Who will solve the great problems facing humanity, a list of critical issues that only begins with the current pandemic? In the interview below, Rosabeth Moss Kanter discusses her recent book, Think Outside the Building, and her view that solutions are most likely to generate from outside traditional institutions. She has also written a brief foreword that ties the book's themes to COVID-19.
Foreword
By Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Surprises are the new normal. The coronavirus crisis certainly hit most of us like a very unwelcome surprise.
When I mentioned global pandemics on the first page of the first chapter of Think Outside the Building as among the systems problems requiring advanced leadership skills, little did I know that we would all soon be living through such an enormous health crisis.
But then, in a sense, I did. We had seen earlier pandemics—I write about a venture that had to weather an Ebola outbreak. We have lived with the consequences of increasingly visible problems, such as gun violence and the volatile weather of climate change, that make it hard to carry out business as usual. That’s why I wanted a call to action for innovative leaders to step outside the usual approaches and find fresh solutions.
The coronavirus crisis and the economic disruption that followed have underscored the relevance of many of the book’s themes. One is the clear interdependence of the system; it is impossible to stay inside any one silo or sector or company and hope to hide from things happening outside the walls supposedly separating one from others. Cracks, fissures, and gaps became visible in the crisis—that health systems were largely unprepared; that (in the US.), federal and state governments were too divided; and that racial disparities spread the tragedy unevenly.
We saw that there is more to learning than classrooms; family situations matter, too. Would children go hungry without school meals? Would learning be possible without Internet access and enough devices? The crisis showed that the quality of education, for example, is dependent on many things that take place “outside the building.”
The other major book theme that the crisis has laid bare is more positive: the incredible outpouring of creative energy on the part of people who arose like a new army of democracy to fight the virus, fill gaps in supply chains, take local action in their own communities, and help others survive the crisis, even if done remotely on screens. That is in fact the main point of Think Outside the Building. If institutions can become too rigid and let us down, there are numerous small villages of people mobilizing outside the establishments to contribute to their communities in innovative ways. We need more such leaders who operate outside hierarchies. They don’t wait to be asked; they just get moving.
Such inspiring, entrepreneurial leaders use imaginative thinking that is like shaking a kaleidoscope and finding new possibilities out of the existing fragments. They forge new partnerships and build new coalitions that can keep working on solutions even when the worst of the crisis has passed. They persist and persevere even when the going is tough. The skills to do all this are exactly the point of my book, and why I was so thrilled to talk about it with Brian Kenny for Books@Baker.
Q&A: Thinking Beyond the Building
At a Books@Baker event at Harvard Business School on Feb. 26, Rosabeth Moss Kanter was interviewed by HBS Chief Marketing and Communication Officer Brian Kenny about her new book, Think Outside the Building: How Advanced Leaders Can Change the World One Smart Innovation at a Time. The following transcript of that session was lightly edited.
Brian Kenny: Why was this the right time for you to write this particular book?
Rosabeth Moss Kanter: We certainly know that these are troubled times. In fact, as I was out and about the country the [other] day, somebody said, boy, I really called it. Because when I'm listing all the things we have to be worried about, I listed pandemics, and here we are.
Climate change—we have to do something about it. This is the time. It has been the time for a long time. And there are people already taking action on the things that worry us. But there's a whole litany of things that we know they're going to interfere with business, they're going to interfere with our lives, and we have to do something about them. And who's going to do it is the question.
I do get into metaphor overload in the book, but I had gone to a lot of dinner parties for a number of years that were accompanied by fine whines, W-H-I-N-E-S. The complaining, not the Chardonnay. I'm a fairly positive and optimistic person, and I wanted people to do something about it, not just complain. And they would say, “There aren't enough leaders. Where are the leaders? Do they have a plan?” And I'm thinking: It's us.
I have always throughout my career believed in the people in an organization to create innovation, not necessarily the voice from the top. I have always believed in people in communities taking action to do something about communities. I have studied change, I have advised on change. And so the way change happens often in companies, the top will claim the change if it's a good one, but it often starts out with some maverick just deciding to mess around a little bit and do something a little different from the norm.
