The Art and Adventure of Leadership. Rob Asghar
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the late 1990s, and he was a loyal friend and mentor to the very end – always available with encouragement and a helping hand. As executive editor for my four books in the Warren Bennis Books Series, Warren generously shared his time and his insights. When I was writing True North, coauthor Peter Sims and I spent an entire week with Warren in Santa Monica going over all the key ideas for the book. He had an enormous impact on the lives of so many people in just the same way – always with kindness, insight, and warm generosity.
Throughout his career, Warren was motivated by a deeply human, democratic view of how organizations should function. In his final years, he grappled with both the promise and the pitfalls of democracy when democratic springs were struggling to blossom around the world. Thankfully, in this book he is able to leave us with some profound insights into what makes a functional, healthy democracy worth fighting for in our organizations and our societies.
Although Warren passed away last summer, his legacy remains as strong as ever: With this new book, he and Steve have made the art and adventure of leadership accessible to new generations. Only 600 students over 15 years were fortunate enough to engage with them each week, as they discussed the biggest issues and thorniest questions of our time involving leadership, ethics, success, and legacies. Now through this remarkable book all of us have the opportunity to gain from their combined wisdom. It is indeed an enduring gift to the rest of us – and a tribute to their generosity.
PREFACE
For much of the past quarter century, I enjoyed the extraordinary privilege of leading a large organization through a time of major change with the world's greatest leadership expert at my side – advising me, questioning me, encouraging me, and challenging me.
The friendship between Warren and me began and blossomed in Los Angeles. But Warren in some sense had always been a creature of Cambridge, Massachusetts – one who felt invigorated when breathing in its rarefied intellectual air. He relished the academic pageantry and power of that educational mecca.
Yet his curiosity would draw him to places far different from Cambridge – spiritually, geographically, or both. The rust, frost, and rugged self-reliance of Buffalo would lure him, then would Cincinnati's peculiar blend of communal spirit and proud independence. There, he began to live out his leadership theories in cauldron-like conditions and make the essential refinements to those theories that would make him unique in our time.
Warren was finally lured to Los Angeles and his academic home for his final 35 years of life, the University of Southern California. Both the city and the school were still fresh faced and a bit brash when he arrived, disinclined to bow to older traditions and enthusiastic about inventing their own new ones. Both the city and the university were stubbornly reluctant to leave the trailblazing to others.
When USC's ninth president, James Zumberge, announced his impending retirement in 1989, its board of trustees tapped Warren to chair the committee to find Dr. Zumberge's successor.
The significance was that the world's greatest authority on leadership was now being called by his university to lead the search for USC's next leader.
The challenge would be daunting for any new president naive enough to accept the job. Even a brief glimpse of Los Angeles's history reveals that this city of dreamers hailing from around the world has little tolerance for association with failure or even mediocrity. USC people, colloquially known as Trojans and the Trojan Family, reflected that uncompromising ambition in an even more heightened fashion.
Early in the search process, Warren contacted me and said he believed he needed to explore whether I was the person that USC needed. It was not evident at the time that my family and USC would be a fit. I had worked my whole life at state-run universities, and USC was proudly private and autonomous in its self-governance. And Los Angeles had little in common with my roots in the Midwest and the Northeast.
But Warren's presence made the situation compelling. He had always instinctively gone to where he felt the action was happening. And now he said that he felt something important was happening in Los Angeles, and that his university could help shape that.
His optimism was infectious, as all who knew him can attest. My wife, Kathryn, and I accepted the challenge and moved west in 1991, and I undertook a nearly two-decade presidency at a time of rapid growth for USC. Warren was along every step of the way, making success possible.
Warren and I regularly lunched, dined, and sat across conference tables. We discussed current events, the state of higher education, and the future, all to which he which he brought his rare, polymathic insights. Unsurprisingly, we spoke often of leadership – how to understand it, how to bottle it, how to unleash it into society, as well as how to minimize or prevent its more pernicious aspects.
Within a few years, our discussions morphed into a class that we would coteach. Though technically listed in the formal course catalog as MDA 365, it was known to everyone else as The Art and Adventure of Leadership. This was a seminar for only a few junior- and senior-level undergraduates. Though the average USC undergraduate was extraordinary by this phase in USC's rapid growth, only the finest of them could succeed in demonstrating enough academic strength, leadership knack, and experience to earn one of 40 to 45 seats each spring semester.
Warren was an acclaimed author and public intellectual, and I was an electrical engineer by trade and an administrator by profession; but he and I would both look back on our 16 years of coteaching that course as a true highlight of our careers. Our students were bright eyed, eager, and passionate. They challenged us, they challenged each other, and they challenged our impressive list of top leaders from around the world who visited as guest speakers.
The experience was intensely human and intensely productive. And many alumni of the class told us something that surprised us. One of the most educational aspects of the class, they said, was a certain dynamic tension resulting from the confrontation of Warren's ideas and my own.
Although we had been allies and Warren had personally recruited me to USC, our styles, our philosophies, and even our values indeed could seem – at least on the surface – markedly different. This led to disagreement and debate, which the students observed and joined. The discussions covered issues such as:
● Whether the leader should focus more on what's changing in our world or what's timeless within it (here, I tilted toward the latter and Warren to the former),
● The extent to which the organizational pyramid needed to be flattened (Warren always believed in the benefit of the flattest and most democratic organization possible, whereas I was more measured on this point), and
● Whether a leader should be judged more by noble character or by bottom-line outcomes (I was more inclined to the latter position).
And, of course, we explored various aspects of failure, as it involved figures from history and our own colleagues (including many a chief executive officer, politician, or university president who fell along the way). We pondered momentary and final failure – failure as judged by others and failure as judged by the leader's own conscience. And we thought about how failure could be a stepping-stone to something better, perhaps even to a victory that would have been impossible without the failure along the way. This book is a result of those honest discussions.
In 2010, I retired from the USC presidency and became president emeritus. In my new role, I still found that one of the most rewarding parts of my life was the interaction with Warren.
After I read his memoir, Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership, I told Warren that he may not have been fully aware of the sort of document he'd gifted us with.
“This isn't a book about leadership,” I told him one day at lunch.
He seemed taken aback. “Oh…then what is it?” he asked.
“It's a love story,” I said. “It's about a man who deeply loves humanity. A man who's spent his entire life seeking to understand humanity. And to help build up people who are worthy of serving humanity.”
Warren seemed touched. He was too modest to speak in such terms about himself or his work. But I could tell he knew, deep within, that he wasn't simply an expert on