 Should we get started? Lots of room up in the front. All right, everybody come on and have a seat. I think we're ready to get started because our mics are live. Happy to go. Well, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to get started here. So thank you very, very much for coming. I hope more people continue to arrive and just pile into the front row, which would be great. And my name is Kurt Volker. I have the honor of being the executive director of the McCain Institute for International Leadership, which is a part of Arizona State University. And I'll come back and say a word about that. And I am delighted to be here with Ann Marie Slaughter, who I've known probably for 10 years, give or take. And she has had a great career as a professor at University of Chicago, at Harvard, as a senior program leader at Princeton, as the director of the policy planning staff at the State Department working very closely with Secretary of State Clinton, and now leading the New America Foundation, which has a well-deserved reputation of being one of the most innovative think tanks and action-oriented organizations in Washington. So it's a terrific thing. She's also earned notoriety through some of her writings, both about foreign policy and about challenges that particularly women face in foreign policy. So we're going to talk about that as well. The McCain Institute is about five years old. As I said, it's a part of Arizona State University. And that means that we are also partners with New America, because New America has a relationship with Arizona State University as well. Peter Bergen in the audience here runs the Future of War program, which is deeply embedded with Arizona State University. So we have a lot of connections here, and we're delighted to have them in the build on them. McCain Institute's core mission is advancing character-driven leadership. How do we promote better leaders for the future? And one of the things that we thought would be smart to do would be to talk to successful leaders. And another thing would be to do that with a view towards communicating with a new young generation of new career professionals who are interested in hearing from people who had some successes in their careers and figuring out how and why. So that's kind of why we're here. And we will go on for about an hour. We will definitely leave a lot of time for discussion and question and answer with the audience. But maybe I'll kick it off, if I could, with a few discussion points. And I guess the first thing I'd ask, and we ask this of a lot of people and a lot of our conversations, what is leadership? What defines a good leader? So let me start by saying you should see the other guy. And if I hold this up, I'm not holding my hand up. I'm just this is what I'm supposed to do. So what is leadership? So I'm going to start by saying what I don't think it is. And then I'll say what I think it is. I do not think it is getting out front and expecting others to follow. I think that is our traditional conception of leadership. And certainly, if you walk around this city and you look at all the statues of generals on horses, that's the kind of idea, right? They're out there charging ahead, and they're the leader, and the troops are following. I don't think that is leadership most of the time. I'm not going to say there isn't a time for it. And it may still be a time in a battle campaign. You can lead without a horse. You can lead without a horse. But just because you have a horse doesn't make you a leader. Yes, I would like to have the horse. So my favorite definition of leadership is from Nan Kohan, who wrote a book thinking about leadership. She was the president of Wellesley, and then president of Duke, and first woman president of Duke, and then a political theorist, philosopher, feminist in her scholarship. And her definition is that leadership is clarifying or determining the goals for a group of people and mobilizing energies to achieve them. Now that's an interesting idea. So clarifying goals, that doesn't even sound like setting an agenda. That just sounds like you're a group of people, and you actually want something, but you need me to help you figure out what that is. Determining is a little tough. There's a little more there. We all discuss our goals. You want this, and you want that, and I as the leader either make the decision or often when you're sharing a meeting, you just basically call the discussion. You say, this is what I hear, and that's generally what you think a majority of people want. So that's kind of more determining goals. And then mobilizing the energies of people to achieve them, this part I think is critical, that leadership now is as much about mobilizing and empowering as it is asking people to follow you. And I think I lead best when somebody comes into my office and says I have an idea, and I ask them questions about it. I often follow a larger process to sort of help figure out exactly does this make sense to do or not? And then I make connections and support them in a way that their energy is unleashed. And lots of good things happen. And actually we're talking about Arizona State University, what Michael Crow has done as the president is unbelievable. I mean, he has literally unlocked the energies of any number of people and said go, some of it doesn't work, right? Some people will fail. But I think of leadership as much more that empowering, mobilizing, unlocking of other people's talent than I do myself being out there in front of people. Cohen Powell said something like, I'm not getting the quote right, but if you're not pissing some people off, you're not doing your job, what do you think about that? I think that's right. I do. So I will say, if you want to be liked by everybody, do not go into leadership. I mean, I really mean that. I think in my career I've done things more roughly than I needed to, that if I'd put in more time in some places, I might have been able to make a few more allies. I might have been able to smooth things over. But I have repeatedly been confronted with decisions where, and this goes to character and integrity, where I knew what the right thing to do was, and I knew that other people just didn't have the guts to do it, whether it's facing somebody down who simply is abusing power, or at Princeton getting basically confronting a blocking coalition of faculty who are preventing somebody from being hired, you have to have the courage to say, this is the right thing to do, and I hope you'll understand later, but you're not gonna like me now. And some number of people are not gonna like you. And if you can't stand for that, you are not gonna leave well. Again, you can do it, they're