Keynote Address:
Leadership

Dr. Peter Senge
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Thursday, September 14

[These remarks are a closed-caption transcription edited by the Discovery 2000 Web team]

Thank you. I'm not sure I can add to what's happened over the past few days. First off, I want to thank the organizers because you have no idea what kind of a pleasure it is to be able to participate in a meeting like this, first because of the purpose and intent. And I can kind of feel it as soon as I walk in the door. I first got a sense of it through a series of conversations with Jerry Rogers and Nancy Burgess, bringing me up to speed on the Park Service. Of course, I'm someone like most citizens in this country who knows the Park Service by being there, and has a sense of the importance of the organization, but no sense of its history, or you might say the particularities of its development. And thanks to Jerry and Nancy. I think I've picked up a little bit of that.

I also was really quite struck by the way this program came together. As I watched and I think we first talked, Jerry and Nancy and me, about a year or so ago, and in watching the evolution of the program since then and the people who have participated, you have had quite a treat here. Very special. I suspect, most of you will not forget many of the experiences during these last few days. And I always think that's kind of interesting because it's not just for entertainment purpose, is it? And maybe that's not a good word to use. Let me say it slightly differently. It's not just for the personal [impact of] getting a chance to listen to Mr. Franklin, and Wilson, and Peter Raven, who is someone I've known for a while, and of course Maya Angelou. This has an immense-kind of an opportunity of a lifetime-Franklin, from my standpoint-to be able to listen to people like that But it's also because of the context. The fact that people like that want to come and be with you is in turn a salute, acknowledgment of their perception of the importance of your work, and I just want to add that as my sentiments exactly.

I also found it really interesting, you know, that this kind of leadership track comes near the end. I think that was a concept right from the outset, and so it leads me to want to ask a question. Why do you think they put the program together the way they did?

Why do you think? I'm not saying there's a right answer, I'm just kind of curious [about] your thinking. Why do you think we kind … do all this extraordinary stuff, get exposed to both the sense of history, and mission, through dr. Franklin, and then the larger context of what's going on in our natural world, people like Dr. Wilson and Peter, and then of course, beginning a process of kind of getting it anchored in not just here [pointing to brain], but you know here [pointing to hear], as only someone like Maya Angelou can do, and then all of a sudden here we are at leadership. So what's the message of that to you?

[Appealing to audience for comments about previous question]

You can just call out your thoughts.

[Participant] Tie it all together.

[Senge repeating answer] Tie it all together. I'll repeat, if you say something and not everybody can hear.

[Participant] Build the plane before you fly the plane.

[Senge] That's an interesting image. Thank you.

[Participant] Pyramid, have a base.

The speaker: A pyramid, you have to have a base before you can kind of build it up.

[Participant] Leadership is the hardest.

[Senge] Thank you, I appreciate that.

[Participant] Know where you're going before you can lead.

The speaker: know where you're going before you can lead.

[Participant] Our guard is down.

[Senge] We've gotten to know each other through these sessions and we can be a little bit more honest now as we kind of consider what's next.

[Participant] We know ourselves better.

[Participant] Send us forth.

[Senge] Other thoughts? By the way, I'll warn you now, one of the interesting … byproducts of being involved in the work that I've been involved with so, I guess now over 20 years.

[Pauses for additional audience input] You get quite comfortable with silence. I may be more comfortable than you are.

[Participant]

[Senge] Interesting. He says it builds a desire to learn before you begin the process of learning. You might see a kind of impulse. I remember a year ago, a friend of mine who is a great theories on learning. Do we have a generation of musically illiterate adults? Because children are taught scales before they've developed an impulse to music, so that kind of impulse is down below the surface of any real learning.

[Participant] You need to know the subject matter of what you're leading before you can lead.

[Senge] Anybody else?

[Participant] A memorable experience.

[Senge] He said you can go anywhere, if you start with a memorable experience? Did I hear that right?

[Participant] We were stripped naked and now we're getting new clothes. [I hope not] the emperor's new clothes.

[Senge] All clothes have the risk of being the emperor's new clothes. We'll talk about that.

I hope this is helpful for you. It's very helpful for me. You kind of appreciate the challenge in a situation like I'm in right now. It's like stepping into a very fast moving river. You've been here for three days. You've been part of this for three days so in a sense your comments also help me to kind of step in with you.

[Participant] It has developed a bit of cohesiveness in our thinking as we have come together and shared ideas, then as a group, we can actually make decisions and look at our leadership .

[Senge] It's interesting. Now the part of the program that I'm most familiar with are the people who have spoken in the plenary sessions and I know there's a lot, of course, that's gone on beyond that, but it's interesting to use the word "cohesiveness" in our thinking.

Just from the standpoint of the plenary sessions, people are standing up here talking. And talking about a lot of different subjects, and how does that kind of produce cohesiveness.

[Participant] During these sessions we've actually been discussing and these are set up in a different way where these are not just presentations. We're a part of it.

[Senge] A lot going on and those smaller sessions you are actually getting a chance to talk to one another. I wanted to ask you about what was behind your perception of the cohesiveness that's an example of what all of you are going to be doing [when you go] home? One of the cornerstone hallmarks you might say of effective leadership in any setting is some capacity for diverse people working together to could he here, to have some coherence, or cohesiveness. It's important to notice what has led me to experience it because it gives you clues as to what you want to work on when you go home. That's as much so of anything else that you consider to have been important. Here is the real reason for having you all together.

It's very hard to create what you haven't experienced. This is kind of really the first principle of the creative process. It's so blatantly obvious that it's easy to pass over, but it's worth underlining as a principle.

It's very hard to bring something into reality when you don't know what the something is. Now when you bring it into reality it always looks and feels different than what you anticipated. Reality never shows up according to our plans exactly, but on the other hand, if we have no kind of deep idea of what it is we're trying to create, it's very hard to create anything. So the real reason for coming together actually is to come together. And people like myself and the others who have spoken in the plenaries and all the other smaller activities are really kind of like setting the props for the actors. The real play is what the actors produce.

I speak for myself but I think I probably imagine others who have spoken in the plenary would agree. We're not doing anything here except doing whatever we do. What really happens, where the real action is, is with you. So anything that you think is meaningful that's happened in these three or four days, you should be asking yourself now how has this come about? How might this relate to my own work when I go home?

What we have created here is a kind of microcosm, and I use the we gently because I'm still the newcomer, but this is a kind of microcosm. If it has meaning, seems on track, if it seems like the kind of things that matter to you then what happened is quite relevant. It's what happens when you go home that really matters.

Let me just ask you the obvious question and I'm kind of talking around it so maybe I'll come right to it directly. What does leadership mean to us? I think a lot of the key ideas came out when I just asked you that question, why do you think this conference has been organized the way it is with this leadership stuff near the end? And I think a lot of your comments would echo my own sentiments exactly. So when all is said and done, why do we even concern ourselves? What is the issue? What's the reason that we think leadership matters? Leadership, I'll tell you, is a very problematic word. Some of my colleagues, some people who I respect a great deal, work with closely, actually have stopped using the word. They find it has so much baggage associated with it that the kind of kernel of real meaning and importance is often totally lost in the welter of different meanings and in particular, a conflict, deep I would say in our culture, in our cultural use of the term.

That really is a conflict between creating and "bossing." I'll use that word. So what does it mean to you? In fact I kind of like some of the comments that were coming out earlier. Maybe a good way to start off is just asking myself, each of us, who in my life have I been around, who have I worked with directly, or studied with, or whatever the context, who has struck me as a natural leader? Who are some of the people that stand out in my personal experience? I always think its best to start off a subject like this, anchoring it in what we've actually experienced. It's really a question. You don't have to say anything but if you would think for a moment about that, who are some of the people that stand out in your life as people you would regard as natural leaders?

My guess is several images probably start to come to mind. They do to me. It's a powerful question for any of us. Why? What is it that brings those people to mind? What qualities do they embody, what aspects of their work really stand out? Why is it you thought of them? Any thoughts? Go ahead.

