writing a summary for an article

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On

Becoming

a

Leader

Warren Bennis

(1989)

New York: Addison Wesley 256 pages

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Knowing Yourself

I have often thought that the best way to define a man’s

character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral

attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most

deeply and intensively active and alive. At such moments, there

is a voice inside which speaks and says “This is the real me.”

William James

Letters of William James

By the time we reach puberty, the world has reached us and shaped us to a greater extent

than we realize. Our family, friends, school, and society in general have told us – by work

and example – how to be. But people begin to become leaders at that moment when they

decide for themselves how to be.

For some leaders, this happens early. Former Secretary of Education Shirley

Hufstedler has spent her life in the legal profession, but she was something of an outlaw

as a young girl. She told me, “When I was very young, the things I wanted to do were not

permitted by social dictates. I wanted to do a lot of things that girls weren’t supposed to

do. So I had to figure out ways to do what I wanted to do and still show up in a pinafore

for a piano recital, so as not to blow my cover. You could call it manipulation, but I see it

as observation and picking one’s way around obstacles. If you think of what you want

and examine the possibilities, you can usually figure out a way to accomplish it.”

Brooke Knapp, a trail-blazing pilot and businesswoman, also fought her way out

of the mold. She said, “ I was raised in the South, and I was raised to be a wife. When I

went to college, the definition of success was to get married to a gentleman and help him

succeed and have children…(but) I was a little savage, in the best sense of the word,

because I was stronger than my mother, and there was no way to control me.”

As Knapp learned, however, breaking out, being yourself, is sometimes anything

but easy. She said, “In high school, I realized that I was going to be voted the most

athletic, but I didn’t want the ‘lady jock’ label, so I decided to become the most popular. I

learned the name of every single person casting a ballot and called them all by name and

won.” Her popularity took a nosedive when “the mothers of the girls in my class started

taking potshots at me. I concluded that success means that people don’t like you and you

become a bad person, so I shut down for a lot of years. It wasn’t till after I got married

that I began to experience my need to achieve again.”

Know thyself, then, means separating who you are and who you want to be from

what the world thinks you are and wants you to be. Author/psychiatrist Roger Gould also

declared his independence very early. He said, “I remember, during arguments with my

father, there seemed to be arbitrary rules, which I never understood. I used to ask ‘why’

all the time. One time, I must have been six, I was lying in bed and looking up at the stars

and thinking ‘There’s other planets out there, and maybe there’s life on some of them,

and the earth is enormous, with millions of people, and everyone can’t be right all the

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time, so my father could be wrong, and I could be right.’ It was my own theory of

relativity. Then, in high school, I began reading the classics, and they were my transition

in my own life, which I could appreciate on its terms, and never talk to anyone else about

it until I had digested it for myself.”

Hufstedler, Knapp, and Gould clearly invented themselves, just as the other

leaders I talked with did. They overcame a variety of obstacles in a variety of ways, but

all stressed the importance of self-knowledge.

Some start the process early, and some don’t do it until later. It doesn’t matter.

Self-knowledge, self-invention are lifetime processes. Those people who struggled to

know themselves and become themselves as children or teenagers continue today to

explore their own depths, reflect on their experiences, and test themselves. Others – like

Roosevelt and Truman – undertake their own remaking in midlife. Sometimes we simply

don’t like who we are or what we’re doing, and so we seek change. Sometimes events, as

in Truman’s case, require more of us than we think we have. But all of us can find

tangible and intangible rewards in self-knowledge and self-control, because if you go on

doing what you’ve always done, you’ll go on getting what you’ve always got – which

may be less than you want or deserve.

All of the leaders I talked with agreed that no one can teach you how to become

yourself, to take charge, to express yourself, except you. But there are some things that

others have done that are useful to think about in the process. I’ve organized them as the

four lessons of self-knowledge. They are

 One: You are your own best teacher.

 Two: Accept responsibility. Blame no one.