better and worse ways to do it, and I have definitely made some mistakes, but I do not think, I think Colin Powell's right, that fundamentally they pay you to make tough decisions, and the toughest part of that is, somebody's gonna be disappointed, and some people are gonna twist the truth, and really aren't gonna like it. A couple of the thoughts that we bring up at the McCain Institute when we talk about leadership is that leadership is not about being in a position of authority. It's identifying a problem, and being willing to solve the problem. So how do I engage in doing that? And that gets to the point of courage, because you may not have the formal authority, but if you can inspire and do, and it also gets to the point of service, that you're not doing something for yourself, you're serving a cause that is more important. And I wonder if you have any reflections on some of those ideas of leadership as service. I definitely think that the reason to lead is, again, to achieve a larger purpose. And when people come to me and talk about should I do this job? I always say, and particularly if it's a fancy job, I got offered to be president of X, a director of Y, and I say, don't think about what you're gonna be. Think about what you're gonna do, because believe me, the being part wears off in a hurry. I mean, I've been dean, I've been director of policy planning. That's lovely, and when you meet somebody on an airplane, you get this little thrill, I'm an X, but that wears off in a hurry. What you have to believe in is that what you do every day matters. In some larger sense, whether it's foreign policy, and as you well know, or at NATO, thinking about the Ambassador Volcker was Ambassador NATO, the larger purposes that you are serving. Here at New America, we have this out there renewing American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the digital age. That's this grand vision. Do I think we're, will people say down the road, yes, New America renewed American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the digital age? Probably not. But do I believe that the work we do here is making a real difference to lots of people and generating ideas that will matter in the world? I do. And so I think it's about what do you do day in and day out? Nobody loves their job 100% of the time, but I think you can get to 70, 80% of the time. And to do that, you should feel that you are serving something bigger than yourself. And that gives you the inspiration and also, again, the strength to make this, to make tough decisions. Let's shift a little bit to careers, because I know that's something that people, young people in Washington are thinking a lot about. Is there anything you can point to in your career that was like a big break, you know, a decisive point that sort of launched you? So we were, I was looking at some of these questions earlier and thinking about this. So to answer your question, I have to back out. Some of you have heard me say this, so for those of you who've heard me forgive me, but my roommate in college always says I was the single most directed human being she had ever met. I arrived in 1976 with a plan. I was gonna major in international relations. I was half Belgian. I had gone back and forth between Belgium and the United States. I spoke French. I had decided I wanted to do foreign policy. I had decided that I was gonna go to law school to do foreign policy. I had decided that I was gonna go to a big New York firm after law school and kind of connect to a partner who was gonna go in and out of the State Department. I mean, I had mapped it for 40 years. And I did graduate from Princeton. I got a master's. I did go to law school. I did work in one of those firms, a firm where the former Secretary of State, Sy Vance, had worked. Everything was going great until I discovered that I simply couldn't stand the work. That a summer as a, and I was doing corporate interestingly enough for many of you who are afraid of public speaking. I was so scared of public speaking that I wouldn't do litigation. I did corporate because I was terrified of the idea of standing up in court, which in retrospect was crazy, but there it was. And so I then decided there's a problem with this grand plan. It involves my doing this work for many years and I can't do this work. I don't wanna do this work. I just, so I spent four years kind of spinning out. Like I enrolled in a PhD program, but not to get a PhD really, but because I was still at Harvard and if you're not a student, you have no status. You have no ID card. You have no access to funding. You can't go into the library. You have to have status. So I re-enrolled at Oxford. I was the executive director of the program on international financial systems, which sounds really impressive, but I was the program on international financial systems. It was a program of one. And I did all sorts of other things. And so there were four years of really my parents, like what are you doing? My law school friends, what happened to you? They're all marching along as associates of big firms. And the break was this professor that I was working for said, have you thought about law teaching? And A, I had never thought about teaching. Never. I mean, my grandfather was a football coach at UVA. That's as close as my family got to academia and I just thought professors, they write books. They, no, no, no, no. I'm not interested in being a professor. And my grades reflected that. I can assure you, my law school grades were not great. But he said this and I said, well, yes, by now I'd sort of been experiencing life. I'd been working for him. It looked pretty good, but I was not what a normal law professor looks like. And a normal law professor, for those of you who don't know, gets A's in law school, goes to law review, clerks for an appellate court, clerks for the Supreme Court, if you're going for a top law job. I hadn't done any of those things. No law review, no clerkship, no great grades. He wrote me a recommendation and he was a brilliant, brilliant man. And I went on the law teaching market with an article because I had written an article. That was the one place where working as a scholar had helped. And this fabulous recommendation and I ended up an assistant professor of law at the University of Chicago and in one year went from, well, I don't really know what I'm doing and it took me about 20 minutes to explain the various things I was doing to this lovely status that was quite wonderful. So, looking at that, what would you have done differently? At any point, would you? Oh, well, that's a long lesson. I mean, I think the lesson of that for me was that it's great to have a plan, but