[Participant] Relative to leadership, coming here we were asked to leave our titles at the door, more or less putting us in a plain of being equal[ity] and I guess what comes to mind, is something I read. I think it holds true to a lot of us…. People with titles aren't necessarily the leaders.

[Senge] Right. That's right. So who [are] necessarily the leaders? You know the flip side is kind of the background of your question, there's a statement people with titles aren't necessarily leaders, but who are necessarily leaders? That's why I asked the question. We start thinking together about this. By the way, I don't have anything grand to tell you. My hope today is that we actually do some thinking together because what you remember, what lasts from any session like this is really what happens in you. It has nothing to do with what I say, per se. So my simple hope is we do some thinking together. Why do some people stand out?

[Participant] People who inspire.

[Senge] Call it out.

[Participant] People who articulate a vision, who resonate.

[Senge] People with power? Okay, thank you. People who empower us.

[Participant] People who listen and learn.

[Senge] People who listen and learn. Thank you.

[Participant] People who keep us on track.

[Senge]: People who have vision.

[Participant] People who keep us on track with our vision, direct our vision.

[Participant] People who keep us on track with our vision. I'm just trying to make sure I hear it. So like if we get off track, they kind of ask the questions, to help us say, "wait a second, this is not what's really important to us. We really should be over here." That's the kind of thing you mean.

[Participant] Exactly. They provide continuity of the kind of things we're trying to do.

[Senge] Continuity. Interesting. People who have interesting lives and enrich the organization by bringing their lives [to it]. Like maybe even add their life into the organization.

[Participant] People who could make change, people who could make change.

[Participant] People who can make change and people who can motivate others.

[Senge] I would like to, by the way, just leave a question. What does it mean to motivate others? I would like to come back to that in a second.

[Participant] People who facilitate success?

[Participant] People who can find some common ground, people who make everyone feel part of the team.

[Participant] People who are so authentic in what they are, that they truly want to enact what they are, which is like leading from within. Where leadership just seems to happen.

[Senge] That's kind of mysterious.

[Participant] In multitalented organizations, leaders are sometimes followers and sometimes leaders. And they can be interchangeable in many instances.

[Participant] People who respect and value those who they work with.

[Participant] Leadership is creating the future out of the lessons of the past, from today's actions, while caring for those who help us get there.

[Participant] I think that leaders are [not just human beings but] bears and deer and rainbows and all other kind of energies besides people.

[Participant] People who are willing to learn and explore new and innovative ways to do things and to learn from the mistakes of the past.

[Participant] People who are willing to take a risk and willing to lose something in order to create a positive change.

[Senge] I want to just ask a question, I don't want to interrupt but as you're talking, I want to make sure that everyone of your comments is really coming from something you've experienced, so I also want to add a question as you're kind of reflecting on what this means to you. Because part of the thing that makes leadership confusing is that we've been immersed in a set of ideas in our lives. They come from our religious upbringing, from our families; they come from our schools; they come from the media in general. We have a lot of "shoulds," if I can use that term. Leaders should be a certain way, and the first step of really thinking together about this is to recognize those things and also set them aside, and ask yourself what have I actually experienced? What have I actually seen and been with? That's why I asked you to think of a person or persons and then ask what is it about that person or persons that really strikes you? It doesn't mean a lot of the ideas aren't very relevant. It's been said by many that there are few subjects that people have written about longer than the subject of leadership, but it also gets very confusing because before long you have this kind of laundry list of all these things we should do and ways we should be, and the laundry list in my experience actually moves us backwards, not forward. It gets us up here [Senge indicating a level], you know, the three steps to leadership, or the eight things you need to pay attention to or yadda yadda yadda.

And I guess I'll give away part of my own feeling about this. Part of the reason this subject is slippery is we have to sneak up on it. I wasn't kidding, I really wasn't…. I really don't want to use the term because it immediately evokes all these theories and ideas and shoulds: should be this way, should listen, should respect everybody, blah, blah, blah. [It] actually gets us out of, paradoxically, away from the source from which the capacity to lead really comes. It's a lot easier to get back to that source to say now what have I actually experienced? What has touched you?

[Participant] People who challenge us to be the best we can be and expand oursel[ves].

[Participant] I've experienced leadership as someone who helped me uncover my own passions.

[Participant] I think in the most basic terms we are all, everybody, is a leader and that we set examples to be followed and seen by other people.

[Senge] So the people you are thinking of were people who were examples.

[Participant] Exactly.

[Senge] I want to give you a tip on this by the way. If you notice your language getting abstract, do you know what I mean by abstract? I would go back and imagine you're describing something you see right before your eyes or you experienced. This is-how should I say this-how we reflect on this and how we talk about it is the first step in actually bringing it to be or actually moving in the opposite direction. I'll say it real simply. Abstractions destroy leadership. The best theory is the best way to make sure that it never happens.

And by the way, you're listening to somebody who believes a lot in theory. I spend a lot of my time, I'm basically a researcher, but is there a paradoxical aspect to this? I'm trying to lead us into that domain of paradox, if we over-engage in it, and leadership is about what we create and not what we say. "I cannot hear your words; your actions speak too loudly," that old line. Believe me, that applies to the subject of leadership. A few others?

[Participant] ….

[Senge] People who are genuinely competent in what they do and they teach kind of naturally, spontaneously, pardon my editorializing by the way they operate. Others are learning around them. Right?

[Participant] People who refuse to acknowledge those barriers that the rest of us keep banging into.

[Participant] My impression is that people, leaders are not made, they're born.

[Senge] That's interesting. Another one of the key paradoxes in the subject of leadership. Good to kind of get it out in the open. Are great leaders born or made?

[Participant] People I have experienced have focused on relationships rather than leading.

[Senge] So they didn't actually focus on leading at all if I'm really hearing you. They were paying close attention to the quality of the relationships around them and leadership was kind of a consequence or almost might say a byproduct? Is that a fair extension of what you said? It's useful reflection.

[Participant] The person that I'm thinking of has a lot of vision, courage, a risk taker, and as an employee of his, I know that whatever he's going to support me and back me and help me with what I'm doing.

[Participant] A person who is so enthusiastic and committed and excited about what they're doing and where they're going, that I want to go there, too, even though it was somewhere I hadn't even thought about going.

[Senge] Does the person try to get you to want to go there?

[Participant] No it's through their enthusiasm that I go….

[Senge] Like the comment of the gentleman over here [pointing]. That person's leadership as you experience it is kind of a byproduct? You get enthused going someplace that they're so passionate about going even though they're not trying to get you enthused? Have you ever been around somebody trying to get you enthused? What's your reaction when someone is trying to get you to be enthused about something?

[Participant] Sales job.

[Senge] It's a little bit like being sold, isn't it? Poor sales people, by the way this is not meant as a criticism of sales people because great sales people often operate exactly the way you described. They are so passionate about what they are doing, that other people say, gee, I really want to be involved in that.

But people trying to get other people enthused will produce a very predictable response, won't they? You know it will produce a kind of backing away, and as far as I know this is universal in humans. There's something in us that's evoked when someone is trying to get us to do something. Isn't it interesting? By the way, kids all know this. A lot of us as we grow up, we kind of forget it? Why? Because we had to fit in.

Let me give away another one of the kind of underlying ideas, and again paradoxical, but the essence of almost all institutions is compliance, or getting you to do what the institution wants you to do, and yet there's something in all human beings that fights against compliance. Or to put it really bluntly, and by the way, kids are very insightful on this point because they're right in the middle, particularly in their early years in school before they've completely become compliant to that system, they know that school is based on one fundamental principle and the principle is obedience. And ironically, no human being actually wants to be obedient. So there's a real puzzle, yet we can say no institution can work without people who kind of pull together. Confusing, paradoxical.

[Participant] Ppeople who are not afraid to surround themselves with people who know more than they do.

