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Monday in the Park with Rand: Teaching, Leadership, and Why We Don't Want to be College Presidents
Meet Rand Park! He's a senior lecturer in the Department of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship at the Carlson School of Management, and he joins us this week to share his insights into how extraordinary teaching and authentic leadership can lead to both transformational learning and leading.
Our discussion is threaded through with the importance of self-knowledge. Rand talks about how he learned to "be himself" in the classroom, and we explore the challenges of "being yourself" in leadership roles -- which is part of the journey both of us have taken in deciding *not* to pursue college presidencies.
My favorite part of this conversation is where we explore the tensions leaders face in decision-making. We talk about how leadership decisions set the tone for entire organizations, how empowering it is to grant autonomy and ownership to faculty and staff, and the importance for leaders to build up a strong and diverse team.
Whether you're an educator, a leader -- or BOTH! -- this episode is for you.
Let's connect! Come find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook.
I also coach women leaders (individually and in groups) and facilitate campus workshops. Learn more at the website.
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Hey there today my guest is Rand Park, who teaches at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. I first got to know Rand a long time ago when we were both working in the world of higher ed consortia. I was the executive director of the Associated Colleges of the Twin Cities and Rand was working in development at the Minnesota Private College Council. People kept saying to me do you know Rand?
Speaker 2:You must know.
Speaker 1:Rand. You'll love Rand. They weren't wrong. We've both moved on from those roles and today Rand Park is back in the classroom. For the past decade, he's been a senior lecturer in the Department of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches business ethics and corporate responsibility to both undergrads and graduate students. Rand has a PhD in organizational leadership policy and development from the University of Minnesota, a JD from Hamlin University School of Law and both bachelor's and master's degrees in English from the University of Georgia. Of course, I think there's something magical about his English degrees, his focus on ethics and his commitment to teaching. And also, yeah, he's a white guy and the first man I've interviewed on this podcast, but Rand is truly someone I love learning from and I think you will too.
Speaker 1:Let's get into the episode. Hey there, welcome to the Uplift Podcast, where we talk all things leadership for women in higher ed. I'm Carol Shabrius and I want to help make your leadership path a little easier, a bit brighter and a hell of a lot more fun. Here at the Uplift, we mash up real stories, real feelings, real theory and occasional f***ing problems, all to help you become the kind of bleeping awesome leader you would love to follow. I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump in. Rand, welcome to the show. I'm so happy to have you here today.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's great to be here.
Speaker 1:What I really want to jump into with you is this idea that I'm, I want to say, hypothesizing, but it's not even clear enough to be a hypothesis.
Speaker 1:It's just this idea that I'm struggling with, which is I think leadership and teaching have core principles in common, and I'm curious to know what other people who teach and what other people who've served in leadership roles think of this idea.
Speaker 1:And what I'm particularly interested in and this was in the material I shared with you but this idea that good teaching is really about the transformation that happens in the learner.
Speaker 1:It's not in what happens with you standing in the front of the classroom or even walking around if you're teaching in an engaged way, but the teaching is focused on what happens as somebody makes changes in their life, in the ways they think and their perspectives on the world, and that good leadership in academic affairs and I borrowed this from a book on academic leadership is about teaching and learning, and I think both those things are true and I'm trying to unpack and untangle those. So the first thing I wanted to ask you and I know we talked about this at length, but the first thing I wanted to ask you is what in your teaching, when you think about extraordinary teaching and you can tell us how many teaching awards you've earned. It's about the student. What does that look like for you in the classroom? What's happening that draws you to be the kind of teacher and what do you do to embody this that actually creates those kinds of transformations for students?
Speaker 2:Well, I think the number one thing for me and it was a lesson that I learned through the years of sort of part-time, adjunct teaching, which was a different kind of it was at night, it was grad students who had come from a long day. But when I was first teaching I had an idea of what a teacher was supposed to look like and the way a teacher was supposed to carry themselves and wanted to sort of embody that and realized very quickly that you can't pretend to be somebody else and have a really meaningful connection with your students. You have to be authentic and I know that sounds, you know, like a inspirational quote that you paint on a board and hang in your law, you know, but really being who you are. So I will often tell people. You know I spent most of my elementary and high school years getting in trouble for talking too much, telling jokes and drawing cartoons, and now I get paid for all of that because I can't do anything other than be myself. And so I tell jokes, I talk, I write.
Speaker 2:You should see the whiteboards that I do. I fill up, I have multiple and this is an adjunct thing. You never know if you're going to have markers, so you bring your own markers. Well, I discovered that I like lots of different colors, and so I draw little cartoon faces and I draw colorful arrows and I'll fill a whiteboard during the course of class, not because I'm trying to impress anybody, but because it's literally how I think, it's literally how I just you know, and so I'll use a PowerPoint deck that'll be projected above the whiteboard and that will be sort of you know, that's a episodic slide at a time. At the same time I'm connecting the concepts and, you know, visual elements on the whiteboard as I talk, and nobody taught me to do it that way.
Speaker 2:That's just who I am, and so you know I'm at that point where I feel like I'm fortunate that I get paid to just show up and be who I am. But I know that the students seem much more receptive when they know that it doesn't look like I'm trying to do something. You know, like I'm not trying to manipulate them, I'm not trying to force a square peg into a round hole. And if I get excited about what I'm talking about and I tell them why, why we're doing this assignment, why this concept is important, why they will more willingly, I think, kind of come along for the ride and think about some of the things that I'm presenting, and so you know, I feel like in some way, and also so I have a varied career path.
Speaker 2:I think you and I've talked about this before. I went to law school, I worked at a publishing company. I worked at higher ed administration. I eventually worked in fundraising. Along the way, I served on the board of directors of a healthcare company. I did some other things let's not forget you were an English major, because that's super important. I think it's super important. I think it's super important.
Speaker 1:I think it's super important. I think it's super important. I think it's super important.
Speaker 2:I think it's the most important thing. I was an English major who got a master's degree in English, decided not to pursue a PhD, thinking that a higher ed being a professor was not going to be my calling, but eventually it kept calling. But my students, I feel like when I say, wow, I did this, but then I did this and they also find that really nice because you know, 34, oh, my goodness, so long ago I graduated from high school 40 years ago. When I graduated from high school 40 years ago, college cost, like you know, $2. Not really, but you know it wasn't so high stakes, it wasn't. We weren't in that sort of arms race of tuition and prestige and rankings.
Speaker 2:I grew up in the state of Georgia and I went to the University of Georgia because that's just. That was just what I did, so to be able to talk to the students about you know, okay, yes, yes, you're at the business school. Yes, you're studying for a career. Yes, you're probably many of you borrowing some money to do it. The most important thing is you're going to learn some things along the way, get the degree in hand, because that's an important thing.