if you really hate it, stop, right? I mean, you're just not going to succeed if you hate what you're doing. And this is not, I know we all tell you, and I tell my kids and my former students, follow your passion and all that. You are not gonna like your job every day. That's just, we all do a lot of grunt work or scutwork and we have to, but you have to feel like this is worth doing. And as an associate in a large firm working on projects, I didn't even know what we were selling. I think it was arms, but I never found out. I mean, I just realized I couldn't do that work. So the lesson for me was it's worth handling uncertainty until that thing comes along. It's really worth saying this is really uncomfortable, but it's more important to be uncomfortable and to try on different things than it is to kind of do what's expected of you. And I think the best things, including, when I left academia to take on New America, my mother is still kind of going, you left a tenured professorship at Princeton University, right? You need your head examined. And New America's been hard at times, but I have grown and I believe in the work we do in a way that, again, you're growing, you're learning, it's worth it. Did you anticipate that you would make a leap from academia to policy making at some point? Yes, so that's the one thing. So if you'd asked me in 1976, maybe not 76, but certainly 80 when I graduated from college, if you'd said, do you think you'd like to be director of policy planning someday? I'd have said yes, this is the part, I mean I knew what policy planning was, I knew that George Kennan had created the office, I knew that it was the big think job in the State Department and that I would have said I'd love to do that. It's just that I would have never predicted the way I got there. But it is true once I moved to Princeton in the early, in 2002, I laugh at this and whether you're Republican or Democrat, this is equally true. I was part of every Democrat wanna be foreign policy group there was. And they're all mostly in Washington. There are task forces, there are working groups, there are boards, and they are folks generally from one party or the other, although I did a certain amount of bipartisan work and believe strongly in bipartisan work, that are essentially kind of letting people know who are going to ultimately run for office, I'm here, and that was, so that in many ways I did position myself for, and it worked. But I gotta tell you, it would never have worked unless Barack Obama appointed Hillary Clinton and nobody expected that. And I had done, she was looking for a woman who was a big thinker and somebody who was close to her had known me, I did not know her. So there's a tremendous amount of luck in getting into those jobs. And anybody in those jobs will tell you that you can plan, but you know this. This is a great piece of career advice right here is you position yourself to become lucky. Yes, exactly, and then you just, you hope. You may not become lucky, but if you're in the right spot you have a better chance. Exactly, and there's so many factors, who gets this appointment, who gets that appointment, that's exactly right, position yourself but then understand you cannot make it happen. So being a successful professor, becoming a dean, becoming the head of policy planning, your college dream. Are there challenges that you faced as a woman that especially 1976, that are different than what your male colleagues would have faced? And do those challenges still apply today or how have they changed? Unquestionably, there were additional challenges and they're still there. But I think they're definitely different. And yeah, 1976, when I, Princeton only started taking women in 71. The State Department only allowed women to be married starting in 73. So this is the dark ages for a lot of the young women in this, and I, growing up, I always say I knew one woman lawyer, I knew no women doctors, no women professors, no women engineers, no women judges, nothing else that you can think of much less, Secretary of State, President, that just was really unthinkable. And I will say that I didn't think of myself as a leader until my late 30s, and I do think that was definitely gendered. Nobody, I didn't see any women leaders. When I taught my first law school class, I went to see Diane Wood, who's now a judge on the Seventh Circuit. She was at the University of Chicago. I went to watch her teach the class because I'd never seen a woman teach a law class. So unquestionably different in terms of no role models, still lots of assumptions about you just couldn't do it. In national security, I was long the only woman in the room or one of two. It is still true that if we convene a national security meeting in this town, you will have at least two-thirds men, if not four-fifths men. And if you convene a development meeting, it will be flipped. So you still have this very strong, women do the softer stuff, men do the guns and bombs. Now we know, if we were talking about Afghanistan earlier or Iraq or anywhere, we actually know that many of those people working for those NGOs are putting themselves in incredibly difficult and scary positions, and that the work they do is every bit as important as the work of winning the war, right? You actually, they're security, and then there's long-term securities. But it's still true that I think women are not heard the same way. They are often interrupted, they are often overruled, there are lots of assumptions that play out in ways that disadvantage women. But here's the difference. I think there are also ways in which women are advantaged, and I have been advantaged as a woman, because people were looking for talented women law professors by the time I got there. 