[Senge] That's very, that's my experience as well. You could say there's a kind of quality of "egolessness" or willing to submerge oneself, so that the people around you can really come forward.

By the way, one of the reasons for getting a lot of these personal experiences and reflexes out is it also creates a point of comparison, because I don't know about you, but when I heard your statement, I immediately of course thought of a lot of other people who are kind of the opposite. For whom they actually aspire to be leaders, they want to be leaders and what it basically means to be a leader is to get people to do what you think they ought to do, to have power. Remember what I said before, this is a problematic aspect of the word.

We're talking in a particular way about leadership here, partly probably because of what's happened over the past three days in this meeting, partly because of the way I'm asking the questions, you know what [we] are actually experiencing as opposed to a bunch of concepts. I want to guarantee most of what you are saying here is quite counter to the actual practice of leadership in most of our institutions. It tends to have a very different meaning in practice. A few more.

[Participant] To me one of the best signs of a good leader is somebody who can create a process or bring people to an initiative and leave. That initiative, idea, [or] process carries on without them. They don't need the guts and glory, and leave it to others to take it on.

[Senge] Similar to the other woman's comment over here. One of the timeless bits of wisdom about leadership, the wicked leader is he who the people despise. The good leader is he who the people revere. The great leader is he who the people say we did this ourselves. That was about 2,800 years ago. These are not new ideas.

Clarity of purpose and clarity of expression, a characteristic of great leaders I have worked with. Clarity. Interesting, clarity is an interesting image. We can think of it in terms that they're telling me something crystal clear. I know what I should do. We can think of it as looking through water. You know clarity in the sense of being able to see through. It's a very interesting image, clarity, has some different, nuances.

[Participant] Some of that is just doing. I think of Canada geese in the natural world and it doesn't seem like the goose who is leading the flock is trying to empower the rest of the geese.

[Senge] The goose has been to leadership school, has advanced degrees, has learned how to command. [Laughter].

[Participant] The leader is just there and the geese are going, and they don't feel pressed or enlightened, but they're facilitated and split into more than one flock and the leaders are going and they're all going together and it seems to be very seamless and I want to know what's going on there.

[Senge] I have a question. There are some people that know the answer to this one. Not all audiences do. I feel so confident. You have all seen the geese flying overhead in those beautiful vees-natural images of something that looks like hierarchy to us, right? There's clearly that lead goose out there. How long on average does the goose in front stay in front? Someone said minutes.

Yeah, I think it's on the order of 1 to 3 minutes. Years ago, I was just driving along and I had the top back on the car when suddenly I saw one of the vees going overhead and it was my good fortune the geese were going exactly in the direction I was going. Going a little slower than on the car. I was on the interstate, wasn't a lot of traffic so I could drive underneath what normally you see at a distance or some angle and it's hard to actually see what's going on. I was stunned. because I watched that lead goose change probably 10 times in 10 minutes.

There is a wonderful metaphor [in this]. There's an effectiveness, a functionality in that "V," isn't there? It has a lot of effect on the drag, and the difficulty of everyone in the group, and it looks like someone is out there leading, and of course in some sense, someone is, and then someone else is, and then someone else is, and then someone else is, and then someone else is. Now I couldn't really tell if there was a recurring pattern. Maybe there were three geese going in and out of that lead role but my impression was it seemed to be continually interchanging. I don't know if that's actually the case. I'm not a biologist, but isn't it interesting image? Think about it. And now think about how we do it. One of the hopes I have this morning is that the kind of flow, and I appreciate, maybe it was the first one of the first comments said, why do you think leadership comes here at the end, and someone said, "well pulling the pieces together."

I would like to suggest that what you heard from the whole group of people who have been in the plenary sessions, is really the same message, expressed through different vehicles, you might say, different historic, different people's life experience as a vehicle. We are all nothing but a vehicle. We live our lives and we see and talk from the vantage point of what we've lived.

But the kind of depth of humanness that Maya Angelou brings is present in the other speakers in a slightly different way-in the appreciation and the deep concern for our place in the world, and what we're doing, the plight of species, and so on, which might be the central point of focus of someone like E.O. Wilson, is every bit as much there in Maya Angelou or Dr. Franklin. It's just that we express it in different ways, and the reason is we are in a pickle right now. We are in a particular bind. And we all see it, and particularly people who have incisiveness and articulateness of the sort of folks you have been listening to, have found ways to talk about it that helps evoke it for others.

That vee of the geese is a wonderful kind of metaphor for it. We think leadership are the people who are making things happen but in a natural world, how would nature do it? If we asked that question, we look at the geese, and find that it's just a role, just a role, and different people step in and out.

I remember years ago, one of my mentors is a CEO who recently retired. Very successful. Founded a company. Very active in Massachusetts. Founded something called Massachusetts High Technology Counsel. Ray said many years ago, "I'm not opposed to hierarchy." It has functionality just like that vee. It's functional in many circumstances, some degree of hierarchy is functional. He said, "What I am opposed to is the value system that holds the person lower in the hierarchy as somehow a less important being." That was kind of a blinding flash of the obvious when I heard him say that. It struck me that he really hit the nail on the head. What I am opposed to is the value system that holds the person lower in the hierarchy somehow a lesser human being.

Let me just make a few simple points. I don't want to cut off the reflections. Try to tie together a few of the comments and themes that have already begun to emerge. We could easily do the whole morning just by continuing and frankly, speaking, I would really like that. It's easiest for me. But it's not always equally easy for everybody else. And how many of you noticed yourself feeling a little bit almost overwhelmed with all the comments that started to come in, because there's so many different points that seem valid and that's why I made my comment about the laundry list. I've got to remember this and this, and got to add that, and my gosh that's really important, and before long we got this growing laundry list of things we've got to keep in mind in order to be capable, and effective, and inspiring, and aspiring, and authentic, and on and on and on.

The bind that we find ourselves in is one that every person who leads, and I'll define in a minute exactly what I mean by that, I would argue needs to be aware of. We as a people are in a bind. Not even we as Americans, you might say we as Americans are in a particular version of the bind because in a sense, we're kind of, maybe the most dramatic exemple of this bind. But in my own way of thinking about it, we have a way of living that is not going to continue, and not many people even see that, although we kind of feel it. We kind of feel it. It shows up in all kinds of different subjects. It shows up in the subject of leadership in the following way. On the one hand, with just a little bit of thought, guess what? You're not unique. You're not unique at all. Almost any group of people, if they reflect on their experience, and the people who they actually regard as leaders, guess what they'll say? Right? All the same kind of things you said. Because that's our experience. They'll reflect on authenticity, and genuine vision and selflessness, and empowering others, and taking a stand, and clarity, and on the other hand, we look out at our world and look at our institutions actually function and guess what? We see something very different, by and large. We see power and we see ego and we see people who want to be in the leadership position because somehow that's where the action is. Don't underestimate this gap. The ideals and the genuine experience that we quickly touch in here does not actually play out by and large, in our world. Of course there are exceptions. We're thinking of people who are those exceptions. But they're hardly the norm. We shouldn't forget that. That gap is considerable.

First premise in my experience, leadership has nothing to do with position. Just say some obvious things. Most of this is implicit in your statements but tying together basics. Leadership has nothing whatsoever to do with position. Nothing. Nothing whatsoever to do with position. Leadership is not a positional phenomenon. Actually management is, and believe me management is not bad, and leadership is good. Sometimes we get people saying too much management, we really need leadership. You don't want leadership without management if you're in an institutional setting, if you're in an organizational setting, management has to do with the capacity of people to produce results. The best definition of management, I'm in the school of management, have been for quite a few years, and it's remarkable almost no one asks a question, "What's a manager?" How do you define a manager? There's no agreed upon definition of what a manager is, which probably doesn't surprise you if you have ever hung around universities much. People can generate a lot of ideas without tending to the most basic of questions.

The best definition I know of [for] management is a person, a manager is a person accountable, accountable for results produced by others.