Speaker 2:But you may do six or seven different things. You know and your life can look like this, and you know not every professor that the students have had that, but to be for me to be able to say, wow, I did this, I did that, I did some other things, hey, everything worked out right. Then they seem to also feel somewhat affirmed that any insecurities that they're having about, maybe, what they're studying, it's okay, because I have somebody talking to me right now who's saying it's going to be fine, you're going to figure it out eventually, you're going to figure out what you're doing. I remember when I was on my law school alumni board I used to do volunteer mock interviews and I had this young woman who had come to Hamlet to go to law school and she had grown up in Kentucky and she had done all things equestrian. She had ridden horses, trained horses, all the horse, all the horse things. And now she was in law school and I was doing the mock interview with her and we were talking.
Speaker 2:I said I had a resume and I said so, tell me about coming to law school. I would like to be a corporate attorney. Oh, okay, and what about some of your passions and interests? I would like to be a corporate attorney and I'm like your resume is full of horse things. You're from Kentucky, you have done all these things and I said you know, there's a lot of money in horse, there's a lot of laws, there's a lot. I mean, it is entirely possible for you to take this law degree and still do lots of stuff related to things that you have a passion about. It doesn't have to be. This was my passion and now I'm going to switch and so I try to embody that for my students. Right, I went to law school. I'm not practicing law, I'm doing some other things.
Speaker 2:I have students that come to my office hours and say I am passionate about the theater, I love going to plays, I love, you know, community, but I'm really not going to ever make a living on stage. But I love theater. But I'm here in the business school. What should I do? And I'm like major in accounting, because every theater in the country has an accountant. Every right you can do something functional. I said there's no shortage of people with passion and creativity. There's a shortage of people who can count and read a ledger sheet. Right, if you can do functional, technical things that benefit an organization, you can work in an art museum. I think I, in our previous conversation, told you my daughter works in an art museum running their website. She does a paint. She's not a curator, she's a technical person who works in the communications area and every day she goes to work in this beautiful art museum and is around people who have a passion for art. So in my it may be more pronounced for business students, because when people come to the business school they often feel like they have a very linear path and so the other interesting so I think I told you before the class I teach is business ethics and corporate responsibility, sustainability.
Speaker 2:My classes and intentionally so it's the first, they take it in their first year, but so many of the classes in the business school are one inch wide and about 10 feet tall. Right, I'm going to do a deep dive on accounting. I'm going to do a deep dive on supply chain. So I've intentionally created my class to be a broad and you know. So we'll touch on accounting, we'll touch on marketing ethics and human resources ethics and supply chain, in an effort to give them some connectivity across, and I feel like they they need to know how it hangs together. They kind of need to know the why. They need to know the, the sort of synthesis along with the analysis.
Speaker 2:You know if, along the way, when you're talking about your class, you say, okay, so today we're going to talk about accounting fraud. Why is accounting fraud unethical? Well, if I show you my audited financial statements that shows that I'm making a zillion dollars a year and you're trying to find a company to invest in, you would probably say, wow, they're making a zillion dollars a year. I'm going to invest in that company so that I too could make a zillion dollars a year. But what if I'm lying to you? If you knew the truth, would you buy my stock? No, I'm intentionally deceiving you to get you to do something you wouldn't otherwise do. So that's the categorical, imperative right. That's Immanuel Kant saying. The intent of the actor is how we're going to judge the rightness or wrongness of the action.
Speaker 2:Now let's back it up. You know, in Ron, accounting fraud, elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, any of these sort of huge issues are just a macro version of the little white lie. What if your books aren't? What if your sales numbers aren't just quite good enough to get a bonus? Might you consider cheating just a little bit? Well, you know, then, all of a sudden, we brought this huge issue down to something that's very, very specific, but it's the same kind of idea, and so we talked about it. So, a few weeks later, we get into advertising and I show them this ad with Matt Damon talking about cryptocom, auction favors, the brave, and I'm like there's literally nothing in this ad that has anything to do with the risks, with the underlying, about what is cryptocurrency, what is blockchain. It's all about being like Matt. Oh, I'm going to be brave, I'm going to be bold, I'm going to be like Matt Damon. Right, is he intentionally getting people to invest in crypto, knowing that he's not really telling people the truth, the full truth? Sure, okay, let's go back, so to be able to connect the dots across from accounting to marketing and talk about it being kind of the same thing, I think, makes it.
Speaker 2:I think students find that to be because they then, from a leadership perspective, are more in control of their own narrative and analysis, instead of just having discrete, little chunks of information. They're putting things together and making those connections and that's, I think, good leadership, is empowering people to make better decisions, and I think that's you want to teach, you want to help guide people. I mean, I had an MBA student one time tell me when I was teaching my class, say you know there's literally nothing. You've told me today that I didn't already know. Most of this is common sense, right, don't do bad things, do good things. Right. But it's like you take the object, you take the thing and you turn it 45 degrees right, and you look at it from a different perspective, right, you say, okay, you're going to a stakeholder analysis. This is the way it looks standing in your shoes. This is what the problem looks like.
Speaker 2:You're the manager at Walmart. You're trying to decide who to promote, right. What if you talked about it from the perspective of this woman of color who has been passed over promotion the last two to three times, not because you're an opor, horrible, racist person, but because she's not in the breakroom hanging out and laughing with everybody else? Right, you're like oh, I know who the good people are to promote, because they're the people who are friendly and talk to me and the people I hang out with. You're like well, is that really the best way to do talent management Right? Is that really the best way to? Let's put yourself in the shoes of this worker. Okay, I do this with the Betty Dukes versus Walmart case. She was a minimum wage worker at Walmart who was passed over for promotion. Eventually, she and a number of women would have been the largest class action lawsuit in US history against Walmart, because the managers were not given any guidance by Walmart about who to promote. Managers around the country were just given free reign to promote whoever they wanted. Shocking, not shocking. They promoted a lot of white dudes and not other people.
Speaker 2:So if you're a student and you say, okay, how would it feel if you were doing a good job, working, showing up and just being constantly ignored? Is that the kind of environment that you would want to work in? Well, no, I wouldn't want to do that. Well, maybe it looks a little different. So, same issue, but put yourself in the shoes of a different stakeholder. Put yourself there. So if I could talk about gender discrimination, most of the women in the room will be nodding their heads. Some of the guys will be like oh, like let's talk about sexual harassment. Would you want someone to talk to your mother like that? How about your sister? How about your daughter? Is it different? If it's different, then you're not thinking about the big picture. So finding ways to get people to think about things from different perspectives gives you a better chance.
