Last Lessons

By Jason Lim

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. _ The commencement ceremony at Harvard University was held this past Thursday. It was filled with festivities, with well-known politicians and luminaries, including the commencement speakers Bill Clinton and Bill Gates mingling with the graduating students, taking pictures, offering sage advice, and inspirational speeches.

This was the 371st Commencement at Harvard University. Considering that the United States was founded 231 years ago, Harvard is more than 140 years older than America. Such organizational longevity is impressive by any standards. Such organizational longevity with consistent excellence is almost unparalleled, and speaks to an equally notable tradition of leadership excellence at Harvard. More than any class that I took at the Kennedy School about leadership, it is my participation at the commencement ceremonies that really drove home the two most important leadership lessons that will guide me in the future. The first one is central to my professional life, the second to my personal one.

The first lesson struck me when I first scanned the row of luminaries waiting to receive their honorary degrees. They included Jocelyn Bell Burnell, an astrophysicist who is credited for having discovered pulsars; Bill Russell, the greatest basketball center that ever played the game who stood far taller in fighting for civil rights than he ever did in blocking shots; and Bill Gates, who finally got his Harvard degree almost 30 years after dropping out to found Microsoft.

But the person whose presence shocked me the most was Lawrence Summers, the former and much maligned president of Harvard University who served from 2001 to 2006, when he was pushed out after questioning, in a private gathering, women’s innate capacity to excel in science and engineering. His time at the helm at Harvard was so turbulent and controversial that he is one of the primary case studies in failed leadership taught at the Kennedy School. And yet, there he was, waiting with several others to be honored by the entire school on the most festive day of the year. And he received a standing ovation when he was presented.

Amidst the applause for Larry Summers, standing bathed in radiant New England sunshine, I realized the truth about the nature of leadership at Harvard. Leadership of an organization is not only about individual brilliance; it is about institutionalized excellence. For Harvard to maintain both longevity and excellence over several centuries, it obviously requires more that the genius of one person, since no human being can live that long.

Therefore, leadership at Harvard is not personal per se, but systemic to that organization. By this, I mean that Harvard was not made by the brilliance of one great person, but by the very nature of the organization in which the brilliance in leadership has been institutionalized. The genius is not confined to the individual; it is diffused throughout the campus and infects everyone that comes in touch with it.

This, in turn, incubates the genius in individuals. Maybe this is what Lee Kun-hee, the Chairman of Samsung Group, meant when he said that we should try to create geniuses who can each feed 100,000 others. But, with all due respect, perhaps we should focus on creating a system in which genius can be institutionalized as part of the overall system rather than depending on individualized genius to feed the rest of us. Let’s create 100,000 geniuses rather than wait for just one to save us.

The second lesson was brought home to me by Nicholas Kristoff, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The New York Times who delivered the farewell address at the Kennedy School. As a graduate of Harvard College himself, he declared that idealism can be supremely destructive if not grounded in pragmatism and a deep, “grassroots” understanding of the world. He differentiated between textbook and empirical knowledge, exhorting everyone to go out into the world and experience it not only as a tourist but wrestle with it as an activist and advocate. “You come to see your own life and neighborhood in very different ways when you have engaged with other problems around the world,” Kristoff spoke.

He relayed a story of a humanitarian worker who worked at Darfur who, upon coming back home to America on a vacation, was reduced to tears upon seeing a birdfeeder in her backyard. Surrounded by the utter normalcy of her home, she was struck by the inequality of circumstances people found themselves in by accident of birth. By sharing her story, the well-traveled Kristoff emphasized “that kind of a simple thing that we see every day can look different when you have been to hell and back and when you see all the things that are out there.”

Kristoff's words sunk deep inside me as daggers of humility, striking me to remember that policies should not be driven by blind idealism and cold analysis but by the actual people who will be affected. Those policies should serve the people rather than expect people to serve them instead. Ultimately, you will only develop depth of insight when you engage with various people in an organic way that will be messy _ as human relationships are _ but authentic and humanizing. Humble leadership based on mutual understanding. That’s what Kristoff spoke to me about.

jasonlim@post.harvard.edu

Jason Lim is a fellow at Harvard Korea Institute researching Asian leadership models.