960  |  Visiting professor at University of California
1961-1962  |  University of Lasanne
1962  |  Married Clurie Williams and later fathered Katherine, John Leslie, and Will Martin
1963-1967  |  Professor of organizational and management psychology at MIT
1966  |  University of Southern California
1967-1968  |  Provost of faculty of social sciences and administration at State University of New York at Buffalo
1968-1970  |   Vice-president for academic development at State University of New York at Buffalo
1969  |  Member of White House task force on foreign policy
1969-1970  |  Acting executive vice-president and provost of natural sciences at State University of New York at Buffalo
1971-1977  |  University professor and acting president at the University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH
1977    Professor of research at University of Southern California, Los Angeles
1983  |  Divorced Clurie Williams
1988  |  Married Mary Jane O'Donnell
1991  |  Divorced Mary Jane O'Donnell
1992  |  Married Grace Gabe

[Ursus]

Incomplete but nonetheless useful timeline for Warren Bennis' career, taken from pp9-11 of a PowerPoint presentation Group Development: What Bion, Bennis, Shepard, Schutz, Drexler, and Sibbett Say About Us given at a business conference.  Pre-conference Intensive--PRED103; 40th OD Network Annual Convention; October 1-3, 2004.

OD refers to "Organization Development," a school of thought which I believe arose out of the T-Groups encounter sessions (which Bennis was involved with in at least its early days).  See HERE and HERE for some more info on T-Groups.

Wilfred Bion was one of the founding members of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in the UK, which was started some time around World War II. Therapeutic communities were his brainchild. The Northfield Experiments, as they were called, were intended to assist shell-shocked military personnel on psych leave...in returning to their military duties as expediently and with the lowest overhead possible. By having the patients participate in each other's "therapy," so-called progress came about quicker (and cheaper).

National Training Labs, begun around the same time in the States, was focused on some of the same issues, and there was much back and forth between the two organizations.

[Anonymous]

There's a good reason for Warren Bennis's involvement with Hyde: he's a Hyde parent! Will Martin(?) Bennis was there in the middle 1980's.

[Ursus]

There's a good reason for Warren Bennis's involvement with Hyde: he's a Hyde parent! Will Martin(?) Bennis was there in the middle 1980's.

Well then, there ya go!  :birthday:
Thanks for that input!

—•?|•?•0•?•|?•—

From that handy-dandy (yet still incomplete) time line from a few posts back; keep in mind, for what it's worth, that he allegedly did the est thing in 1979:

1962 | Married Clurie Williams and later fathered Katherine, John Leslie, and Will Martin
:
:
1983 | Divorced Clurie Williams
1988 | Married Mary Jane O'Donnell
1991 | Divorced Mary Jane O'Donnell
1992 | Married Grace Gabe

[Ursus]

Some further corroboration from the "Hyde-Bath Class Notes" section of the Spring 2004 edition of Hyde's Alumni News:

1987
Will Bennis finished his doctoral studies at the U. of Chicago. He received a Ph.D. in Psychology and Human Development and moved to Berlin, Germany, to begin a yearlong fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Will plans to research the implications of sociocultural environments upon people when they make decisions.