1980, it would have been a total ban. 1990, when I was on the law teaching market, it was an advantage. You had to meet the bar, but it was an advantage. So there, women are, I think now, helped in various ways, and the other difference is that the bias is subconscious, right? So when I was growing up, there was conscious bias, right? There were guys who were like, who referred to women as girls and thought of them as really childlike sex objects. I don't know men who think that anymore. So it's harder to fight, because often the men around us really are of the best intention, and they're not aware of the way they act that disadvantage women. And so it's harder to fight, but it's also their advantages, and women have come, obviously, a huge, long way. So you wrote a very famous article. Got a lot more attention than you probably expected. Had more than any of my foreign policy writing. Which is also interesting. Maybe that's the first question there, but it was, can women have it all, or women can't have it all? You got a lot of comments, both pro and con. What were you thinking about in writing it, and what do you think about it now, eight years on or whatever it is? Well the first thing to just say is that no one expected what happened. Indeed, so this article is published in June 2012, why women still can't have it all, which I meant to say, women, this is what we still need to change. It was never meant to say women can't have it all, I now get introduced. Not prescriptive, but descriptive. Right, it was like, here's what's still a problem. So it's women, why women still can't have it all, but eventually we'll get there, which is not how many people read it. But the week before it came out of the Atlantic, the Atlantic publicity people called all these talk shows or whatever, and nobody wanted to see it. It was like yawn, right? We've seen this movie before. We've seen it in 1990, in sort of early 90s, early aughts. This is old news, and it was old news. Like this is really hard, was not news. But it caught a generational wave. It caught many of you. It caught many of your peers, five years older, who were all fighting with their mothers. This is, I think, the best way to explain it. They were many young women who were saying to their mothers, one of two things. Either, of course I can do everything, and their mothers were saying, it's not as easy as you think. Or the mothers were saying, of course you can do everything. And the young women were saying, hey, I don't want your life. I want to actually see my children. I want different things. So, Ariana Huffington told me that her daughter showed up with my article at Thanksgiving heavily underlined. So, I think, so partly it just caught this generational debate, where mothers send it to daughters and daughters send it to mothers, and then there were all the men. I remember Jack Lew, no, it wasn't Jack Lew. It was somebody else of the State Department who greeted me and said, my wife handed me your article. Pause. We had quite a discussion. That was, we had a huge fight and you are to blame because there were lots of women who I think also said to husbands and boyfriends, hey, we're not there yet and here's lots of problems. And I really thought I was writing for the Atlantic. I thought I was writing for a group of foreign policy women, but what I was doing was saying, I have always been that woman who said, of course you can do it. Of course you can do it. And it's just a matter of will. And as I wrote the article, I had kind of looked down on women who had made different trade-offs because my view was they just didn't want it hard enough. And that was part of the lean in argument, although I think I agree with Sheryl Sandberg much more than I disagree and vice versa. But I was saying, hey, this is a lot harder than I thought and I've had a teenager and I never expected this, but he needs both parents and I am not going for that next job at the State Department, which frankly, when I went in in 2009, no one who knew me would have said I'd make that choice. My mother, my best friend, they'd have all said, this is her life ambition, this is what she wants. And yet it was clear to me that the right choice and the right choice for my son, that the right choice for me was to put my family first. And so it was a kind of I have seen something different and I think because you couldn't put me down as somebody who wasn't ambitious, you couldn't say, well, she's a feminist and she's writing this, you had to say, maybe this is harder than we thought. That's very interesting. It is a really interesting read and if you haven't read it, I would suggest you. It makes you think a lot. The question I remember as you're talking, I think is that in fact, what you just described is in fact a choice. You're saying, I could have done that and I didn't want to do that, I wanted to do this instead. Frankly, anybody could make that choice, not everybody does, few are men do. And that's what it is and what I'm happy to see and I think this maybe gives me hope for where we're going as a country is it hasn't hurt you in any way. In fact, it probably made you. Yeah, but not everybody and the kid go right at it. No, but I mean, you stepped out of something that you were successful at. You did something because you wanted to and you were merged doing something else that you're successful at and are better now probably than you were at any other point. Sorry to be so flattering, but I mean, I think these things build on each other. I think that's right, although I had a choice. One of the things I learned, as I said, I was writing for the audience of The Atlantic, which is a very elite audience. And that audience, I think, by and large have choices. But what I really came to see over the next three years before I wrote Unfinished Business, which is the book, which is really quite different than the article, was how many women, of course, do not have a choice, right? That for vast numbers of women in this country, the vast majority, there is no choice. And there's no choice in all sorts of ways. Either both people simply have to work because you need both incomes, or you're a single mother and you are the only income. 40% of women in this country are the primary breadwinner. And that includes lots of single mothers, but that also includes families where the man has lost his job and she's the one going or she simply makes more. And that, so I have learned that what I described as a choice is a very privileged choice. It still matters to people who have it, but I came away thinking actually, the real kind of tragedy here is that we are forcing many women and men, and I'll come to men in a minute, to not be able to give their children what they need. Those children need it. We need that as a society, right? I mean, it is on all of us that those children are not getting what they need from their parents and we don't have what I now call an infrastructure of care that helps the kids and the families and the society. But the other thing I'll say is, and this was the most surprising, men wrote to me after my article. Men wrote to me saying, you think these are the choices I want to make. You think I'm really happy. I've got a career and a family and I've got it all. I don't. I have to be the breadwinner. That was my gender role. That's the role society assigned me. I'm the man, I'm the provider. I don't have a choice. I have got to provide and if I want to be there more for my kids, if I want to leave and go to the baseball game, if I want to be there and have my children know me, I don't have that choice and I wish I had it. So what I now say to your