 I have the privilege to introduce Mike Usim. Mike is the director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management at Wharton. It's a great author about leadership. He has several books, one including a forthcoming book on the leadership that the authorities in Chile have displayed after the earthquake that devastated the country. He also leads an annual trek to the base camp of Everest with managers and he's a very well known figure and author in the Change Management and Leadership arena. In the context of Latin America, how important leadership is as a topic so we understand better how to lead in these very turbulent times that we live on. So let's start with the basic, Mike. First of all, there is translation into Spanish and Portuguese so if anyone wants to ask questions later on on those languages please do so. So Mike, how is leadership defined? So Leo, as I pick up on that I just want to welcome everybody here. We're going to have a dialogue and we're going to open it up so be ready with your questions and just a quick thought about the, in a sense, the world that I come from. I'm in a business school. We have about 2,500 Wharton School undergraduates, fresh people age 18 come. We have about 2,000 MBA students, many from your home countries and about 10,000 mid-career people who come for short term programs and throughout the undergraduate MBA and mid-career programs going back about 15 years we've decided that if you're going to lead anything you need to know marketing, finance, accounting, operations, management and certainly how to lead. So with that we've had to define it and here's my starting definition. Today I'd like you to be thinking of your own but a good starting definition is to think about the office you have now and think about what you will have added by time you leave. So as you take an office with a government, as a minister, a deputy minister, as you are a senior manager, as many of you are at firms, with that you have a budget, you have a job description and a good way to get at what leadership is. It's the value add notion at the end of your day, at the end of the four or five years in your current position, maybe more, maybe less, what have you added? I personalize that by asking myself that every day. I have a privileged position, I get to teach, it's a lot of fun but I do ask myself when I leave the university what is there on top of what I was given? So a good way to think about that Leo is what is the value add? It doesn't say how to add value but it is getting at the essence. In Latin America today, thinking about our context, our issues, our challenges, thinking about a region with huge inequality, with sometimes weak institutions, some bureaucracy and corruption, how do you see the biggest competences needed from a leadership perspective to deal with these issues? Here's a way I tend to think about that, which is to quote in the U.S. Americans, U.S. citizens will know this, most of you who are not familiar with the U.S. baseball tradition won't recognize the quote, Yogi Berra is one of America's great baseball heroes used to play for the New York Yankees and he was famous for making statements that are a little bit odd, although they always had a kernel of truth to them. Many famous statements from Yogi Berra, for example, if you have a piece of pizza, if you cut it eight ways, there's more to go around than if you only cut it four ways. You have to think about that, there's an element of truth but he was famous for these statements. His son, Dale Berra, also a major league professional baseball player, was asked one time, aren't you like your father, aren't you similar to your dad? And he said no, our similarities are different, I have to listen to that, our similarities are different. So Leo, that's a long-winded way of saying, in my view, if you are, let's take the current new president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, she has to lead with the same quality, the same skill set as President Obama, as Sebastian Piniera, her predecessor in that position. That's the similarity part and what does that mean? Well let's see, just to tick off a couple items, you're hoping that Michelle, certainly Sebastian Piniera, her predecessor, hopefully Barack Obama, they have a vision and a strategy and a way to execute around that, doesn't matter who you are, where you are, vision, strategy and execution. Number two, you've got to be able to make decisions, a decisive decision maker, that seems like a good thing as well. And maybe number three, without belaboring the point, it doesn't matter where you are, Lima, Peru, Santiago, Chile, Washington D.C., you have to be a persuasive communicator. Having said that, some of the similarities are different and just to offer one Leo and maybe I'll just sort of throw this back at you, let's see, there's an argument that to lead, certainly nationally, but let's say within a company, you do need a, I tend to call it an institutional framework or a set of values or principles and in the U.S., some of our institutional principles are well established, which makes it easier for Barack Obama to say, do this and it does get done. In some settings, that's not the case, which is a way of saying then in, let's make it, I know the U.S. better than anywhere else, in