Six keys to leading positive change | Rosabeth Moss Kanter | TEDxBeaconStreet

From the power of presence to the power of voice, leadership expert and professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter discusses the process of making a difference in the world. Kanter uses the stories of great leaders and ordinary people to reveal the six success factors that are the keys to positive change, including lining up partnerships, managing the miserable middles of change and sharing success with others. This uplifting talk will inspire you to lead and take action.

Leadership expert Rosabeth Moss Kanter is a professor at the Harvard Business School, Chair and Director of the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative, and author of "Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End" and "SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good."

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx.

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)