Member Connector - International Leadership … join us for this exciting and unique opportunity. Questions can be directed to Sean Thomas, Director of Leadership Programs at [email protected]

ConnectorMember

P a g e 3Introducing ILA’s 2015 Board Officers

P a g e 7Thank You ILA 2014 Sponsors

P a g e 9Featured Publication: Hard Times: Leadership in America, Interview with Barbara Kellerman

P a g e 1 7San Diego Keynote Videos Now Available on ILA’s YouTube Channel

P a g e 1 8Kansas State University and Washburn University Bring Home the Gold in ILA’s 8th Annual Student Case Competition

P a g e 2 0Leadership Events & Opportunities - Print, Post, & Pass It on

P a g e 2 1ILA Events & Important Dates; Leadership Job Opportunities; and Newsletter Ad Rates

JANUARY 2015

Inside...

The beautiful new Presidential Library for George Washington at Mount Vernon, in partnership with the International Leadership Association (ILA), is hosting a two-day conference, Thursday, April 9th–Friday, April 10th, 2015, on James MacGregor Burns and his contribution to Leadership Studies. The conference will feature former students, colleagues, and mentees of Burns and will focus on the scholarship and legacy of one of the most influential thinkers on leadership. Burns was a staunch supporter of ILA from its inception and the winner of ILA’s Lifetime Achievement award in 2008.

Why should you attend?

As the “father of leadership studies,” James MacGregor Burns demonstrated that our own past provides an inexhaustible storehouse of powerful lessons. Through the study and examination of centuries of world leaders, including George Washington, Burns transformed how we think about the problem of leadership. From a focus on the personal qualities of individual leaders, to a broader consideration of how change happens, Burns understood leadership to be a moral imperative. As he wrote “the task of leadership is to accomplish some change in the world,” and the study of leadership entailed understanding the profound desire of human beings to satisfy “the opportunity to pursue happiness.”

The conference — The Pursuit of Leadership: Remembering James MacGregor Burns — will be an opportunity to hear and discuss with today’s thought leaders on the merits and possibly new directions of study of Burns’ seminal theories.

[Continued on Page 2]

Registration is Now Open: http://goo.gl/MVUSUA

* Photograph Courtesy of Williams College

http://goo.gl/MVUSUA

ILA MEMBER CONNECTOR • JANUARY 2015

International Leadership Association www.ila-net.org2

[The Pursuit of Leadership Continued]

The schedule is filled with an impressive list of leadership scholars and historians — most of whom are ILA members — who will be offering pre-circulated essays or serving on discussion panels.

Michael Beschloss - Award-winning historian, Emmy-winning contributor to NBC News and the PBS NewsHour

Joanne B. Ciulla - Founding faculty member, University of Richmond Jepson School of Leadership Studies; author on leadership and ethics

Richard A. Couto - Senior Scholar at Union Institute and University; founding faculty member of the Antioch University PhD Program in Leadership and Change; award-winning author on community leadership and social change

Tom Cronin - McHugh Professor of American Institutions and Leadership at Colorado College; author and co-author of several best-selling text-books on American government and the American presidency

Susan Dunn - Professor of literature and the history of ideas at Williams College; author of several critically acclaimed books on Franklin D. Roosevelt and the founding era

George Goethals - Faculty member, University of Richmond Jepson School of Leadership Studies; noted scholar and author of several books on leadership theory and heroic leadership

Gill Robinson Hickman - Professor Emerita, University of Richmond Jepson School of Leadership Studies, author of many scholarly articles and books on leadership and change

Ed Larson - Pulitzer Prize winning author on history, politics, and law; Hugh & Hazel Darling Chair for Pepperdine University’s School of Law; Inaugural Fellow for The Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington

Georgia Sorenson - Founder and Director James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, University of Maryland, College Park; prolific author and scholar on leadership

Why Mount Vernon?

James MacGregor Burns once shared that, “the causality of leadership is, to me, the most crucial question and I think we can find answers to it in history, political science, economics, sociology, and the other disciplines”. Mount Vernon is an

iconic American landmark - an enduring reminder of the life and legacy of the Father of Our Country and one of its greatest leaders. Having visited the estate several times, as well as co-authoring George Washington with Susan Dunn, Mount Vernon not only serves as an ideal location to honor Burns, but also serves as a springboard for future leadership scholarship for generations to come.

These new initiatives into leadership education at The Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington include the new George Washington Leadership Institute at Mount Vernon. The George Washington Leadership Institute at Mount Vernon is the only leadership development program in the world to focus its teaching exclusively on the leadership principles exemplified and executed by this remarkable hero and statesman — principles that have been proven effective for more than 200 years.

The Leadership Institute’s programs seamlessly blend historical examination with modern-day insight, to take you deep inside Washington’s world and mind. Through: Fascinating lectures and discussions led by world-renowned scholars and experts; behind-the-scenes exploration of Washington’s beautiful Mount Vernon estate; and hands-on examination and analysis of original documents and manuscripts

Participants will learn to connect the lessons of the past to the specific issues you face today, and apply to your own performance the same principles and strategies that guided Washington’s actions and contributed to his phenomenal success.

How do I register?

Registration is now open: http://goo.gl/MVUSUA

Date: Thursday, April 9th-Friday, April 10th, 2015

Cost: $200 - Includes Thursday and Friday evening cocktail receptions, Friday lunch, and transportation to and from conference hotels. Additional meal and tour options available for purchase during online registration.

Location: The Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon, Mount Vernon, VA

Please join us for this exciting and unique opportunity. Questions can be directed to Sean Thomas, Director of Leadership Programs at [email protected] or by calling 1.703.799.8627.

http://goo.gl/MVUSUA

mailto:sthomas%40mountvernon.org?subject=Burns%20Event%20Question



Katherine Tyler ScottILA Board ChairManaging Partner at Ki ThoughtBridge

Why did you first become a member of ILA?

I was one of the researched-based practitioners invited to participate in the Kellogg Leadership Studies Project’s (KLSP) gathering of scholars and practitioners to create and publish cross disciplinary leadership research. This gathering was one of the foundational events in the creation of the ILA. At the time, the expansion of my work made my participation impossible. I was the Executive Director of The Lilly Endowment Leadership Education Program (LELEP), a statewide program developed in collaboration with the Lilly Endowment and the University of North Carolina Center for Early Adolescence. LELEP transitioned into a national program focused on governance leadership development, which I directed for 17 years. The program — Trustee Leadership Development — trained over 50,000 staff and board members in 30 states and trained over 300 consultants to use the materials and tools we developed. My colleagues and I developed numerous resources focused on improving governance and leadership in the not-for-profit sector including Creating Caring and Capable Boards, published by Jossey-Bass in 2000, which was the first book I wrote on governance. While developing LELEP I continued to

Introducing ILA’s 2015 Board Officers

receive reports and updates from KLSP and I was aware of the founding ILA Conference in 1998. I attended my first ILA conference in 2000.

During my service to ILA I chaired the Global Learning Community for Applied Leadership (now the Leadership Development Member Interest Group), assisted in the development of a process for the selection of presentations/papers, and — as an ILA Board member — chaired the ILA Board Development Committee and served as a member of the Executive Committee. I also had the honor of being the conference weaver for ILA’s annual global conference in Prague (2009), Boston (2010), London (2011), Denver (2012), and San Diego (2014).

I believe that leaders need to have an external group in which they can share their ideas and experiences, remain up-to-date on current research, theory, and best practices, and learn new and more effective ways of leading and teaching this work. ILA is this resource for me — it has stimulating thought leaders, cross sector learning, like-minded visionary colleagues, continual learners, and more.