some settings, the ability to follow through and execute, knowing that there are many reasons why people will not execute becomes more critical and in my limited experience in some settings in South America, that execution piece is more important. Leo, what do you think? Well, particularly in the Latin context, what we see when we operate throughout the region, the institutional piece is a very relevant one and what I've seen is, when we ask about, you know, why do Latins tend to have so many connections, put so much important into networking, into relationships, it's because sometimes that's the best way to protect you from the weak institutions and the execution about laws and regulations that those institutions do not enforce on the time, so relationships become a very important part of it. And also, having your true north, your values, your principles, very clear because you know that it's easy to step off the path. So I think that's a key piece on the leadership challenges we face in Latin America. It's very easy to get the right. Let me just emphasize that point. We have a phrase in English, there are many ways to skin, excuse me, many ways to skin a cat. That's kind of the cute phrase, which means there are many ways to get from point A to point B, and in the U.S., if you are, let's say an armed services general officer, our traditions are very strong, they go back a couple hundred years, you issue a command, we've worked a lot with the armed forces, and it pretty much gets down to the front line soldiers. If that's not going to happen because of threats of maybe corruption or values are not shared or respect for officers are not part of the deal, then we've got to do it differently. So I like your point, if we don't have the institutional values, we need to create them if they're not as strong as they should be, then finding other ways to get the job done, that's all a part of the creativity of leadership, networking, part of that. Now leadership sometimes is understood as one person's job, is this a team sport or is it an individual sport? Well, let me just say that question again so we really got it, is leadership an individual sport or a team sport? Many ways to answer that, I'm going to go to some of my former students who work as equity analysts for some of the banks represented in this room, I'm sure. So we graduate about a thousand MBA students a year, a lot end up as equity analysts at Morgan Stanley or JP Morgan Chase or at Citi or at Goldman. And a question I often asked, and my guess is some people in this room have actually faced this question in your profession, if you're going into a praise the future of a company like Senkosud publicly traded in Chile, in the US American Airlines or Disney or Apple, do you want to spend time as an equity analyst to use a phrase kicking the tires inside by spending the entire day with the chief executive officer? Let's make it Disney, Robert Eiger CEO. And so if you're an equity analyst, let's make it Morgan Stanley, you're going to issue a report by Holder Sell. You want to know about the leadership, not to mention the strategy of that company, and are you better taking eight hours your one day per quarter inside, let's say Disney with Robert Eiger, chief executive, or would you rather take it with the top 12, Bob Eiger and his 11 direct reports, a guy named Jay Rusulow, chief financial officer until a couple days ago and Sweeney who runs the big ABC property that is owned by Disney. The answer statistically and probably intuitively is this, let's take the statistical answer, are you going to learn more from talking to the top person or the top team with some exceptions that maybe Sandy Weil when he ran Citi was that exception, or maybe Jack Welch and G.E. was that exception, or maybe Steve Jobs at Apple was that exception, but those are the exceptions that don't disprove the statistical rule and probably our intuition, which is that we're going to learn more from taking eight hours with the top team than eight hours with the top one. That's a way of saying Robert Eiger has got to have a vision, a strategy, and he's got to be great at execution, he's got to be good at networking, he's got to have a true north as you put that very good idea there, but equally, maybe more importantly, but certainly equally, who exactly is on his team? How well do they work together? To come back to my former students, I almost always say when I have the discussion, I want to talk to Bob Eiger, I want to talk to Anne Sweeney, Jay Rusulow, I actually want to talk to the top 50 or 100. So here's the ambiguous answer to your question is leadership, your leadership, all about you, all about your team, the answer is yes. It is all about you, all about the team, who's on it? Do they share the strategy? So it's a leadership, individual and team sport at the same time. In your experience, leaders are born or are they made? Such a good question. And by the way, that sort of leadership question 101, I'm asked that all the time. If you're not Steve Jobs, can you become Steve Jobs? The answer is no. By the way, I think everybody knows he didn't finish college, nor did Bill Gates, nor did Michael Dell, and if you really get going, if you're Michael Dell or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, fine, don't