Dean Bruner's Blog

The academic year has ended.  First-year MBA students are sighing with relief before starting summer jobs.  Second-year students are off for a week at the Atlantic shore (“beach week”) with friends—for them, too, there is a sigh and some nervousness about starting the career this summer.  Not a little of the sighing reflects the work of gaining their MBA degrees.  Honestly, I doubt that the content is much harder than other b-schools.  But what is different is the pace of work: learning teams in the evenings; three cases a day; preparation at a high enough level to talk about the case; the expectation that you will talk and contribute usefully in front of some 60 peers; and above all, anticipation of cold-calls.  In that sense, Darden may indeed be harder.

What does all that hard work get you?  First, there is very good mastery.  You learn best that which you teach yourself.  Case studies are basically organized self-teaching.  Second, it exercises all the attributes of outstanding business leaders: the capacity to recognize problems and opportunities, to frame a vision and plan; to enlist others; to communicate ideas; to be socially aware; and to take action. Third, this hard work simply strengthens your capacity and character for such work—these are hugely valuable gifts.  Life gets harder, not easier, as you progress.  Therefore, you must prepare for longer future, not merely the next job.  I have not met a business manager who doubted that attributes like these become more important as one progresses in the business career.   The great American poet, Langston Hughes, conveyed this in his immortal poem, “Mother to Son”:

Well, son, I'll tell you:

Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

It's had tacks in it,

And splinters,

And boards torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor—

Bare.

But all the time

I'se been a-climbin' on,

And reachin' landin's,

And turnin' corners,

And sometimes goin' in the dark

Where there ain't been no light.

So, boy, don't you turn back.

Don't you set down on the steps.

'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.

Don't you fall now—

For I'se still goin', honey,

I'se still climbin',

And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

Make a public statement of commitment and you feel bound to uphold your reputation by meeting the commitment.  Studies of mindfulness show that intention and determination make a large positive difference in one’s capacity to achieve stretch goals and do complicated work.  Commitment counts.  Declare you want to lose weight and you start paying attention to things you missed before: what you eat and the exercise you do—Weight Watchers employs this basic behavioral characteristic.  Alcoholics Anonymous works on a different problem using the same principle.  Most first-time home buyers probably achieved their goal after making some kind of intent to save, such as committing to a regular direct deposit to a savings account.  Nothing good comes without some kind of resolve to obtain it.

After Darden declared its goals for environmental sustainability, people began surfacing new ways of doing things that are consistent with our initiative.  At a reception a student showed me his beer cup: it had a symbol indicating a plastic based on recycled cellulose—leaders in our food service area made the decision to start purchasing environmentally-friendly service materials.  My nonpareil assistant, Lee Pierce, called for a taxi to take me to the airport.  Waiting at the curb was Go Green Transportation (www.gogreentransportva.com), an environmentally-friendly hybrid automobile transportation service.  Dwight Ledford founded the company eight months ago and boasts a range of clients in little Charlottesville.   Like the early bulbs in the first signs of spring, little choices like these promise to blossom into something bigger.

Talk isn’t always cheap.  Expression of intent creates an important initial shove to a strategic initiative.  Our task at Darden is to build on this momentum.

Recently, I announced to the Darden community a strategic initiative on environmental sustainability.  Our initiative has two goals: by 2020, the Darden Enterprise will achieve carbon and waste neutrality; and by 2013, Darden will rank among the b-school thought leaders on sustainability.  The goals address how we live and how we learn about business and the environment—they are ambitious in the time-frame expressed.  But our assessment of the urgency and the opportunity to serve the business profession compels us to set these targets.  Darden’s leadership team thinks that now is the time and that Darden is the place for these goals.