Management is a hierarchical concept. Not good or bad. Hierarchies occur in nature. Lots of examples. Not a bad thing we should throw out. That would be rather stupid. We have a lot of dysfunctional hierarchies. Hierarchies don't work very well. That we should pay attention to. But management is hierarchical. They create hierarchies of management. There's nothing inherently wrong with that because management is a role where a person is accountable for results produced by others. Okay. No big deal. We kind of all understand that. We have managers. We may not like them. We have them. It isn't necessarily bad.

Leadership, I would argue, is not positional. At its essence it is fundamentally not positional. It has nothing to do with the position that someone is. Would you regard Picasso as a leader? Right. Or Stravinksi? You can look into the arts right away and you see lots of examples of leadership. Looking at the arts is insightful because rarely are there hierarchies in the arts so we see that leadership is a phenomenon. Most artists would say absolutely, there are leaders in the arts, but it's a very different notion of leadership. It's not "boss-ship." It's not the being in a position where you can tell someone else what to do. It's not hierarchical. The problems come because, because, when people are in positions of authority, we would like those people to also exhibit some leadership. That's a perfectly understandable expectation.

When people are in positions of authority, we would like them to also be or to exhibit or contribute many of the qualities that you described. Why? Because one, they'll be much more effective as managers if they can empower the people around them, if they can inspire a line, get people to work together, get people to really feel good, all those things will make them better managers, and secondly life will be more worth living. Period. You and I will be happier, everyone will be happier in that kind of organization.

There's always a dimension of organizational effectiveness. Deep down there's a dimension, we want this because we want this. It just matters to us. "Life is too short" as they say. All people seek joy in work. A pretty simple statement. He got more and more kind of forthright as he got older. He was about 90 when he started saying that. People when they get older are a little more willing to buck convention and just say what's really on their mind, publicly.

So, all people seek joy in work. That's the other reason this stuff matters to us. We would really like people in positions of authority, I'm using my language very carefully here so we can get the concepts clear, people in positions of authority, people with particular, particularly senior levels of management accountability, have accountability of results produced by large numbers of people to exhibit leadership to the qualities that you are talking about, but leadership itself is not positional.

Okay? So just basics. What is leadership? Well you know, I don't really think definitions matter a whole lot at this point because I think you've evoked a sense of it beautifully in your comments. The simplest definition that we have found very helpful in our work, for what it's worth, if it's useful to you, try it out. Leadership is the capacity of a human community to shape its future. Leadership is the capacity of a human community to shape its future.

Now I'm mindful of the limitation of calling it a human community. You may very well be right. It's worth thinking about what does leadership mean in other communities that aren't human? That's a very interesting comment you made.

But let's just stick with the human community for the time being. We can come back to the larger communities maybe in a few minutes. Why has that been a useful definition for us? Two reasons. First off, talking about as a capacity of a community as opposed to an individual. And I'll leave this a question for you to think about because I think a lot of you, perhaps all of you I hope, were actually thinking in my experience, where have I really experienced what I would call leadership? What I would assess as leadership?

And I asked you, of course, to think of it in terms of a particular person, because it's easier usually. But I'll leave you this question to ponder. In every one of those settings you were thinking about, in every one, would you have assessed it as leadership or the person as being a leader if some group of people around that person had not collectively been able to achieve something you thought was meaningful? Is that not also part of why we assess an individual? Would we assess an individual as being a great leader if the people around that individual didn't grow, couldn't create things they really cared about? Weren't able in some sense to achieve things that really mattered to them? See? Even though we might focus on the individual, which is natural, because we experience our life most of the time as individuals, so it's very insightful to ask questions in kind of an individual frame. In fact, leadership is not individual. It is a paradoxical phenomenon that is both individual and collective at its heart, at its heart. It is deeply personal and inherently collective.

Why do I keep using this word paradox? Because one of the things in my experience unleashes people's capacities to lead is a willingness to embrace paradox. To explain that, you've got to follow me on, as a friend of mine would say, on a rabbit trail. You know what I mean? Nature doesn't always go in a straight line, right? In fact, it rarely goes in a straight line. Why do I say that about embracing paradox?

For the following reason. And this will get to the second point of definition. Leadership is the capacity of the human to shape the future. When you really dig down deeply, and the way I was asking you here, asking people to think about their experience, the other thing that always comes up is that there is something that people connect with that has to do with creating, shaping the future. We know, most organizations, most of the time, you guys are not unique in this and I suspect, I don't know, the Park Service, of course. I suspect you experience this a lot of time, most organizations a lot of the time people feel basically helpless. People feel somewhere somebody else must be calling the shots here because it sure as hell ain't me. Right? Most people most of the time live their lives in their work setting in some state of victimization. Fair enough?

I am sure you have read about it but never actually experienced it, but you can identify, get a feeling for what I mean. Why do we think leadership matters? Because it transforms that condition. Again if you look at your own examples you were thinking about, I think you'll find in every single one even though you might have thought about an individual, something happened, if you will, in the social space, in the collective space, that people actually started to believe they could shape their future. They actually started to believe that they, individually and collectively, could make a difference, that they mattered. Hence the second part of my little simple definition leadership is a capacity of a human community to shape its future. They escape the prison of fatalism. They experienced a degree of real freedom. By the way, freedom is a word we use a lot and don't think about. For most people it means you can't force me to do something I don't want to do. Freedom is very meaningful to us because it's a kind of anti-obedience, right? There's another sense of freedom. It's not the absence of something. It's the presence of something, and it's the presence of the experience and deep belief that I can actually have an impact on the future. It's a very particular kind of freedom. It's actually the positive sense of freedom.

Doesn't mean, by myself I can make everything happen just the way I want it to, but I feel a sense of deep confidence. I can be part of shaping the future. It matters. That's why leadership matters to us. It has to do with evoking that social space. I know that's an abstract phrase but bear with me, because I don't think we can escape dealing with the fact that leadership is intimate, and collective, deeply personal, inherently collective. It's both, and people who develop their capacities to lead, one thing that I found again and again and again is, they are willing to embrace that kind of paradox.

Now, here is my rabbit trail. Why is this hard for us? Why is embracing paradox hard for us? To put it another way, why is it a little bit difficult for us to develop our capacities to lead? Because we went to school together. That's why it's difficult for us.

Now I know we all went to different schools and I'm using school a little bit as a metaphor and a little bit as a factual phenomenon. Let me explain. I'm not saying this to criticize teachers. I am saying it to kind of get us thinking about something that is pretty much common to all our experience. You and I entered school, every single one of us, everyone, without exception, as a human being who was a master of learning. If that wasn't the case, we would be having this meeting, sitting on our rear ends. Because we would not have learned to walk.

[Participant] We are sitting on our rear ends!

[Senge] A little lower down. [Meaning on the ground, not on chairs]. We wouldn't be able to get off them, either. We learned to walk; we learned to talk. You think this is kind of, well no big deal? Believe me it's a big deal. There are few things in life that are more actually challenging and complex as a learning process than the mastery of natural language. And yet children just seem to do it like rolling off a log. And if they're in the right setting, they will actually master several natural languages.

We learned all about social systems. We learned how to control things in our family, right? Every parent knows who is really in control. It's not the big folks. It's the little folks. But then something interesting happened for all of us. We went to school. We went to school, and we then encountered a different set of ideas. The very word learning, as many of you know a lot of our work for many years has been about learning and learning organizations and all that. It's a mixed bag. The very word learning is a double-edged sword. What's the first picture that comes to most people's heads as soon as they hear the word learning? Classroom. Absolutely! And what are the emotions and feelings that come into our awareness when we evoke this image of classroom? Fear. Thank you….

Tests. And all the anxiety that gets associated with that. Authority. That has a very particular meaning when you are 6 or 7 years old, you don't use the word authority. You use the word teacher, and I think teacher, which is a very old idea, people have been teaching one another for as long as there have been people, right? Teacher is not a new idea, but in the context of the institution we call school, teacher takes on a very particular meaning, doesn't it? See this is where we start to learn, this confusing set of cross currents about leadership and authority. Teacher becomes a person in a position of authority that has what? This is important. This is just as real for each of you as managers as it is for that teacher. The only reason I'm asking us to think about school is we all went there together, and again, getting a sense of how these ideas get shaped into us.