generation is it's for the men and the women, but to claim something that the reason many of women are conflicted is we don't want to give up the fact that our children need us, want us, love us. That's a really great part of life. It can also be a tough part of life. There's that period between about 12 and 17 where excuse me for living. I would come downstairs and sort of say, good morning, grunt, but really the point being men should have access to having the joys of both, that the career is wonderful and the self fulfillment if you're lucky enough to have it, or even the independence of bringing in an income is hugely valuable, but men ought to also have what my husband has, which is that sense that our sons depend on him and need him and turn to him. I get jealous sometimes when that happens, but it's a source of huge joy and value in his life and I think men should have that as much as women. Okay, last question from... Even when it's one word test, we're talking about... Which is a lot, you have to work at getting more than one word. I'm gonna ask one more question and take it to the audience for questions and comments, but millennials in the marketplace, or millennials in the workplace, I should say, how do they do? So, there is, I was glad we have our millennial fellows, many of you are in the audience and I've said to all of you and I've said to everybody else at New America, the energy, the idealism, the innovation, it's just been an infusion of wonderful stuff and New America, we've just done this, 46% of people at New America are under 30, so we've got a very high millennial percentage and of course they're millennials now who are in their 30s, so we've got young millennials and I think there's lots of great stuff, I love that about us, actually, I think it's one of our strengths. I will say, however, that there is a... There's not the same set of expectations about having to do the grunt work, I remember very clearly at my late 20s and I had already a master's and a law degree from really fancy places, I spent a huge amount of time Xeroxing, right? Cause I know this old thing, it's called a copy machine, we have put things on the machine, you stand there for a long time, real grunt work, cause I was working for a professor and somebody had to do it and I was the junior person on the, I mean there was barely a team and that, what my understanding was, that's what you gotta do and eventually you'll stop doing it. I think there is much less expectation that there is a ladder and to be fair to many of you, the ladder's not clear, right? I cannot tell either of my sons, I've got an actor and a jazz musician for sons and we're looking for anybody who earns a steady income, there's no other requirement, just saying. But I can't tell them or any of you, here's the ladder. So I get that, that it's, why shouldn't you be out for yourself? Why shouldn't you be planning your career? Cause nobody's planning it for you and you've been led to understand rightly that we're not going to be loyal to you in the way that companies of my generation work. So I get that completely. There's still a code of professionalism that will serve you well. So I'll just give you an example. We had several people over the past year leave with one day or no notice. This is a very bad idea. I mean if you want to torch your career, go ahead cause that's what it will do, right? When you leave somebody completely in the lurch, they're not gonna be happy with you. You need to give them notice. Whether you like them or not and at least one of these people was not unhappy. She just got a better job and didn't think to give notice. And so there's a sort of set of what I would call norms of professional behavior that I don't know where I learned them. I suspect it was my first couple of jobs where there was this hierarchy and it was like this is how you behave and this is how you don't behave. But it's important because you're still working for people who expect that. The other thing I would tell you all to do is read the book The Alliance which is written by Reed Hoffman and Chris Yee and one other person whose name I'm not gonna forget. And what it says is the old model of you go to the quick company or the firm or whatever and they take care of you for life, that's dead. The new model is like contracting it will. I'm in it for me, you're in it for you, I can leave you any moment, you can fire me any moment, whatever. There's an in-between where it's an alliance. We're not gonna have you forever but we'll do our best by you if you do your best by us. And you think of each place you work as more like your university, like think of yourself as an alumni group and when anybody leaves New America I often write them and say you're still part of our community, send us your friends, keep in touch with us. The alliance kind of spells out a way that I think is professional but it recognizes that you're gonna be making your own career with jobs that probably don't even exist yet but nurturing a set of relationships is still really important. I wanna link it back to our earlier conversation as well because I think, certainly I think about the McCain is to do one of the things that has worked for us very well with a diverse group of people working with us is being mission-focused. So when you're trying to accomplish something that's empowering the people. It can allow leadership at any level and it allows learning as you go which is a way of enfranchising everyone in the area because we don't have the hierarchy, the hierarchy and you also don't wanna have people who make expectations about themselves rather than about accomplishing the mission. And so I think that's a... The other one I would say is assume positive intent. This is just a good life rule. I actually originally heard it from Indra Nui who's the CEO of Pepsi and she said her father told it but when something happens, assume positive intent. Do not assume this person was out to get me, this person was an idiot, this person was horrible. Just assume, just try the lens on. This person intended something good and it didn't work out. They didn't think of something, they forgot this. They made a mistake, we all make mistakes but it really matters as it matters for you and for your life outlook but it also causes you to stop and think, oh yeah, I've done that too and I didn't mean to as opposed to this just instant demonization and obviously in our national politics that's all you see. Nobody presumes that people of the other party are actually trying to accomplish the same goals but by different means. We presume that they're evil. That is not a way we're ever going to get to the country we need and don't start