The growth of my own support for this initiative mirrors the development of thinking among many of my colleagues at Darden.  Given the sharp debates about the environment, one does not enter this area lightly.  I would encourage any of the readers of this blog to consider a path similar to mine:

**Look.   I enjoy the natural world immensely—hiking, camping, canoeing, and biking.  Seven years ago, I paddled the length of the James River (301 miles) with my son.  I travel extensively.  Often I see evidence of degradation of the environment.  In some places this evidence results from practices of the past, rather than the present.   But I wonder how we can leave a world for our children that is better than the one we presently inhabit. 

**Study and reflect.  One doesn’t have to be an expert in the natural sciences to note the growing consensus among scientists about climate change and other forms of degradation.    Books ranging from Al Gore to Bjorn Lomborg[1] take environmental decline as a basic assumption; they part company on what to do about it.  Various writers are downright alarming; some are openly hostile about the role of business and free markets in becoming part of the solution.   A recent book by Gus Speth, Dean of Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, blames environmental change on capitalism—to anyone who loves entrepreneurship, business innovation, and free markets, such a charge seems extreme.   We see leading companies engaged in strategic shifts to their product mix and their operations, in recognition of changes in the environment.   Batten Fellow Joel Makower writes in his popular blog that: 

“Green leaders are emerging throughout companies, not just in the environmental departments, as forward-thinking entrepreneurs (and intrapreneurs) identify and exploit new ways to leverage green thinking into new products and markets. As the number of success stories moves beyond hybrid automobiles and organic foods to include other categories products and services, green will be seen as a more "normal" part of the marketplace.”

**Listen.  Hear what business executives, consumers, and investors are saying about business and the environment.  Clearly the best-practice corporations expect Darden to master sustainability—I found this in conversations with our leading MBA recruiters and our top executive education clients.   A study by McKinsey at the end of 2007 found that executives consider environmental issues likely to have the highest impact on shareholder value over the next five years.  Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric spoke to our community in 2006 and offered a strong expression of commitment to the environment.  One of the most frequent questions in my meetings with alumni regards business and the environment and what Darden is doing.  And within Darden, casual conversations and meetings raise the environment often. Darden students also recently produced a week of discussions by business leaders from leading companies, including GE, Cargill and Duke Energy, who each talked about how the context of environmental challenges is shaping exciting innovation within their institutions.

**Try.  If you really want to understand the range of environmental problems and solutions, you should experiment.  Install some compact fluorescent lights in your home.  Use a ceramic cup for your morning coffee instead of throw-away paper or plastic.  Walk more, drive less.

By looking, listening, studying, and trying, my colleagues and I grew to believe that Darden should engage more energetically with the environment.  The hearts of business professionals should be in this.  Businesses and business schools need to find the intersection between economic growth and environmental sustainability.  Growth brings higher standards of living for everyone, especially the world’s poor, benefits such as better clothing, housing, medical care, education, and elevation of the status of women.  The challenge of balancing growth and sustainability can inspire a great deal of innovation.

Some business school students are, early in their careers, at the source of this innovation, creating business plans for companies that address environmental challenges. This week a team led by Darden students Manoj Sinha and Chip Ransler won first prize in the University of Texas at Austin RGK Center Social Innovation Competition for their company Husk Power Systems, which provides power to rural Indians by converting rice husks into electricity.  These students are in Darden’s small business incubator.

We should find means of harnessing the dynamism of capitalism and free markets in the service of environmental sustainability.   It is said that business executives are indifferent, consumers seem disinclined to pay more for environmentally-friendly products; and investors are disinclined to accept a lower rate of return for the sake of the environment.  In other words, government will have to have to intervene heavily into markets and the behavior of individuals to stabilize and/or remediate the environment.