Speaker 2:So I do teach about leadership in my classes. I use Edgar Schein's research on leadership mechanisms, and the essential takeaway is you can have the best code of ethics, you can have the best compliance team, you can have all these things, but the leaders, what the leaders say, how leaders react to crisis, the actual things the leaders do, the role modeling, the criteria for selection and dismissal, who they hire and who they fire or don't fire, and then the allocation of rewards, who they promote. Those actions drive the culture of an organization More than any, and so, to give my students those examples of those, I have a video of Jeff Skilling saying money's the only thing that matters to anybody, and money's the only thing that matters to them. Ron, are we shocked to learn that people cut all kinds of corners to show profit, when that was clearly told to them by their leader, that that was the number one priority? Probably not shocked.
Speaker 1:You said something a minute ago that I'm going to carry with me for a long time that good leadership empowers people to make good decisions, and you were talking about the ways you draw connective threads for your students and what I felt was the sense of your content being sticky, so that the students had multiple ways of hanging onto it and even as that's happening and they're able to tack pieces here and there, so they're all attached. They're also, if they're being empowered to make good decisions, they're also having autonomy and ownership over their own growth and their own thinking and their own ideas. And I'm kind of interested in hearing you talk about that and the work of a leader, like even the work of a campus leader. I don't even have a question, ron, I'm just struck that I know when I have been someone's employee or direct report, what I have loved most is being trusted to think and solve problems and kind of do things and that's the student in me, right, like that's what I loved in the classroom.
Speaker 1:But I don't think it's necessarily and I'm thinking back to your opening point about you had an idea of what a teacher is. I think a lot of leaders have an idea of what a leader is and you put on a lot of what a leader is and you put on the suit and you walk into the room and you command the presence right, but that doesn't get people feeling connected and autonomous and curious and empowered. So, like I don't know, I don't. I wish I could ask you a decent question in there, but let me just ask you to ruminate on that, like what comes up for you as I try and tie those pieces together.
Speaker 2:Well, I think so prior to my time being a full-time teacher, I was in administration, right, and I had leadership roles, but I never really had a lot of direct reports. So my job was pretty much always you're in charge of this, and now I need you to get all these other people who don't report to you to do things so that we can make progress. So I would have like one employee I've never had, I've never sat at the top of the work chart and that's probably because I'm very uncomfortable. I mean, that's just not me. I'm a very good individual contributor and it turns out I'm also really good at talking to people and helping guide things indirectly. I'm not in charge of doing your performance review, but I'm going to tell you why it's really important for you and I to do this thing and convince you to do so. I will laugh out a quick intro.
Speaker 2:So teaching business ethics one thing that I've learned I do some executive education, which is the non-credit. Somebody is doing a management certificate. They're not doing a pull in BA they take, and so in those environments I'm doing one. This week students from a company will come and they will take a class on intro to basics of accounting, basics of marketing, executive presence, ethics and leadership. And so one time I was doing something for a corporate client and when you do the pay for play, corporate client stuff all illusions of sort of being academically independent a company hires you to teach a thing and so you have a meeting where you say, okay, here's my content. They're like okay, more of that, less of that, and even if you know that probably it shouldn't quite be that way, you sort of help take what you do and you fit it in because you're getting paid and it's very transactional and you, you know, I mean the way I draw the line on that stuff is, if they get too far, I just say no, and I can also do that because that's what markets are right. So one time I had a company the students were going to come in and do this, you know all these different things and one of them was ethics and the guy from their compliance office was the guy where I was working with and he said I gave him, I talked about all my things. I said the best organizations are ones where you know people really want to do the right thing and leaders work to create opportunities for people to, you know, through suggestions and nudges and choices and kind of go through the behavioral psychology of putting people in a position to make good decisions. And he said well, I really think we should change the title and I think because I think we should call this driving performance through compliance. And I'm like you know, if you want compliance, the last thing you want to do is drive performance through compliance.
Speaker 2:Let me talk to you a little bit more about the personal. You know the social psychology around creating an environment through your words, your actions, your reaction to crisis, who you hire, who you fire, how do you create an opportunity for people to want to do that? So back to my previous thing about sort of leadership and how do you do that. So you know, I was never in a position to just tell people what to do. That was not my job. So at one point in time I was the director of corporate relations at the Carlson School of Management.
Speaker 2:I was in the corporate and foundation relations. So instead of having a portfolio of major gifts personal individual giving I worked with companies. It was a little more transactional and you would put together a proposal or the company would come to you and you would do some of these things Well, if you think about a business school which is public facing and touches. So let's think about, let's say, you're, cargill or General Mills or any company I don't want to pick any specific company. Let's say you're a Fortune 500 company in the Twin Cities, of which there are many, right, how are you connected to the Carlson School? Okay, so from my perspective, you are a donor right From the Career Services Office. You're an employer right.
Speaker 2:From the Alumni Relations side, you have an affinity group, you have the Carlson Alumni group at your company. From the supply chain side, you might actually be using some research on right Right. So we have different groups at the Carlson School that have relations outside the school and we don't always know what each other is doing. So what I did was created and I'm not this is not new to me, other people have done this in the past but what I recognized a need for was we got to figure out a way to talk to each other or to know what's going on. Now, if you think about it, there's a lot of ways you could do this right. You could say I'm going to create a Google Sheet and everybody types in what they do and then, whenever it's time to interact, you go and look at the Google Sheet. Do you enjoy looking at Google Sheets of other people Like that? It's not right. We can create this. So what I did was I said look what works for me. What am I good at? I'm good at talking and facility.
Speaker 2:So once a month, I would have the Corporate Relations Council. I would have somebody from the Home Center for Entrepreneurship, somebody from the International Programs Office, somebody from the Career Services Office and we would just all sit around the room and everybody reported and I'll do a little humble brag here and that I was always the secretary, because I was really super mindful early on in my career of women being saying why do I have to be the secretary? And I'm like, okay, so I took the notes. But we would go around the room and everybody would give their top two or three activities they were doing that month with certain companies and we would just one. It was really quick. I kept it moving. By the time we got about halfway around the table we were already starting to see it's almost like coding, you know, analyzing a document, right? You're like, oh, three people have already mentioned Cargill, right? Oh, here's this thing coming up, oh. And then somebody would hear and they'd be like, hey, what about that? And I'm like, okay, you guys, we're not going to talk now, but I'm going to end this meeting 15 minutes early and you guys need to take it up then, right? So we talked for about half an hour. I would write everything down, I would do a matrix and show where, just for that particular one, we would break everybody who had been sitting across the table and like, hey, I need to, yeah, yeah. And so everybody would talk and they would leave. I'll write up some notes, I'd email them out to everybody and then the next month we do it again.
Speaker 2:It was dynamic, it was live, people were looking at each other, and so I used I talk about psychological distance all the time in my ethics class. If you can't picture the stakeholder that your actions are affecting, it's easier to do things that might harm them or that might be self-ed. But if you see the person across the table that you're interacting with, you're more self-governing, you do a better job. So we did a better job.