"If we keep that entrepreneurial spirit going, we will solve problems. But we sometimes forget that when we're at dinner parties just whining."
For these horrendously big problems, we clearly need that. And so I think it's time while we're talking about who should be the one person at the top—which so far people have agreed that there’s [not] one perfect person [or] one perfect big thing— you need lots and lots of small things.
It's important that people get active. We talk about America, American history, what's great about America. What's great about America is the entrepreneurial spirit. And if you go back in history, when Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat, came to the US to study democracy in America and wrote a book about it. He didn't say democracy was in our voting processes and the federal government. In fact, I don't even think he mentions the federal government.
He said it was that people were always organizing, people were not sitting still. They were doing something about problems in their own community, their own environment. And that is the strength, the great strength. We keep that entrepreneurial spirit going, and we will solve problems. But we sometimes forget that when we're at dinner parties just whining.
Kenny: There's lots of great metaphors in the book. You open it up by talking about storming the castle. So my question is: Are you calling for a revolution?
Kanter: Yeah, not me. I'm calling for a kind of sensibility, not a revolution. And I have to be careful now that those words are being thrown around nationally. I'm not anti-establishment or I wouldn't be at Harvard. We're an institution nearly 400 years old overall, and the business school is over a century old. And several of us thought we could do something outside the building.
We could create something new here— [the Harvard University-wide Advanced Leadership Initiative]. Nobody asked us do it; it was total entrepreneuring. That was Rakesh Khurana [Dean of Harvard College], Nitin Nohria [Dean of HBS], and me. We're sitting around saying, let's invent a new stage of higher education. And that's that same spirit of innovation. So we didn't do it by saying you overturn all the other stages of higher education. We said you add something, you do an innovation, and you see where the innovation goes.
When I talk about attacking the castle, which by the way I learned about that first from a former Dean of HBS, John McArthur, who used that image [to say] sometimes establishment or incumbents or mainstreams in companies sort of dig in their heels and they don't want change. They want to protect the status quo. They want to protect their jobs, protect their territory. And I've spent decades studying innovation in established companies.
And so, McArthur's metaphor did have people burrowing underneath the castle to look for the disaffected people and mobilizing them. And then the castle would collapse of its own weight. And he would say he did that when he helped put together Partners HealthCare. Two of the teaching hospitals just got them to do it because the process was too slow to try to get all five to agree at that time.
But my way of attacking a castle or getting change is the little villages you can set up outside the castle. Pitch your tent, set up camp. It could be a boot camp. But encourage ideas and fun, and you've got so much art and music going on in those tents outside that the people in the castle wander out to see: Why are they having so much fun and we're not? So, I mean, that's another kind of metaphor for change. If you try to challenge incumbents head on, you get all the forces of resistance, and there are a lot of them.
But if instead you add something, and at first you don't ask anybody to change. You just say, here's something we can add. But when you add something, you often change the conversation, you provide an alternative pathway and eventually an institution will start to change. I believe this building metaphor, castle metaphor, that's the think outside the building. Health is not the hospital. Education is not the schoolhouse. It's so much bigger and broader, but when it gets confined only to the people who feel they own that building or that structure, you don't get change.
Innovation for change
Kenny: I want to take a step back because your whole life as a scholar has been about leadership and innovation for change. Why are those themes that resonate so strongly with you? Why did you choose to look at those things?
Kanter: I guess I don't know. Everybody has things they carry forth from their childhood. I was always interested in the system. I was always interested in how the whole thing worked and what could make it better. I was always fascinated by how we get things done by changing the system.
And I wanted to be relevant and make a difference, and I had to learn how to do that and how to have my voice heard, how to help other people have their voices heard, so that we would get new and fresh ideas.
These are times that demand change. I want to do things that are relevant. I always wanted to have an impact on the wider world, and I wanted to think broadly and think about the system.