The teacher has a particular type of power. A very particular type of power. It revolves around two or three dimensions and it's exactly the same power that you as a manager have, by virtue of your position in a hierarchy of managerial authority. You and I learned all about hierarchies of managerial authority at the age of six, seven, and eight, and those were formative learnings. They shaped our behavior and our perceptions for the rest of our life.

First, when you were eight months old, who gave you the idea that it would be worth learning to walk? Where did that idea come from?

[Participants] Your parents.

Did they? So they sat you down one evening and they said, "Human being, I've been thinking about your development as a child. You're right at the stage where walking would be a good idea for you." That's how it happened to you, right? [Laughter] Your mom and dad told you that you ought to learn to walk, right? Really? See, I started in the right place. I probably should have started here before because if you believe that it's really worth slowing down a little. We ought to extend the periods of silence. Where did you get the idea that walking was really worth going for?

[Several participants] From myself.

[Senge] From yourself! Thank you. Now some people can say it's biologically programmed into us. I don't know anybody who would make a completely, you know compelling argument that it's totally preprogrammed. That's kind of a very intellectual question. But from an experiential standpoint, all of us at some point in our life decided we really wanted to walk. You know, our big brother whacked us on the head. It would be really good to be able to catch that sucker. Or whatever.

Or, of course, you live in a community of walkers, so you naturally want to join that community. You want to be like those bigger people. And by the way it's the same reason we learned to talk. Mom and dad didn't motivate us! It's terribly important. I have, by the way, some very big questions about the phrase "motivate others." I find it a very problematic phrase. Don't get me wrong. I do think human beings motivate others, and I've only found one way it ever happens.

It's through fear. It's the only way I've ever seen human beings motivate one another. Fear is a motivator. Don't be naive. We all know that. Most of what we get done in organizations, particularly most change we accomplish in organizations, we accomplish through that motivator, so I'm not saying that people don't motivate others. But in my experience, deep down, when you look closely, the real, you know, "I-did-it-to-you kind of motivation," "the manager motivated us," "the leader motivated us," usually comes in this way and of course we learn how that works in school.

The teacher has a very particular type of power. It has two dimensions. First off, in school, we learned that what I want to learn actually isn't the point here. Didn't we learn that? The teacher doesn't start the day off by saying, "Okay kids, what would you like to learn today?" Now maybe a few teachers do, but they're really exceptions. The teacher does what? The teacher tells you what you're going to learn. So that first shift from learning to walk because I want to walk, learning to talk because I want to talk, what psychologists would call the intrinsic orientation, I do it because I really care about this, starts to shift, and we discover the agenda is set by somebody else.

Now I know many of us had the same discoveries in our family, because we encounter a lot of these same dynamics of authority in our family, but that's different. People have all kinds of different families. I'm focusing on school because it's consistent. There are very few of us in this room who did not make these discoveries in school.

Just two or three crucial ones, and the reason I'm focusing on school, in part, is because you see this, you have no idea why organizations function the way they function. They function the way we function because we were inculcated, indoctrinated into a way of working together, a way of working .... It's very effective because it's very deep and it's universal, and by the way, it is not accidental. Come back to that in a minute. It's right at the heart of the design concept of why school is the way it is. It's not accidental in the least.

We learned three critical lessons as young kids in school. The teacher tells us what we're going to learn. Right? "If you don't want to learn this, too bad." Well of course you can always just ignore it. But then the second type of authority comes in, right? How do you know when you've learned, and knowing that you have learned is critical for getting ahead, isn't it? That's why the test is a powerful metaphor. Who tells you when you have learned? Come on.

[Participants] The teacher.

[Senge] Thank you. So the teacher tells you what you will learn, and the teacher tells you when you have accomplished it. Do you have any idea how radical a shift that is for a young child? Because no one had to tell you when you were a walker. You were a walker when you assessed yourself to be a walker. You were a speaker when you assessed you could begin to interact verbally with the people around you.

And you might argue that all are real learning. I would kind of argue this, all real learning has these two qualities: one, it is instigated by the learner, and two, it is assessed by the learner. Please do not hear me saying assessment doesn't matter. Some of the teachers get anxious. You're saying everything is okay. No, I'm not saying that there are walkers and non-walkers, and believe me every kid knows the difference, and if they don't know the difference they can't learn to walk. Assessing, judging how we're doing, drawing our own conclusion is absolutely essential to learning.

So in school we learned, one, the teacher tells us what to learn, and two, the teacher tells us when we've learned it. Are you with me? Why am I talking so much on school. We're not a bunch of educators here. Guess how it feels for most people in work most of the time? Guess who sets the goals? Guess who tells us when we've done well? What do we call that person?

[Participants] The boss.

[Senge] Thank you. Did you all hear the word that was just used? Almost everybody said the same thing. We call that person the boss. Let me give you one little additional rabbit trail. This is a rabbit trail on the rabbit trail.

How many of you have kids who play video games? How many of you have no kids who play video games? Have you ever seen a kid playing a video game. Almost all video games are organized in levels. You know that level one, level too, three, four. Right? And by the way, I've never met a kid who wants to stay at level one forever. Isn't that interesting. They always want to go to level two, and then to level three. So forget motivation. Nobody motivates the kids…. "You'll get more candy if you get to level eight." Nobody has to say that. In fact, by the way, if you try that routine, by the way the candy is more important than getting to level eight. That's the problem with motivation. It's the way we've done it. What can you say? She said it would be interesting if it weren't called level one and level eight.

Wait until you hear the next part of this. You will really think about this. What's the universal term, as far as I know it's worldwide, the universal term used by kids for the thing you need to kill, if it's typically these levels of organized, you know our culture if you don't kill something, you're not getting ahead, right, the thing you have to kill at each level to get to the next level. Not all games are like this but maybe three quarters to 90 percent, some big ugly monster, something that's yucky looking but you got to kill that to get to the next level and go to the next level after that, kill that one, you got the picture? That's the way virtually 90 percent of the video games are organized that way and there's an universal term amongst kids worldwide for what you call that thing you kill to get to the next level and the term is.

[Participants] Boss.

[Senge] Thank you. If you haven't been around kids, it's called the boss. Interesting. Interesting. You think the kids get the picture here?

That's going on within every organization. I've never been in an organization anyplace where people, if they had their druthers, wouldn't like to kill the boss.

So in the process of going to school, we get indoctrinated into a whole other set of ideas about learning, that learning follows an agenda set by another, and is assessed by another, and that other has a very particular power to shape our lives. And believe me, we carry that over fully into our work lives.

There's one third thing. Remember I said there were three critical things we learn as kids in school. There is a third and all these have first-order impact on what we can do in an organization, believe me. That's why I'm taking the time to take us back a little bit in our own personal time to when we were kids, because that's where the formative learnings occur. I'm speaking in generalities and you're saying, "That's not me," and "I didn't come to that conclusion, I didn't go to that kind of school." Maybe. But I would continue to reflect on it if you feel that's not you. And at the very least think about, well this is most of the people who I'm working with. The third thing we learned in school, which is first-order impact, and what we can do together working in any setting is we totally shifted, turned 180 degrees, our notion of how learning occurs.

So as young children we have a very strong experience that learning is initiated by learners who want to learn something. Learning is assessed by learners passionate about being able to do something they can't otherwise do. And thirdly, we learn that all learning occurs through processes of how did you learn to walk? What were you actually doing most of that time? Falling down. Right? As far as I know, when a one-year-old child falls down, trying to walk, they do not suffer a severe psychological trauma. Right? They get a bruised knee or whack their head or hit the back of their head on the corner of a table. It hurts! It's not nice to fall down, but it's not psychologically unsettling. It just hurts. You put that same child in a schoolroom, seven, eight years later and they get that test back and the test says "C," they have a psychological trauma.