Speaker 2:Instead of the sort of classic academic model of resource scarcity and fighting for survival, we were always meeting in a sort of public, functional, non-competitive way to make those little sticky connections somewhat informal, somewhat formalized by the fact that we had a monthly meeting. And. But the reason it worked was because that's how my leading style worked, because I could tell a joke or tell somebody to be quiet without pissing them off or say, okay, great move, got to do this. A different person might have done it differently, in fact, the next person after me did it differently, but that for me turned out to be a super effective way of helping people. Again, what's a decision you don't want to have One thing the university used to talk about the four or five, like I think it was Target, or one company got donation gift proposals from five different campus units all on the same day with no coordination at all, and so you don't want.
Speaker 2:You want Cargill. You want these companies to feel valued, but you also want, when they show up, they want to know that we all know what we're doing, what you're doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure yeah.
Speaker 1:So the two things that come to mind is I'm listening to you talk about that as one you're talking about leadership as facilitating other people's work, right, kind of opening the doors, seeing, making it possible for them to see where they can do their work better, like rather than dictating what they could do, which I think is interesting for people to think about when they think about their own leadership, their approach to kind of directing folks work. But I'm also really struck, both personally and professionally, by this idea that you keep kind of coming back to. That is and you haven't said this, this is my interpretation but that that leadership is different when you focus your leadership on people than it is when you focus your leadership on the institution, sort of where's your affiliation, who are you looking out for? And I have always felt, both as an employee and as a leader, that if you don't look out for your people, there's no institution anyway. So the only point is to look out for the people. But I know a number of attorneys who would disagree with me. I don't know where your legal training comes down on that, but so I'm thinking about this, this challenge, that that I've lived as a campus employee where you have a leadership team that's so focused on protecting the institution in a number of ways and not necessarily for bad reasons and not not your Enron type of story, but this but protecting the institution comes at the expense of caring for the people.
Speaker 1:And I'm wondering just kind of randomly if there's any connection and this is not a question, because I don't think this is an answerable question but if you take the kind of person in higher ed who stands in front of a classroom and lectures and you put them in a leadership role, are they more likely to be the kind of leader that doesn't kind of look out at the room of people and wonder how to get the most of them out of them right? It sort of like focuses on something that's easy to deliver. I don't know, that's just somebody said this to me the other day that you can have really great teachers who are lousy administrators and really lousy teachers who are great administrators. I don't know that you can have really lousy teachers that are great. I haven't seen that. I haven't seen lousy teachers be great teachers, be lousy administrators, because I think great teachers are so focused on people.
Speaker 1:Now I'm kind of rambling, but I'm interested in this idea and I'd love to hear you talk about it from, and maybe you have. Okay, now my brain is just kind of going round like this idea of teaching students that personal perspective, seeing it in action on a campus, and also like you are, you are kind of soft peddling in that story away from your leadership, because you know you like being an individual contributor and you've never been kind of the sole person on top of the org chart. I'm wondering if there's something and this is this is an honest question, just kind of chatting I'm wondering if there's something about that leading from the side, that leading through influence that connects to a more more facilitative leadership as opposed to a more kind of top down leadership. I don't know, you've just got my wheels turning on some things I hadn't really put into words before.
Speaker 2:Well, I think so. Part of it is and this is maybe why I didn't like the practice of law is that I am not a big fan of the high stakes decision. I don't want to be the person, because in my experience, the people who make high stakes decisions are often not the most popular people.
Speaker 2:And if you are like me, a person who likes for people to like you, and like me, a person who likes to be the joy and light in a room and to have a good time, it is hard Because there are people who need to make those hard decisions and some people are better wired at doing that. The best leaders can kind of do both, but I will say that. So there was a time in my life when I thought I wanted to be a leader at the top of the pyramid. And because I wanted the positional authority, I wanted the prestige, I thought about the money. It looked as someone looking from the outside, in that if you wanted to be important and powerful and have a lot of money, that you would aspire to be at the top of whatever organization you were going to be. And it is also the case that there's the traditional academic path. But because I had been in the world of fundraising and development, I had seen people who were good fundraisers ascend into roles of leadership, sometimes even to be presidents of colleges. So the experience that I had had two experiences that helped me to know that this was not going to be for me, and the first one was the actual amazing opportunity when I was the vice president for fundraising at the Minnesota private college council, because the board of directors of the private college council are the 17 college presidents and some community board members. So I got to meet 17 college presidents over the course of two years. I got to. Sometimes I would drive them to the airport, sometimes I would have a committee. I met the president of Augsburg, the president of Concordia, the president of all these different places and to listen to them talk about their job and the kinds of decisions and especially a small private colleges, the existential crisis of running a small private college, keeping all the stakeholders happy. You know the delicate balance of being. You know providing academic rigor yet being flexible. How do you increase diversity? How do you cultivate donors? How do you it it? So many of those decisions were high stakes decisions that I, just in terms of the way my mind works and the way I'm built, I would knew I would be an absolute wreck to be put in that situation. You know I often joke with my students at the Carlson school that nobody dies on the operating table around here. Right, literally nothing we do in this building is going to result in anyone dying, unlike, say, the medical school or in the engineering school where you're building a bridge, the cars you know. Like we are, we are basically doing paperwork, it's spreadsheets and making you know. I mean, a lot of what we're doing is not, is not that?
Speaker 2:The second experience that I had was our the dean of the Carlson school, who's just retiring now Sree's here, who had come up through our faculty and she and I had a very good relationship. She was always incredibly supportive of me. In my second year teaching we got she got invited to a conference at the University of Colorado and it was a conference for deans, people who teach business ethics and people from the business community. And so she had been invited and she said let's go, and because you're in the second year of this job, it'd be a good experience for you to go to this conference. Then we'll drive down to Denver and do a alumni event. You know we'll wrap it all together, and so obviously I felt very validated to have been asked and so, but if you've ever been, have you ever been to Denver?
Speaker 1:Only the airport.
Speaker 2:Okay, but have you ever driven from the airport into Denver? No, it's really far. You fly into Denver and you get a car, and then you drive and drive and drive and drive, and then, and then we drove up to Boulder, driving and drive and drive and drive. So I was driving with the dean in the passenger seat, with her phone being a dean, so I got the front row seat of her doing the dean thing. We also got to talk a lot. Like you know, I, we weren't ever going to be sitting with each other for hours talking about things. We drove up to Boulder, we'd go out to dinner, we'd go, we did all these things. And, having already done the private, this was after I'd left the private college council and met all those presidents, but none of whom I'd ever really had a like heart to heart.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So here I have the dean. You know, she's the chair of the federal reserve. I mean, she's a big, she's big time, she is, you know, but so human and so normal. It's just a good person to talk to. And so I was talking to her about what is it like to be a dean, what is it like? And I think I don't, I can't imagine that she would be upset with me for sharing this, but I mean, so let's imagine she'd come from the faculty.