I don’t know about that.  Markets and individuals are highly inventive and adaptive.  Thoughtful people on the topic recognize that business and the power of markets will have to be part of the solution.  Our environmental challenges open up opportunities for innovative and entrepreneurial leadership from the business sector that has the potential to create value for both individual businesses and society.  I think this is what makes it such an interesting time to be studying these issues.  The role for business schools should be to identify best practices of invention and implementation of new products and practices.  I am cautiously optimistic that there is a sizable intersection and that research can and should find a way.  I, like my colleagues, bring a natural skepticism to new causes.  Our role in society is to think critically and speak the truth.  Thus, it is unlikely that any academic community will forge complete unanimity on issues about the environment.  The world needs more research on best practices and more teaching.  The science is leaning very consistently toward evidence of adverse impact on the environment.  Business plays an important role in this impact.  A leading business school should make an original contribution to this need and should help to disseminate best practices.  Here is where Darden can make a difference.

A strategic “initiative” declares our intent to grow in a particular direction.  In recent years, Darden’s leadership team has declared initiatives in the areas of globalization, research, and diversity.   An initiative should meet several tests.  From the start, it should be consistent with Darden’s mission.  It should offer some substantial benefit to our constituencies—especially to the profession we serve—and to society.  Fulfilling the aims of the initiative should be at least plausible, based on the capabilities we have (or can reasonably develop)—this is a criterion of probable impact (good generals choose their battles carefully).  Successful execution of the initiative should boost the strategic positioning of the school.  And finally, the initiative should have strong champions within the community: students, faculty staff, alumni, trustees, and the University—nothing important ever happens without leadership. 

Our initiative on environmental sustainability easily meets all of these tests.  In my three years as Dean, I have seen rising interest and commitment by students, faculty, and staff—I challenged these people to form a working committee, to draft a vision and mission for Darden, to suggest near- and longer-term “wins,” and to offer a plan.  The working committee responded with enthusiasm and patience, and with a strategy for the School.  The strategy points out that sustainability complements well Darden’s special strengths in strategy, innovation, ethics, and virtually all functional fields—I grew more persuaded that we can do this. 

Darden faculty members as diverse as Dick Brownlee, Andrea Larson, Elizabeth Teisberg, Sherwood Frey, and Ed Freeman have carried elements of sustainability in their research and teaching.  Some have focused their research on sustainability as a key driver of strategy and innovation. Professor Michael Lenox will join our faculty this summer; his expertise is in strategy, innovation, and sustainability.  He will become the Executive Director of our Batten Institute, following Jeanne Liedtka’s distinguished service in that role.  We are energized by Mike’s vision.  Coincidentally, we hired Erika Herz to serve as Darden’s Director of Sustainability Programs—a Darden graduate, she returns to us from United Technologies Corporation where she worked on sustainability programs.   Listen to Erika’s recent podcast.   All of these colleagues bring significant expertise and thought leadership in sustainability.  We discussed this among the Associate Deans and the Leadership Team of the school: they offered their support.  The University has some high-profile sustainability efforts in play—I reached out for counsel to other senior leaders in the University and found strong support, especially from Provost Tim Garson and Dean of the Architecture School, Karen Van Lengen.    

In short, my decision to lend my support to this initiative was easy.  This initiative declares our strategic resolve as a community.   I hope and believe that at some point long in the future, this initiative will constitute one of the important positive turning points in the history of the school.   We did not come to this point lightly and we see great opportunity.

We can do this.  I invite you to consider what actions you can take and to engage with the Darden community as we challenge our enterprise in this area, executing on our mission to be leaders in the world of practical affairs.

Darden’s semester has come to an end.  Last week, I spoke to the MBA Full Time students who were just concluding their first year.   The air was full of congratulation and relief for the students.  But I asked them to pause and reflect: when I welcomed them to Darden last August, I said “you must be present to win”—this phrase has been a theme of a number of my blog postings.  So I asked the students, “What does it mean to ‘be present’?”   Three of them spoke up: being present means to come to class and other meetings, to participate actively, to contribute usefully, and to help others.  All that, yes; but I think there is more.

It is easy to marginalize the importance of being present.  Woody Allen said that “80% of success is showing up.”  Allen’s mockumentary, Zelig, is about an innocent nobody who craves approval and changes to fit in wherever he goes.  He manages to show up at many of the historical turning-points of the 20^th Century and thereby gains fame.  Another film, the withering satire, Being There, is about a simple gardener elevated to the circle of the White House by chance.  The main character played by Peter Sellers utters the memorable line, “I like to watch.”  Are just showing up and watching what “being present” is about?