How many of you learned in school that you couldn't sing? Put your hands up. Look around. How many of you learned in school that you couldn't paint? How many of you learned in school you weren't very good at math? How many of you learned you weren't very good at English. This is what we learn in school, because mistake making in the institutions we live in is not okay. You know you don't learn as a kid to put your hand up right away and say, Teacher, teacher, I don't know. I'm confused. This is the most difficult thing I've ever tried to understand." [Laughter]. No, no, no, no, I know, I know. We also learn to sit in the back of the room, right. Sit in the back of the room, teacher might not call on you. You might escape being discovered that you really don't know. We learn how to avoid her eyes to look busy, maybe they won't call us on us.

We extend that in a social setting to what we all experience every day in most of our organizations, something gets screwed up. "It's not us. We did it perfectly. Those idiots in purchasing. What do you expect? The junk they send us and of course it doesn't work." So, the third core lesson we all learn in schools is making mistakes is not a good deal. It's not the way to get ahead. It doesn't build our credibility. It is not going to cause us to rise, to succeed, and by the way, this is particularly important for all of us sitting in this room because one common denominator also of everybody sitting in this room is, we were all pretty successful. We made it through the system with some degree of success, probably in most cases a lot of degree of success, which means we really bought into the system lock, stock, and barrel. We have got a lot invested in that system. Do you think those three qualities are operating in your organization? Somebody else sets the agenda. Someone else tells us how we're doing and by all means whatever you do, whatever you do, don't screw up.

Okay. So that was my rabbit trail. You've got to get a sense of it historically, in how it's in us. It really is in us. It's interesting, though, it's a layer below which there's other stuff. I would have loved to have been here yesterday. I would have loved to have been here the day before also. Unfortunately I was somewhere else and I'll tell you about it in just a moment because it's apropos to what I wanted to share. I was with a group of people with a group of companies called the Society of Organized Learning Consortium.

I would suggest to you one of the reasons it's such a precious experience for us to be with people like Maya Angelou and there are many people like this, is they take us down below that level of conditioning. Because that's all conditioning. That's all it is. It's deep, it's pervasive, it's important to appreciate it. It's not good or bad. You don't have people in your organizations who just avoid taking risks. We all avoid taking risks. Okay. We all were traumatized psychologically when we discovered that we couldn't sing. I'll never forget our 7-year-old son, just now starting college, when he was seven in second grade, he got a drawing back in school. He drew a house. Right? Had a "C" on it. I'm not kidding you. People think, oh that can't be true. They don't grade 7-year-old's drawings. Believe me he had a "C" on his drawing. My wife is an artist and she was more than a little bit upset. We went to the school and talked to the art teacher who is 22 years old and she was as sad about this as anybody. She said, "If I don't do this, I lose my job. And if I give everybody 'A's', I'll get so much grief I'll lose my job." What decision did he make that day? I can't draw. He never drew again. He doesn't draw anything to this day and this is a kid who grew up with his easel here and his little Macintosh computer here. His two parents. [Laughter]. And he moved back and forth as kids will. Kids will always use whatever is in their environment to learn. Curiosity, experimenting, it's one of the reasons [we are] who we are. One of the reason it's [such an impact] to be around Maya Angelou is. Somehow we get to a deeper level. We reach below that conditioning, that fear that is what it is all based on at some level. Of screwing up, of not fitting in, of not getting ahead, of disappointing mom and dad, whatever it is.

And when we touch that, we discover, "Gee, I do remember what it's like." I don't know how many people this happened for here, but I have seen it happen before. All of a sudden people find they write poetry although they concluded they hated poetry. Drawings pour out of them. Maybe music pours out of them.

As leaders, if leadership in some sense is about tapping the capacity of human communities to shape their future, you have one core fundament task. You need to get down below that conditioning. That's it. It's as simple as that. You need to get to that level of the human that's below the student. And that's why I said at the beginning what I said. The real reason for having this meeting is to have direct experiences that really orient you and give you a sense, "Well this is of course what we need to do." Change is not easy in any organization. It's never easy. It is complex. There are many things about the organization people are trying to preserve that's not bad, but I'll guarantee you, there's no hope if you don't tap that level, because if you don't tap that level, all you can do is keep trying to "drive change."

I'm curious do people use that terminology in the Park Service?. "Excuse me, we need leaders who can drive change." Do you hear that much? Okay I don't see too many people saying yes. I'm really pleased. You do. The reason I say it, it's inevitable in this modern society that ideas and phrases creep in from the corporate world because the corporate world kind of sets this tone. And this is something you hear all the time in the corporate world. The corporate world people always look for leaders who drive change. What we need, the reason things don't change is we don't have the right leaders. You know exactly who they mean. Just say it. We don't have the right bosses. Look, when you go home, this is just part of your research, part of your getting more sensitized to your environment, very simple little assignment I'll give you so you get a sense of what's out there. Whenever the word "leader" is used, particularly the word leader, not leadership, it could be that, but particularly the word leader, ask yourself what do people mean? I think you'll find that the vast majority of time they mean boss. Leader is a synonym for boss in most organizations.

Now why did I say, if you have people using this term leaders who drive change. It's a very, very common phrase in the business world and it's creeping all around. You hear it in schools a lot now. "We need leaders who will drive change in this bureaucratic institution; nobody wants to change, everybody wants to keep their job. We need people who will come in here and drive change." What do you drive?

[Participants] A car.

[Senge] Thank you. Sometimes people say a tractor. That's an equally good answer. Pickup truck. You name it. You drive a machine. Would you use the term we need parents who will drive their teenagers, or let me be more blunt? Do you think about driving your spouse? Now that's a tricky one, all right, because all of us go, "Well, yeah, I guess I do kind of occasionally." But it doesn't kind of seem right, does it? If you try to drive your teenager, what do you expect is going to be the consequence? Well not too favorable, right? So we kind of wouldn't use the word in the context of our families, but somehow it doesn't feel like the right verb, right? Even though we might, in fact, try sometimes to do it, we somehow know that doesn't fit. Why? Because we appreciate that our families are actually living systems. They are not machines.

Unfortunately, we find it very easy to talk about leaders who drive change in organizations, and the reason is very simple. We think of our organizations as if they were machines. Now this is a tricky subject to talk about with you. If it's a corporation and you were all people who worked for corporations believe me it would be quite easy. I think it's a lot more complicated, my guess, in your organizations, in the Park Service and related organizations who are here; I think it's a little more complicated in part because you're here as part of this commitment to history, and the natural world, and so on, but bear with me one second because I think you'll see why this is an important idea, and I think if you start to see it you're going to see what somebody said a while ago. That the message of the naturalists and the humanists is actually the same message.

In business it's very easy for people to see this, because deep down you ask almost anybody in any business what's the real purpose of this business and they will tell you, if they feel safe or they've got the fancy mission statement on the wall and they have the little value cards they whip out of their pocket. But you really ask, look I don't want to know what's on the wall. I want to know what you actually experience as you see how decisions are made around here and anybody in any business will tell you if you ask them what's the purpose of this business, it is to what? -- make money. Of course. The business of business is business, right? In effect a business is a machine for making money.

And again, this is a short rabbit trail so bear with me. I'm not going to talk business very long. Business is such a significant institution in our modern society, and the images, the phrases, and the thinking that … in business easily creeps in. If you go to management school, if you get a degree in management, which many of you probably have, guess what? You're immersed in that business world. The organizations you interact with are immersed and often are coming out of the business world. Your management hierarchies are full of people whose experience is in the business world, so you can't ignore that. It's probably the most impactful institution in our society, second only to education. Education hits us when we're young because it has the most power.