What specific expertise do you bring to your officer position?

Board Leadership is about a lot more than title and position, although I have served on and been in positions of leadership on numerous boards over the years. I respect the gifts and contributions of others and find ways to meaningfully engage those with whom I work. I value open, honest, and constructive dialogue. I like clarity and efficiency and am comfortable with ambiguity when it will lead to a better decision and outcome.

On January 1, 2015, three ILA members stepped into their new 3-year terms as board officers. ILA’s by-laws (Article IV) stipulate that the association shall have four officers elected by the ILA Board who may serve up to two terms: Chair, Vice-Chair, Treasurer, and Secretary. ILA’s Board Secretary began the third year of his 3-year term on the first.

We recently asked ILA’s officers to think back on why they first became involved in ILA and what led them to deepen their involvement and serve in this capacity. We also asked them to look forward, imagine the association ten years from now, and describe what future members might say about the journey they are about to embark on.

Their answers reveal the diversity of experience these officers bring to the association, reflective of the unique mission of ILA to bring together a diverse global network of those who practice, study, and teach leadership for the purpose of promoting a deeper understanding of leadership knowledge and practices for the greater good of individuals and communities worldwide.



I have served on the board of a New York based pension fund with assets of over 9 billion dollars for 12 years. My expertise in leadership development and governance was used in the development of the Board, to help frame the strategic planning process, and in the search for a successor to a long tenured President and CEO. I was also the Vice-Chair and Chair on the Board of The Stanley K. Lacy Executive Leadership Program (a community leadership program).

My expertise and passion is leadership education and adaptive leadership skill development, governance leadership, process consultation, and organizational development. I have served on many boards, chaired numerous committees and have been asked to assume a leadership role on nearly every board on which I have been asked to serve.

When we look back ten years from now, what do you hope ILA members and staff will say about your work as a board officer? What do you hope to accomplish?

I hope they will be talking about the Board of leaders, whose vision aligned our core values with prudent action and provided a solid foundation for sustainable growth and a global presence of ILA.

So much has been accomplished in ILA since I first became a member and since I have been on the Board. There is increased attendance at conferences, vitality and growth in membership, increasing interdisciplinary collaboration, and increasing financial health. As a 501(c)(3) with different legal responsibilities and fiduciary duties, we are obligated to be the keepers of the mission while ensuring that the core values of ILA are expressed in responsible, innovative, creative ways that inspires trust and engages ethical and authentic leadership all across the globe. One of our highest priorities is to provide ILA with excellent governance leadership in order to position the organization for a sustainable and financially secure future; serve our members’ intellectual and professional interests with excellent offerings and opportunities; and become the envisioned global network of scholars, educators, and practitioners with the capacity to impact and improve the world.

Mansour JavidanILA Board Vice-ChairGarvin Distinguished Professor & Director of Najafi Global Mindset Institute, Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University


One of my earliest involvements with ILA was when my GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness) colleague Robert House gave a plenary session at ILA 2001 in Miami. I returned to ILA in 2007 to give a keynote in Vancouver and then a special session in 2008 in Los Angeles on the Global Mindset Inventory. In late 2009, I was part of a keynote panel in Prague and then I began my board service with ILA in 2010. I stepped down for a bit, due to other commitments, but now I’m back!

The main reason for my interest in ILA is the international scope of the organization. ILA is a rather unique organization that tries to bring practitioners, researchers, and students of leadership together from different parts of the world, from different industries, nonprofits, corporations, etc. That is interesting and challenging to me. My interest is in leadership in the global environment so it’s a perfect match there.


I bring a few different angles to the board.

First, the research angle — since 1991 I’ve been involved in GLOBE, a large scale multi-phase, multi-country research project trying to understand societal and organizations cultures and their relationships with leadership expectations in different countries as well as leadership expectations across many countries. As a result, I’ve developed a deep understanding of how to work across countries and the challenges of expanding globally.

Related to that is my Global Mindset Project, which helps managers succeed in global roles in a global environment. That project has been going on for the past eleven years and I now have a database of over 26,000 managers in different countries. My interest is in answering the question, how can leaders and managers develop a global mindset and work better with people in different cultures? I bring that research

Learn more about ILA’s Board of Directors atwww.ila-net.org/about/board.htm

http://www.ila-net.org/about/board.htm



side to the board and the membership, which can be applied to ILA’s different initiatives.

Second is the practice angle — I’ve led workshops and training programs and worked with managers and CEOs in over 30 countries all over the world. Through the Najafi Global Mindset Institute at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, I’ve worked with executives one-on-one and on a group basis, developing ways to put that research into practice. So, I bring the ability to bridge between scholarly research and managerial needs and requirements.

Having this kind of background allows me to support the ILA and is aligned with ILA’s mission of bringing people together. And, I also have a large network of scholars, researchers, and practitioners from many countries who all have a common interest in understanding and improving leadership across cultural environments.

I also have past experience on the board of another nonprofit institution. The other members of this particular board were all senior executives and CEOs of large organizations. That was a helpful learning experience.


I agreed to join the board, number one, because ILA is designed to bring together practitioners and scholars and people from different places. Diversity of thought. Diversity of realities. Diversity of challenges. One thing I hope to achieve is to help ILA expand and exceed its past success in this area by growing the organization’s numbers. So, ten years from now, we’ll be a bigger organization with a stronger presence in practice and a stronger presence in academia. Ten years from now, I hope we have a large number of members bridging the worlds of research and practice in and across many countries.

I would also like to support and encourage the ILA as a vehicle for enhancing the scholarship of leadership in specific countries. For example, I just finished editing a special issue of Leadership Quarterly on Asian models of leadership, which is due out later this year. There has been very little research done in Asian countries on leadership. Encouraging projects like this within ILA’s membership will be an important accomplishment in my mind.

The last thing I hope we see ten years from now is the further spread of ILA globally and a more global membership and

Board of Directors. Members of the Board, for example, will be individuals from many different countries and will include a diversity of senior executives, practitioners, and scholars.

Janis Bragan BaldaILA TreasurerAssociate Professor of Sustainable Enterprise, Center for Sustainability and Global Change, Unity College


Actually, I became involved with ILA through my daughter, who was in college at the time, and began attending the global conferences. She kept telling me what a wonderful organization it was, with an exciting mix of professionals interested in and working with the ideas and practices of leadership. After going the first time, I never stopped! It has been a joy to attend the conferences and also to meet and collaborate with others who are part of the ILA network. It has offered wonderful opportunities and close relationships.


Since I am an attorney who specialized for many years in nonprofit organizations, I have served as a volunteer on a number of different boards of directors. All of those experiences have fostered in me a deep appreciation for the ways in which such organizations operate, the immense value of their membership and volunteers, and the fiduciary responsibility of their boards and committees. In the ten years I was on the Board and Finance Committee of MAP International, a health-related NGO, I learned to appreciate the highs and lows (financially and otherwise!) and the significant complexity of responding to the internal needs of the organization while ensuring the externally oriented mission of the organization keeps us innovating in what and how we deliver to our stakeholders.


The ILA is in a solid financial position and it’s an exciting time to be involved on the Finance and Executive Committees. I’m hoping that I will have made a significant



contribution to strengthening the resources and organizational development of the ILA. What I plan to work toward is adopting sound financial policies, expanding and diversifying our financial strategies to ensure we not only maintain a current level of service but accomplish our strategic goals (and in particular advance internationally) and developing and protecting the ILA brand. I’m also committed to identifying the individual strengths and committee standards needed to make the Finance Committee an even stronger resource for the Board.

