A few years ago,
I ran into a colleague I hadn't seen for a long time,
who said, "What are you working on now?"
And I said - I was in that kind of mood -
I said, "Oh, making the world a better place."
And he said, "Could you pin that down just a little bit?"
Well, I realized that what I actually do
is I try to provide other people tools for making the world a better place
by giving them leadership skills.
So what's your goal?
Do you simply want to get things done and maybe improve them a little?
Do you want to start something, maybe a social venture?
You can be any age to do that.
I was amazed when Katie of Katie's Krops
got an award from President Bill Clinton
for a venture she started to feed the homeless
when she was nine years old.
So anybody can start something.
Do you want to start something?
Do you want to grow something?
Do you want to start a business? Do you want to lead a big business?
Or do you just want to make the world a better place?
The leadership lessons for being effective at doing that
are things that I have learned
from working with tens of thousands of leaders
in dozens and dozens of countries all over the world,
and I'd like to boil them down to six positive things
that help us keep things moving up
or in a positive direction of progress.
The first is the universal lesson of life,
which is show up.
If you don't show up, nothing really happens.
I remember a Peter Sellers' movie of a number of years ago
called "Being There."
And it was a very instructive story
because Peter Sellers played a fairly ignorant man,
Chance, the gardener.
And he was just hanging around the place where he did gardening
when a very important meeting was about to take place.
As people arrived for the meeting,
they didn't know that he was only helping at the house,
so they said, "Who are you?"
and he said, "Chance the gardener."
And immediately, people misunderstood and called him Chauncey Gardiner,
invited him into the meeting,
and he ended up solving their problems.
Well, it was a comedy, but I thought how real that is.
The very fact of showing up, of making oneself available,
of deciding that your presence makes a difference,
is the first key to leadership.
And I think about President Barack Obama of the United States.
He's been reelected,
but he started out, basically, by showing up.
He was a fairly obscure state senator from the State of Illinois
when asked to give the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention.
He showed up, he gave the speech, and the rest is history.
Being there makes a difference, but that's only the starting point,
that you're in the situation.
The second lesson that I've learned is that it's important to speak up,
to use the power of voice.
No one knows what we're thinking if we don't express it.
I say this to my students at Harvard Business School all the time
because people get graded on class participation,
and you know, there are some people
who think they're entitled to have all the air time,
and so they often just talk and continue to talk
until finally they hit upon something they really have to say.
(Laughter)
But there are others in the class,
and sometimes it's the women that I have to encourage,
that they can own that air space too.
Sometimes I'll say, "Why aren't you speaking?"
And they said, "I want to make sure that I really have something to say."
And I point out to them that the men didn't feel that way -
just do it, just talk.
However, the power of voice is not simply words.
The power of voice is shaping the agenda,
framing issues for other people,
helping them think about it in a different way.
This is why thought leaders can be leaders,
because they influence the thinking of other people.
Have you gone to meetings
where you've noticed that whoever is running the meeting,
the person who ends up as the most influential,
is the one who names the problem and gives people an idea for action,
and that gets things moving, that gets things started.
I think about a Brazilian I know whom I think the world of.
He's a journalist, and yet as a journalist,
he has managed -
through his columns
but also through suggesting to other people
actions that they could take -
he has managed to transform an entire neighborhood in Brazil
into what he calls "the learning neighborhood,"
where kids now not only learn in school,
the entire neighborhood is mobilized to help them learn.
And that learning neighborhood
has helped make this section of São Paulo considered an upscale section.
I just saw it in an airline magazine, so it must be true.
(Laughter)
But my journalist friend
did this entirely through encouraging many separate people.
He didn't have power; he was just a writer.
He is just a writer.
What he did was encourage many different people
through the power of his voice:
"Why don't you do this? Why don't you do that?
We have a problem. Let's fix education."
The power of voice is big,
and I'm thinking about another journalist I know,
using the power of voice in a very powerful way.
It's Ellen Goodman,
whom many people know, in the United States in particular,
as a former syndicated columnist,
who went through some things with her own family
and decided that it's time to have end-of-life conversations.
And as an individual using her power of voice,
she has created something called the Conversation Project,
which now has as a media partner ABC,
and they are spreading the idea
that one should just talk about preferences for end of life
so that people can have a humane ending of the kind they want.
But it's entirely the power of voice.
So speaking up is the second attribute of leadership.
The third is to look up.
Look up at some higher principle,
bigger issue, bigger vision,
values.
Without vision and values, leadership is hollow.
No matter what it is that you want to achieve,
it's always important to remember the principles.
And when I say "higher principles" and "looking up,"
I'm not thinking about spiritual matters,
but for some people, they would take it that way.
I'm simply thinking about how important it is
for any leader to know what they stand for
and to be able to elevate people's eyes from everyday problems,
which bog us down,
in the weeds,
difficult to deal with.
And we're in troubled times now, in the world,
and what we need is leaders who help us get above that,
to gain a sense of hope
but also to remember what's truly fundamental in our values,
and the best leaders do that.
In fact, one of my most recent books is about great companies.
I realize I say that advisedly,
that many people wonder if there are any great companies.
But there are some truly great companies:
IBM, for example, Procter & Gamble,
a bank in Brazil, a bank in Korea -
amazing that there can be good banks -
companies that I've seen all over the world
that stand for vision and values.
When their leaders lead,
they're constantly reminding people of a nobler purpose.
It isn't just making money;
we're trying to achieve something for the world.