with national politics. Start with people around you and presume positive intent. That's a very good advice. Okay, from our audience here who has a comment or question and do we have a mic runner? We do, so start where you are in the very back. Just introduce yourself, please. Hello, my name is George Bogdan. I work in the office of Walter Russell Mead in the Hudson Institute. About halfway through the summer I was fascinated to read your column in the Financial Times about systems leadership and you chose kind of this moment when the sort of focus was shifting to Merkel and you described conceptually how this functions and I'm just wondering if you could apply it to kind of a specific issue or difficult problem that's on the horizon and how it might come out of systems leadership reuse. So for those of you who might not have read the column in the Financial Times, I described Merkel at the G7 and various people calling her the leader of the free world and saying, well, but if Merkel is the leader of the free world, she's not gonna lead the way American presidents have led, regardless of who they are, because Germany is a much smaller company, country, 80 million people and she's gonna have to lead collectively. So systems leadership is another way of talking about collective leadership. It comes out of an article written for the Stanford Social Innovation Review three or four years ago and it's something, the examples I use Teach for America has moved to this idea. What it really is is that your job as a leader, again, like as we said at the outset, is not to get out front, but I think of it as leading from the center, it's to help build a whole ecosystem that empowers others. So with Teach for America, it's really about teaching the teachers, teaching people who will make things go when you're gone. And this is not what we think of as a leader. You tend to think, no, no, I'm the one, that's me, I'm the leader, you follow me. This is a much more kind of, again, you may be in the center, but your job is to empower others. So I'll give you an example from what New America is trying to do right now. We are building, so our job is solving public problems. All of you who are in think tanks, public policy schools, legislative offices, government, what do we do? We try to solve public problems, whether it's education or environment or labor or foreign policy. These are problems that affect a whole body politic or some subset of it. How do you do that? Well, traditionally, the think tank thinks we get smart people in a room and we figure that out. New America thinks that somewhere, someone in this country has come up with a solution for most of our problems. Not all, I mean, there are really tough problems out there, but for so many people in Phoenix or St. Louis or Tulsa or Chattanooga or wherever you may be from, there are smart people and they're really working at it and they're on the ground. They don't have the luxury of just kind of imagining they're making it happen. And that our job is to build the network that will surface those and share them and scale them. Now that's a really different view of how, not just how I live, but how an organization that has traditionally been headquartered in Washington would actually accomplish its goals by lifting up others. So it creates a network, a system to actually get to those solutions that will presumably last beyond, certainly me or even New America. Resilience is part of it. Resilience is part of it. Other questions? This is more of a question along the lines of career and you said you always had a plan and I'm actually the same kind of person where everything's like mapped out and I know what I'm gonna do 10 years from now. What is your opinion on saying yes to everything or every opportunity that comes to you? Well, as is the military general frequently back there, we'll say always good to have a plan but don't expect it to work, right? In other words, it is good I think to have some notion of if you can of what you want to do and how you want to get there. But I definitely encourage people to seize opportunity and part of not doing something you hate is to be available when the something you love comes along. And again, we've got to support ourselves so I'm not saying you just kind of hang out and I did plenty of things when I was kind of treading water. So I do, I think you should take risks. I definitely, you're not gonna grow if you don't take risks and I always say it's does your stomach hurt? Your stomach should hurt. You should be good and scared on the first day of a new job. And to that extent, I would definitely take you to tell you to seize an opportunity. Even if you don't know how you're gonna do it, even if it wasn't in the plan, suddenly you have this opportunity. I wouldn't necessarily seize every opportunity and this again goes to you all change jobs fast. I think my view is if you're still growing, stay where you are and build those relationships because they will serve you well and you really will, it's like teaching a class. The first year you teach it, you see a bunch of stuff in it. The second year you teach it, you see a bunch of other stuff. And the third year you're still seeing new stuff. By the fourth year, maybe it's time to teach a new class or do something different. So I wouldn't say seize every opportunity but I would absolutely encourage people to do something they never, it was not on the plan. Like law teaching was not on the plan but it was in fact what I was very happy doing for a long time. That's a really good question. I'm gonna chime in on that too. Please do. I think first off, nobody has your timeline in mind except for you. So you can't control when opportunities arise. So when good ones arise, you really have to take them seriously. From an employer perspective, everyone knows, everyone thinks, takes you a year to get good at something. So an employer wants two years, just as a starting point. You're gonna learn for a year and then you're gonna be good for a year. And then after that, we can seize. And then the other thing is unless you're working for the federal government, you can do more than one thing at a time. So you can be building your future while doing your current and developing yourself so you become better at everything. And I think thinking about things as a broad spectrum rather than a narrow channel is probably a way to think about opportunities. And then you're really limiting based on what can I manage? What's fair to my commitments? How do I make sure I excel at everything? Don't leave anything hanging. It's a managing your time that way. In unfinished business, I talk about a career matrix where you think about here are