Roger H. SublettILA SecretaryPresident, Union Institute & University


I’ve been here since the beginning. I was working with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, running the Kellogg National Fellowship Program. We were starting to do leadership programming and one of the first programs we did was work on creating a network of leadership scholars around the country. The Kellogg Foundation hosted a meeting in Battle Creek and about 80 folks attended, including Georgia Sorenson. That meeting led to a number of grants being given to various places, one of which was for the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland. With Kellogg’s interest in leadership, I was thrilled to work with Georgia on the Academy of Leadership and with Georgia, Barbara Kellerman, Larraine Matusak, Jim Burns, Juana Bordas, and Scott Webster, among others, on the creation of the International Leadership Association, housed at the Academy of Leadership.

It was a heady time for those of us involved in leadership back then. There weren’t a lot of leadership programs in the U.S. or around the world. People were talking about management, but not leadership. It was really a wonderful opportunity to expand the knowledge, the scope, and the study of leadership. Kellogg invested in all kinds of leadership initiatives at the time including investments in about 40 different college programs as well as grassroots community leadership programs. It was a fun time to be a part of a cutting-edge initiative at Kellogg.

Over the years, I’ve participated in most of the ILA conferences and gave the conference weaving at the 2000 conference in Toronto. I joined the ILA Board in 2010 after I became President of Union Institute and University. It was only after I left Kellogg that I was able to serve on ILA’s Board due to a potential conflict of interest.


I think I bring the understanding of funding and grant writing from my experiences at Kellogg. As the President of an organization that has centers from New England to California to Florida, I also bring an understanding of leadership in a dispersed organization and how important collaboration and communication skills are across distances.

Over my career, I’ve had the opportunity to serve on a lot of boards of directors. To name just a few, I served on the Board of the Association for Continuing Higher Education (ACHE) including five years from 1984-1989 as Executive Vice President. ACHE represented about 600 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada. I served at the American Council on Education and was Chair of their Commission for Lifelong Learning and also at the Coalition for Adult Education Organizations which, at the time, included AARP and had almost 40 million members. Specifically, as it relates to my role as ILA Board Secretary, I served as Secretary on the Battle Creek Symphony Orchestra’s Board of Directors, the oldest symphony in the state of Michigan.


I hope they will see us working to establish a very solid 501(c)(3) organization and that we will have developed excellent leadership to sustain ILA for a longtime in the future. I hope future staff and members see that we added meaning to the word “international” and expanded our global outreach. I’ve just been so impressed with our past 2-3 global conferences. They have been fantastic. We’ve attracted more global presenters and a greater diversity of leadership knowledge. I hope future members will look back say, “Wow! They made a difference in the development of leadership around the world.”

It remains a privilege to have been around at the start of ILA and to now be a part of our ongoing transition from an institutionally based organization to a strong, independent nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization.



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MANY THANKS TO OUR

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Thank You 2014 Annual Global Conference Sponsors!

Bronze SponsorsCabrini CollegeFielding Graduate UniversityJepson School of Leadership Studies University of RichmondPresentation TechnologiesSaybrook UniversityWright Graduate University

Sponsorships are now being accepted for ILA’s 2015 Annual Global Conference in Barcelona

Details are available online at: www.ila-net.org/sponsor

Or Contact ILA’s Director of Conferences, Bridget Chisholm at [email protected] or

1.202.470.4818 X 103

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FIE: Foundation for International Education proudly presents...

LEADING THE CHANGE:Social Justice in a Complex WorldDate: Friday 10th - Sunday 12th April

Location: Imperial College Union, South Kensington, London, UK

The 2015 Theme: Explores the present and future nature of leadership in a world of inequity filled with complex and competing economic, social, and environmental dynamics. From small beginnings can come big change. Privilege, power, choices, and responsibilities of leadership in the 21st century will be considered throughout the conference in the context of social justice, both global and local.

BREAKOUT SESSIONS

keynote speakers

and much much more...

PANEL DEBATES

for further information please visit:web: www.fie.org.uk/conference

email: [email protected]

socials

• study • intern • serve • london • dublin • amman •

STUDENTGLOBALLEADERSHIPCONFERENCE

2015

http://www.fie.org.uk/conference

mailto:conference%40fie.org.uk?subject=



by Barbara Kellerman (Stanford Business Book, October 2014)

Barbara Kellerman is the James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Public Leadership at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. She is the Founding Executive Director of the School’s Center for Public Leadership and was cofounder of the International Leadership Association. She has authored and edited numerous books on leadership, frequently appears on media outlets such as CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, NPR, BBC, and regularly contributes to the New York Times, the

Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the Harvard Business Review. Kellerman speaks to audiences all over the world and was ranked by Forbes.com as among the “Top 50 Business Thinkers,” (2009). In 2010 she was given the Wilbur M. McFeeley award by the National Management Association for her pioneering work on leadership and followership. In 2014 she was ranked 13th by Global Gurus in the “World’s Top 30 Management Professionals.”

Matthew Sowcik is an Assistant Professor in Leadership Studies and the Director of Leadership Education in the Department of Entrepreneurship and Leadership Studies at Wilkes University, where he has worked professionally for the past 11 years. Aside from his research and administrative duties, Sowcik also currently serves as a consultant to the New York Times, focusing on the newspaper’s educational programming for leadership studies faculty and students. Currently, Matthew is serving as lead editor for the ILA Building Leadership Bridges book series, working on the book Leadership 2050: Contextualizing Global Leadership Processes for the Future coming out later this year.

MATT: I have the pleasure of talking with Barbara Kellerman about her recent book Hard Times: Leadership in America. First, Barbara, let me congratulate you on writing an amazing book. More importantly, let me congratulate you on once again writing a book that takes on a topic that I think is tremendously critical to leadership, yet underrepresented in the leadership scholarship.

BARBARA: Thank you so much.

MATT: There is a wonderful quote from Jim Kouzes discussing the book and sharing his appreciation for your ability to “tell it like it is.” I think one reason leadership scholars and practitioners are drawn to you, and your contributions to the field, is because you’re a contrarian. You were addressing the dark side of leadership in your book, Bad Leadership, when most people were writing about good leadership. You wrote Followership, which advanced your belief that followers are as important as leaders at a

time when most scholars focused on the leader. Finally, I think your skepticism and questioning of the leadership industry, in The End of Leadership, has really opened the eyes of many in the field. How have these books, written over the last decade, brought you to the point of writing Hard Times: Leadership in America?

BARBARA: That’s a good question, Matt. I do regard Hard Times as the last piece of a very small and simple puzzle. As you mentioned, I’ve been on this trajectory for about ten years. I’ve been in the field a long time. I was in the field when people were still optimistic that studying leadership and teaching leadership could make a positive contribution to world affairs.

Hard Times: Leadership in America

Featured Author Interview



I have a relatively untraditional history. I have a Master’s in Russian and East European Studies. I did my dissertation on a famous German chancellor by the name of Willy Brandt. Then, as I began teaching, I veered into American studies. The continuing themes throughout this history were power, authority, and influence — in other words, leadership. When I first began writing explicitly about leadership, very early in my professional career, I was a relatively traditional leadership scholar. That is, I had the leader at the center of the action. Then, I started to question my own field in several critical ways.