A business is a machine for producing money. End of story. That's most people's experience and by the way, if you don't believe that, notice what we call people in business. I don't know, I imagine this terminology has crept out of business into the Park Service. There's a new term that was concocted about 15 years or so ago, people thought it was very enlightened. Started having personnel departments and started having departments of "human resources." That's a great term. Nobody bothered looking in the dictionary. You know what the term resource means? Exactly. "Something standing in reserve waiting to be used." So next time you think it's enlightened to have a department of human resources try it on one another. "It's useful working with you humans standing in reserve waiting to be used." It's consistent terminology if the organization is a machine that takes all these inputs, right, takes all these inputs and it produces an output, and the key output for a business is money. Why is it so obvious? Why do we do things this way!? God, nobody would do that knowingly.

It's true, in a sense nobody would do that knowingly. We don't say we're going to drive change in our families, but we say we're going to drive change in our organizations. We don't call our kids, you know, "young resources." I hope! [Laughter]. And we don't call our spouse, you know, a "home resource," but we feel very comfortable calling our people human resources. What's come over us? Where does this kind of hypnosis come from? Really? Really, I mean this is a real question. The reason is that we are products of an age. We are all products of an age. Now we have longer histories. We have family histories, cultural roots. We have aspects of us that go back much further than this. But in addition to all of these, we are products of an age. We have all grown up in the last 100 years. And what is this age? It's the industrial age, and what is the guiding metaphor of the industrial age?

[Participants] Machine.

[Senge] Thank you. If you didn't hear it, the word was the machine. The machine has become the guiding image or metaphor of our society because we are products of an age. All human beings are products of an age. We are products of a particular age, depending on how you look at it, [which] started 100 to 200 years ago. Doesn't matter too much when it started. It's been with us for long enough. It's deep within us. We are products of an age. The age is called the industrial age and the guiding metaphor of the industrial age is the machine.

If you don't believe it, then ask yourself why do we talk about driving change and feel very comfortable about that? Why do we have school organized the way we have it? Come on, give me a break! This is so obvious. All you got to do is step back and look at it. Grade 1. Grade 2. Grade 3. Grade 4. Grade 5. Grade 6. What do you think this wonderful concept of organizing school came from? Henry Ford! Predated him, he perfected it. It's the assembly line. The school was explicitly modeled after the assembly line, complete with bells and whistles on the wall, time schedules to organize it all, and all run by the mechanical clock.

The god of the assembly line is efficiency. Productivity. What is the value that we look for all the time in an organization? "Have to become more efficient. Productive." Rarely do we hear people say we have to become more meaningful. That's an older world. The industrial age is our age. Why do we have the pickles we have today with nature? Because the industrial age kind of put an afterburner on ideas that have their roots actually several thousand years earlier in most of our Western cultures, at least, which is the human, a little more important in the rest. Right? That's really an idea that has quite old roots. We can find it articulated in our religious traditions in many of our religions.

But the industrial age harnesses that idea. The human is a little bit more important than the rest. The extraordinary power of the machine. In 50 years, from I think it was 1775 to 1825, 50 years, the very beginning of the industrial age, labor productivity in England rose 200 fold. Not 200 percent, 200-fold. Extraordinary bursts of productivity. The only problem is we started to conclude that we can look at everything in life as if it was a machine. Like this. You know, breaks down, fix it. Right? How many of you think of your doctors as like repair experts? Right something breaks down we haul into the doctor to fix it. That's machine thinking. "Your organization is broken. It needs to be fixed. Something is wrong with my son or daughter. She or he needs to be fixed." Where do you think that kind of imagery comes from? It comes in the deep conditioning to see the world around us as a world of machines. I don't know if I can find the quote, and it is probably not terribly critical right here, but I want you to know I'm not making this up. [Laughter].

Somebody mentioned the new education field book, I think, Bill in the introduction. This is a copy of it. Here it is. "My aim." Listen to the words. "My aim is to show that the celestial machine is to be likened not to divine organism but rather to a clockwork." [Repeating]. "My aim is to show that the celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to a clockwork." That is Kepler, 1665. Newton had the exact same idea. He called it "God's clockwork." Descartes had the same idea. Then he gradually becomes the basis of modern technology. Becomes the basis of how we organize society. It is the basic belief that the universe, the world we live in, including you and me, including our organizations, is nothing but more and more complex machines.

Not a nice thing to say. But it's the essence of our age. We don't recognize that, we don't see what's going on around us, there's no pattern to it. It seems like how can human beings be so stupid. Have you ever met anybody walking around the airports with placards or handing out leaflets or advocating anywhere that we should destroy species? Have you ever met anybody doing that? "I am for the elimination of all species. I am for the end of biodiversity." Have you ever met anybody advocating that? I mean I know a lot of people who could give a damn, but I'm talking about saying, "that's my purpose, to pollute things." Have you ever met anybody who advocates pollution? Advocates. "That's a good idea. If we're really good, we can pollute a little more." People don't advocate. They don't want to produce that. We produce these phenomena as a byproduct of the way we do things, not because we're intending, but once we treat our organization as a machine and our society as a machine, we look at inputs and outputs and it's all a big calculus. "Do the outputs justify the inputs," right? "The benefits greater than the costs?" And of course costs and benefits are always measured in quantified ways because machines can only be understood in quantifiable ways so we can only look at the costs we can measure, look at the benefits that we can measure. Just remember, again just to give you small example, if it's a beautiful day outside, gorgeous day, the sun is out and the birds and there's grass underfoot, if you come inside, close all the doors, and sit in a room like this without any windows and turn the air conditioning up, the GNP rises.

That's the insanity of our age. That's right. It's absolutely right, by the way. GNP goes up. Quality of life goes down, GNP goes up and we find that in all kinds of things and what's the god we worship, the quantified product of GNP. Created in condition where the economy can flourish. Not saying it's bad, that progress is bad; I'm trying to help us understand. There are deep roots, deep, deep roots to the environmental crisis. Human beings do not want to live separate from nature. At that deep level, at the deep level we all know we are nature. In fact, we are not a machine. Today biologists have learned a lot about even how you can distinguish machines from living organisms. There's a term in biology called autopoesis, very simple, a living system creates its self.

You know it's interesting, parallels to the ideas of learning. A living system creates itself. A machine is created by another. Self-creating versus other-created . In the assembly line concept of school, we suddenly saw children as being molded and shaped by the system. Kids are taught by teachers. It's interesting no great teacher ever quite thinks that way. A great teacher knows that human beings learn because they learn, and if I can do my craft really well, I might create an environment where a human being can learn. I do not do it to them. No one actually teaches you the things that really matter, but there are teachers, those who inspire. Interesting. Very similar parallels when you ask who the teacher is, what makes a great teacher? You know what they'll come up with all the things they said about a great leader: inspire, create an environment where human beings can grow, let another person's well-being, and another person's … more important than their own. All the same stuff, but in the machine worlds the operator and the system, the assembly line, manufactures the product.

By the way, the machine moves at a certain speed, right? Many of you put your hands up before. I can't paint. I learned I couldn't draw. Not too good at math. I didn't ask you this question but a little more subtle one. How many found that it was a race to keep up? It was a race to keep up? The reason for that is very, very simple. Grade 1, grade 2, grade 3, the whole thing is organized in the assembly line; the assembly line moves in a certain speed, and if you don't move at that speed, guess what you are? You're stupid. The operational definition of intelligence in our society is the ability to move at the speed of the assembly line. Do you think it has any real correlation with intelligence? Very, very little. But it's the way we set it all up.

And it's the way we run our organizations. Assembly lines for producing output. Now, I said a little while ago your world is more complicated. It really is. And I'm saying these things in part because, to appreciate the context, the historical context, the institutional context, business is a formalized institution and has been throughout the industrialized era. Business is where technology gets advanced, and we know, by the way, all this talk about new economy and stuff. Don't take it too seriously. As far as I know, nobody is saying, "I finally have time to relax and reflect," right? In fact, if anything, what has the new economy been about? Speeding up a little bit more. By the way, talk to kids in school. One of the most poignant things to do this day, go and hang out around a primary school or a middle school. Pick up one of the backpacks of the kids. If you haven't done that, if you don't have children of that age, do it sometime. You will be surprised. You see a little, you know, 60-pound girl carrying a 35-pound back pack. Why? Because the answer to the question of how we improve schools in the assembly line context is only one way to do it. Speed it up. Increase the uniformity of it. Why do we love standardized testing? Of course, it was standardized output. And your people in your organizations live in that world.

