We have a son who is studying at the Marriott School. When he was about three years old, our family was living in the Governor’s Residence in Salt Lake City.
One day I called home, and we had a conversation that went something like this:
“Hello?”
“Is this Weston? Is Mom there?”
“She’s here, but she’s busy.”
“How about Anne Marie?”
“She’s busy too.”
“What are they busy doing?”
“Looking for me.”
I want to speak to you on one thing that the world is looking for: collaborative leaders who have the power to convene. My focus is to challenge you to recognize who is convening as well as to recognize that we can all get better at this. It is, in fact, an essential skill of the twenty-first century.
Military Post
As a young second lieutenant, I had been assigned to attend red-eye gunner school in Fort Worth, Texas, in the middle of the summer. I was housed in an empty officers’ barracks. But on the second day, another soldier, who happened to be a brigadier general, was assigned to the same building. Now, second lieutenants and brigadier generals don’t spend a lot of time hanging out together, but when you’re the only two in the barracks and it’s really hot outside, you begin to talk.
I began to learn about this brigadier general, who had been a management consultant for Firestone, which at the time was a very large holding company with more than five hundred different corporate entities. It was his job to analyze the management in each of them.
I said, “General, I am a young businessman. Tell me what you have learned in all of your experience that I can use to begin my career.”
“I have one piece of advice for you,” he said. “There is a limit to the amount that you can be paid for what you do by yourself. After that you must be paid for what you can do through other people. Learn to manage and to leverage yourself.”
It’s good advice.
In the several years since, I have learned that there is a corollary to that principle: there is a point when getting things done through others must be modified so we are getting things done among others. This happens when there are obstacles that are outside our control or when there are necessary resources that we don’t have.
Former Marriott School dean Gary Cornia was a member of the Utah Tax Commission for a long time. During his service there was a movement to make a very minor change that would make a big difference to a lot of people: to give car buyers a license plate when they bought the car rather than having them come back to the dealer six weeks later.
When we started analyzing the idea, we realized it was a good thing financially for everyone, but we did not have control of all the resources. Yes, the state had the Tax Commission, but there was a county assessor, and there were banks and car dealers involved. We had to work together in a collaborative way to solve the problem.
Collaboration skills have become, in my mind, a critical measure of leadership in this century. Why? It’s because the world is beginning to organize itself intuitively into alliances and networks. I’m not talking just about the social kind. I’m talking about the way nations, societies, communities, and businesses organize themselves for financial survival.
Strong Networks
Something tells me I’m not the only one who took a Fortran class in college. Do you remember the deck of cards that we would have to keypunch in order to go to the computer center? We would sign up for the mainframe computer at two o’clock in the morning because it was the only time we could get work done. Then if we had stacked those cards in just the right order, somewhere on the other side of the computer lab there would be a sound of cascading paper. That was the technology of the day.
But as time went on, we began to get our own personal computers. My first one was a TRS-80 Radio Shack with 256K memory. I could do very cool things with it, but the best part was that it was mine. I could use it when I wanted and didn’t have to wait in line.
Soon we made the discovery that we could network these PCs together and form a powerful force, even though they were less powerful on their own than a mainframe. Networking PCs has not just reshaped the computer world, it has begun to reshape society.
For example, the European Union is an organization of mainframe governments who realized that they could be better if they began to operate collaboratively, like a group of networked PCs.
The US military has recently taken the traditionally siloed centers of power and authority—the army, the navy, the air force, the marines—and made them operate more like a network.
General Stanley McChrystal, who was commander of the forces in Afghanistan, told me that when he arrived, we were losing. We were the most powerful nation on earth militarily, but we were losing because we were up against a networked enemy who could move and adapt more quickly. General McChrystal’s conclusion was, “You can’t defeat a network without being a network.”
And it’s the same in business.
I was in New York City not long ago, flying home to Utah. I’d gone to Gate 17 at JFK expecting to get on a Delta Air Lines flight. When I got there the screen said “Air France.”
I checked my ticket and looked up to see Alaska Air. I looked again, and it was Virgin Atlantic. Finally, the fourth time, it was Delta. It was an airline alliance—a group of airlines that realized they could operate more efficiently as networked PCs than they could on their own.
Executive Power
This new way of being able to find solutions did not occur magically. These alliances occurred through the hard work of orchestrating collaboration. While it is a twenty-first-century survival skill, it is not a new skill.
Perhaps one of the great collaborations in the history of Western society was the
Constitutional Convention in 1787. The thirteen colonies had just won their independence with their blood. They were operating under a document known as the Articles of Confederation. It was a disastrous situation. There were no courts to sort out disputes, and there was no foreign policy and no standard currency. The colonies knew they had to come together.
They met in Annapolis, Maryland, to work out one problem: trade across boundaries. They could not do it. They realized they needed to have a national government, but these colonies were not at all interested in subjecting themselves to a powerful government after they had just extricated themselves from one.
Knowing that they had to do something, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton went to George Washington and pleaded for help. General Washington was the only person in the country respected enough that when he called a gathering, people would come. Although he sat in a chair in the front of the room and said very little during the convention, he had agreed to be what I have come to call a convener of stature.
A convener is a person who invites the right people to the table. A convener is a person who must define the problem in simple terms so people will understand why something has to be done even when it would be easier not to do anything. A convener is a person who brings accountability to the process through his or her stature. It is a person who establishes the culture by example. It is a person who rewards good behavior and, on occasion, takes someone out of the room and responds to poor behavior. Collaboration requires conveners of stature.
Diplomatic Skills
In the Governor’s Mansion there is a ballroom on the top floor. I was to address a group of about eighty students there. My wife, Jacalyn, unfortunately had other responsibilities, and we couldn’t find a babysitter. Finally I persuaded our ten-year-old son to watch the three-year-old for one hour in exchange for a trip to 7-Eleven, where he would receive a quart of chocolate milk that would be his and his alone.
Just at the rhetorical high point of my remarks, I heard two oak doors in the back of the room begin to rattle. My son poked his head into the room and said, as loud as he could, “It has been an hour! Your time is up!” I will finish today by recognizing that my time is finished, but a new part of your life is just beginning.
My challenge to you is that you begin to refine your collaborative leadership skills. Recognize that while we are not all out forming countries, airline alliances, or supply chains among large companies, we all have the capacity to develop a sphere of influence and to convene. If people have confidence and trust in us, if we take care of relationships through networks, if we maintain a sense of objectivity, and if we refine and execute our diplomatic skills, we can become powerful conveners in big ways and in small ways.
You are entering a workforce in which change will happen rapidly, and there are only three ways for you to approach it: The first is that you can fight it and die; you will be overcome by events. You can accept it and have a chance. Or you can convene it, you can lead it, and you can prosper. May you do so.
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Speech given by Michael O. Leavitt
About the Speaker
Michael O. Leavitt is the founder and chair of Leavitt Partners, a healthcare intelligence business. In 1993 he was elected governor of Utah and served three terms. Leavitt then joined the cabinet of President George W. Bush as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (2003–5) and as secretary of Health and Human Services (2005–9). Leavitt is a seasoned diplomat and has led US delegations to more than fifty countries. In 2013 he coauthored Finding Allies, Building Alliances, which chronicles his passion for collaboration. He and his wife, Jacalyn, have been married for more than forty years and have five children. This text is taken from remarks Leavitt gave at convocation on 25 April 2014.