complete your university years. May the rest of us, though, not being indeed, get that education thing to finish off and build a platform around. Having said that, to back into the answer with an illustration, I think many of you have maybe even known the Chief Executive of Federal Express, big package delivery worldwide, Fred Smith. And I ran into a college classmate at Yale University. And I said, well, you knew Fred Smith way, way back when he wrote a famous senior paper on package delivery. I think he got a poor grade on it from the professor, thought it was not a good idea. But the colleague of Fred Smith, age 21, said, Fred Smith was an amazing guy. We had no idea where he was going in life. But, Leo, we knew he was going to lead something. We knew he was a natural born leader. Nelson Mandela, I think we all would probably, if you've gone back and looked at his early years, he just seemed unnatural. Steve Jobs just seemed to be natural. And so the answer to the question is, again, a little bit of a yes. It's a bit natural born. For some people, they have a head start, maybe their parents, maybe the luck of the draw could be because they had a great elementary school teacher or maybe a high school sports coach. But for most people, it is an acquired skill. And I challenge everybody in this room to think about it this way. Pardon me, remember who you were at age 15 and think about how you got from the person you were at age 15 to the fact that you're in this room. You lead a non-government organization, maybe ministry. Many of you are leading company or company operations. How did you get from there to here? And most of you are gonna say at age 15, unlike Fred Smith, nobody would have forecast, my own case in point, that we're gonna do amazing things in life wasn't a negative. It's just that you weren't a natural. But you did learn, a couple of American writers have said it's about a 10,000 hour proposition to do it. And by the way, Leo, let me just pick up on that and what goes into it. So if you're gonna learn to lead, which is a way of saying, yes, it's partly natural, it's partly acquired. Here are the three well-worn paths to developing leadership for which experience I think says, these sound right. And academic research unequivocally has confirmed the same. And in my own experience in working with many companies on leadership development, I see the same three avenues as the way to take people, maybe incoming managers, and give them the leadership they're gonna need to make big decisions that can affect you dramatically. Think about financial products of AIG and Joe Cassano, the man who ran that and some decisions he made were not so good for AIG or for the earth as it turns out. Anyway, main point, the three avenues reflect on this personally. Well, you think about this too. Number one, people will say, if you make it personal, how did you learn to lead when you were not a natural? Statement number one, I have been a lifelong self-directed student of leadership. I watched people come and go on the human stage. I read in the US a book by Jim Collins, the great writer on leadership in the US these days. I watched the History Channel if I don't like to read, studied the life of Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa. More importantly, people say if that's number one, number two, I've been blessed in my post-age 15 career in having mentors and coaches. People who would work with me personally to give me fine-grained, offline private feedback. What did I do well and what could I do better? Unequivocally, most importantly, it's built into our leadership programs at the Wharton School. It's built in the companies represented in this room. I was given, this is number three now, I was given or I took opportunities again and again to do what I've not done before. New assignment, new geography. Sometimes we scientific phrase, blow it, we've made a mistake. But the main point is leadership is best developed by getting out there and doing it, my almost gold standard for making that point is the person that some of you in this room will know personally. Name is Lawrence Goldborn, Santiago Chile used to run San Cusud, became Minister of Mines under Sebastian Piniera, affected the rescue of the 33 miners. He knew nothing about mining when he became Minister of Mines, March 11, 2010. All of you or many in this room saw at least one of those miners come to the surface, October 13th and 12th, 2010, biggest audience probably ever for live television. And Lawrence Goldborn, he had a pretty good mentor in Sebastian Piniera. He worked hard to understand the technical aspect of mining. And at age 15, he was not destined to be one of the great figures of the modern era in that regard. But he learned what it took to lead that rescue. I'm sorry about the long-winded answer there. What he tells you also, it's a mentor of mine told me one story. He said, you may read all of the books about how to play tennis. All of them. But unless you go to the court and play, you'll never be a good player. Great point. Can I add by the way, professional tennis players, many of you have known them. We'll always say I've had a couple of great coaches. Sure. Now, in this audience, we probably have leaders from all sorts of organizations, whether it be social, government, business. And