 Three: You can learn anything you want to learn.

 Four: True understanding comes from reflecting on your experience.

Lesson One: You are your own best teacher.

Gibb Akin, associate professor at the McIntire School of Commerce, University of

Virginia, studied the learning experiences of sixty managers. Writing for Organizational

Dynamics, Akin said that the managers’ descriptions were “surprisingly congruous…

Learning is experienced as a personal transformation. A person does not gather learnings

as possessions but rather becomes a new person… To learn is not to have, it is to be.”

Akin’s roster of modes of learning includes

 Emulation, in which one emulates either someone one knows or a historical or public figure

 Role taking, in which one has a conception of what one should be and does it

 Practical accomplishment, in which one sees a problem as an opportunity and learns through the experience of dealing with it

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 Validation, in which one tests concepts by applying them and learns after the fact.

 Anticipation, in which one develops a concept and then applies it, learning before acting

 Personal growth, in which one is less concerned with specific skills than with self- understanding and the “transformation of values and attitudes

 Scientific learning, in which one observes, conceptualizes on the basis of one’s observations, and then experiments to gather new data, with a primary focus on

truth

The managers Akin interviewed cited two basic motivations for learning. The first was a

need to know, which they described, he said, “as rather like a thirst or hunger gnawing at

them, sometimes dominating their attention until satisfied.” The second was “a sense of

role,” which stems from “a person’s perception of the gap between what he or she is, and

what he or she should be.”

In other words, the managers knew that they were not fulfilling their own

potential, not expressing themselves fully. And they knew that learning was a way out of

the trap, a major step toward self-expression. And they saw learning as something

intimately connected with self. No one could have taught them that in school. They had

to teach themselves. Somehow they had reached a point in life where they knew they had

to learn new things – it was either that or admit that they had settled for less than they

were capable of. If you can accept all that, as the managers did, the next step is to assume

responsibility for your education as well as yourself. Major stumbling blocks on the path

to self-knowledge are denial and blame.

Lesson Two: Accept responsibility. Blame no one.

The wisdom of this seems intuitively obvious to me. So I’ll let you listen to Marty

Kaplan, who id the best example of accepting responsibility for oneself that I know of.

At 37, Disney Productions’ Vice President Kaplan is embarked on his third

career. He came to Disney with a wide-ranging background – from biology to the

Harvard Lampoon, from broadcast and print journalism to high-level politics. He knew a

lot about a lot of things, but very little about the movie business. His description of his

self-designed university illustrates how he accepted the responsibility for creating his

own success:

“Before starting this job, I put myself through a crash course, watching five or six

movies every single day for six weeks, trying to see every successful picture of the last

several years. Then I read as many of the scripts as I could get my hands on, to see what

made these particular movies great. I kind of invented my own university, so that I could

get some sense of both the business and the art…I’ve always been in worlds where

knowing the community has been important. In graduate school, when I was studying

literature, to know the writers and critics was to know a universe. In Washington, I had to

learn the political players, and here were about one hundred core writers, and I

systematically set out to read a screenplay or two by each of them. When I got here, I was

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told it would take me three years to get grounded, but after nine months, the head of the

studio told me I’d graduated and promoted me. Within a year I found – with some

stumbles here and there – that I could perform the way my peers, who had spent their

entire careers here, did. I attribute that partly to discipline, partly to desire, and partly to

the old transferability of skills. You use many of the same muscles in molecular biology,

politics, and the movies. It’s all about making connections.

“One thing I did when I first got here was to sit in the office of the studio head all

day, day after day, and watch and listen to everything he said or did. So when writers

would come, when producers would come, I would just be there. When he was making

phone calls, I would sit and listen to him, and I would hear him contend with what a

person in his position contends with. How does he say no to someone, how does he say

yes, how does he duck, how does he wheedle and coax? I would have a yellow pad with

me, and all through my first many months, any phrase I didn’t understand, any piece of

industry jargon, any name, any maneuver I didn’t follow, any of the deal-making

business financial stuff I didn’t understand, I’d write it down, and periodically I would go

trotting around to find anyone I could get to answer.”