That's what we get from looking up.
I've learned this in my own work in a project I manage at Harvard.
We can get bogged down in the details -
believe me, academic politics aren't fun.
There are always things that we have to work on.
It can really drag you down.
And a wise person,
who was one of the first people to work on this project with me,
said, "You know, we should remember
to start every meeting by reminding ourselves of our mission,
reminding ourselves of what we stand for."
And you know, that lifts the spirits like nothing else.
There's a purpose; there's a reason that we're doing this,
and that's going to stand us in good stead when I get a few skills down.
But the fourth skill -
and why vision and values matter, in part -
the fourth skill is team up.
Team up.
Everything goes better with partners.
Nearly anything worth doing is very difficult to do alone,
and the best enterprises, the best projects, the best ventures
are one where there's a sense of partnership from the beginning.
I did a study with a colleague about technology start-ups,
some of them very famous,
and in recent years, which ones came to dominant the industry?
Like Google in search, not AltaVista.
Like Facebook rather than Myspace.
And one of the things we discovered,
besides having a good value proposition,
was that they had more and better partners faster.
Partners matter.
For the best social enterprises that I see around the world
including one I'm very proud of -
I happen to be on the national board of this forever.
It's an international national service organization
called City Year.
And City Year was founded by four partners.
Two of the co-founders continue to build it and grow it,
and there was a sense of teaming from the beginning.
Finding partners who believe is essential.
And when you find partners,
then you can do incredible things in the world.
Here's something that many people may not know
about Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Hillary Clinton is very interested in solving problems of the world
from her position at the State Department,
which has development, social progress on its agenda
and not only international diplomacy.
But she sees development as a part of diplomacy,
and she also wants to solve problems that disproportionately affect women.
And there's been a problem in the world,
known for a long time.
It's the problem of women cooking on open fires.
In fact, more women die from cooking on open fires
than from major diseases in the developing world.
That was something I didn't know
until I learned about the Clean Cookstove Project.
So Secretary Clinton and her office of global partnerships
picked this up and created a massive teaming up
of governments and businesses and NGOs all over the world,
and finally,
the Alliance for Clean Cookstoves is beginning to make progress
in building an industry in which households, women,
can have affordable access to clean cookstoves,
which means, by the way, no air pollution.
It means they can cook in their home without worrying about it burning up.
Otherwise, they had the cookstoves at a distance from the home.
A massive example of teaming up,
and that's how we're going to solve the problems of the world in the future,
by the way - make the world a better place -
is because we take lots of separate efforts
and we bring them together,
aligned in one big team.
So now I've had four skills, and I want to get to the fifth,
which is never give up -
because of something that I coined a while ago,
I call it Kanter's Law; I hope you do too.
Kanter's Law is that everything can look like a failure in the middle.
There's almost nothing we start
that doesn't hit an obstacle, a road block.
It takes longer than we imagined because we'd never done it before.
It may take longer just to convene the first meeting.
I sometimes have my MBA students do an action plan,
and they say, "Week One - change the strategy.
Week Two - implement."
Well, you know, that's not realistic.
I mean, middles are very, very difficult.
You hit a bump in the road you didn't know was there,
because you've never gone down the path before.
The critics surface; they start attacking.
It doesn't work the way it was envisioned -
true of all kinds of technology -
you have to go back to the drawing board.
And so never give up.
Because if you give up, by definition, it's a failure.
You've stopped prematurely.
If you keep going, persist and persevere,
find a way around the obstacles,
flexibly redesign,
often you can produce a success.
Sometimes it's not the success you first imagined.
A lot of technology
turns out to be applied in ways we had never thought of in the beginning.
But that ability to hang in there and not give up is a hallmark of leaders.
I mean, I think about a friend and colleague in my own area,
Dr. Donald Berwick, who was recently the chief administrator for Medicare,
the biggest health program in the United States.
Well, for 20 or more years,
he has been pursuing the idea of quality in healthcare,
he's been pursuing the idea
of innovation to raise quality and reduce costs.
And do you know that it sometimes takes 17 years
to get an innovation in healthcare
from the mind of those who dream it up into use?
That's an amazingly long time, but he never gave up.
And my iconic example of a leader that we should all aspire to emulate
is Nelson Mandela,
the first democratically elected president of South Africa.
He was in prison for 27 years
and didn't give up.
Finally, emerged from prison to be elected president,
first democratically elected president.
You know, sometimes my students say, "27 years in prison."
And he emerged without a feeling of revenge.
He emerged ready to get on with it, just interrupted in the middle -
get on with it and build a country.
They say, "I could never do that. I could never feel that much forgiveness."
Well, I think, we hope, that you're not in prison for 27 years,
we hope that your middles are shorter and sweeter,
but find your inner Mandela.
Find the strength to persist
even against the naysayers, the critics and the obstacles
because that's what makes a difference between success and failure.
And then when you get to the point
where it looks like what you're doing is working,
it's taking hold, you have the first pilot,
you have a little more support,
you do the sixth thing, which is lift others up.
Share success,
the credit, the recognition,
the idea of giving back once you have a success
because that's what creates an environment in which you can do it again,
you can do it the next time.
You build support rather than lose support.
You must feel positively about the achievement
but make sure other people feel elevated by what you do as well.
So that, quickly, are six secrets of success
if you want things to continue to be up:
Show up.
Speak up.
Look up.
Team up.
Never give up.
And lift others up.
Thank you.
(Applause)