Speaker 2:She and her husband joined Carlson. They were faculty together and then she moved up, she became, you know, she said it's really lonely. You can't hang out with the faculty that you used to do because you now are making macro level decisions. And I say this because I'm I mean, academics are professional complainers. We're really good at complaining. We can do analysis, we can complain Right. So you know she's really lonely.
Speaker 2:And I said I don't like to be lonely, I like to be around a lot of people. And she said, and she said, and people aren't always very happy with me and I said but I like for people to be really happy, I want to be the sunshine and light when I walk into a room. I want people to be happy to see me. I want to be around people, I want to be a highly social person, I like to facilitate and conciliate and bring people together.
Speaker 2:And she's like I don't think this kind of leadership role like a dean or president, is really based on what you want out of life, and that she wasn't being critical, and I mean it resonated with me that there are some and I desperately want people to be in those roles that make tough decisions Right. When I'm on the operating table and the surgeon is trying to decide whether to cut here or there and you know there's trade-offs and things have to happen I want somebody who's there doing that hard decision Right. It's like Gardner's multiple intelligences. I think you have to have multiple kinds of leadership.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And sometimes the best leadership teams meld some of the different kinds of leaders to do those kinds of things I think about. So I think one of the readings that you shared about the higher ed reframing is either Bowman or Diehl, I can't remember but Bowman and Diehl.
Speaker 2:there's a book called reframing organizations that I use in my class, sometimes about the four frames Right, You've got the factory or the machine, you've got the family, you've got the jungle and you've got the carnival. Right. And all organizations have a little bit of each one. But often leaders will come up from one part of the organization and then they're in charge of the whole organization. So how do you take somebody from the sales department? It's like get it done, whatever you got to do 110%. And now you're in charge of the auditing team. Who's like we follow the rules, we give exactly 100%. What do you mean? There's no such thing as 110% Right. Or flip it around Like you come up from the auditing and accounting and you're a super detailed person and now you're in charge of the sales team and they're like all over the place. And you're like we've got rules.
Speaker 2:They're like oh, rules are meant to be bent Right, so their thesis in that particular text is that to be a good leader, you have to get out of your own frame and understand and become more multivalent and learn how to lead. And to take it back to teaching, I feel like and I know this is it kills me that this has been. This has been now debunked, but I grew up thinking that there were different learning styles, that some people are more visual and some people are auditory and some people are kinesthetic, and evidently the research is that none of that actually is true, but it certainly felt true to me. And so, as I'm teaching my students, I have some students who really want what is, what do I need to do to make the what is the functional nuts and bolts of this class? I'm like no, I want you to have joy and have fun.
Speaker 2:And no, I need you know. It's like the great UPS commercial from like a decade ago. It still, it still sits with me. The commercial opens up and there's this panorama of a city and a skyscraper and it zooms in on the top floor and there's this Steve Jobs looking guy. He's like today we have to think outside the box. And then the elevator zooms down all the way down and then at the basement and there's the package room and the guy's like.
Speaker 2:But sometimes your job is to think about the box and I think about that with my students. Like some need to have that. Some of my students love the visuals and the cartoons and like the videos. Some students want to talk to each other. So the small group. You know I'm talking and now we break and now we do some small group stuff and now we come back. You know this is to who may never raise their hand, may never interact with me, but they will do it with somebody else. So if my teaching style is only one way, I'm going to miss some of those other, right? If my leadership style is only one way, I'm not going to be able to affect the change I want to affect or shape the culture the way I want to shape it. So teaching once again you got to. I think you have to de-center yourself, right? You have to take yourself out and you have to say okay, what if I'm sitting in that seat and I'm neurodivergent?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I, my brain does not work the way everyone else's brain works. Can I be successful in this class? And maybe one way I can be successful in this class is to have a professor who says we all learn in different ways. We're all going to you know. If this isn't working for you, reach out to me. I have students who have official certified letters from the Disability Resource Center that say I get extra time on an exam. I've had students come to me and say I took, I didn't have enough time on the last exam. I don't have a DRC letter. I think I could do better if I had 15 more minutes. You know, I think I.
Speaker 2:You know some people might be like, oh, they're just trying to cheat. They're just, you know, like you can kind of tell what students are. You know, if you have a student from another country for whom English isn't their first language and they're like, wow, your test is really English heavy. Really, maybe do you mind if I have a little more, you know, and now that I've moved my exams online thanks to the pandemic, I can do all kinds of custom things I can give somebody 15 extra minutes based upon that conversation. That I don't think is necessarily unfair to everybody else, right, right, but you know. So any, any number of different situations that students have, you know. Obviously you want to be, you want to be consistent as possible, you want the assessors to be rigorous, you want people, but I mean, and I will say this, it's never going to happen.
Speaker 2:After teaching first year students for 10 years, I am now absolutely the opinion every 1000 level class at every college should be pass, fail Everyone. Yeah, the first year of college, people come in from really elite private high schools and countries little, almost one one from school houses. You got international students. You've got people who come from families that have the vocabulary and language of higher ed and understand the shadow rules. You have people who are first generation college students who have no clue. Yeah, at the end of the first year, everybody's kind of more starting at the same starting line. The first I get students in it's all over the map and yet I'm supposed to great. You know, like I have students who get to see for example, the smartest kid in the room might get to see because they're just learning how to college, right, and they don't have any knowledge about a college, and yet they're brilliant, I just, and so I. But, like I said, I don't think we're ever going to get there, but I do feel, like you know, meeting the kind of the students where they are helping them as much as you can reminds me of my days being a leader and not actually having any direct reports. Yes, getting them to sort of how do I get everybody to sort of move together? And heard this group of you know loudly oscillating molecules, and we can, we're going to kind of try to keep things together, and so we need those kinds of leaders as well as the high states leaders, and maybe some people can confidently do both.
Speaker 2:And it's good to know, just from a personal health, mental health and physical health perspective, that putting yourself in a leadership role that you're not constitutionally prepared for or that you really want the right reasons, the disconnect, the discontinuity, can be really egregiously damaging to your mental health and to your, you know, well being. I think there's a, you know, I do feel like there's a sorting and as it will. I mean I've counseled.
Speaker 2:It's happened a couple of times where students are like my parents were going to go to business school. I don't want to go to business school, I got to do something else and and they're like, and, and I'm like, well, I didn't go to business school and, like you know, maybe, maybe being an English major or philosophy major is better for you at this point in time. You can always get an MBA, you know. I mean the fact that some people do an undergrad degree in business and then come back and do an MBA, which is basically round two of all the same content. It's really not that different. It's almost better to do something else first, and you know so.