That questioning was first evident [chuckle] with the publication of my book Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters. I looked at leadership studies and I had no clue — and, I have to say, Matt, I still have no clue [chuckle] — as to why our field is so woefully inattentive to leaders who are other than wonderful. We focus incessantly on developing good leaders. We teach nothing about how to stop or even slow down bad leaders, which I defined in the book in several different ways. Everybody knows the world is full of bad leaders. I am still thunderstruck by the fact that for a field that presumes to be about the study of leadership, and the teaching of leadership, and the development of leaders, we are averse to looking at the dark side. Why? Even if bad leadership only suggests inadequacy and inefficiency — it doesn’t have to be evil and dreadful — why do we study it so little? I don’t know the answer.

Then, while I was writing Bad Leadership, it dawned on me, really for the first time, that you simply cannot have, and do not have, bad leadership without bad followership. This led to my book Followership: How Followers Are Creating Change and Changing Leaders. Then, while I was writing about bad leaders and bad followers, it similarly dawned on me — although it took years for the idea to mature — that one cannot understand leaders and followers without understanding the contexts within which they are embedded, which brings us to Hard Times.

My quintessential example of the importance of context is the case of Nazi Germany. I often use this example before different audiences because it is so obvious and so easy to understand. You cannot understand Nazi Germany if you only look at Hitler. You cannot understand Nazi Germany if you only look at the German people. You cannot understand Nazi Germany even if you look at Hitler in tandem with the German people — all German people, regardless of what they did during the war and the years preceding it in the 1930s, after Hitler became chancellor. You cannot understand Hitler and the German people in the 1930s and the early 1940s

without understanding where Germany was in that moment in time.

It’s no accident that when we teach this, we always mention that Hitler had a particular appeal, in part, because Germany had been humiliated immediately subsequent to World War I; in part, because of the Great Depression; in part, because of certain aspects of the German culture. Even when I was writing Bad Leadership I realized that leadership had to be about more than looking at a single individual. Each chapter of that book was divided into three parts — the particular leader, the followers, or the others who were involved, and the context of the case that I was writing about.

After Bad Leadership and Followership, I wrote The End of Leadership in which I looked at the world, the total universe [chuckle], and decided that leadership in the twenty-first century was changing in ways that needed to be addressed. Inevitably, perhaps, in The End of Leadership, I also took on what I came to call the leadership industry, and I wrote about the many things that I would do differently if I had my say about how leadership should be conceived, and taught, and so on. Finally I arrived at Hard Times: Leadership in America which is really, as I mentioned, the final piece of my evolutionary trajectory, which took place over the last ten years.

Hard Times: Leadership in America is exactly what its title implies. It is not particularly about leadership. It is not particularly about followership. It is entirely about the United States of America at this moment in time and how various components of context impinge on leadership and impinge on followership. I argue that the way to look at leadership is to take a more systemic approach. It’s a very simple system that I call the leadership system. Drawing on my work over the past ten years, there are three parts to the leadership system, all of equal importance. One part is the leader. One part is the followers or the others, whoever they are. The third part is the context or contexts within which leadership and followership are taking place.

MATT: That is a wonderful part. You suggest in the book, “more than ever it is better — better in practice and better in theory — to focus less on the leader and more on the leadership system.” I agree. Why do you think those who study leadership have focused so little on “contextual expertise?” It just makes so much sense and seems so simple. Why has it taken so long to get there in our writing?

BARBARA: That’s a really good question which, of course, I’ve asked myself [chuckle]. How did we, who are leadership



scholars, get to be where we are? As with any good question, Matt, there are several different answers. I will give you two, but there are more. The first one is because that’s where the money is. You know the old line, “ follow the money.”

MATT: Sure.

BARBARA: So, follow the money. Most of the leadership industry is about the teaching of leadership — that is, teaching (or trying to) how to be a good leader — not about the study of leadership. Jim Burns [James MacGregor Burns], who so many people in the field revere, did not do this. He was a student of leadership. He knew about leadership. He never claimed to know how to teach people how to lead. But, nevertheless, the field has gone in a different direction. There are a lot of people claiming to teach people how to lead. This fixation is related to where the money is. Follow the money — the money is in teaching how to lead.

The second thing — and this is really a phenomenon as old as human history that I think is hardwired — is it is unbelievably simpler to sometimes credit, but more often than not blame, a leader for whatever is happening. If we’re in a war, or we’re in a recession, or a company is successful, or a company is unsuccessful, it is so much easier to look to the leader and to use the leader as the main explanatory factor. It is much more difficult to step back and do a more complicated analysis of why the country — or the company, or whatever entity you’re talking about — is where it is. It’s just simpler. It is simpler to blame the principal if something is going wrong in a school than it is to step back and say let’s see now, is the problem with the teachers? Is it the students? Is it the parents? Is it the community in which the school is embedded? Is it other administrators? Leadership, we think, is all about individuals. The individual leader is where there is money to be made. And, the individual leader is the simplest way of explaining our reality to ourselves.

MATT: Let’s dive a little further into the book. In Hard Times you provide what you’ve called a “checklist” of what a leader needs to know about context if that individual wants to lead effectively. You do a thorough job in the book of getting at the breadth and depth of about 24 different contexts to consider. Can you talk a little bit about your checklist and the different contexts that you selected for the book?

BARBARA: Sure. First, I’m not sure I would say they are “different contexts.” Rather, they are different components of context. Look, when I examined where the United States of America is at this moment in time and how, at this moment, different factors or different parts of this country impinge on leadership, I ended up, as you said, Matt, with 24 different

components, but I could just as well have ended up with 14 or with 34. At some point every author or every instructor, as you well know, draws a line around what they will write about or what they will teach on. As I looked at the different components, I thought, “Well, 24 is a good number. It conveys complexity, but it is not so big a number that it becomes an encyclopedia of what the United States is at this moment in time.” Each of these sections, of course, is very brief, but I hope they are not so brief that they do not convey some depth of understanding.

I always knew I was going to do something about the importance of history and ideology because I just don’t think you can understand anything without knowing a little bit about both. You certainly can’t understand Barack Obama as a president or, what most consider to be an incredibly dysfunctional, Congress without having a clue about the history of the United States of America. After beginning the book with a chapter on history, I then move on to the American ideology. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, checks and balances — all those things that people in the U.S. grow up learning about — they impinge on our conceptions of authority and on our willingness to be led. Ideology matters. I then go on to many more contemporary considerations including, as you can imagine, politics, religion, economics, business, technology, media, the law, etcetera.

I was really trying to do a 360 degree scan of the United States in this second decade of the twenty-first century, always with a view to asking how these different components interact with people who are trying to lead. The book is called Hard Times: Leadership in America because I wanted it to have a title that conveyed how these different contextual components make leading in the United States of America very difficult. There are reasons why leaders in America, regardless of sector, are finding it quite a bit harder to lead in the second decade of the twenty-first century than they did 25 or 50 years ago, or arguably even five or ten years ago. It is Hard Times because leadership in the U.S. at this moment in time is hard. It’s really difficult to do.

MATT: That certainly comes across throughout the book. As a professor in a business school, I was particularly interested in the sections on the contextual components of business and organizations. I could certainly see myself asking my students to read those chapters to be able to frame those contextual components. Could you talk just a little bit about how the current contextual components of business impact corporate leaders and managers and, more specifically, how it has become more difficult to lead in these environments?