the things I think I'd like to do. Here are the skills I'll need and the possible jobs I could get them in. And then it's really just what comes along. But so for instance, you think, well, I'd love to do that. Well, to do that, I'll need to be good at public speaking. I'll need to be able to manage. I need something to do with budgets. And then you can then think, well, I could get that in the private sector. I could get that in a government job. I could get that in a nonprofit and sort of map it out and then just see what happens. And everybody should have something that is paying the bills. Something that is a charitable activity and something that is a learning opportunity. I think that that triad is always a good triad. And the fun. Vash an ontiveros. Thank you both for being here tonight and taking time out of your, I'm sure, busy schedules. My question was around kind of what you were talking about at the beginning. Like how you talked about what leadership means to you. And it sounds like to me what you're talking about is servant leadership. And I guess I want you to elaborate a little bit on that and kind of let us know if that's what you are hinting on or if there's servant leadership. And if there's a distinguishable variable between those two. That's interesting. I do think of leadership as serving a larger mission. It could be public service, it could be a company, it could be as an academic as a dean, I was serving an ideal of education and a public service. I don't think of myself as a servant day to day. And I do think, again, you've gotta make tough calls. You, sometimes it's lonely. One of the hardest things I've had to learn and I think this is harder for women than for men is you can't be friends with everybody who works for you. You just can't. You want to be. You really kind of wanna make it all like we're just one happy family until you need to tell somebody they can't work here anymore. And or you need to give them a bad review. Or so, and that's when they say leaders are lonely. That's because you have to maintain some distance. So I think I think of leadership as service but I don't think of myself as a servant on a daily basis. It's, I mean, maybe if I said public servant but I do think of myself as no, I have a set of responsibilities that other people don't and they, that also gets me some lovely benefits but it also means it's up to me to make tough calls and do things that other people don't wanna do. Right, in the system that you're empowering. It's again, as a leader, thinking about the mission rather than about your role per se, how do you empower everybody else? Yes, over here. Hi, good evening. Introduce yourself. Sure, my name is Christian Hosom. I'm one of the Millennial Fellows along with these other two right here next to me. So I actually do have a question about the Millennial Generation and as we've talked about before, you mentioned that there is no clear ladder for our career paths and there's quite a bit of shifting in the labor markets especially in the last 20 to 30 years. And I know that there's a lot of popular journalism about there not being a ladder but there's a lot less about what there should be and what there will be. So we understand that there will be an increased tech focus, we understand there's going to be jobs that we might not have conceived of yet but I do think that a lot of what you're talking about around a code of professionalism, around a code of ethics and professional ethics kind of is the fulcrum of that is that we really don't know what's coming next. So a lot of millennials, especially now are taking a lot of jobs at a much quicker pace and oftentimes they might very much like the job but they might feel they need to leave for a lot of reasons and so maybe talk a little bit more about what we might think, how we might think through what maybe is the future of labor markets and for this generation, subsequent generations. Yeah, that's a very good question and again I think of it as a head of New America and a mom because I have to give my own kids and my many mentees who are sort of my larger family that kind of advice. So what I think of again is you may not know what the job is but there's still a set of skills that will be in demand so obviously good writing, good speaking, ability to present, ability to meet deadlines, understanding management so you do want to get to the point where you can say I have actually had a team and I've managed a team. Those things may be deployed in very different ways but they're still gonna be there. Innovation and creativity, I mean I'm reading a book right now about the returns to innovation are extraordinary in many ways, innovation jobs are the manufacturing jobs, the innovation jobs today are like good manufacturing jobs in the 50s and 60s. They're high paid and they support a whole ecosystem. Now you say well but I may not be that creative like how do you just make yourself creative? Well there are actually ways to tap in to the creative side of you and you can read about that. You can also put yourself in a job or if you're in an existing job try something out. Be innovative even if it gets slapped down some of the time because it will. Try things out so I think you can and this idea that you have to move on seems to me crazy. I just don't get that. What's important to me when I hire somebody actually if they've changed every 18 months I worry that something's wrong. I really do, I then wanna call their former place because that could well be you couldn't actually stick rather than you decided to leave. So I think again as long as you're growing and even if you're growing laterally rather than up I would stay where you are and the other point is and this goes to you it takes a year, relationships are never going out of style. I got where I am because some very powerful people mentored me and put a thumb on the scale for me. I told you that professor made all the difference. I worked for him for five years and I did grunt work and I did other work and he got to know me and he got to know who I was not just my work but who I was as a person. So he could really recommend me and that will not change. So if you are in a situation where you can learn from somebody and help them that will help you. No matter what whether they're taking you with them and that still works particularly in this town or they're recommending you to others that would be my measure. Am I growing and am I building a relationship that is really going to serve me well and the rest of it, you're not a stock portfolio. You don't need to churn. And you just mentioned something that is a really important thing too. Always treat everybody well. Oh