Speaker 1:I'm wondering if there's this kind of circular iteration where, as as you're talking about essentially professional discernment, I'm wondering if that's easier for students who've been in a class where, like in your classrooms, where they are encouraged to see multiple unrelated things, kind of stick together and find their way through them and kind of feel their way to what feels right to them and what feels interesting, and sort of having that chance to really come to understand themselves through content as well as understanding content. And I'm wondering if that, like recursive practicing that over and over through your life, then helps you get to a point when you can be 48 and say, yeah, I don't think being a college president is really the thing I wanna do. I also used to think I wanted to be a college president and now, like you couldn't pay me enough, you just they're literally you could not pay me enough, but I think I have. Well, I have two points. One is a question and then I actually have a real closing question for you. But listening to you talk about the different kinds of leadership skills that are required, kind of stuck like a light bulb went off for me, because I here's my observation about myself that has come to me through this conversation. I think I have this really teacher focused and naive belief, but I'm gonna cling to it cause it makes me happy that if you are that authentic person you described at the beginning, right, if you know who you are and you know how to communicate in a way that is transparently you, so that people believe, when they're talking to you, that they're getting you, they're not getting the filtered you, they're not getting the corporate you, they're getting you.
Speaker 1:If you can do that, then I think you can lead. You can lead through crises. You can lead through downturns. You can lead through all sorts of traumas. You can lead in successful times. If you can couple that authenticity with the ability to tell the truth, like what you were talking about with students here's why we're doing what we're doing, here's the purpose behind it and here's where it's gonna get us.
Speaker 1:If you can do that and be authentic about it, then I think you can be a leader at the top that makes high stakes decisions. People may not like you for it, they may not like your decision, but they're far more likely to not hate you. They're far more likely, I think, to feel respected, to feel seen, to feel heard, to say things like I don't really like that decision, but I do understand it. I disagree with it, but I understand it. I think that's kind of for me, that's the key, like I think that's what makes for really successful leadership.
Speaker 1:But listening to you, I'm thinking and also, maybe you can have a leader who is a high stakes decision maker who, instead of being the person I just described, empowers. There's the take a college president. That college president is gonna make all those painful, publicly unpopular high stakes decisions, but if they have a cabinet that they have empowered to make good decisions and that cabinet is empowered to empower, like downstream, down and down and down, throughout the ranks of the institution, then you can have a leader who's that kind of high stakes decision maker and also have that really beautiful thing that I want, which is the self-recognition, the autonomy, the mastery, the coming to work, feeling fulfilled and, like you, understand what you're doing because you've got a leader who's helping you see your place in all of that. And I hadn't really, maybe because I haven't experienced it. I haven't experienced an autocratic tyrant of a president, have, but I have not experienced one who also empowers their cabinet, and maybe that's an alternative that I'm gonna spend some time pondering that maybe the top leader doesn't need to be everything.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I'll tell you one more story.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then I want you to tell us what you think we should read to help become the kind of leader that you're describing.
Speaker 2:All right. So I think another issue that we have in higher ed when it comes to leadership at the highest levels is that we have created such a narrowing pipeline and process, that we are not getting the kinds of intentional leaders that can do a lot of these things. Because we I say I'm using the Royal Wii because there is an entire ecosystem of search consultants and search firms and carefully curated types that people have to fit into a certain type of role.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And very I am not an expert in all of these areas but in a very sort of masculinist, gendered kind of way, so that even women who want to participate often have to take on a very masculine persona to be taken seriously. So I was at a case, you know, council for advancement and support of education, that's the professional org for fundraisers, and so the MLA, but from fundraising. Okay, so you go to your conference. And I've presented at case conferences before and I've attended. And at one case conference that I went to in Chicago it was the regional case conference they had a breakout session on going from advancement to the presidency.
Speaker 2:And I'm like, and this was, you know, back before I had discerned, and so I went to this room and I've told people this before I walked in and there was this group. They were all kind of sitting together but there was this gaggle of people who were pretty much all men, they were all tall, they all had on suits, they all had silver hair, and I'm saying all, but I'm like no, I know there was the rest of us, the flotsam and jetsam of higher education, all the round and brown and not fitting.
Speaker 2:And there was. I told my wife, I said it looked like a funeral home directors convention. Oh and so, and this was. And so the three college presidents that were and this was many years ago, but they were from small private colleges in Wisconsin, talking about how they got to their roles. And then and so there were some of us who were like, well, and this was clearly not done by homework, but I'm like you guys post these jobs.
Speaker 2:We see them in the chronicle, like people just apply, can you just apply for these jobs? And there's laughter from the, from the dias for, and they're like, well, no, you have to. You have to get in with corn fairy, you have to get in with the search consultants. You have to be willing to move your family every 18 months from coast to coast, you have to be willing to sort of get into this pool. And then you're like, well, who is going to be the kind of person who would live a life like that and put their family through? You know, it's gonna be a very particular kind of leader who takes certain things.
Speaker 2:And this was actually. This was the beginning of my awakening. Right, if Oliver Sacks was writing my novel, this would be the point in which I awakened from my stupor and I'm like, wait a minute. You mean you don't just hire the best people and apply broadly across populations to find great leaders. You mean there's this very narrow ecosystem, echo chamber of people who get into the higher ed leadership vortex, and only through this tube of toothpaste are we going to get the subsequent finalists for the sole finalists, because nobody wants to go public.
Speaker 2:They were like all of the things that are broken about this system is a big part of it is that you I mean like I wouldn't put up with that right and so many really good people, really good leaders, aren't gonna put up with that kind of screening and vetting process. And so I do feel like we are culpable in higher ed of going to the well again and again from these same sources of leadership where the only people who are in that pool are the people who are narcissistic and to put everyone else's needs to the side and to say this is what I want to do Now. I just painted with a very broad brush there, but if you're a rookie looking at it from the outside in. Why would you even get on that escalator to the get go?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have had three presidents that I can think of who were active presidents at the time, offer to mentor me into a presidency. And I didn't really understand what that offer meant, by which I mean, I didn't understand the way it was an invitation in that I might not get again Right Like I was like, oh well, of course, you would mentor me into a presidency. I'm awesome. Like no, that's actually not. That has nothing to do with anything. It's a fascinating world. And the other tube of toothpaste that I think we're equally culpable of and need to do whatever you do with tubes of toothpaste.
Speaker 1:I don't know how to play that metaphor out, but we keep referring people once they've been in leadership positions into the next leadership position, whether they did a good job or not. And I was reading this morning about Finlandia closing and the president saying that now he feels ready to go lead an institution, but he won't get that opportunity because nobody hires presidents who've closed institutions. I'm like, actually, someone will hire you because we hire anybody who's been a president before. Like, you can do this. Like and I'm not holding him responsible. He got there and things had already happened, but it was just a moment when I thought there's a whole system that actually doesn't care about you as an individual. It's just, if you've inhabited a certain kind of role, then certain doors will open for you, and if you haven't inhabited that role, then those doors won't open.