The Darden Reunions, held two weeks ago, showed much more than just showing up and watching.  Alumni came back to reconnect to classmates, faculty, and generally, the school.  From what I saw, I would say they were there to reconnect with a part of themselves and a time of their lives that had great meaning—and to reconnect with a school that affords mastery and the discovery of meaning for new generations of students.  Alumni offer advice, opinions, news, and commitments of support; they are mindful  of their past and present experience.  Through their presence, they reaffirm what is important and meaningful about Darden.  In a similar vein, the best students I’ve known have a capacity to interpret the meaning of events in real time; they connect dots well and determine the significance of the emerging patterns.  Being present is mindfulness.

That same weekend, hundreds of Darden students gathered to rehabilitate eleven houses in Charlottesville for the charity, Building Goodness in April.  Of all the charities our community supports, this is my favorite.  The work is exhausting and impressive.  The students do more than show up: they get results.  Being present therefore, is also about advancing a mission; it is about service.

Sometimes being present has no obvious result.  Sitting through the night at the bedside of a sick child or aging parent can give a powerful abiding presence.  The presence of the cop on the beat and the crew in the firehouse is important because of a readiness to act.  In the brilliant poem about his own blindness, John Milton concluded that “they also serve who only stand and wait.”  To wait on someone—to be present-- is to be ready to serve. 

Being present entails more than just “showing up.”  One is present through active engagement, being mindful, serving some purpose, and standing ready to serve.   My casual observation of perhaps hundreds of successful managers on the job is that they are present in these ways.  I would amend Woody Allen’s aphorism to say that 80% of success in life is being present.

Darden has a lot to teach about being present.  And I think our students get it.  But I asked them to approach their summer jobs in the same spirit: to be present for whomever they work and to be present for Darden.  I encouraged our students to speak up for Darden, to carry the word about the Darden experience to employers, prospective applicants, and the public.  To be present for Darden also means to live the Darden brand: leadership, honor, integrity, strong work ethic, and high engagement—these qualities are what “high touch, high tone, and high octane” are about.  Be there for Darden.

Someone said to the philosopher, Voltaire, “Life is hard.”  Voltaire said, “Compared to what?”   This comes to me after the past weekend, when the staff of the Darden School welcomed the many hundreds of visitors for reunion weekend.  We have a high-performance service culture within the Darden Enterprise.  Some of the Darden staff members arose very early on Saturday and Sunday (or stayed late) to provision the returning alumni.   They did it out of a sense of being part of a valuable production, creating a special experience for our guests.   This kind of work is not easy, but the alternative (the “compared to what”) is just not something they dwell on.  This is dedication.

Education is a performance art.  One sees this in the work of faculty teaching teams, the coordinated work of staff members, the late-night rounds of maintenance people.  All that we do tries to create a very special experience for our students, visitors, and the wider profession of business.  The recent research of Joseph Pine and Batten Fellow James Gilmore and others on the experience economy confirms that high-performance enterprises know that great service is founded on the creation of a special experience.   

Such dedication imposes peak demands on our colleagues.  It is not easy to deny one’s family, friends, or rest for the sake of people you don’t know.  Today’s entitlement mentality might encourage some people to check out of work when the demands rise.  But the service ethic affords a different view: we have a mission to “improve society by developing leaders in the world of practical affairs.”  To the extent we accomplish that, busy is good.  I honor all of our colleagues for rising to the challenge.  Life is hard; yet we get on with creating the high-performance community to which we aspire.