And that's what I encourage people to do in the book. And the stories that I tell are all about where you take on something, whether it's for your company or it's for your community or for your nation, that's big. You get known for whatever reason. Harvard Business School professors have a certain notoriety. And I get asked some questions that I sometimes think are ridiculous when I travel around the world.
I have been in several countries where I have been with the top-ranking official, in one case the Prime Minister, other cases, others. And somebody will ask, "So what's the one thing that Japan should do? What's the one thing that Colombia should do?" Those are two that come to mind. And so, first of all, they are ridiculous questions. Everybody wants to boil it down to one. I keep saying, in my religious tradition it's like there are Ten Commandments, but could you just give me the top three?
But there are some things I could actually say, and they're very much like the theme of the book because I've been a big national service advocate and was privileged to be in at the ground floor of some of our Harvard alumni creating essentially civilian national service in America, and getting laws passed and everything else. I've been privileged to be there.
And my answer for Japan, I said, you need more women. And that was five years ago. But I would say to everybody: national service. You [need to] mobilize your population to be out there solving problems. You've got a lot of problems; I can't tell you which one to solve. But in Colombia, I said, "If you're not sending diverse groups of young people out to all the villages where there has been conflict to begin to heal the conflict and create new institutions, then your country will never be repaired." So this sense that empowering people and their imaginations and getting them involved and taking action, that's my theme.
Kenny: And that permeates the book. So let's dive into authentic leadership. The book talks about Fred Astaire being a great dancer, but Ginger Rogers being an advanced leader. What does that mean?
Kanter: OK, I had a lot of fun with that, but I think it's almost time to retire that metaphor because there are increasing numbers of people who have no idea who either of them are. Somebody said I should do J.Lo. But the idea is an old joke, which some people may have heard, that Fred Astaire was a great dancer. He was a great leader. He led Ginger Rogers around the dance floor perfectly and flawlessly. But Ginger Rogers was the advanced leader, the one that's facing challenges because she had to do everything he did, but backwards and in high heels.
But in fact, that's what people who are trying to tackle problems requiring innovation are up against. The pathway isn't clear. You can't see the clear direction yourself. You're tottering, if not on high heels. It's complex, it's messy, you're facing obstacles and setbacks because that's the nature of innovation. You're doing something that nobody's ever done before. You have to forge a path. You can't see where you're going exactly. There's a lot of obstacles that make you feel a little shaky about doing it, and so you have to really hone your leadership. I think it's not that it's easy to lead at any time, but in my book “Confidence,” I talked about how easy it is to lead in a winning streak because everything's going for you and there's so much momentum.
But when you have to do a turnaround, solve a messy problem, or when you have to innovate, it's not all there for you. In fact, there are too many obstacles in your way and you have to have the stamina, the resilience, the persistence, the big dream, the big idea to keep you going.
What is an advanced leader?
Kenny: So, how do you know if you're an advanced leader? Is it something you're self-aware of, or do you just sort of develop that awareness over time?
Kanter: Maybe if enough people read my book, it'll become the aspiration. Everybody says, OK, I'm in a leadership development program, but I really want to be an advanced leader, not just an ordinary leader who leads down, leads in a structured and bounded environment, leads my team. And you know what? The challenges facing every institution and people who are top managers in every institution are increasingly the advanced leadership problems because everything else is kind of cut and dried.
"Increasingly in every institution, people are dealing with these messy, complex systems problems that they don't control."
But every company now has to deal with: What's their response? Right now, what's their response to a pandemic? Is it just to hole up in the building and hope it goes away? What's their response to climate change, which if they don't have a response and don't feel it's in their business interest to be green, their new employees will make them have a response. And so increasingly in every institution, people are dealing with these messy, complex systems problems that they don't control.
They don't own them, they don't control them, and they don't have full authority. And it's one of the reasons why in established companies as well as out in the world, hierarchy is increasingly being replaced by entrepreneurial hustle. Instead of taking orders, you chart a new way.