Speaker 2:Yes, I agree, and I think that's yeah. I mean, the same thing happens in politics and in sports. It's like what's the human failing we have? Well, it's human failing. And or it's the least going for the lowest, the easiest decision. Because everybody, if you're in a risk averse position, you go with, like what you said before, like I don't agree with you, but I understand your reasoning right. So if you say I want you to hire a new college president and you say here's this amazing person who's never let a college before, we think they'll do a great job, versus here's somebody who's led six other colleges, nobody's going to blame you for hiring somebody who's already run a college. But you, what if you were to create this the spectacular failure by going out on a limb? And I think it does speak to the fact that there aren't better pipelines. I think I'm trying to remember I'm pretty sure it's the case that within the Lutheran colleges because I knew somebody who was in this role at Gustavus for a point there is a sort of presidency path that, like you become there is, and so I'm assuming maybe some other college. It seems to me that that needs to be if we're really that. What we really want is finding the best talent and putting people in the best position to succeed, that we would do a better job of these pipelines, but we that's hard. So there's two things I always tell my students in my class that if we get to it and then I stick with it, and so the last day of class these are the two things that I write on the whiteboard.
Speaker 2:So in the course of the mortgage crisis, when the second financial big financial crisis, there's a documentary with Hank Paulson, who was the secretary of the treasury under George Bush, who was basically the guy to try to they did the bailout of Bear Stearns. They had to figure out how to save the American economy. But when he was talking about the mortgage securitization where people's mortgages were bundled and collateralized debt obligations and it was, people were basically it's kind of the cryptocurrencies kind of got this down, like I'm gonna get rich by investing in this thing. I have no understanding of how it works. And he said complexity is the enemy of transparency. And so when we talk about supply chain, when you're talking about policies and procedures, when you talk about anything else, the more complex things are, the less likely people are going to be to understand them and if you think about Cass Sunstein and his book Nudges, which has been sort of proven and sort of disproven, but this idea that simplification can really be a tool of helping people make better decisions. And I'll give you a specific example from my executive education from just this last year, because so often so complexity is the enemy of transparency. So often when we get into a leadership position, we inherit the ways things have been done and we don't always re-engineer or upset the Apple Card. So here is the policy. I am now the leader, I am now the enforcer of this policy. Is it worth examining the policy? So imagine, here I am teaching this group of middle management executives about nudging and simplicity and put the apples by the checkout so people won't need a candy bar like. Help people make better decisions right. Provide them with good choices, because people love choices, but give them good choices to choose from. And one of the things I talked about was simplicity. I said if a policy is too complex for people to understand, to how to follow it, don't blame them for not following the policy when they don't know what to do because not.
Speaker 2:30 minutes later, the general counsel for this company said I need. I wanna. You know, I know you're. We booked you for three hours. I need the last half an hour and I'm like I get paid. You know you get to wrap the little bow. And he said, okay, here's some things, here's some things. He goes. Now let's talk about the travel and expense policy. All of you have people who we're having a lot of problems with, people who are submitting things through the travel and expense policy that aren't really reimbursable. We've had several violations and so and I know it's so long that nobody probably even reads it, but you know, we need to really work on compliance with our very complicated travel and expense policy. And I was sitting here, the crime, like I just talked about this. I literally just said if you have a policy that no one's following because it's too complicated, don't blame the people.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:It's a policy, and he had heard me say that, and then he was literally saying that with no awareness that he was giving an example of what I had just talked about. Yeah, complexity is the enemy of transparency. And then the last thing that I always close out with is, if you look at what's going on in terms of the global whether it's electric batteries or semiconductors the mining and the human rights violations in places like in the Democratic Republic of Congo and other places around the world for us to have Teslas and beautiful Macintoshes and everything else, we've got to get these minerals out of the earth. There are a lot of in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There is widespread militias and gang violence that are being fueled by all these things, and a guy who works with the ENOUGH Project, which is an NGO that's trying to reduce human suffering in that part of the world, was talking about how auditing where these ores come from that go to the smelters to make the minerals. If you can figure out that these ores are coming from a mine, that's funding violence and you stop buying from that mine, you can help reduce, right. And he said it's difficult but not impossible, and so I'd leave that with my students as well, that why do we have garments that are made by children in Bangladesh? Why do we have shrimp that are packed by indentured servants in Thailand? Why do we have environmental? Because it's cheaper. It's cheaper to cut corners with environmental and social because it's costs a little bit more, it takes a little bit more time, it's difficult but not impossible. And so the last day of my class I make sure that's the last two things that have right on the whiteboard. Everybody is the enemy of transparency and improving things can be difficult but not impossible. And so really thinking about how.
Speaker 2:So let's take it over to a higher education situation. What if you have? What if you're like? Why don't we have a more diverse faculty? Why don't we have more women and BIPOC people getting tenure and becoming full professors? Well, how do people understand the shadow system of how you do that? Is it so complex that it hides the transparency? Oh, maybe so. Oh, and, by the way, I would love to diversify my faculty and have more.
Speaker 2:Well, let's hire one. What if? Right, we took a different approach. What if we did like Clemson University did when they decided that they were going to become the number one PhD granting institution of black computer scientists? Why don't we hire six African American PhDs in computer science? Is that going to be an easy sell? No, difficult, but not impossible. Right, and? And so I just hang on to both of those two things and say, okay, is what's happening here? Because people can't really see what's going on because it's so complicated. And then are we choosing the path of least resistance, hiring the mediocre college president who's already been a college president, versus really truly going out there and creating pipelines and creating ways to create new leadership. And I just I came to these organically through teaching. The first few years I was teaching my class and those two things have just stuck with me. As you know, if you, if you, if you can hang on to both of those from a reflective perspective, both of them almost always apply to making meaningful change.
Speaker 1:That was beautiful. I'm going to put these up on my board. I love, I love this and I'm, um. Yeah, complexity is the enemy of transparency. And also, sometimes things are not just so complex that we can't understand them or that, but sometimes people, um, intentionally obscure things, make them complex when they could see up for transparency. I I'm I am sitting here racking my brain trying to remember this type of grading.
Speaker 1:You'll know this type of grading. It's got a name. I swear to God. It starts with an A. I can picture the book, except for the title.