“There was no situation that I could fail to learn from, because everything was

new to me, and therefore no matter what it was, however obtuse the person I was meeting

with, however stupid the idea, however low-powered the agent pitching me something, it

was a useful encounter, because I would be for the first time in that position. Every single

thing was new, and so I had a complete tolerance for every conceivable experience, and

as I learned from what other people would regard as real tedium, and stupid and

avoidable experiences, I would then begin to filter those out of my input until I was

ultimately only doing what I thought was useful and important for me, or things from

which I could learn, or had to do.”

Lesson Three: You can learn anything you want to learn.

If one of the basic ingredients of leadership is a passion for the promises of life, the key

to realizing the promise is the full deployment of yourself, as Kaplan did when he arrived

at Disney. Full deployment is simply another way of defining learning.

Learning, the kind Kaplan did, the kind I’m talking about here, is much more than

the absorption of a body of knowledge or mastery of a discipline. It’s seeing the world

simultaneously as it is and as it can be, understanding what you see, and acting on your

understanding. Kaplan didn’t just study the movie business, he embraced it and absorbed

it, and thereby understood it.

In our discussion, I suggested that this kind of learning has to do with reflecting

on experience. Kaplan said, “I would add a component to that, which is the appetite to

have experience, because people can be experience averse and new and potentially

unsettling things, you don’t learn…Part of it is temperament. It’s a kind of fearlessness

and optimism and confidence, and you’re not afraid of failure.”

“You’re not afraid of failure.” Keep that in mind, because we’ll get back to it

later.

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Lesson Four: True understanding comes from reflecting on your experience.

Kaplan didn’t simply watch all those movies and read all those scripts and spend all those

hours in the studio head’s office. He did all that, and then he reflected on what he’d seen

and read and heard, and he came to a new understanding.

Reflecting on experience is a means of having a Socratic dialogue with yourself,

asking the right questions at the right time, in order to discover the truth of yourself and

your life. What really happened? Why did it happen? What did it do to me? What did it

mean to me? In this way, one locates and appropriated the knowledge one needs or, more

precisely, recovers what one knew but had forgotten, and becomes, in Goethe’s phrase,

the hammer rather than the anvil.

Kaplan stated it forcefully: “The habit of reflection may be a consequence of

facing mortality…To begin to understand any great literature is to understand that it’s a

race against death, and it’s the redeeming power of love or God or art or whatever the

artist is proposing that’s the thing that makes the race against death worth racing…In a

way, reflection is asking the questions that provoke self-awareness.”

Nothing is truly yours until you understand it – not even yourself. Our feelings are

raw, unadulterated truth, but until we understand why we are happy or angry or anxious,

the truth is useless to us. For example, every one of us has been yelled at by a superior

and bitten our tongues, afraid to yell back. Later we yell at a friend who has done

nothing. Such displaced emotions punctuate our lives, and diminish them. This is not to

suggest that yelling back at a superior is a useful response. Understanding is the answer.

When you understand, then you know what to do.

The importance of reflecting on experience, the idea that reflecting leads to

understanding, came up again and again in my conversations with leaders. Anne Bryant,

executive director of the American Association of University Women, has made

reflection a part of her daily routine: “Every morning after the alarm goes off, I lie in bed

for about fifteen minutes, going over what I want to get out of each event of my day, and

what I want to get done by the end of the week. I’ve been doing it for two or three years,

and if I don’t do it, I feel I’ve wasted the day.”

To look forward with acuity you must first look back with honesty. After

spending four days a week at her Washington, D.C., office, Bryant spends the balance of

the week at her home in Chicago, where she reads, reflects on the week just past, and

plans for the days ahead.

Those, then, are the four lessons of self-knowledge. But in order to put these

lessons into practice, you need to understand the effect that childhood experiences,

family, and peers have had on the person you’ve become.

