Who do you listen to? How do you decide to follow? And, more importantly, for students like us who will be the business leaders of the world, how do we chose to lead?
I'm listening to Susan Hockfield's conversation with Charlie Rose online. Among other things she is talking about research, higher education, stereotypical thinking around women not being engineers, and about being a woman in a leadership position. Ruth Simmons, the president of Brown University, where I studied as an undergraduate student was also on the show some time ago.
Like other Sloan Women in Management, I am incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to be associated with such leaders. As a member of SWIM, I have had the chance to have lunch with incredible leaders like the CTO of Xerox, Sophie Vandebroek and DuPont Executive Vice President, Ellen Kullman. I am so lucky. The lunch conversations were incredibly frank, eye-opening, guiding, and practical. Their astute and warm leadership styles started me thinking about the role models we pick for ourselves.
The conversation around leadership started this morning. I was sitting in the lobby of building E-52 staring into my computer screen and cradling my coffee mug. Finance recitation had just finished and I was thinking about valuation. Value. Value creation. The summer before starting my studies at Sloan, I was reading about the value-creating education ideas pioneered in Japan in Ethical Visions of Education: Philosophies in Practice. The idea goes something like this:
Value is created from "beauty and good", and that is what allows people to expand their capacity as members of society. Because they are more capable, they can likewise expand the activities which society itself engages in.
Value-creation has a slightly different definition in the world of strategy, and valuation is a lot more different in the world of finance.
Abby Phelps and I started talking about a presentation that we'd both attended last night on corporate social responsibility by a senior executive at Coca Cola. The speaker said he'd seen both good leadership and bad leadership throughout his career. He also said something that made me think about the legacy of the work we choose to do in society. Who will take up the work that we've put so much time and effort into? These were some of the things we were talking about when I asked Abby what she thought leadership was. "Leadership, like love, is hard to define. It is something you always have to work at."
With all of the chances we have at Sloan to lead, all of the exposure we get to established firms, growing firms and brand new start-ups, and all of the freedom we are given to create the projects that we lead, leadership is something we think about. Leading is different than managing. Managing requires a certain level of competence, but leadership is another thing. Setting the course is another thing.
Last Thursday night I had a conversation with a student admitted to MIT Sloan about social entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility. Because the school doesn't advertise the magnitude and breadth of all of the work that we do in this area, it may help to point to the bigger picture regarding what the school is doing regarding its relationship to the world as a whole.
Aside from pioneering Open Courseware (OCW) and an incredible portfolio of society-changing ideas and solutions, MIT has chosen to focus on the problems of energy and the environment. The school is truly a global leader in this area, especially because we are a creative, passionate and enthusiastic group, and because the culture of the school is to let us invent, innovate and use our hands and our minds. It doesn't hurt that MIT is at the forefront of energy and environmental research because of the school's commitment to it (read more about the Energy Initiative) and because of the great access we have to technology at the institute. And, as the research done by one of MIT's Nobel Prize winning economists, Robert Solow, showed, 50% of the post-WWII economic growth in the U.S. was attributable to technology.
The elementary school I went to is called the John M. Tobin School. That may be the reason why I paid attention to an email that I got with a quote from Nobel Laureate James Tobin (1918 - 2002). The email began with the quote "The most important decisions a scholar makes are what problems to work on." James Tobin believed that the goal of academics is not just to teach students with 100% commitment and produce outstanding research, but also to serve the public. MIT has created the kind of environment where these three things are possible.
Comments