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“Transformational Leadership in a Flat World”
WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran
Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies As Prepared
Washington, D.C. May 26, 2011
Hello Class of 2011.
Dean Einhorn, distinguished faculty, proud parents,
grandparents, friends and future leaders. It is an honor
to be chosen to present this commencement address at
SAIS.
As you know I am blessed to be head of the World Food
Program, a remarkable institution created 50 years ago
this year on the foundation of the Marshall Plan, upon
the ashes of a war torn Europe, where many faced
starvation. From that experience, both Presidents
Eisenhower and Kennedy shared the belief that peace
cannot be built on an empty stomach. Today WFP is
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backed by a coalition of 100 nations and delivers more
than 30 billion life-saving meals on the frontlines of
hunger in places like Darfur, Afghanistan and Somalia.
This is no less true today. Peace cannot be built where
the abject frustration of Mohamed Bouazizi, the
vegetable seller whose self-immolation lit a flame across
the world fueled by the frustrations of the hard working
that have been entrapped in abjectly disabling
environments.
As a graduate of SAIS, you inherit the mantle passed
down by founders Paul H. Nitze and Christian Herter
who also recognized that the post-World War II world
would require a new generation of diplomats, policy-
makers and leaders with a new set of political and
economic skills.
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Boy, were they visionaries. And Dean Einhorn, I see
under your leadership, this dream is being fulfilled.
I think even Christian Herder and Paul Nitze would be
astounded by the global reach of this class: you come
from 50 different countries, representing the different
cultural, religious and ethnic fabric of our world. And look
at all these fabulous women. Congratulations.
Just yesterday I was on the hallowed 7th floor of the US
State Department, in the Secretary of State’s office
meeting with her leadership team on Haiti, food security
and hunger. When I mentioned SAIS, hands went up
around the table: I am a SAIS graduate. Me too.
Bologna. What year? What concentration? Washington.
In leadership roles in trade at USTR, and in global
economic diplomacy at State, I came to rely on SAIS
graduates – always distinguished by a very practical
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training in global leadership. Indeed, 14 members of the
WFP leadership staff are SAIS alumni. Your brand –
indeed your tribe - is special. And I am proud that my
daughter, Nicole Shiner, is a SAISer too.
Today I can only imagine your many emotions, but I
think I can feel your anticipation to go from the
classroom back into action; from listener, to leader.
I know that reaching this milestone was not easy. It was
built upon countless nights spent studying rather than
sleeping, weekends writing papers, and 20 years – or
more – of classes, homework, assignments and well,
hard work and financial investment.
It was also built upon the efforts of those in your family
who came before you. In many cases you may be the
first in your family to earn a masters degree – or even a
college degree. Some were denied the opportunity
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because of the color of their skin or because they were a
woman or maybe they were trapped in poverty so severe
that they struggled just to survive.
Yes, you are among the elite – and the luckiest – of all of
human history: even today less than 7 percent of the
people in the world have a college degree of any kind.
There is a story behind each of you: of someone who
believed in you, invested in you. Perhaps a parent or
grandparent (raise your hands) who sacrificed so that
you could help lead. Perhaps some had to leave their
homeland to give you the dream they would have
wanted in their own lives.
Now that you have completed your language proficiency
examination, core exams and are just one (hopefully)
brief speech away from being handed your degree – the
inevitable question for you is, “what comes next”?
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Perhaps no other class since the founding of SAIS has
stepped out into a world of greater change – of even
hyper-change. Just the past 20 weeks has unleashed a
transformative revolution sweeping away old structures,
mindsets, certainties and moorings.
Yes, we have reached a tipping point. The geo-political
puzzle pieces have been thrown up in the air. They are
tumbling back to earth, and will begin to create new
formations. How will they come together? Will the new
formation advance the aspirations, needs and dignity of
our world? Will it be a more equitable world of
opportunity? Will it be a world tapping the talents of us
all – including women, the marginalized, the oppressed,
the hungry?
Who will lead? What does it take to be a leader in a
world where revolution is spread overnight via social
media and risk is the new normal? What are the qualities
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that a leader must possess to guide constructive
transition in a flattened world? You are being launched
into a world of question, not answers.
As Malcolm Gladwell outlined in his book “The Tipping
Point”, ideas can spread like epidemics. Yet today, we
have Tipping Points in search of leadership.
The expectations of leadership are changing as fast as
the Arab Spring is blooming. Many world leaders must
be saying, “who moved my cheese?” as the classic
management book from the 90s put it. What worked in
leadership even months ago is now considered
hopelessly out-of-date, old-style. Many who have yet to
move onto email, are no doubt demanding of their staffs,
or of their 12 year olds: What is this Twitter? Facebook?
You have all studied the traits of leadership and have
been exposed to leaders. I would like to highlight what I
see as the essential, non-negotiable elements of
leadership in this era of flat, hyper connectedness.
Perhaps add a few of these to your backpacks and
briefcases as you go forward.