I just finished reading Daniel Pink’s The Adventures of Johnny Bunko.  It tells the story of a NextGen kid who hates his job as an accountant for a large firm.  Then into his life comes a genie who changes it with six points of important advice.  I thought, uh-oh, here’s just another self-help book.  But the advice is sound.  One doesn’t actually read the book.  It’s one long cartoon called “manga,” the Japanese comic format.  This makes it quite engaging.  You can finish it in less than an hour—but unlike other quickie self-help books, the ideas stick.  It would be interesting to experiment with this format for b-school cases.

A propos of some of my previous postings, the third point is “It’s not about you.”  The genie says, “Of course you matter, but the most successful people improve their own lives by improving others’ lives.  They help their customer solve its problem.  They give their client something it didn’t know it was missing.  That’s where they focus their energy, talent and brainpower. …The most valuable people in any job bring out the best in others.  They make their boss look good.  They help their teammates succeed.  So pull your head out of your…ego.  Then sit down and get back to work.”

Yes.

“You owe it to me!” said the student.   His red face, loud voice, and body language showed that he meant it.   He argued that he had completed every requirement for the course, had years of work experience, could have written the textbook himself, had received a classy job offer, and was president of the relevant student club.   I explained that his torpid attendance, work ethic, insight, class participation and weak mastery warranted the grade I gave him, a ‘B-’.  The grade he thought I owed him: an ‘A’.  Consumed by a sense of entitlement, he stormed out of my office.[1]  

Last year, the Pew Center for Research published a report that labels people 15 to 25 years old as the “Look At Me” generation (think Facebook, MySpace, and myYearbook)—they highly value fame; two-thirds see their generation as “unique and distinct”; and they reveal a set of behaviors that are quite self-indulgent.  A book by Professor Jean Twenge offers survey results that people born in the 1980s are more narcissistic than those born earlier.  But there is some contrary evidence as well.[2] I’m not totally persuaded that entitlement is on the rise--parents probably said the same thing about baby boomers.  But from where I’ve been sitting, I notice entitlement more.

A general manager will hear the echoes of entitlement in statements such as, “what have they done for me lately?”  “You got yours, now where is mine?”  “I put in my time each week and deserve more than this lousy raise.”  On the national scene, populist politics are founded on entitlement.  Governments have intervened in the subprime mortgage loan crisis to create “safety nets” for the financial system—the fear is that this expectation of entitlement will create a new problem, moral hazard.   Entitlement has risen to the ‘A’ list of topics in conversation.  Comments to this and other blogs mention the subject.  What’s going on?  Where does a sense of entitlement come from?  What is the consequence?  What should a general manager do about it?

“Entitlement” is an expectation that one should gain some benefit, without necessarily returning the favor.    Contracts, laws, and some regulations create legally-enforceable entitlements: Charlottesville deems that its citizens are entitled to a good night’s sleep and therefore enforces a curfew on loud late-night parties in my fraternity-rich neighborhood.  Virtually every reader of this blog benefits from entitlements.  Surely, the mere existence of entitlements is not the reason for the current interest.  No, I think it is all about how and why entitlements are claimed.  Here are the three most interesting possibilities:

**Injustice.  My student seemed to assume that I had broken a promise that even if he did minimal work he could still get the top grade.  Most claims of entitlement are based on some perceived injustice.  As Dean, I must consider such claims for the sake of the integrity of our community.  I look for some explicit commitment that would create an entitlement.  Barring that, I look for some well-defined process or general set of standards that would dictate how we should behave.  In the case of my student, the course syllabus clearly outlined the process of grading (the gradable elements, my general expectations about them, and the weights given to each); but reserved for my discretion the standards of quality.  I don’t think quality can be defined in some contractual way—like Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography, I know quality when I see it.  Actually, the issue of quality is at the heart of the grave decision any student makes in choosing to attend a particular school: he or she is declaring trust in the quality standards of the faculty. 

**Narcissism.  Perhaps entitlement is all in the head.  A strong sense of entitlement is one indication of Narcissistic Personality Disorder[3].    Clinicians suggest that in part, narcissism is learned: too much adulation in childhood; a trophy for every soccer player; the absence of realistic feedback.   We should reserve psychiatry for the experts; but it is not hard to link a strong sense of entitlement to a lack of self-esteem, prompting one to need the external validation of one’s worth. 