A few simple anecdotes. These are not answers but coming back from the comments you made. Why am I taking so much time on this? Here is one of the reasons. Your work as leaders should be something that is meaningful to you, not to be a leader-to kind of aggrandize your sense of importance-but genuinely, because you want to serve, because you want to help an organization. A group of people find joy in work, because you want to help an institution evolve and be true to its mission in a new world, your work as leaders in part is always about helping people understand the context of their lives.

In leadership, it all starts with meaningfulness. It all starts with meaningfulness. Nobody said that before. It's the background. We don't think about it a lot. Why are some visions more powerful than others? Some visions have meaning. It's not a very good religion. You understand what I mean by that? It's not primary. It's very important, and it's clearly secondary. No one wants to waste stuff. But meaningfulness is a different territory. So, why do I think the program is organized the way it was? So that you get a chance to ponder the meaningfulness of your work.

From a historical perspective, how you got here, from a larger natural system perspective, what's going on in our world, and from a human perspective, those are the dimensions that come together so that leaders can actually help the people they work with create meaning in their work. No meaning, no inspiration, end of story.

Many ways and no answers, no right way. Many ways. It always starts with your authenticity. So make the question a little more personal. What's my meaning? What do I tell my kids I do? A person who cannot tell their kids what they do cannot have joy in work. End of story. There's no meaning to it. It's a wonderful cultural historian who argues that's actually the plight of our age, same as Thomas Berry. If you've never read his writings, a couple of beautiful books he's written, and he says that the fundamental plight of our times is, we are between stories. We have no story to guide us.

At some level the story that has organized our society for the last 150 years of technological optimism, and unending progress, of an industrial sort, and even you might say the redemptive religions in that historical context, it no longer communicates with us. We need a new story. We need something that gives us orientation. He thinks that there are elements of it in the sciences. And undoubtedly there are elements in it our oldest traditions, our humanness, but believe me this is not abstract what I am talking to you about now. It might sound it, but it is leadership. Leadership is about helping people make sense, and finding meaning in what they do.

One more comment then I'm going to be quiet. I couldn't start it this way; it's presumptuous. So I would rather end this way because I would rather leave it as a question. I have acquired some real interest in the Park Service and your work, and I know not all of you are from the Park Service but the organizations represented here in this work, so of course I've thought, so from my standpoint where is the meaning? Where is the meaningfulness? And the obvious, you start with the obvious. You know our sense of who we are historically, our sense of who we are as a people, and our sense of our connection with the larger natural world. Okay. Of course that's why people go to parks.

But I thought in this day and age, if the Park Service was really committed to serving society in the broadest sense, you know, what would it be doing? Now that's a question. If my comments this morning about the evolution of our society, the context within which we're operating, combined with comments of the earlier speakers make some real sense to you then here it leads you to one initial question and a series of follow-on questions. What is our mission? Not our historical mission-we have to understand it in the context of our history-but today, here, now. What are we here today to do? Why are we here? And how would we need to start to operate in order to be true to our purpose in the context of the world we're living in today?

Now I make a big generalization, probably many of you will not agree, maybe some will. I don't know if it's true, I think more and more people are sensing that something is deeply out of whack. I really experience that. You know all this stuff about the new economy does come down for most people to the 24/7 job. It never stops, e-mail never stops, and telephone calls never stop. In the corporate world it's totally loony today. Meetings at 11 o'clock at night because that's when the people in Singapore are going to work. It's kind of nutty. I don't find people anywhere saying, "If I just had a little time to think." Why do these little simple five-minute quiet times matter? Because in this day and age, we are desperate for quiet, because quiet is where we settle. Okay?

I think people sense that. I really do. I'm going to read a very short quote. You may get a kick out of this. "Is genuine progress possible? Is development sustainable? Or is one strand of progress … now doing so much damage in the environment that the next generation will not have a world worth living in?" Sounds like the president of Green Peace or something like that, right? That's John Brown, CEO of British Petroleum. Bill Ford has gone on record publicly, current chairman of ford, he hopes, his aspiration as the chairman by the time he retires 20 years from now, we will have seen the end of the internal combustion engine. Things are shifting, dramatically. [Applause]

Xerox produced a copier, came to the market two years ago, year and a half ago. It's their top of the line, fully digitized, first fully digitized. Ninety-two percent remanufacturable and 98 percent recyclable. Has only 200 parts, when you're done they make new copiers out of it and it's even cheaper. The team that has produced this has been nominated for the national medal of technology. Never wanted to have another product to go into a landfill, ever. That was their goal. These things are changing.

I've been working in the business world for 25 years. My personal experience is that there is a real shift. I've worked in the oil industry for a long time, as people as individuals were deeply concerned. They could never talk publicly about their concerns about global climate change. Guess who are [leading] the … worldwide debate [on] a corporate change on global climate change? Oil companies. It's quite astounding.

So my premise is that there is a deep shift. We know that we can't keep going like this. This is nuts. Really. Seriously, it's the technical definition. We're crazy. We're racing faster and faster to get to where nobody wants to go, and nobody is even asking anymore where do we want to go. More is better. More progress. Higher GNP-yes, yes, lord is good. It has become a religion. It's a bad religion. It's important for society but it's a bad religion. It's not an expression of what's primary. My vision for the Park Service is that you become a group of people dedicated to helping people reconnect with what's primary. Period. That's why the meeting is designed this way. If you can reconnect with what's primary you get a sense of what your work is all about.

I have a couple of simple challenges. Challenge is not the right word. I don't want to be presumptuous, your world and your organization, I cannot tell you what to do, but I would love it if every single person spent a day or three days in any of the park's historical or natural facilities, left with a little sense of a different way of being. I'd like nothing to ever go to waste. You know, why can't that vision of the Xerox engineers be your vision? I tell you I have hung out with those people. It was incredible. Five years before that product was released they said, "You know nothing should ever go into a landfill, nothing ever." Look at that. Nature wastes that much. This is again a sign of our times. There is no waste in nature. Zero.

Everything that's an output or a byproduct of a natural system is an input or nutrient to another natural system. Zero. Do you know how much we waste? You already know but as an American, I should know that every week of my life about a ton of junk is taken out of the surface of the earth to support my standard of living, about a ton. And you know how much that ends up as waste either solid or chemical waste, by weight? About 98 percent.

To make me comfortable, you know what? I would love everybody who came to a natural park, in any sense, to experience something different. Wouldn't it be different for two or three days, you look around you and there's no waste anyplace. I was bugging Jerry last year. I had just come back from Mesa Verde. Every place I go with my family, I look for recycling places, and they had places for glasses, cans, and paper. Almost all the beverage [containers] there are made of plastic. And there was no recycling for plastic. I don't say that as a criticism. I have just been corrected now, but I would like that never to happen. Wouldn't that be neat if everybody for a couple of days had a sense that … this is kind of what it's like. It's not harder. It's easier once we get used to it. I'm just using [this] to illustrate. But maybe the program has been organized the way it is so that you can have the 3 to 4 days to just live and ponder, kind of let it soak in.

What is our mission? Is it not about reconnecting with a different way of living and giving people tangible experiences of reference. I actually have made four visits to Gettysburg, three with people from the U.S. Army, and I don't think I ever understood history … in my life until I walked the battleground with people in the army. It's alive to them. See, it was always alive. History was always alive to human beings, then it got put in books, and taught in history classes, and then guess what? It died. That's why everybody is talking about the same. It's all the same talk.

We're between two ages. The age we're living in is an age of dead things. That's what machines actually are. The age we're going to move into, if we're going to move, is going to be an age of living things. Life is the principle. Simple. Thanks.

[Applause]