All too often, we are strangers to ourselves. In his classic The Lonely Crowd,

David Riesman wrote, “The source of direction for the individual is ‘inner’ in the sense

that it is implanted early in life by the elders and directed toward generalized, but

nonetheless inescapably destined roles,” while “what is common to all the other-directed

people is that their contemporaries are the source of direction for the individual – either

those known to him or those with whom he is indirectly acquainted through friends and

through the mass media. This source is internalized in the sense that dependence on it for

guidance in life is implanted early. The goals toward which the other person strives shift

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with that guidance: It is only the process of striving itself and the process of paying close

attention to the signals from others that remain unaltered throughout life.”

In other words, most of us are made by our elders or by our peers. But leaders are

self-directed. Let’s stop and think about that for a moment. Leaders are self-directed, but

learning and understanding are the keys to self-direction, and it is in our relationships

with others that we learn about ourselves. As Boris Pasternak wrote in Dr. Zhivago,

Well, what are you? What is it about you that you have always

known as yourself? What are you conscious of in yourself: your

kidneys, your liver, your blood vessels? No. However far back you

go in your memory it is always some external manifestation of

yourself where you come across your identity: in the work of your

hands, in your family, in other people. And now, listen carefully.

You are in others – this is what you are, this is what your

consciousness has breathed, and lived on, and enjoyed throughout

your life, your soul, your immortality – YOUR LIFE IN OTHERS.

How, then, do we resolve the paradox? This way: leaders learn from others, but they are

not made by others. This is the distinguishing mark of leaders. The paradox becomes a

dialectic. The self and the other synthesize through self-invention.

What that means is that here and now, true learning must often be preceded by

unlearning, because we are taught by our parents and teachers and friends how to go

along, to measure up to their standards, rather than allowed to be ourselves.

Alfred Gottschalk, the president of Hebrew Union College, told me, “The hardest

thing I’ve had to do is convey to children, my own and others, the necessity of coming to

terms with themselves. Their interests aren’t deep. They don’t think about things. They

accept what they’re told and what they read or see on TV. They’re conformists. They

accept the dictates of fashion.”

Asked to define his philosophy, Gottschalk said, “I value the need for the

individual to feel unique and for the collective to remain hospitable to diversity. I believe

in unity without uniformity and in man’s capacity to redeem himself.”

Given the pressures from our parents and the pressures from our peers, how does

any one of us manage to emerge as a sane – much less productive – adult?

William James wrote, in The Principles of Psychology,

A man’s Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his

body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his

wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and

works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank account. All these

things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he

feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down.

It’s hard to conceive of a more apt description of today’s yuppies, those most

conspicuous consumers. But as James concludes, “…our self-feeling in this world

depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.”

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The leader begins, then, by backing himself, inspiring himself, trusting himself,

and ultimately inspires others by being trustworthy.

Famed Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson has divided life into eight stages that are

useful to look at during our examination of self-invention:

1. INFANCY: Basic Trust vs. Basic Mistrust 2. EARLY CHILDHOOD: Autonomy vs. Shame, Doubt 3. PLAY AGE: Initiative vs. Guilt 4. SCHOOL AGE: Industry vs. Inferiority 5. ADOLESCENCE: Identity vs. Identity Confusion 6. YOUNG ADULTHOOD: Intimacy vs. Isolation 7. ADULTHOOD: Generativity vs. Stagnation 8. OLD AGE: Integrity vs. Despair

Erikson believes that we do not proceed to the next stage until each stage’s crisis has

been satisfactorily resolved. Too many of us, for example, never overcome the inner

struggle between initiative and guilt, and so we lack real purpose. A woman caught

between motherhood and an urge for a career was thought only a generation ago to be at

best selfish, at worst unnatural. Giving up motherhood was deemed unthinkable; trying to

juggle her children and her career was a frustrating and usually unsupported choice.