what we tend to do is we tend to talk to the like of us and talk to our direct reports. But we tend to miss what's going on underneath the organization, in the middle ranks. In your experience, what would be the things that those middle ranks see lacking in leadership the most? Let me get that a little bit indirectly as follows. I've spent time recently with the fairly new chief executive of a huge US firm, Johnson & Johnson. If you bought baby powder, band-aids, or a host of other products like Tylenol, this is the guy, his name is Alex Skorsky, who makes those products for you. Well, 130,000 people make those and sell those, by the way, every country in Latin America have J&J products. He went from the entry level job as a sales rep, nobody reported to him, zero. He was talking to surgeons about selling products that J&J made for surgical procedures, but he moved up the organization entry level to the very top now, young guy, and he said just a couple of weeks ago when we spent some time together, he's noticed that the higher he got in the organization, the better became the news and the funnier became his jokes. So the better the news and the funnier the jokes. That's a way of saying one of the great challenges, my view of your leadership, anybody's leadership, is with authority to indeed know what's happening in the middle ranks at the front line and it would be great to have a workshop on this. What are some of the devices by which you can actually get to the mid-level and frontline people after they laugh at your jokes? Okay, what's really going on? What are the problems out here? Just to single out one thing and then come back to the thrust of your questionnaire, Alex Skorsky, like many of you, runs what are sometimes called skip level meetings. He'll go down three or four layers in the organization. He's got a bunch of direct reports. They all have multi-billion dollar businesses. It's a $60 billion a year company, $250 billion market value. He'll go down a couple levels and everybody off record now a little bit like the rules here in Panama City at this building. Just tell me what's really going on, so skip level. And here, by the way, back to Leo's very good questionnaire. I think are the two things that I more often hear if I get to the middle ranks of the people who work for you, we'll say not necessarily about you, but at other organizations that are missing. Number one, see if this is right. Leo, I'm gonna see if it's right with you. If the people at the top, if those guys and women at the top would just tell me where we're going, I can help them get there. But honest to goodness, I don't really know what the strategy is. Now, next an hour later, I'll go to somebody at the top and I say I've heard this and the quick response is, look, we've said what the strategy is, they just don't get it. But there's a disconnect there. But maybe more personally, and then Leo added to this, I do hear this. I've given my life to this organization or this agency. It could be UN, could be the Global Fund, could be one of the companies here in Panama City. And I honestly don't think the people at the top appreciate my commitment, the value I add, how good I am at whatever the task may be. To use the politicians phrase to sum that up, politicians will often say when you walk into a room, we have one, actually a couple of floors below us right now, they will honor the room. And you've all seen that, I've seen that many times in the US. They walk into the room and as they had a handshake with Bill Clinton, a quick question, I live in Philadelphia. What a great city, I've got a cousin who lives in Philadelphia, making a connection, honoring your room. Anyway, clarity in what the vision and strategy as you go down in organizations becomes less clear. And number two, people are less convinced that the people at the top really know who they are in a way that they should be honored. Leo, what about you? What do you think, Smithson? Well, to me, in terms of what's going on in leadership, sometimes it feels the same as I do when I read diet books. So there are so many diets out there, you truly eat carbs, you truly need carbs, you should have fat, not fat. Same with leadership. You read all of these principles, 10 principles, four principles, 11 principles. What do we, the question for you is what's proven to be wrong about those assumptions and principles that we have? So we read all of this, what do we get wrong? Well, let's get the principles and then let's get to what's missing and I see from a signal we've got about four minutes left here. So at a minimum, what do you want to have? And for me, the analog here is the pilot's pre-flight checklist. You want a pilot to check the fuel, flight plan, weight, hydraulics, anti-collision radar. And by the same token, you want to walk onto a stage like this with the complete repertoire of everything required to lead effectively. A vision, a strategy, got to be a decisive decision maker, have to be a persuasive communicator. Having said that, all those things needed, some of the perceptions of what's needed in that leadership office turned out not to be correct perceptions. One perception, this is the most common misperception. I think there's out there, I ask a lot of people like yourselves, what's the