**Envy.  Or perhaps entitlement starts with the heart, with envy.   By long tradition in Western Civilization, envy is called one of the seven deadly sins; envy kills all relationships it touches; it leads to malicious gossip, backbiting, and false accusation.  Envy is the great leveler: it denies the possibility that there may be some reason or purpose that you differ from an exemplar; it assumes that one should be able to do anything anyone else can do.  Someone else’s achievement diminishes one’s own.   Envy’s impulse is to pull down the exemplar.  Heroes, generals, CEOs, politicians, and leaders of all kinds must be shown to have feet of clay.  Schadenfreude(joy in others’ misfortunes) flows at the news of a scandal:  think of the reaction to Elliott Spitzer’s resignation as Governor of New York.   

These three possible causes suggest why the sense of entitlement is such an attractive stimulus for social critics.  Narcissism, envy, and false claims of injustice may be the dividend of affluence, meritocracy, democracy, and a host of government interventions.  Aristotle said that envy grows most naturally among equals.  This is the age of equality and merit in social systems.  In a cogent essay on envy, Henry Fairlie wrote:

“This is the curse of a system that is based on merit.  It produces an inequality of results, as it is forced to do, but it can justify itself only by appealing to the idea of equality, to the very impulse that it would like to allay.  There could  be no more certain prescription for inciting people to Envy, for it leaves the majority of them, who do not succeed, with no alternative but to see themselves as losers.”[4]

One can try to change the system, a task likely to be much harder than changing one’s thinking.   As the burgeoning self-help industry[5] tells us, one ought to get past the entitlement mindset.   This begins with fearless self-scrutiny: is one facing a genuine injustice, or merely a narcissism wound or a prick of envy? 

What is a leader to do?  He or she can’t ignore genuine injustices.  But at the same time, a leader should not unwittingly fuel a culture of entitlement for the simple reason that someone always pays for every entitlement.  Ultimately, this is a problem of the commons:  many entitlement claims are “me” issues, not necessarily claims that raise the common good.  Had I granted an ‘A’ to the undeserving student, I would have diminished the meaning and honor of top grades and trust in the judgment of the faculty.  This point is made in the Gondoliers, in which Gilbert and Sullivan lampoon a ruler who creates equality by granting everyone a fancy title (an entitlement).  The results are predictable:

There lived a King, as I've been told,
In the wonder-working days of old,
When hearts were twice as good as gold,
And twenty times as mellow.
Good-temper triumphed in his face,
And in his heart he found a place
For all the erring human race
And every wretched fellow.
When he had Rhenish wine to drink
It made him very sad to think
That some, at junket or at jink,
Must be content with toddy.
He wished all men as rich as he
(And he was rich as rich could be),
So to the top of every tree
Promoted everybody.

Lord Chancellors were cheap as sprats,
And Bishops in their shovel hats
Were plentiful as tabby cats-
In point of fact, too many.
Ambassadors cropped up like hay,
Prime Ministers and such as they
Grew like asparagus in May,
And Dukes were three a penny.
On every side Field-Marshals gleamed,
Small beer were Lords-Lieutenant deemed,
With Admirals the ocean teemed
All round his wide dominions.

And Party Leaders you might meet
In twos and threes in every street
Maintaining, with no little heat,
Their various opinions.
That King, although no one denies
His heart was of abnormal size,
Yet he'd have acted otherwise
If he had been acuter.
The end is easily foretold,
When every blessed thing you hold
Is made of silver, or of gold,
You long for simple pewter.
When you have nothing else to wear
But cloth of gold and satins rare,
For cloth of gold you cease to care-
Up goes the price of shoddy.

In short, whoever you may be,
To this conclusion you'll agree,
When every one is somebodee,
Then no one's anybody!