Whichever course she took, initiative and guilt struggled, unresolved. And, of course,

these inner conflicts were made outwardly manifest, inflicted on the people in her life, as

well as on herself. No one, including the hermit, suffers alone.

Traditionally, it has been easier for men to make their way through these stages

and their attendant crises, but all too often, prodded by well-meaning parents and

teachers, men, too, do what they’re supposed to do in life, not what they want to do. In

this way, the man who dreams of being a poet becomes and accountant and the would-be

cowboy becomes an executive, and both suffer the torments of the unfulfilled. And who

knows what they might have done if they had chosen to follow their dreams? Former

Beatle John Lennon, possible the most influential songwriter of his generation, gave the

aunt who raised him a gold plaque engraved with her oft-repeated dictum, “You’ll never

make a living playing that guitar.”

In the world according to Erikson, how we resolve the eight crises determines

who we will be:

1. Trust vs. Mistrust = hope or withdrawal 2. Autonomy vs. Shame, Doubt = will or compulsion 3. Initiative vs. Guilt = purpose or inhibition 4. Industry vs. Inferiority = competence or inertia 5. Identity vs. Identity Confusion = fidelity or repudiation 6. Intimacy vs. Isolation = love or exclusivity 7. Generativity vs. Stagnation = care or rejectivity 8. Integrity vs. Despair = wisdom or disdain

With all the power that the world has over us as we proceed through the early years of

our lives, it is a wonder that any of us manages to resolve any of these crises in a positive

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way. Or, as a woman put it to me recently, “It seems to me that this chic new phrase

‘dysfunctional family’ is redundant. If there’s a functional family anywhere, I certainly

haven’t seen it.” What she meant by that is that the Waltons and the Cleavers and, more

recently, the Huxtables are far from the reality most of us experience. TV sitcom children

are a good deal more likely to enjoy wise, nurturing parents and happy childhoods than

the population at large.

Analyst Gould is planning a new book, Recovering from Childhood, that will

focus on “overcoming the adaptational warp that takes place early in life. If you let it

happen, you undergo an automatic recovery process in the course of facing and dealing

with new realities. In order to respond to the challenges of each cycle of your life

appropriately, you have to continually re-examine your defenses and assumptions, and in

the course of that re-examination, you iron out the way…Feelings are memories of past

behavior. When you sort them out and see what’s current and what’s left over, you can

literally begin to use your thinking process to change your behavior.”

There is ample evidence that ego development does not stop with physical

maturity, and so while we cannot change our height or bone structure, we can change our

minds. A current ad campaign promises us that “it’s never too late to have a happy

childhood.” I wouldn’t go quite that far. We cannot change the circumstances of our

childhoods, much less improve them at this late date, but we can recall them honestly,

reflect on them, understand them, and thereby overcome their influence on us.

Withdrawal can be turned to hope, compulsion to will, inhibition to purpose, and inertia

to competence through the exercise of memory and understanding.

There are people who would argue with this, who claim that our destiny resides

wholly in our genes, that each of us is a mere product of heredity. Others argue fervently

that each of us is an offspring of his environment, so our fate is determined by our

circumstances. Studies of identical twins who have been raised separately indicate that

there is more truth to the first perspective. But the real answer to how we become who we

are is more complex.

Recent reports on DNA and our genetic chromosomal structure suggest that there

is a strong hereditary component to disease. Nevertheless, some people argue that

whether we succumb to various disorders can be ascribed to stress and temperament.

Similarly, some scientists see the brain and heart as mere organs, capable of nothing more

than chemical reactions, while others see the brain and heart as the locus of reason and

emotion, sophistication and poetry, all the qualities and capabilities that separate us from

the apes. And recent studies suggest there is neurobiological evidence that part of the

brain is hardwired prior to birth, while part is plastic in nature to absorb and collate

experiences.