BARBARA: Matt, I have a regular blog, BarbaraKellerman.com, where I write about this all the time. In The End of Leadership I talked a little bit more about political leaders than I did about corporate leaders because I felt it was easier to see how ordinary people were complicating the lives of political leaders. But I also wrote in that book, which is only a few years old now, that I thought the heyday of the corporate leader was over. I have to tell you, Matt, if I were teaching in a business school — which I do, by the way, I teach at Dartmouth’s Tuck Business School every spring — I would try to develop a course on Hard Times: Leadership in America for corporate executives.

It is so much harder now to be a corporate leader. They are still paid so much that this colors our view. We think of them as so lucky. But they’re not! They’re in trouble. They’re the last people we think we need to worry about or feel sorry for, but they are having a hard time leading. Everybody is making life more difficult for them. They have many more stakeholders they have to worry about than they used to. Their tenures as CEOs have dropped precipitously. Boards are now nipping at their heels in ways they did not ten years ago. Shareholders — including, most obviously, shareholder activists — are making things hard for them in ways they weren’t three to five years ago, not to mention ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago. To be a corporate leader today is way more precarious a position than it was a decade ago. This is unlikely to change. The public and the media are just after leaders in a way they were not previously. That doesn’t mean that at other points in history we left our leaders alone — after all, there’s a tradition in the U.S. of being anti-authority — but corporate leadership is changing radically as is leadership in every sector. That perch at the top of the greasy pole is a lot less secure and a lot more fraught with stresses and strains, which I write about in the book from all sides.

Let me just make one more point, Matt, very briefly.

MATT: Of course.

BARBARA: I write about sweeping trends. What has interested me now for the same ten years that we’re talking about are the overarching trends in leadership and followership. I don’t find great distinctions between, let’s say, corporate leaders, political leaders, military leaders, or educational leaders. They’ve all suffered a precipitous decline in reputation. They’ve all suffered a slew of stakeholders that are poking at them in unprecedented ways. They are all at the mercy of technology in ways that were unimaginable ten years ago. They’re all at the mercy of media twenty-four/seven in ways that were unimaginable until recently. The reason the book’s title includes something as sweeping as

Leadership in America rather than Corporate Leadership in America is because, although corporate leaders are very much at the center of this book, they are not the only ones. Leaders, period, across the board are beset by the same sets of problems. The similarities among them are much more striking than the differences.

MATT: Absolutely. As you know, I’m lead editor for ILA’s 2015 volume in the Building Leadership Bridges series, Leadership 2050: Contextualizing Global Leadership Processes for the Future. Hard Times has a wonderfully written section on the future, climate change and the environment. In the book you state, “Climate change is a fiendishly complex issue, and controlling climate change is difficult beyond imagining.” How are different components of context impacting our ability to ultimately address climate change both now and into the future?

BARBARA: I’m glad you raised that right after the previous question, Matt, because these problems that seem so impossibly complicated are yet another reason that leaders are having such a hard time leading. Who was even worried about climate change twenty years ago? This whole climate change conversation? It started five minutes ago. Sure, there were people since Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring taking part in the environmental conversation, but only in very recent years have corporate leaders, political leaders, educational leaders, etcetera, increasingly been pressed to address this issue.

There is a sense that the problems that leaders now face — of which terrorism and the environment or climate change, whatever language you want to use, would be high on the list — are more vexing and threatening than they were some time ago. Certainly, threats are nothing new. The United States went through two world wars. But, in those instances, you could more easily identify the enemy. The world seemed simpler. When you’re talking about climate change, you’ve got two primary problems. One, the United States can’t do anything about climate change on its own. Addressing climate change involves a level of international cooperation that is new and formidable. Humankind has not had to cooperate on this scale before and, as we can see, it’s a huge struggle. So, it’s a huge struggle one because we’re not used to global collaboration. Two, it’s also a huge struggle because scientists — while they agree that climate change is a dangerous and potentially imminent problem — do not necessarily have a clear agreement on what exactly should be done about it.

Naomi Klein has recently written a book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, in which she discusses how responses to climate change go against the

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grain of the very capitalist system that characterizes the United States. In other words, to address climate change we would have to get corporations involved in a way that is historically unprecedented. I don’t think I say this is in Hard Times, but it seems more and more likely that it will take a calamity, or a series of calamities, or a major calamity beyond any that the United States or the world has yet experienced, in order for us all to do something. So, if you’re a leader leading in 2014, 2015, 2016, what are you going to do with the knowledge that climate change is happening? On the one hand, you need to to plan for it. If you’re the head of the Coca-Cola Company or you’re the head of Exxon or you’re the head of IBM or Microsoft, you can’t be completely oblivious to the issue of climate change. But, on the other hand, you are also very, very, very, very, very well aware of how little control you actually have over being able to impact climate change in any consequential way.

MATT: Picking up on your reference to the need for international cooperation, while the book does a wonderful job focusing on the contextual components of the United States, we would be selling the book short if we didn’t also mention the chapter discussing the increase in the number of national, transnational, and multinational actors. You touch on global organizations, regional organizations, and functional organizations, as well as the global media’s impact and role. The chapter does a great job of taking contextual components impacting leadership in the United States and expanding them out onto a much larger global stage.

BARBARA: Look, I haven’t written just about the United States in a really long time. [Laughter] But, you can’t talk about the U.S. anymore in isolation. It’s just not possible. In that chapter I describe an international system that is very different, again, from what it used to be even ten or fifteen years ago. The U.S. has been diminished by some of those changes and I write about how much harder it is to lead in that system. But, while I talk about the U.S. in the larger global system, the other thing that’s worth mentioning — and I think your question gets at this — is that countries other than the U.S. ripple through the book over and over again.

When you are talking about economics or business, you can’t talk about them anymore as just America’s corporate sector. America’s corporate sector is now inextricably linked to other corporate sectors just as American markets are linked to Chinese markets or are linked to German markets. Markets are interconnected in ways that are historically unprecedented and so, for example, is competition. In the old days, people in the U.S. competed with each other. Now we compete not only with each other, but with people, literally, from all around the world. The whole playing field of competition has been

expanded. This is true not only in the corporate sector, but in other sectors as well. For example, the way we measure the progress, or lack thereof, of students in the U.S. is not only in comparison with students from other communities, or districts, or states. We measure progress in comparison with students from all over the world. We’re measuring ourselves now, in every aspect and with every product, against global competitors. Hard Times is a book that’s very much about the United States of America, but it is about a U.S. that is situated in a larger global system.

Furthermore, while I use these twenty-four categories, these twenty-four components of context, to look at the United States, my framework is intended to be fungible and transferable. I could take these exact same twenty-four components of context and look at France through that same lens. I could look at Brazil through that same lens or Vietnam through that same lens. The reason I call it a contextual checklist is because it can be applied to any place at any time. You can take the same exact framework and apply it to any country at any moment.

MATT: I think we need to. For me, the point of the book is to start focusing on that third component of the leadership system, context. It is likely that by understanding components of context, on a global scale, we can understand the leadership system a little bit better. For me, your book is the call to do that in a broader sense.

BARBARA: I’m really persuaded, Matt, that we have spent…. Let me make one comment that I write about in the End of Leadership. What’s wrong with this picture? On the one hand, in the United States you now have a leadership industry that’s roughly thirty, forty years old. On the other hand, you have a leadership class that for the last thirty, forty years has suffered slings and arrows as never before. Across the board, leaders are less respected, less admired, less loved, less powerful, less everything than they used to be thirty, forty years ago. This apparently inverse relationship is one that those of us in leadership studies really need to take a serious look at. We need to look at our own field and ask: What is it that we could be doing differently? Certainly one of the things I argue we could be doing differently is to make the study of leadership slightly more complicated than what it has been. I don’t mean that the leadership system is a complicated lens; rather it’s a richer and a fuller lens through which to look at this phenomenon of how change is created or not created. We would do our students, or our clients, or our customers, or whoever is willing to listen, an enormous favor if we would teach them that this field is about much more than them — about much more than single individuals. It is about the other and it is also about the context or contexts



within which, inevitability, they’re going to be situated. Maybe then as teachers of leadership we would be more effective.