1. The end of the “boss” Your generation is turning the “leadership pyramid” –
where power is retained in an ever-narrowing, distant top
structure, upside down. Lesson number one is: Do not
wait to be appointed “boss” to be a leader.
For millennia, the world has operated under a leadership
model based on exclusivity: exclusive access to
knowledge, power, bloodlines. One was able to lead –
and indeed control – through exclusive access to
information and exclusive access to power networks. All
of that has changed in an era where information is a
commodity and power networks can be formed virtually
overnight, from the bottom up.
I was struck by this change when I stood on the border
of Libya on March 1 in a sea of 40,000 people. Frankly,
even the humanitarians – usually agile in leadership –
were caught behind the wave. Tens of thousands of
people had poured over the border, and there was no
formal access to food, shelter or water. The leaders of
the Tulip Revolution, using Twitter and Facebook, had
formed one of the most amazing “citizens supply chain:
cars filled with bread, sandwiches and blankets.
BBC wanted an interview since I was the first UN leader
there, and the reporter was working on a tight deadline. I
was about to start the frontline interview when a gentle
hand touched my arm and said, “Do not talk to the world
before you talk to us.”
I stopped and listened and they told me that their
systems were overwhelmed. They asked for help. They
were seizing their own destiny.
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In every aspect of our society we are moving from a
rigid, hierarchical top-down management structure to
one that is more flat, more flexible and more accessible
to everyone. New technology has also given voice to
those who were once voiceless. On that Tunisia-Libya
border I received Twitter messages with people trapped
in ongoing fighting inside Libya who gave me their
coordinates and said they were waiting for food to be
delivered.
My leadership job today is not so much about “telling
people what to do”, but is more about knowing how to
tap into and guide creativity and talent toward a bigger
vision.
Think of the leaders who have impressed you throughout
history: the Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandellas, and
Gandhis. They did not need Twitter or the Tulip
Revolution to teach them this fact. None of them was the
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boss. But they all led right from where they were, without
a title.
2. The second leadership trait is the one of the most critical: Be a problem-solver. The late John Gardner, former Secretary of Health,
Education, and Welfare under President Johnson and
recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom once
said, “We are all faced with a series of great
opportunities – brilliantly disguised as insoluble
problems.”
It is said that in any given situation, 90 percent of people
are followers, 5 percent are detractors and 5 percent are
leaders. Faced with a challenge or obstacle a true
leader will turn the challenge into an opportunity.
Let me give you an example of how one of my leaders at
the World Food Program turned around a chronic
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problem and moved people from food aid dependency to
sustainable solutions.
In the northern regions of Cameroon, smallholder farmers
are faced with the chronic “boom and bust” cycles of
hunger. They eat well after harvest and can get some
cash by selling food. There are virtually no storage
facilities, harvested crops floods markets, fetching the
lowest prices. And with no way to store their food they
starve – or depend on food aid – in the lean season.
WFP has been there year after year, sometimes even
decade after decade providing aid.
I have challenged WFP staff: work with the communities
and present ways to break these cycles of dependency.
From the bottom up came a revolutionary idea in
Cameroon: community granaries. Here is how they work.
We put together a program to build the first true food
storage facilities and filled them with an initial food aid
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donation of 10 metric tons of cereal. We trained women
management groups and farmers in food storage
management and financial accounting. Community
members can withdraw stocks from the granary during
lean season, and later replenish from their own crops
during harvest with a little interest so the granary is self-
sufficient.
Now there are over 500 granaries operating in
Cameroon, and in many villages women comprise 75
percent of the participants. Guess what – I did not have
to bring those villages food aid this year or last year.
3. The third is the ability to act without perfect knowledge Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and early UN Secretary
General Dag Hammarskjold said, “It is when we all play
safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity. It is
when we all play safe that fatality will lead us to our
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doom. It is in the dark shade of courage alone that the
spell can be broken.”
True leaders must act. In this rapidly evolving
information age sometimes it’s as much a problem
dealing with too much information rather than not
enough. A leader must be able to gather information,
filter it, prioritize and then act. Then it’s critical to have a
feedback loop to correct course quickly, and decisively.
In Haiti, WFP supported the international network of
crisis mappers, who leveraged the combined power of
social networks, such as Twitter, mobile phones and
mapping technology to enable citizens to seek help in a
disaster.
4. The fourth leadership quality: Be passionately curious – ask questions, and then more questions.
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I always say there are only three important things to
know: Where are we today? Where do we need to go?
How do we get there? This can apply to your own life as
well as it can apply to ending world hunger.
One of the most dangerous attitudes in life is the attitude
that our main job is to prove to people how smart we are.
I have sat in critical government meetings where there is
more preening than problem solving. I think this is driven
not so much by arrogance as by an almost primordial
fear of asking questions. My background as a journalist
helped my overcome that fear.
