Peter A. Reiling, Executive Vice President, Leadership Programs
How do you maintain a “true north” on your moral compass when the whole world seems content cutting corners, taking the easy way out?
No question better captures the essence of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.
As I open today’s daily paper at the end of June 2009, here is what I read: In the world news, a leader in the Mideast seems intent on ignoring the rights of his people to speak out when discontent. In the national news, another leader, this one in a southern state of the US, has lied to his constituents, his staff, and his family about the nature of his overseas travels, supposedly on official business but actually pursuing an adulterous affair. And, on the business pages, a leader pleads innocent, despite mounting evidence, of swindling his investors of billions (with a “b”) of dollars.
Leadership matters. It can take countries onto higher trajectories, turn companies into inspirations, individuals into emulated icons. Think Lee Kwan Yew. Steve Jobs. Nelson Mandela.
But the pantheon of great leaders seems thin these days. Sure, the world is full of local heroes doing important and inspiring work in their communities. This is wonderful, and we do need more of these. But at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the world as a whole is at the greatest, most critical inflection point in at least decades. It needs leaders willing to stretch, to step up to the greatest challenges of our time, to lead with vision, with courage and with integrity.
How effective are you? How enlightened are you? What values guide your decision-making? Are they the right ones that could stand up to the critical if affectionate scrutiny of your fellow Fellows?
Thirteen years ago, the family and friends of a great Chicago businessman approached the Aspen Institute to create an opportunity for high-achieving US leaders in their 30’s and early 40’s to step back from their daily responsibilities to think. To think about the kind of society they’d like their children to live in and to ask, as Bobby Kennedy so often did, “Why not?” These leaders would all share common traits: Each would have already proven him or herself successful at building great businesses and organizations. Each would be an entrepreneur, a do-er by nature. And each would be nominated by a mentor or a friend who was convinced that he or she could do more – that he or she could move beyond thinking to doing; that he or she could move from success to…significance.
So was born the Henry Crown Fellowship Program of the Aspen Institute, each year bringing together a cohort of 20 high-achieving leaders, mostly from the world of business and challenging them through four weeklong meetings spread over two years to consider their leadership: How effective are you? How enlightened are you? What values guide your decision-making? Are they the right ones that could stand up to the critical if affectionate scrutiny of your fellow Fellows? Could you be “painting on a much broader canvas”, impacting not just your organization but your country, your region, the world? Could you make “the good society” a reality in your time?
Henry Crown Fellows aren’t just asked to do more. It’s a requirement of admission. Each has to commit to designing and carrying out a project that will stretch them so that if, as is posited during their fellowship experience, they could somehow come upon their younger self some 20 or 30 years hence, they will be proud to share what they have done in the world.
Asking someone to step out of his or comfort zone to stretch makes them profoundly uncomfortable. I know. I am a Henry Crown Fellow, and the experience has changed the trajectory of my life. It has changed how I view my place in the world, my responsibility in my organization, my role as husband and father. I am no longer at ease. Instead, I know I have to ask – and respond to — the hard questions of my self, of those I lead, and of those I love.
The wonderful thing about the Henry Crown Fellowship is that it has grown. Of course, after 13 years of annual cohorts of 20, we number 260. That’s simple math. But the fun thing is that we’ve done more than build progressively…we’ve cloned. Today, the Fellowship has inspired a dozen other similar programs in the US, Africa, Central America, India, the Middle East and, soon, in China. The result: the Aspen Global Leadership Network comprising nearly 1000 Fellows from 43 countries, all with the same leadership DNA that impels them to do more, to push harder, to “think different.”
One of the Henry Crown-inspired fellowships is the Nigeria Leadership Initiative, itself designed by two business leaders who saw the need for values-based leadership. And already, it has assembled an admirable collection of Fellows, some senior, some emerging, who are daring to speak truth to power, to question the status quo, to look at the grand experiment that is Nigeria and say “We can treasure what we have, but we can also do better. Our children demand it.”
Many years ago, emerging from his Fellowship experience, a young man in West Africa said to me, “We arrived here as a collection of stars. We leave as a constellation.” To him, I say, “We have become a collection of constellations. We must become a universe. And, through our actions, it is time to make a dent in the universe.
The world is in need. It is time to step up. None of us can be at ease.
Peter A. Reiling is the Executive Vice President, Leadership Programs and Executive Director, Henry Crown Fellowship Program at the The Aspen Institute, Washington, DC.