MATT: I love that. Another piece I really enjoyed was the discussion around trends and the four broad groups that you talk about: demographics, economics, technology, and ideology. What impact do you think trends in those domains will have on the future of leadership? How should we be paying attention to those?

BARBARA: I think all of them will impact what it means to lead. I don’t have any magic answers. Whenever anybody writes a leadership book readers say, “Okay, so what’s the solution?” [Chuckle] There’s no magic potion here. I just think it’s going to get harder. First of all, let me make a distinction between democracies and autocracies. If we look to places that are in the news right now — we’re having this conversation in December of 2014 — such as Russia or China, these are countries where, in general, leaders have become more autocratic, not less, certainly in recent years. This raises the question of why. Why was Putin, for example, more liberal five or ten years ago than he is now? I would argue that it is precisely because of active followers. There’s an increasing divergence between democracies and autocracies, but it seems to be rooted in the same sweeping phenomena. Young people, especially those that grew up in an egalitarian culture, are less willing to just go along. The Weberian model of bureaucratic hierarchy is, in part, out the window. It’s why we talk about flattened hierarchies. Autocratic leaders meet these trends with great resistance. They try to clamp down. You see this in Russia and in China, today. Time will tell how this is all going to work out for them. As I’m talking with you Matt, oil prices are dropping and the ruble has dropped through the floor. Is Putin going to be able to hold on as long as he had originally intended, through something like 2024? What’s going to happen in China? These are questions I can’t answer.

In terms of these trends and the democratic model of leadership, it is getting harder and harder to lead. Leaders in the Unites States, and in Western democracies in general, are saying, “How am I going to get anybody to do anything?” Germany is one of the few exceptions to the general rule. It has been led for many years, as you know, by Angela Merkel and I have to say it has been led to her great credit, or to the credit of German people. Germany has been an oasis of stability and a model of good democratic leadership for some years and Angela Merkel has done very well for herself being able to lead Germany through a period of some turmoil in the rest of Europe. But, it’s tough. The trends all lead in the same direction. Leadership is going to get harder and not

easier. This raises the question: How do you lead in a moment in history when people, especially but not exclusively in democracies, are resistant to being led?

MATT: I wanted to expand on that thought. Certainly one of the themes in the book is that leaders are getting weaker and followers are getting stronger. Would you talk a little bit about followership and the strength of followership? Additionally, would you discuss the importance of follower influence from a leadership perspective?

BARBARA: Sure. The theme of the changing balance between leaders and followers is very much present in Hard Times: Leadership in America, but of course it’s also a central theme in my previous book, The End of Leadership. When I finished writing The End of Leadership I was asking myself, why is there this shifting balance — certainly in the west — between leaders and followers? That question then prompted me to think, “I’ve got to write a book about context because I think the reasons for that shift are not in ourselves.” It’s not we who have changed. [Chuckle] Human nature is more or less the same in 2014 as it was in 1994, twenty years ago or, for that matter, two hundred or two thousand years ago.

MATT: Absolutely.

BARBARA: What then has changed? The context. For example, we could spend this entire conversation just on technology. What has been the impact of technology on the relationship between leaders and followers in the last five or ten years? What is the impact of social media on followers, setting aside leaders? It’s commonsense and touched on often, but it has not been explored or looked at in depth. There has been little written about it. What is the impact of technology on ordinary people who feel emboldened and empowered, who have been given a voice, who have been given the capacity to connect, who have been given the capacity to say horrible things about their leaders in ways, I might add, that are usually, or at least often, anonymous? What does that do to people? How does that make people react when a leader then tries to tell them to turn right or to turn left? There is no doubt in my mind. Look, I can’t prove this. I do not have empirical evidence. But, it stands to reason that if you have grown up digitally, if you have grown up feeling enormously empowered through your devices, when somebody then comes along and tells you what to do, you’re going to say, “Excuse me? What?” [Chuckle] You’ve exerted so much control over your environment through your devices, you’re so used to expressing yourself and stating your opinion through your devices, that the idea that you should suddenly shut up and be a tame citizen or a tame worker, as people were at an earlier moment in history, is farfetched.



Just technology alone is empowering ordinary people, followers, if you will, or whatever language you want to use, in a whole new way that makes it really hard for people to lead. Leaders have been so denigrated, so torn down, and so ill attended to that they simply don’t have the power, authority, and influence — the three leadership resources I typically talk about — that they used to. One of the arguments I make at the end of Hard Times is that the primary tool of the trade for leaders in the twenty-first century is, in fact, interpersonal influence. As power and authority decline, what’s left? Influence. So, leaders need to look to interpersonal skills. These become more important than they have ever been before.

If I can, I’ll just tack on one more comment. It is often said of Barack Obama that as president he has not been interpersonally skilled. However bright he is, however hard working he has been, one of his strengths is not this sort of personal schmoozing, wheeling and dealing, having drinks after five with members of Congress and so forth. Some people argue that that’s not important, it’s trivial. I’m in the camp of “it is not trivial!”. It’s really important. It is a necessary skill to a president or a leader who is going to succeed at this moment in time in this particular culture.

MATT: Yet, there is also the follower paradox that you talk about at the end of Hard Times. Followers are more emboldened and have more influence than ever, however, not enough to change things, which is why leaders stay in place.

BARBARA: Yes. It’s complicated. We have a great case right now. In the wake of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson and in the wake of the chokehold death of Eric Garner in New York City, as you well know, the U.S. has had marches in many cities around the country protesting police tactics and the findings of grand juries. Ordinary people have just had enough. They’re sick of it. They don’t want this to happen anymore. But, whether these protests will be translated into a successful political push to really change things at the local level, in police departments for example, is too early to tell. I have no doubt that there will be some changes as a result of what happened in Ferguson and Staten Island and also in Cleveland and in several other cases since Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012. People are looking at this in a more serious way. But, there is no obvious or visible leader around to lead us toward major charge.

That’s what I call the follower paradox. There are a lot of angry people out there. They’re unemployed or they angry

about race relations or they’re moaning, for very good reason, about the miserably inadequate minimum wage. There is a lot of anger, but it hasn’t come together. It hasn’t led to change. The occupy sentiment has not gelled. The anger, the disenchantment, the alienation has not yet gelled into a coherent political movement. That’s the follower paradox. Followers aren’t happy about the current situation, but until that dissatisfaction evolves into a clearer sociopolitical movement, it is unlikely significant change will have a chance to be realized.

MATT: Your examples are always so evocative. I think that’s one of the things that people should know going into your book. There really are some wonderful examples. You do such a great job at telling the stories.

BARBARA: Thank you, Matt. I wanted to mention that I recently developed a new course at the Kennedy School called Leadership System, which I taught for the first time last semester. It’s not a hard sell. Everybody gets it. Nobody disputes it and everybody in my experience seems to welcome this somewhat more complicated, but also immensely richer model of how to understand change and stasis.

MATT: I think they just needed someone to do the dirty work and put the stories together, so that the components of context are interesting enough to teach. [Laughter] You have certainly done that, and done it very well, in the book.