Kenny: We've talked about the Advanced Leadership Initiative here at Harvard. I'm wondering what are some of the things that you've learned about the qualities of advanced leaders through that initiative? And maybe you can just describe what the initiative is for people here that may not be familiar with it.
Kanter: I said we invented a new stage of higher education because it wasn't being done, and we saw three things that were important. We saw, first of all, [that] higher education was another castle under attack for not being all that relevant and training people in skills that didn't always translate to their work in the real world.
So, we had that in mind. We had in mind that the problems, these complex, messy system problems seem to be getting worse. Not all of them. Longevity is greater today, over the last hundred years, except not in Stillwater, Oklahoma, where life expectancy is 56— the same as Somalia, a poor African country. But things seem to be at least more noticeable, even if not all was getting worse. I mean Steve Pinker says violence has been down in the world over the last 100 or 200 years.
But try telling that to the survivors of mass shootings. So the second thing we saw was that there were all these problems, and there wasn't enough leadership to solve them. There was a UN effort called Rollback Malaria, where the goal was to reduce the rate of malaria in half in 10 years. And five years into it, the rate of malaria had doubled. The initiative was way too complex. It had lots of governments. That sounds like a good thing. Everybody was agreeing, except bureaucracies were getting in the way. And the Gates Foundation rescued it and made it a lot simpler.
He saw that they needed leadership. I mean, Rollback Malaria in those five years had four different executive directors. And finally business had to come in and help. And so we thought sectors, silos, the business community throwing things over the transom as philanthropy, charity, spare change, was not really helping with real change. And the third thing we saw was the demographic revolution.
There were so many people living a lot longer beyond the time where they tended to exit their main income earning careers. People have portfolios and people keep a hand in their profession. They do different things, but we saw this incredible force potentially of people who had talent capabilities. I say you need to begin to tackle these problems with the three Cs, which are capabilities, connections, and cash or know how to find the cash, but three forms of capital.
Your own intellectual capital, your social capital, and financial capital. I call that in the book kaleidoscope thinking. You take existing pieces and it's like shaking a kaleidoscope, and you make the fragments form a different pattern. That's what we did. We said, here are these three pieces, relevance to the university, big problems, and this incredible population. Let's put these three together, and maybe we can create something new.
And our goal secretly was not to invent a new stage of higher education. That was just the vehicle. Our real goal or my goal was to deploy a new leadership force for the world, which I now call the army of democracy.
Kenny: Let's talk about big ideas because the premise is that these are people who have the life experience now and the networks and the knowhow to take on big, thorny problems. What does a big, thorny problem look like?
Kanter: There is this big population, [and] there is also the rising generation who also has the aspiration and they have the fresh ideas. Often the experienced people don't necessarily have the fresh ideas. We need to marry the generations, those with experience with those with the fresh ideas and let them stimulate each other.
So big, thorny ideas. I had a couple who wanted to solve the Syrian refugee crisis and actually they kind of are. They have a new pathway that no one had ever done before. They started with the idea, it's an Uber-like platform, but not the bad parts of Uber, where they would match the refugees with talent, of which there are a lot who have skills in advanced degrees.
They would match them with employers who are finding it hard to fill jobs, often in remote locations. And without getting into details, that was pretty big, and they didn't start out with a lot of experience in it. But they had a conviction; they had an idea they could do something, and they tested. You pilot, you demonstrate it. That's why I say one smart innovation at a time. They might start small, and it's growing rapidly and they're resettling people now [on] a whole new pathway.
So the pathway is we're always on humanitarian grounds. People needed aid. They were victims who needed charity. This is a whole new pathway involving economics and the marketplace. It's a labor market pathway to resettlement, which is good for the country, good for the employer, and very good for the dignity of the people.
And that doesn't apply to everybody in refugee camps, but if you start stripping out a lot of people, you're beginning to solve the problem. And then Sesame Workshop—I talk about rescuing Big Bird by partnering with commercial television—but in addition to their commercial aims, they partnered with the International Rescue Committee and they're now doing early childhood education all over the Middle East and in the camps.
