 Hi, everyone. How's everyone doing? Good. So my name's Richard O'Carroll, as I've said. I am the CEO and founder of East London Connect. But before I start, this is my first time, and it's an honor and privilege to be in front of you guys today. I wanted the things I wanted to practice. It's my first time in Alabama, my first time in the South. So I'm going to practice my southern accent, and I want you to tell me whether it passes or not, OK? So, how are y'all doing? Good. No? No? Very British. Very British. OK, OK. So, once again, it's a privilege to be with you guys today, and today what I want to speak to you about is the hidden purpose of leadership. How many people even knew the purpose of leadership was hidden? Anyone? So everyone knew it was hidden? All right, I can't see any hands. You didn't know? Brilliant. So today, that's what we want to talk about. But I think one of the key things I want you guys to know, and I think what's important about future leaders, I see quite a few young leaders, is it? Yeah, I think it's more senior leaders. One of the things is leadership is a great privilege, a great honor. It's something that I think is so important in the military, in the US Air Force. But sometimes, how you define leadership changes over time. So I want to just talk to you briefly. So I'm only going to talk about theory for a few minutes, and then we'll get into more practical things. Sound good? Yeah. So the theory. Why is the purpose of leadership hidden? Who knows? One of my theories is, firstly, at the start of the 19th century, you had Friedrich Taylor. I don't know if you have learned about Friedrich Taylor. And he had this book called Scientific Management. And this book was about how you lead efficiently, how you lead as a team, how you basically make sure that everything's efficient and works almost like a scientific experiment, hence the name. So as I can see, quite a younger generation, my generation as well, in the 80s, there was a different movement about what leadership was about. So leadership was about, there was a book called In Pursuit of Excellence, Tom Peters and Waterman. And that basically said, to be a leader, for you guys to be leaders, all you have to do is be excellent, be pursuit, be in first, be amazing at what you do. And that's one of the ways you can become a great leader. So that was just one idea. And then you had some other ideas from Japan. I don't know if you know, it was called Kazan Leadership. So this is the idea that some of us are like, oh my gosh, to be excellent, that's just, how am I gonna be, to lead excellently is quite a challenge. Would anyone agree? No? Yes, it is. So what this other idea says that Kazan means incremental changes over time. So it's small changes over time that brings transformation, but you do it little by little on a regular basis. So I don't know, on your projects, on your assignments, on a deployment, that's not saying we're gonna change a whole deployment, we're gonna change where we're going, but that's saying, can we change the time? Can we change how we work together? That's that kind of idea of Kazan Leadership. And a more exciting one, and a one I think fits in with the lead-ex conference, is this idea of disruptive leadership. Has anyone heard of disruptive leadership? Yep. So it was pioneered by a person called Clayton Christensen. Does anyone know that name? No? Anyone? Yes, one person, good. So, and this is the idea that to be a leader, you have to be completely different. You have to break boundaries, you have to think outside the box, you have to go against the grain. So those are just some definitions of leadership, but that's one of the reasons why the hidden purpose of leadership, why the purpose of leadership is hidden because there's so many different definitions. If there's so many different definitions, how can you understand what the purpose of it is if it always changes over time? Yeah? And then the second thing, especially for us, as we look forward to the next generation and to the future, a second thing is uncertainty. So what it means to be a leader today in 2020 might be different in 10 years time, in 15 years time, and in 50 years time, it might be completely different. So for those two reasons, changing definitions of leadership and also uncertainty, for those two reasons, it's very difficult to know what the purpose of leadership is and that's why it often goes hidden. So that's enough theory for now. So now I wanna give you a practical example from some of the work I do and how we can relate it to the work you do. So as part of my work, I work with young people from London who are predominantly from ethnic minorities or from working class backgrounds and what we do, we try to make them the leaders of the future. We try to make them leaders that they never thought they could be. So this is one of our projects that we did. Can you see it? Yeah, this is one of the projects we did last year and we take them to places like this. So does anyone know what this place is? It looks like a... It looks like a library, yeah, exactly. So am I suggesting that to become a leader and to discover your hidden purpose, you go to a library? Not exactly, because this is not any ordinary library. This is a library where it's the Cambridge Center, so, sorry, I should say, I'm studying at Cambridge University in the UK and this is the Center for African Studies at Cambridge. It's a very unique place in the sense that it has books and materials on every single country in Africa. So it's a collection of materials that you don't really find everywhere else. So it's not just a normal library. And so what we're trying to achieve here is get these young people who are from, originally from maybe Africa or from the Caribbean or just maybe not from the UK. We wanted them to discover their origin, read about people, read about leaders, read about different things in the hope that it inspires them about their past, give them a new sense of their history, but also allows them to change history and be leaders of the future. So that's one of the interesting ideas that we did. So, back to the question. So where is the purpose of leadership hidden? Am I suggesting that after the lyrics, everyone goes back to a library, a local library in Alabama or in a different place and reads about leaders, learns from their histories, what they're good at, what they're bad at and then tries to implement it? Does that sound exciting? No, no. It's very simple, it's very basic but it's more complex than that and more interesting than that. So what I'm suggesting is the hidden purpose of leadership and leadership in general lies beyond the