BARBARA: Well, thank you. It’s not really as if I’ve invented something new. What I have done, I like to think, is simply pull the strands together and make sure that they are enduringly entwined.

MATT: As we get near the end of our time, I want to take a bit of a side journey and talk a little about your writing process. I think people would be interested in hearing about that and about the time and energy you put into writing this book.

BARBARA: One thing I will say about writing is the longer you do it, as with anything, the better you get at it. I have written quite a number of books over the last several decades and a lot of articles. I am also a regular blogger. In other words, I write a lot. Doing it for so long, I write quite well and I write quite quickly. Furthermore, I write in a disciplined manner. People often say to me, “How do you do it?” My answer is, “I work hard.” [Chuckle] This is not

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something that falls in your lap. I’m a morning person, so typically I like to write first thing upon awakening. I do it, usually, seven days a week. That’s how all these books get written. I do it and I’m disciplined. I try to get some research support. Harvard is pretty good about that. So I’ll put down some books or articles that I need and if I’m lucky, I’ll have somebody help me procure them so that I can go through them quickly. Hard Times: Leadership in America took me about one year to write. And, when I say one year, I actually mean 365 days. I don’t mean one year minus three months that I took off!

Although I’m quite fast at writing now, I never just churn it out. I will sometimes look at a paragraph and think, “Oh my, this is horrible. How did I write such a rotten sentence?” I always go back. I always edit. I try to write for an educated lay audience. My general model is the New York Times. No academic jargon. I’m past that. Though I do footnote heavily so that people can see from where I got this statistic or that quote. I try to write in a way that is entirely accessible and in plain English, but also provides context so that readers are not wasting their time.

MATT: That certainly comes across, as does your multidisciplinary perspective, which I know has been important to you in the past.

BARBARA: Very. How one can study leadership without understanding history or, I should say without knowing something about history, philosophy, psychology, politics, economics, and I probably could tack on several other areas of inquiry. I have no clue how leadership is understood apart from a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary approach. By the way, that’s one of the things that makes it thrillingly and endlessly interesting. It is precisely because so many different disciplines are brought to bear on it. At Harvard I also developed a course called Leadership Literacy, and then put together an anthology to accompany it, titled, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence. It contains excerpts from the great leadership literature. If I were queen of the leadership world, I would assign Essential Selections first and foremost. The selections go back to Plato and Confucius and Lao Tzu and Machiavelli and continue with Hobbes and Locke and John Stuart Mill, Freud and Lenin, Peter Singer, Larry Kramer, and Rachel Carson, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln. This is a canon of the great leadership literature. Apart from all the other disciplines that we’ve been talking about, leadership can also be seen as a fabulously rich literary exercise.

MATT: That ties back to your initial comments about the difference between studying leadership, which this book

does, and the rush to develop great leaders or the belief that we can develop great leaders. Those who truly understand the importance of studying leadership and understanding it in all its capacities, will agree that this book is wonderful.

BARBARA: Thank you. And, again, it’s not a hard sell. We do our students a disservice if we treat leadership as something that’s a how to. It’s not a how to — or at least not only. It’s also a journey into intellectual inquiry.

MATT: As we reach the end of the interview, I have one last question. It’s actually a question that you pose in the book. What lessons, if any, can we learn from contextual checklists and from the lessons that Hard Times: Leadership in America teaches?

BARBARA: I’ve got one short and simple lesson for you, Matt. The primary lesson that I have learned in focusing on the leadership system is that if we’re going to insist on teaching how to, then we should do a better job of it. Instead of this relentless focus on the self, on the leader, we should focus much more on other people and on the contexts within which leaders and followers alike are embedded. We need to teach leaders to see who is out there. As a leader, to whom do I need to pay attention? What do they need and want and what do they need and want from me in particular? What can I do for them? Similarly, what are the contexts that pertain? Stop focusing so much on yourself. Pay more attention to what is beyond your own immediate persona. Pay more attention to other people and pay more attention to the situation. If we teach people “how to” do this, they will be more successful leaders, more effective leaders, more decent leaders, than if you fixate too much, not to mention solely, on self-development.

MATT: I love the idea of humbling yourself to the follower and then humbling yourself to the larger system in that context.

BARBARA: Exactly. It is humbling yourself and understanding the degree to which you need to focus on what’s external, not only on what’s internal that will make you more effective at what you’re ostensibly trying to do — which is to lead.

MATT: Barbara, thank you so much for your time today and for your contribution to a field that so desperately needs to focus on things like context.

BARBARA: Thank you, Matt.



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Kansas State University and Washburn University Bring Home the Gold in ILA’s 8th Annual

Student Case Competition

Washburn Students Celebrate Victory on the Beaches of San Diego

For the second year in a row, Kansas State University students departed ILA’s annual global conference in San Diego as winners of the Student Case Competition, Graduate Division. Incredibly, their 2014 team was made up of three undergrads and only one graduate student. Case Competition rules stipulate that even if the majority of a team are undergrads, the presence of just one graduate student pushes the team into the graduate division of the competition. Washburn University took home the prize in the undergraduate division. A first time win for their Leadership Institute, team member Mary Ralston warns competitors in Barcelona to “watch out for Washburn University — we are on a roll.”

Organized by ILA’s Leadership Education Member Interest Group (LEMIG), the yearly Case Competition brings together teams of students to faceoff in an event where they analyze and develop a specific set of strategic recommendations that address key issues in a real world case involving contemporary leadership issues. The winning team from each division receives a $1,000 cash prize to be divided amongst them and is honored at the closing plenary of the conference.

Rian Satterwhite, 2015 LEMIG Chair, notes that, “With 25 teams and approximately 100 students participating in the 2014 Case Competition, by many measures it was the ILA’s most successful yet. The judges walked away from each of the three rounds very complimentary of the work, thoughtfulness, and application of theory that each team was able to bring to bear in responding to this year’s difficult leadership challenge. Each team should be proud.”

The case this year, written by ILA member Todd Murphy of Northwestern University, was titled, “Chasing a Dream” and was from the New York Times inCollege inLeadership. The case details the challenges faced by young adults who were children when they immigrated with their parents to the United States without the proper papers. These “dreamers,” now considered illegal immigrants, face numerous obstacles impeding their ability to attend college and obtain employment in the U.S.

Prior to the start of the conference, teams were given the case and asked to create a two to four page brief (round one). Teams then prepared a poster of their analysis and recommendations, which they presented at the start of the conference (round two). After round two, the top three teams in each division were invited to compete in the third and final round. These teams spent the next two days attending conference sessions that contributed to the further development of their analysis and preparing a 15-minute final presentation, which they then delivered before a panel of judges and interested conference attendees.

According to Satterwhite, Rob McManus — past Chair of the LEMIG and an Associate Professor at the McDonough Center for Leadership and Business at Marietta College — “coordinated the judging and played a crucial role in the success of this year’s event. We revised the judging system this year and involved many more people in the process.” Satterwhite offered a “very special thanks to Rob and to all of the judges who are too numerous to mention by name.”

Kansas State Students Pose with Their Poster During Round Two

“I volunteer to coach our

team because I enjoy working

with students on leadership ideas

and issues. I really enjoy the ILA conference

and watching our students develop as leaders and engage in the conference in a meaningful way. Our students get so

much out of being at the conference and participating in the case competition.