So that's a very thorny problem and a big idea. And using those cute little Muppets. The one I like in the United States is Julia, the autistic Muppet. I love Julia. But they have Arab Muppets and so they're doing real good in the world, and these are pretty big problems. And you and I did Cold Call about the oceans.
The deepest challenge: Oceans
Kenny: Let's talk about the oceans. That's an amazing project.
Kanter: All right. You still can encourage small things. So when I talk about the ocean issue, first of all we have this saying: You can't boil the ocean, which is the way to tell people, don't take on anything too big, too daunting because it's impossible. And so the person we talked about, Torsten Thiele, decided he could boil the ocean or actually he wanted to stop it from boiling.
He was a climate change activist, and the oceans are one of the biggest things you could take on because they cover most of the Earth’s surface, and they are highly implicated in climate change. I mean that's sea level rise. That's the oceans. And we count on them for food and shipping and to keep our land mass intact and so forth. So he wanted to take that on. And he knows about lots of other projects. He had friends who were, for example, the people who designed the Adidas shoes that were made out of marine plastic. Those Pacific islands filled with plastic are now being used in shoes.
So he also knew the person who flew the solar plane around the world to prove that solar energy could do a lot of things. But he really felt in the discussion of the oceans, there was something missing. He saw all these advocacy groups that operated with their own association, some of which had thousands of members.
They operated in silos. The NGOs didn't talk to the governments and they certainly didn't talk to business. They were often suspicious of the motives of business. The governments were big bureaucracies where people in various departments felt they owned it, and it's every country because the oceans have no sovereignty. Nobody owns the oceans, nobody's in charge.
There are these UN attempts, the commission on the high seas, et cetera. And so he felt that what was missing was a finance and investment perspective. He said, "There are a lot of technologies that should deserve investment, technologies that will improve the health of the ocean, from undersea sensors to things that do things with the water supply." So he wanted to take that on. And his idea—I’m making a long story short— it sounds sensible when I say it now, but he thought it up. He said, "We need a World Bank for oceans." There's a World Bank for our land and it invests in development projects, but there's no financing mechanism for the oceans.
There's ad hoc here and there. And he managed through incredible coalition building, which is a big advanced leadership skill to get the NGOs, first of all, to talk to him, and then to talk to banks, to begin to trust him that they have interests in common. And he started getting people together across these divides.
He often worked in the beginning behind the scenes, not taking credit. He formed an entity, Global Ocean Trust. And then behind the scenes he worked on a contest for the Economist Magazine for the best new idea in ocean finance. And that led to the first sovereign blue bonds. The first time a nation issued blue bonds to invest in projects on their coasts in the ocean.
Kenny: So he's a great example of somebody who leveraged his capabilities and his connections and his understanding of finance and the important role that finance would have to play in any kind of a solution. But he also had a great story to tell. How important is the narrative that you have to tell to get people to start listening to you?
Kanter: Absolutely critical. First of all, leaders are good at narratives. Some people have [said] that they have to be mythmakers, but that doesn't mean the stories aren't true because a lot of the stories that keep us stuck are myths that actually aren't true. But you need to have something that connects past to present to future [that] people believe. It's one of the things that makes castles so difficult to deal with incumbents and establishment or the established order of things, not necessarily the people who would like change.
But what makes them so hard to deal with is they become structures that are justified because that's the way it's always been and it makes the present inevitable and therefore we can't change anything in the future.
The storytelling is really important. And it's not just like getting up and saying, “I grew up here and this is what I had.” It also has to be an inclusive story, not just about the individual, but about the people they're trying to motivate and that they are a part of this change. One of the things that I wish we heard more of in all the presidential candidates' rhetoric is the word “we” more often.
And I wish we heard people, for every problem, saying, let me give you an example of an innovator who's pointing the way to something possible that could solve a problem. And I know they're out there. I've been out on my book tour and I keep hearing from people who have wonderful ideas besides the small sample I have in this book.