Speaker 1:But it's grading where you give the students parameters. It's not, it's like it's it's a contract grading is a form of this kind of grading, but you give the students parameters and if they meet the parameters they get a grade. So it's not based on scores, on individual assignments, but it's it's way more holistic and it's really empowering. And it's also like the faculty who love it tend to be fairly progressively minded humans and it really makes traditional faculty very nervous. Um, because it's it looks way more subjective. It's actually not very subjective at all, but I'm trying to remember what it's called, but it strikes me that that's that kind of grading is.
Speaker 1:Has an like an, an analog to the kind of leadership you're describing, where you, you create the, the expectations, you are super clear about what counts as success and then the way you get to that is open. Right, I can get. I can get to my, your version of you. Just tell me what the, what, the goalpost is, and let me get there in my best possible way. Okay, so we were supposed to read Bowman and deal. Yep, you want us to read? Do you want us to read nudges?
Speaker 2:Not sure, I'm just knowing, knowing that it has not always it is presented as these will all work and it turns out they don't all work.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So, for example, uh, nudges are low stakes, low tech, think of, think of reminders, think of uh, uh. So one example of where it works is if I send you uh, uh your power bill, your gas, electric bill, and it says here's how much you're paying, here's the average amount that people in your neighborhood are paying, and if your number is bigger than this number, it might mean that you need more insulation or a better, more high efficiency furnace. So there's no shame going on here, but there is knowing kind of what more information. Right, that is a very effective nudge. Another one that's very effective is the little signs in the hotels that say only, uh, we're trying to save water on towels, so, uh, only put your, you know, only put your. Put towels on the floor that you want us to wash, but if you would reuse your towel, please keep it hanging. People keep their towels on the hanger, like I mean they. That's a nudge that helps people make a good decision, because they've explained the why, right.
Speaker 2:Higher education gives us a very good example of one that doesn't work, which is getting people to fill out the FAFSA and to apply for financial aid For whatever deeply complicated socioeconomic reasons and different experiences about college and everything else. No amount of text, reminders, emails. Everyone else has spelled out FAFSA. Why haven't you? Nudges don't seem to work when it comes to getting people who haven't filled out financial aid to apply for financial aid, because we all know that dollars are left on the table every year, but otherwise very well deserved. So it's not a panacea, but I do think nudges is a good book to read because of the simplification thing. It goes to complexity as the enemy of transparency. Think of the travel and expense policy that's so complicated that nobody will follow it and the immediate response from the company is we need to enforce this more strictly. We need to punish people for this, as opposed to saying, wow, a good leader would say. If nobody can follow this policy because it's too complicated, maybe I need to either simplify it or change the way that it's presented so that it is actually effective, as opposed to when Wells Fargo had its huge blow up and John Stumpf, who was the CEO at the time and I think Elizabeth Warren just destroyed him on the congressional hearing but when the Wells Fargo employees were creating those fake bank accounts you know, to try to get I don't know if you remember. Yeah, all that. I clicked the Wall Street Journal and I have the piece of pay. I took a picture of it, put it on a PowerPoint slide. Wells Boss says staff at fault. The immediate response from the CEO as to why is there the scandal of all your employees creating fake bank accounts to try to? It's because it's their fault, not we created the incentive structure that says you have to open so many bank accounts, but it's their fault for breaking the rules. And to me, that's the ultimate example of you know, not looking. Instead of looking at the complexity that you set up and the difficulty of your situation, you blame the ultimate stakeholder who can't keep up with what's going on, as opposed to reassessing your processes. Right, so so Nudge is just good. The Bowman and Deal book is good, I think. The other thing that I would say in in I am so in my own self trying to be a better person.
Speaker 2:In the last year or so here, I had spent so much time working at my PhD in the academic literature, in the leadership literature. You know that I had stopped reading literature and poetry, and so I just finished Dona Tart's third book, the Goldfinch, which I'd already read, the Secret History and the Little Friend. But I just spent and it's a big, thick book full of lots. You know, and I'm reading right now. I'm reading David McCullough's biography of John Adams and it's based primarily on like over a thousand letters they have between John Adams and his wife during the whole time that we were writing the Declaration of Independence and everything else. So it's a historical book but in the sense of being sort of research it's. So here's the second president of the United States, the guy who was integral to all this stuff.
Speaker 2:But instead of somebody saying this is what I think happened. They went and got the primary texts and you know this is not, you know, the Harvard bestseller, latest flavor of the month leadership thing, right, this is history and literature. So I also think that you know some of these folks get your Virginia Wolf, get your Emily Dickinson, right. Think about some of that and I think that we are. If all you're reading is technical leadership stuff.
Speaker 2:And back to my original comment to you about when I was originally an English major and now I'm teaching business ethics and it turns out that the ways of making, meaning and thinking and describing and talking about the human condition and why we make decisions and what we do. That I felt particularly well prepared by a deep study of literature, is that when you go back, if you are a person who studies the humanities and your head's been stuck in the leadership, business, literature, modern day stuff, go back and you would be. You know, as my MBA student said, nothing you're saying here today is anything I haven't already heard. We're just looking at it from a different perspective and I think some of those themes, some of those ideas right, help. It's helpful, you know, just in terms of context, in terms of nuance, in terms of some of those other things, to get back into the art a little bit and the history, and not so much the modern technical stuff.
Speaker 1:My flip side of that learning experience came this year, as I, for the first time in my life, have bothered to read anything about marketing and who knew marketing was storytelling? Not me. I got into this like oh my God, like I just felt like a whole window into my undergraduate education didn't open and could have opened, and. But it gives me a whole different way to think about what it is you do when you talk to people about something you want them to want or something you think they want, but you know they're not articulating. It's just, it's fascinating. The book I want to pick up is this Insighting Joy. So he's a poet, but this is a collection of essays and what I really love about it is that Insighting Joy is about also sitting with grief, because you only experience joy as a counterpoint to something else and so it's not a, you know, cheerful polyannish.
Speaker 1:Everything smiles in happiness, but it's about like the really beautiful moments in life are also grounded in something probably really painful, and that's what's actually really beautiful about the whole thing. So, yeah, yeah, well, rand, thank you so much for this conversation. You're welcome. All right, my friend. Now that we're done, I want you to do two things for me. First, choose one thing that came to mind while you were listening. Maybe it was something we talked about, or maybe it was something that occurred to you while you were listening. It doesn't matter. Just put it into practice.
Speaker 1:This week, I want you to take action. It can be imperfect action, inspired action, scared to do this new thing, action, I don't care. Just take action. Don't overthink it, don't talk yourself out. Just do it. And then, second, tell me how it goes. Dm me on LinkedIn or Instagram or shoot me an old fashioned email about carol at the cleriogroupcom, and once you tell me what you tried, you'll be entered into a monthly drawing for a $20 gift certificate to bookshoporg. You'll get to expand your learning and I'll get to help you build your library. It's a win for both of us. So that's it. Try something out and then tell me how it went. I can't wait to hear from you.