yes. Up, down, sideways, whatever. Be a good person to everybody else because no one disappears. They're always around. What you did doesn't, it lasts. And that goes absolutely for people below you and sideways. It also goes and this is important to me for anybody in a workplace. Like how you treat a secretary or a receptionist or a custodian, if I used to see students who butter wouldn't melt in their mouth when they were talking to me and then they'd be rude to my assistant. As far as I was concerned, they were done. I'm a Harry Potterite there. How you treat people who may be lower on some ladder but they're human beings and don't do that. Final question. Yes ma'am. Hi, I'm Linnea. I actually completed the McCain Institute policy design studio in 2014 and now I have a full-time job, so that's great. I'm also a graduate of Arizona State, very proud Sun Devil where your article was required reading in my women in politics class. So, but my question is actually in the vein of character-driven leadership and systems-based leadership. And could either of you or both of you identify leaders right now, international or domestic, who are really exhibiting that, that you find really exciting to watch, whether it's heads of state or government, private sector, et cetera, that you think would be interesting for us to also read about and follow? Well, so the leader I wrote about was Wendy Kopp and Teach for All and Teach for America and they've really embraced it and that was one of the examples that I used. Also, I would say there's a book called Beyond Better that is about social entrepreneurs who are really successful and a lot of them are doing this because a lot of social entrepreneurs, wherever they're working and the United States are abroad, they're not gonna fix the problem. That is not possible, but can they build a system that will empower others? That's what matters and Beyond Better is about a set of transformative social entrepreneurs. It's written by the woman who was the head of the Skoll Foundation, Sally Osberg and Roger Martin who is at the Martin Prosperity Institute and they've chosen people who've won Skoll Social Entrepreneur Award. So that I would definitely look at. It's interesting, when I think about heads of state, I mean, generationally, you don't see that much of it. Well, so it's interesting to watch Justin Trudeau and look at his cabinet and look at who he's chosen. I think he does have a much less grand style of leadership. Now, partly he was a snowboarder and all that, I get that, but if you compare his father to him and partly that's leadership styles have changed. Pierre Trudeau is kind of the prime minister. I think Justin Trudeau has a more collective idea of what he's doing. And maybe McCall too, it'd be interesting to see. These are younger leaders. Interesting, I've had more time to think since you've been talking. Yeah. I think that Vladimir Kuzemara, if you have heard of him, he is one of the most impressive people in the opposition in Russia that you could meet. He was working for Boris Nemtsov, who was killed. He was poisoned twice in Russia trying to support democratic practices in Russia and he's still going. So it's a remarkable type of leadership, not ahead of state, well, but never be ahead of state, but he is holding out an example that a lot of people in Russia, I think makes them believe they can be a better society. So I think that's a good example of a leader there. And then as a head of state, the one that came to my mind, as I had plenty of time to think, was Tom Ilvis in Estonia. Oh yeah, yeah. And the reason I think of Tom Ilvis, he's now no longer president of Estonia. He was for two terms. No, it's Kasti Kallilai, she got lucky last year. Tom's at Stanford actually, Hoover. But he, as president of Estonia, actually doesn't have any power. The structure of the system is that the prime minister has executive authority. You know that, you never would have known. You never would have known that. No. He doesn't have any power, it's the prime minister that runs the governance of the country. But Tom understood the ability to speak clearly, to be an advocate, to tell the truth about things, mobilize people, do it with a sense of humor, do it with some courage, right mixture of irritating people and embracing people. And he made Estonia the e-country that it is. It wasn't his idea. But he boosted Estonia as an e-society. He also called out Russia as it is. It made a big difference in the EU, everything from doing the sanctions, to defense things, to positioning the forces in the Baltic states. He was certainly an inspiration to a lot of other people in the Baltic states in Poland, Hungary, Romania. And he did it all just out of force of personality and will, without any actual power, but he did that. So that may be a good note to end on. Your point about he called out Russia is a good one. Often leadership is about saying things that are true, but that no one really wants to hear. And this is a good example with the EU where a lot of states know that Russia is doing something Russia shouldn't be doing. And this is not, Russia's all bad, it's not. But they just don't want to hear it, right? It's the sort of inconvenient truth. Like they just don't want to hear it. And all of us are very aware of those kind of social signals. You know, in any group, that it would just be much easier to go along and that we're just not gonna name the elephant in the room. We're not gonna say that unpleasant thing that is gonna force people to do what they should do, which is to take responsibility. And I think, again, leadership is often, I said it's about courage, but it's also about being willing to hold people to their best selves, to recall their responsibility. In a way that no one wants to, but when you do it, they're not gonna be able to say, that's bad, right? It's tacit collusion. We just, we're not gonna name it and it'll be fine. I mean, the same thing is true often with sexism or racism or any other kind of bias. People know it's there, but you're just not gonna call it out because it's gonna make somebody really uncomfortable. It's gonna be inconvenient. A leader is the person who says, and this is true for any of you in any group. A leader is the person who says, I'm calling it out. I'm gonna stand for principle. I'm going to change the tenor of this conversation. You're here. So that's gonna wrap it up for tonight. Please join me in thanking and Reese Slaughter for sharing all of this with us. We've got even better out there now, so please stick around a little bit, mingle a little bit, chat will be the same, and thank you all for coming. Great, that was fun. So how many of these are you doing?