Re: What do you believe?

Description: Kanter's Law: "Everything can look like a failure in the middle."

Question: Do you have a personal philosophy?

Transcript: My personal philosophy . . . Do I have a personal philosophy? I have many personal philosophies. I am constantly quoting things to myself. I learned this when I was writing my book “Confidence”, and I was studying how great athletes and great sports teams achieve winning streaks. And I learned about self-talk, that athletes engage in self-talk. They’re always saying things to themselves. So I have a lot of self-talk. At the moment I’m saying to myself, “Don’t push the river. Go with the flow.” So I’m going back to Zen statements stemming from my formative years. And I’m doing that because I’m working on some very difficult projects, including a project to bring a new kind of education to Harvard. And I’m working on projects with companies that have some thorny problems to solve. And I’m impatient. I wanna have it done right away. And you have to wait for people to get back to you. You have to wait for coalitions of people to form. Meetings keep getting rescheduled. So I say to myself, “Go with the flow. Don’t push the river.” But I also know how important it is not to give up. So I repeat to myself, “Everything can look like a failure in the middle.” Kanter’s Law. I think persisting is more important than almost anything else. You have to listen to negative voices, but I say to myself, “Don’t let the voices and the negativity drag you down.” So most of my personal philosophies have to do with action . . . with getting it done.

Question: What is your highest virtue?

Transcript: I care about outcomes that are good for people, and for as many people as possible. I care about empowerment. I care about finding the . . . the strength that might . . . that might lie in each person. I certainly care that people are fed and clothed and that the water is clean and everything else; but I think that that will happen when we do empower people . . . find the strength in them.

I’m impressed by the Nobel laureate from Africa whose projects was planting trees and getting other women in the village to plant trees. That’s very powerful. It starts with a small act, but it starts with finding what strength you have and what you can do. So my highest values have to do with unlocking the potential in people. I know that sounds a little “new age-y”, but it’s still a good thing to do! And it could be, if we’re lucky, the 21st century mode. We’ve been through several decades of cynicism where hard numbers drove out other kinds of thinking . . . where we had a little bit of greed in the United States because, well, people could. There was money to be made. And I’m hoping that we’ll enter an era of hope.

I started out my career many years ago – or my intellectual career – writing my doctoral dissertation about how many organizations build commitment. But the organizations I chose to look at were 19th century, utopian, American communities. So I’ve always had a slight utopian streak. I believe that hope and optimism are good ways to think, because you can be proved wrong; but if you don’t have hope and optimism you don’t even try!

Recorded on: 6/13/07