I learned this lesson in a powerful way in Jabori, a small
mountainous village in Pakistan that I visited shortly after
the devastating earthquake in 2005. To get there we
had to helicopter in and then cross a raging stream on a
shaky log. When we arrived we were shown a newly
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built clinic with medicines and a storehouse with other
supplies. All of this was untouched.
I asked to then meet with the women of the village.
Gathered in a makeshift tent I asked the women what
they needed. If you had a magic wand, what is the one
wish you’d ask?
They told me that they only needed one thing – a water
buffalo. The villages’ buffalo, which was lost in the
earthquake, had provided milk for pregnant and nursing
mothers. It gave vital nutrition to young children. They
were so frustrated that of all the aid agencies, UN
organizations and government agencies, none had ever
asked them this simple question.
They had very little use for the unfamiliar boxes of
supplies that kept arriving. They just wanted their
buffalo. I told this story to a group of women in
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Washington not long after and they were so moved that
they raised the $1,000 for the water buffalo, which I’m
happy to report is providing milk to the village.
5. The fifth is: question conventional wisdom Admiral H.G. Rickover said, “All new ideas begin in a
non-conforming mind that questions some tenet of
conventional wisdom.”
At WFP I have banned the words: ”That is not the way
we do things.” Well, we have to try new things. This
reminds me on Einstein’s famous quote: “Doing the
same thing over and over is the definition of insanity.”
One of my favorite books is Clayton Christianson’s “The
Innovators Dilemna, When New Technologies Cause
Great Firms to Fail.” He coined the term disruptive
innovation, which talks about how a new product or
service is often launched at the bottom on the market
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and then relentlessly moves up to displace established
competitors. He tells the story of an ice company in New
England that went out of business when it didn’t see
refrigeration coming. This is why IBM didn’t invent the
PC or why Microsoft didn’t launch Facebook or
Facebook didn’t launch Twitter.
Change is hard, so I also reassure my staff, telling them
that our transformation is like IBM in its mainframe days
turning into Google. We’re doing it, but not without
reminding ourselves everyday that just because it was
always done in a certain way before, does not mean that
we can’t continue to innovate.
6. Plan and strategize – but make it flexible and modular Sun Tzu said, “Tactics without strategy are the noise
before defeat.”
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Today we have a lot of “Ready- Fire- Aim.” There are no
shortcuts on strategy. It requires time and planning to
align ends, ways, and means. Some of the most
successful companies – from Apple to Starbucks – are
those that have clearly defined strategies to reach their
vision.
But the days of crafting a 5 year strategic plan and then
executing it are over for everyone as disruptive
technologies make even a 1-year plan soon obsolete.
At WFP, we develop strategic plans that are both
comprehensive and overarching on a global level as well
as specific and relatively short-term for each country and
context. This decentralized and modular strategy allows
us to be nimble in response to unexpected emergencies
and rapidly changing situations on the ground.
Our mandate for 50 years has been to save lives and
livelihoods and everything we do supports that highest
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goal, but what programs we use, foods we deploy and
responses we have come from a flexible toolbox of
responses that allow us to respond as quickly as
possible while being as efficient as possible.
7. Finally, Be opportunistic. Benjamin Disraeli said, “The secret of success in life is
for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it
comes.”
Leaders recognize the unique window of opportunity
before them and respond accordingly. The ancient
Greeks had a word to capture this: kairos, meaning the
opportune moment. The Greeks believed that such an
opportunity had to be grasped otherwise the moment
would be gone forever.
Be proactive in creating your own opportunities. If there
is one single piece of advice I would offer you it is: Don’t
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chose a job. Find mentors. My career has ranged from
journalism to the private sector from government to
international service from diplomacy to Wall Street. And
every move I made was motivated by the opportunity to
learn from someone I admired.
When Paul Nitze was asked in an interview by the
American Academy of Achievement about all the
contributions he had made during his illustrious career,
his laconic reply was the following: “I have been around
at a time when important things needed to be done.”
This was a man who had the foresight to conclude that a
massive aid program would be necessary to avert an
international financial crisis, recognizing the unique
opportunity to structure a new post-war international
order. As one of the principal authors of the Marshall
Plan, Nitze capitalized on this moment in history to help
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shape world affairs for generations of Europeans that
would follow.
Well, you all graduate today at a time when something
important needs to be done. Get in the closest proximity
to a leader you admire as possible. Study them. Take
initiative, lead from the bottom. Treat all with respect,
kindness and as a potential source of brilliance. The rest
I am sure will follow.
Ray Kurzweil, a futurist and inventor of disruptive
technologies from voice recognition to scanning, was
quoted in Time Magazine as saying, “We are the species
that goes beyond our limitations. We didn’t stay on the
ground. We didn't stay on the planet. Our species
always transcends."
Lead, transcend. Graduate, celebrate. I look forward to
collaborating with you on the front lines of the world’s
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challenges – for today, you become, something very
esteemed. Something very valuable. A SAIS graduate!
SAIS Class of 2011, I’m counting on you to be the
generation of leaders that makes hunger history; that
breaks the bounds of poverty and helps our species
transcend.
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