surface. Who knows that phrase that says there's no time like the? Exactly. So in the here and now, it's all about projects, it's all about completing that objective, it's about galvanizing your team, working together, trying to make the next thing happen. However, in that hustle and bustle of life, we never or we don't get a chance to look beyond the surface. What leadership, oops. What leadership do you guys want to embody? Well, for the senior leaders, what leadership are you embodying? What is it rooted in? What leadership is it rooted in? So that's the first clue as to discover where the hidden purpose of leadership is. It's firstly rooted beyond the surface, beyond what you can see but actually, if you start to dig, you might discover the hidden purpose of leadership. So that's just the first clue. And the really exciting thing about speaking here at the Ledex and here in Alabama and Montgomery and at this air base is the history, leadership history, fantastic leadership history is right here in this place. So note, does anyone know who this is? Who these two, who do these two people, ooh. Who these two, ooh, oh gosh. My slides are going a bit crazy. Ooh. Yeah, so does anyone know who these two guys are? Exactly. So there's no prizes for guessing who they were but they were pioneers in the aviation industry. They transformed what leadership looked like but it wasn't just their achievements in aviation, it was they inspired a generation of people to believe in the impossible. So I believe the hidden purpose of leadership, here's the answer, it's to leave a legacy of leadership. They haven't just left tools, ideas, they haven't just left ways to build, ways to build aircrafts, they have inspired generations to believe that they could make a difference. So whilst models and leadership ideas are really, really helpful and useful, one of the key things is to leave a legacy of leadership. So if you're young and if you're slightly more experienced, the question I'm asking today basically is how do you want to be remembered? What leadership do you personify to your teams? And how can you make sure that you come together as teams from whatever unit you are in to galvanize and to make a difference? But there's a caveat. The caveat, the caveat is this, if you, it's not just copying leadership histories, so not just the Wright brothers or local histories of aviation role models, but actually you have to ask yourself the question, what are the seeds of your leadership that you're producing? So what I mean by that is everyone, I believe everyone here are future leaders or currently leaders. Is that true? Yeah, does everyone believe that? Yeah. Good. If you are a current leader or a future leader, the key thing is to be, I think they mentioned it earlier in one of the talks, be authentic. And one of the keys to be an authentic is understanding the seeds of leadership that have been planted in you. And that might be your personality, that might be your values, your beliefs, but it will influence not only what is important to you, but how you lead as a leader and the leadership that you want to, the leadership that you want to give on to the next generation. So, as I almost wrote to a close, I wanna give you another example of one of our projects that we run. So our project that we run is a university mentoring scheme. So we help young people who have not necessarily had the background in going to university. They don't have a parents who have gone to university and we help them by connecting them to someone who is at university. They work together as mentor and mentee and the idea is this leaving a legacy of leadership. How can the older ones who are in their 20s inspire these younger ones who are 14 or 15? So the idea is to make sure that they can be leaders that they never thought they could be. And in essence, these mentors are becoming leaders who leave a legacy. And finally, I wanna talk about a very, very dear project to my heart. And I want to talk to you about this person. You probably don't know who he is. I know who he is. He's a, we worked on a project in Cambridge in the criminal, in the criminology department. Is anyone studying law? No? Okay. But we worked together on a project in the criminology department. And this guy works in prisons and it's a project called Learning Together. You can search it on the internet. It's called Learning Together Cambridge. And what they do is they work with people in prisons to change their lives through education. So it's really, really cool. They did a conference. And I remember going to the conference, it was in a prison and one of the people who spoke, he talked about himself. He talked about how education changed his life. And I spoke to him afterwards and it turned out he'd been convicted, he'd been convicted of quite a serious crime, but you'd never know. And he talked about how education transformed his life. So this guy is one of the, this guy was one of the main organizers of this project. And we were hoping, I don't know if any of you saw Neil Stott's speech earlier in the other building, anyone? Yeah, and he was talking about social innovation. So the idea last year, December, over a course of time was to teach people in prisons about how they can make social change and how social change works. And this was a really, really interesting project. And we were meant to meet in the second week of December, but this young man unfortunately was killed in a attack doing his job, basically working with people in prisons. And one guy who just for every reason decided that he wanted to be violent and basically kill people. So I give this example because I want to speak to the younger generation. I want to speak to you guys because this guy was only 25, sorry, there's only 25. There's lots of clever people at Cambridge. There's lots of people in his college, but he is one of the few who have now been remembered not just for what he did, not just for the work he did, but he was on national news and his legacy lives on. So for you young people, don't think that you can't discover the hidden purpose of leadership. That is to leave a legacy of leadership. At the age of 21, 22, 23, however old or young you are, or young at heart you are, the key thing is to build your skills, your talents and your leadership competencies so that you can leave a legacy of leadership that outlives you. Thank you so much for listening today. Tomorrow I'll be speaking in more detail about how you can do it in a practical level, whatever area you are in your career. But it's been a privilege speaking to you and I look forward to hearing more, meeting you personally later on. Thank you very much.