Teach as you. Lead as you.
I am glad I said that. It is in keeping with who I am and what I aim to teach. Now it is a kind of brand.
But I doubt it would have had much resonance for me if someone I admire had not repeated it to others.
There's a good phrase for any teacher: make it visible.
If, as a leader, you want to uplift those in your charge then hear what they say and repeat what's valuable to others. Make it public.
Somewhere Coach John Wooden says you should do two kind things each day, and do them anonymously.
If your job--provost, headmaster, teacher--is to design a program, make a schedule work, or navigate a class that moves people forward in life, teach them to do the above too, as best you can. And do the same yourself.
And make it fun to do, if at all possible.
The future we want? Surely it includes more kindness, less ego.
Dear Harvard,
Wanna change the world? For real? Require applicants to know how to grow a green pepper or demand they know how to change a bike tire. Tell the world you will give preference to kids who ride public transportation.
Because if you really want to offer terra firma an upgrade, that's all you need to do.
As you often like to imply, you run the system. You are #1. Cool. Good for you and a big congrats. Branding that makes even Google and Hollywood jealous is no small accomplishment. But being an icon means that far beyond the thousands of kids who apply to Harvard and do not get in are tens of thousands who do not apply (but might) and millions who don't really know what the Ivy League is but nevertheless attend schools that mold themselves implicitly or explicitly to serve your admissions process.
Might you shape them into something that helps us all sustain our world? Since students are a product moving on the assembly line you engineer, could you please engineer them towards behaviors our whole world needs? Please?
The world needs a population that lives on less, that cools rather than heats. (It is the research completed by your brainiacs as much as any that shows this, is it not?) Make it clear, then, that a Harvard student will begin their career as a person who does those things a sustainable world demands. Make sure even the geniuses can tend garden and the future Nobel laureate will get around town by something other than a Mercedes. Insist on a minimum standard for all your applicants of those activities that make today better, a day a hundred years from now possible. Force those tiger mom's now picking up their kids in SUV's to tell their kids that Harvard expects them to be biking home instead. Let's see what that does for truth and light.
The above requires nothing more of you than a willingness to say it out loud, to use your unprecedented place in the system to turn your dial one degree. Easy.
If you really wanted a challenge worthy of your greatness, it would look more like this: Put tents up in Harvard Yard for your freshman class and give their dorm rooms to the homeless who overpopulate Harvard Square.
True, this will not look sexy on the alumni report, even if the high school seniors who knew this was gonna be the deal when they applied would be an especially resilient crop, might even help you churn out leaders who can serve the world from refugee camp-like conditions.
Still, to align all the brilliant adults in your employ, all the ultra-capable kids you can pick from each year, all the money at your disposal and take on a single problem, lowering the refugee population in the world by 5% in ten years, say, would be worthy of you as "the best."
Or try this: Close up shop for five Cambridge minutes and then re-open as a school only for girls from Kabul. Let your world-class faculty and top-notch facilities and ocean of cash be put to use educating only those whose empowerment is most obviously connected to a more peaceful world. Sure, the logistics, the visas, the vetting, and the risk would be staggering, to say nothing of how you stay afloat without keeping your brand what it is as the place that sends kids to Apple and Goldman. But if you can't overcome such hurdles, who else can?
Besides, what might such a shot in the dark mean when it is taken by an institution the whole world watches? Your flare sent into the night sky of a crumbling planet? What might that signal as a way to say: we must change?
Or is that the role of others who have less to risk, whose buffer for failure is tiny when compared to yours? Let those on life support model risk, you might say. Your role is the status quo.
Real leadership? I wonder what Stanford is up to these days.