Some scientists now claim that even personality traits – introversion, humor, and

so on – are genetic in origin. Between the arguers for hereditary determinism and those

for environmental determinism, not much room is left for self-determination. All of these

arguments become just one more way to remove the responsibility for behavior from the

individual, a new variation on the old Flip Wilson routine, “The devil made me buy that

dress!”

The truth is, we’re products of everything – genes, environment, family, friends,

trade winds, earthquakes, sunspots, schools, accidents, serendipity, anything you can

think of, and more. New Agers would add past incarnation. The endless nature-nurture

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debate is interesting, even occasionally revelatory, but inconclusive. And it’s about as

useful a guide to life as an astrological chart. Like everyone else, leaders are products of

this great stew of chemistry and circumstance. What distinguishes the leader from

everyone else is that he takes all of that and makes himself – all new and unique.

Novelist William Faulkner told us that the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past yet.

Each of us contains his entire life. Everything we did or saw, everyone we ever

encountered, is in our heads. But all that psychic baggage can be turned into

comprehensible and useful experience by reflecting on it. Socrates said, “The

unexamined life is not worth living.” I’d go a step further: The unexamined life is

impossible to live successfully. Like oarsmen, we generally move forward whole looking

backward, but not until we truly see the past – truly understand it – can we truly move

forward, and upward.

Until you make your life your own, you’re walking around in borrowed clothes.

Leaders, whatever their field, are made up as much of their experiences as their skills,

like everyone else. Unlike everyone else, they use their experience rather than being used

by it.

William James again: “Genius…means little more than the faculty of perceiving

in an unhabitual way.” By the time we reach adulthood, we are driven as much by habit

as by anything else, and there is an infinity of habits in us. From the woman who twirls a

strand of hair when she’s nervous or bored to the man who expresses his insecurity by

never saying “thank you,” we are all victims of habits. They do not merely rule us, they

inhibit us and make fools of us.

To free ourselves from habit, to resolve the paradoxes, to transcend conflicts, to

become masters rather than the slaves of our own lives, we must first see and remember,

and then forget. That is why true learning begins with unlearning – and why unlearning is

one of the recurring themes of our story.

Every great inventor or scientist has had to unlearn conventional wisdom in order

to proceed with his work. For example, conventional wisdom said, “If God had meant

man to fly, He would have given him wings.” But the Wright brothers disagreed and built

an airplane.

No one – not your parents nor your teachers nor your peers – can teach you how

to be yourself. Indeed, however well intentioned, they all work to teach you how not to

be yourself. As the eminent child psychologist Jean Piaget said, “Every time we teach a

child something, we keep him from inventing it himself.” I would go a step further. Every

time we teach a child something, rather than helping him learn, we keep him from

inventing himself. By its very nature, teaching homogenizes, both its subjects and its

objects. Learning, on the other hand, liberates. The more we know about ourselves and

our world, the freer we are to achieve everything we are capable of achieving.

Many leaders have had problems with school, particularly their early school

experiences. Albert Einstein wrote, “It is nothing short of a miracle that the modern

methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry…It is

a grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by

means of coercion and a sense of duty.”

Among the leaders I spoke with, scientist and philanthropist, Mathilde Krim said,

“To the extent that school is regimented, I don’t like it.” And Edward C. Johnson III, CEO

of Fidelity Investments, said, “Sitting in a classroom was never one of my strengths, but

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I’ve always been curious about ideas and objects.” Johnson instinctively knew the

difference between teaching and learning, between training and education.

Obviously, we cannot do away with – or do without – families or schools or any

of the instruments of homogeneity. But we can see them for what they are, which is part

of the equation, not the equation itself.

The prevailing equation is:

family + school + friends = you

But the only workable equation for anyone aspiring to self-hood is:

family + school + friends

= true you

you

In this way, rather than being designed by your experience, you become your own

designer. You become cause and effect rather than mere effect.

Self-awareness = self-knowledge = self-possession = self-control = self-

expression.

You make your own life by understanding it.