most surprising thing when you became a top executive that you thought was true, it turns out not to be true. And the answer is, I thought I'm finally the top executive. I've got 10,000 people working for me, and I'm going to make a difference by telling them what to do. And so I instruct and nobody returns the salute. I think that's the summary on that one. A quick point about purpose and meaning in the organization and the importance of it for leadership. There's a lot of discussion right now about the importance of having a shared meaning that goes beyond just making money in business and so on. So what do you think? It's a great sea change. And Leon, when I finish this, I'm going to throw a final question back at you to bring this to a close. We all know this, that there's a bit of a generational shift. People coming out of our business school, we used to be called the Wharton School of Finance. We graduate 1,000 MBA students, 550 undergraduates every year now. And that search for meaning and purpose is so strong. It's extraordinary. Now maybe that's going to be the moment of youth when we steal our very idealistic and we can make a difference in the world. I actually think there's more to it than that. And so without getting into it, it seems to me to send on that point that I've got a question here, that as you think about your next five years, your leadership vital, lots of evidence says leadership critical when the world or the market's changing and uncertain. When life is good, leadership less important. I think every country I'm familiar with in this region, lots of uncertainty. And that's maybe one of the universals. But the more specific element for the next five years is appreciate that that new workforce coming in, they really want to know what they're doing for the world to make it a better world. Leo, here's a final question for you. This really is a question for everybody. It seems an odd question. Who exactly were the first people to summit Mount Everest? Do you know the answer on that? If I remember correctly, Hillary would be the obvious choice of New Zealand. But it was the Sherpa. Tenzing Norgay. Tenzing Norway. I've got a tougher question. Who put them there? Well, of course, the team. Totally. And that's the point, and I'm going to end on this. So we know the two great figures, Ed Hillary from New Zealand. If you've been to New Zealand, you know he's on the back of the New Zealand $5 bill. Sir Edmund, one of the great heroes, passed away a couple years ago. Tenzing Norgay of Nepal and India, a Sherpa. Question of who put them there? It is the team. And how did that team get composed? And who's the leader of the team? A man named John Hunt. None of us know that name. Later on, he became Lord Hunt, a British citizen. But John Hunt was put in charge of a great team by actually a group back in London, what the British loved to call the great and the good. I'm sorry, the good and the great. That's the phrase. Notables, lots of initials after their name. And they had decided that the British mountaineering tradition for 50 years, practically, going back to Mallory and Irvine, had been failing on Mount Everest. And they concluded, because we had a wrong strategy. The goal is unequivocal. The strategy was wrong. So they brought in John Hunt, a British Army officer, India, an operations specialist. And he was the guy that has given us this tradition. Now, Base Camp, Camp 1, Camp 2. In the old days, you just throw a backpack on. You try to get to the summit like you might climb the Matterhorn in Switzerland. So let's see, who put Tenzing Norge and Ed Hillary on the summit of Mount Everest? It's all about the leadership. It's all about the team. And by the way, many of you serve on boards and directors these days. It's also partly about this group in London who put together the right strategy. Let's do it differently. Pick the leader who could execute around that and look what happened as a result. Thank you, Mike. I would like to open it up for the audience for questions. It can be Spanish, English, Portuguese. And I think we've got about two minutes. I'm getting the signal. So it would be one or two questions, Mike. No minutes. OK, I'll repeat the question. What's the role of courage and humility? And there's an and, actually, courage and humility. And I'll just sum it up because we're really out of time at this point. We'll sum it up with the great work. Read it. It's in Spanish and Portuguese. Good to great. You can't find a better book on leadership these days by Jim Collins, great American writer, US writer. And he says, after looking at 11 companies that went from good to great performers, exactly this point. It takes enormous courage. You know that because you go to an office and it's downhill within 10 minutes. People say, Brad is glad to see you this morning. Then it takes a lot of courage to get through the day. And he says, and it's absolutely correct, think Nelson Mandela, think Mother Teresa. In the US, we think about Martin Luther King. It's all about the fact that it's about the mission, the purpose on earth that you have. And it's not about you. That's a humility piece. Thank you, man. So we're running out of time just to end it up. All right, Leo. Thank you. Many thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.