Some of our students who have participated in the Case Competition

have come away from the conference with new ideas for their careers, some have changed their majors, and some have found meaning in their existing

major and/or career paths. When I see that the conference can have that

kind of impact on students, I really do say Wow!”- Andrew Wefald, Assistant

Professor, Staley School of Leadership Studies, Kansas State University



Participating in the Case Competition is an incredible opportunity for students to more fully engage in an ILA annual global conference and traverse a large gathering of leadership folk with a team of friends. When asked what wowed them at this year’s conference, the winners highlighted sessions that resonated with them and shared their feelings of being part of a larger leadership universe.

For Washburn student Jack Van Dam, “The best part was getting to meet and network with students, faculty, and scholars of leadership from all across the world. Although we were from different countries, and spoke different languages, leadership is the language that brought us all together.”

Alix Carole Onmalela Bilip, originally from Cameroon, wrote, “Being from Kansas State University, I do not see a lot of other Africans pursuing the study of leadership. At the conference I was excited to see that I was not alone in seeking the knowledge that I think is necessary to build ‘healthy’ Nations at home, and all over the world. I was motivated to keep up my passion for leadership.”

Kansas State teammate Colby Haverkamp shared, “I observed so many speakers applying leadership concepts and ideas in ways that I never would have even dreamed of. Individuals were taking ideas we often discuss up to the next level. I really felt empowered to know I can do so much more with what I am learning.”

Lauren Edelman, Associate Director of Washburn’s Leadership Institute echoes this with her advice to coaches, “Strongly encourage students to attend every conference session/workshop they can throughout the experience and have many conversations with people from different institutions and backgrounds. This takes

the competition to a different level as students expand their base knowledge of leadership theory and learn to apply new perspectives and approaches to their existing arguments.”

Students who participate in the competition experience multiple facets of leadership firsthand. As scholars, they

ILA’s Leadership Education MIG is currently seeking a volunteer to coordinate the 2015 Student Case Competition in Barcelona. Contact Rian Satterwhite, Chair of LEMIG, at [email protected] if interested.

Look for the opportunity to serve as a judge in one of the three stages of the competition when you register for the ILA’s 2015 annual global conference in Barcelona online. All non-student attendees are welcome to

volunteer in this capacity, though space may be limited depending on the needs of the competition.

analyze the case and develop theoretically sound strategies. “The ILA Case Competition offers students an amazing opportunity to apply concepts they are learning in leadership courses and brings related theories to life. My hope is that this will translate into the application of these theories in other situations in their lives,” shares Michael Gleason, the Director of Washburn’s Leadership Institute. As practitioners, students do their own leadership work by organizing their team, developing a division of labor, and learning how to navigate individual differences and ideas between colleagues to create the best possible solutions.

As Kansas State student Tyler Bedell describes, “The whole process was intense. I was able to work with very different individuals from different walks of life. We combined our knowledge and broke down our own stereotypes together. It was amazing how we grew.”

Rebecca Maasen, a member of Washburn’s winning team learned, “It is crucial that each member of the team agrees on the main goal of the project and is passionate about achieving this outcome.” Teammate Mary Ralston added, “When we utilized each person’s individual strengths, we were able to create the best possible product.”

Perhaps Alix Carole Onmalela Bilip said it best: “Team work has always been the best way to come up with GREAT, in my opinion. One can tell that there was no possible way one brain could come up with such a perspective like the one we proposed. Our success spoke for itself. That is the strength of working as a team. Our differences make our strength.”

Finally, Gleason points out that participation in the case competition benefits more than just the students who attend the conference. “I would encourage the coaches to consider ways in which students can share their learning back at their own institution. This increases opportunities for the students to reflect while also encouraging other students to participate in future years. On our campus, for example, the students presented to our Leadership Institute Advisory Board and were also selected to present at our Undergraduate Research Day at the Capitol.”

mailto:rsatter%40uoregon.edu?subject=Case%20Competition%20Volunteer



Leadership Events & Opportunities — Print, Post, & Pass It OnThere is so much going on in the world of leadership that ILA members are involved in! To help members connect with other members, we’ve developed this new column, “Print, Post, & Pass It On,” where members can share leadership events, opportunities, even survey requests with other members. If you have an item for inclusion please email [email protected], but please note, we do not guarantee publication of your item nor do we make any warranty regarding the items listed.

Conferences, Symposia, Workshops, Etc.

May 21-23Leadership: Today & Tomorrow, IEDC Bled School of Management conference, Bled, Slovenia

June 15-18Becoming a Leader: A Matter of Education? University of Nordland, Bodø, Norway, Email Anders Örtenblad for details

June 17-20Uncertainty Is a Great Opportunity, 15th Annual EURAM conference, Warsaw, Poland

July 2-4Organizations and the Examined Life: Reason, Reflexivity, and Responsibility, European Group for Organizational Studies 31st Colloquium, Athens, Greece

July 12-15Association of Leadership Educators, 25th Annual Conference, Washington, DC, USACFP DEADLINE: MAR. 6

July 15 -167th Annual Developing Leaders Conference, Henley Business School, University of Reading, UK

July 20-23 Grounded in What? Re-examining Foundational Leadership Theory: Implications for the Field of Leadership Studies and Student Leadership Development, NCLP’s National Leadership Symposium, University of Louisville, KY, USA

Sep. 3-4Towards Socially Responsible Management?, 18th Annual Irish Academy

of Management (IAM) Conference, Galway, Ireland

Sep. 8-10The Value of Pluralism in Advancing Management Research, Education, and Practice, British Academy of Management Conference, University of Portsmouth, UKCFP DEADLINE: FEB. 27

Oct. 1-3Leadership Conference 2015: Leadership. Complex. World, Royal Roads University, School of Leadership Studies, Victoria, BC, CanadaCFP DEADLINE: FEB 15

Dec. 13-15New Directions in Leadership Studies: Exploring the Critical Turn, 14th International Studying Leadership Conference, Lancaster University, UKABSTRACT DEADLINE: SEP. 1

Publication Opportunities

Feb. 15Call for Chapter Expressions of Interest Deadline: Leading and Managing in the Social Sector

Mar. 13CFP Deadline: The Mid-Atlantic Leadership Review

Mar. 15CFP Deadline: Design Thinking and Social Justice, a special issue of Organizational Aesthetics

Mar. 31CFP Deadline: Gender and Leadership, a special issue of Leadership Quarterly

Apr 1CFP Deadline: Dynamic Viewpoints on Implicit Leadership and Followership

Theories, a special issue of Leadership Quarterly

Oct. 30CFP Deadline: Charisma: New Frontiers, a special issue of Leadership Quarterly dedicated to the memory of Boas Shamir

Other Opportunities

My name is Joseph Lestrange and I am currently collecting data for my doctoral thesis at Indiana Institute of Technology. I am seeking a diverse set of global leadership professionals with a minimum of a Master’s Degree in management /leadership, i.e. MBA, EMBA, MPA to interview regarding their lived experience pertaining to Values Based Leadership. I have constructed a theoretical model for values based leadership based on an intense integrative literature review and I am now seeking to test this model cross culturally via a series of open ended semi structured interviews using the phenomenological method of qualitative inquiry. I am hoping to purposefully select three global leaders from each of ten geographical clusters identified in the GLOBE study. Each interview will be about 60 minutes via SKYPE. If you are interested in participating in this study, please email me directly at [email protected] to receive additional information. Thank you in advance for your willingness to be a part of my doctoral journey.

Feb. 27th RFP Deadline: Central Michigan University is seeking a consultant to develop a written report that outlines a plan for a comprehensive student leadership program at their school. To receive the full RFP send a one-page statement of interest with contact information and a single reference to Daniel Gaken at [email protected].

mailto:dderuyver%40ila-net.org?subject=

http://www.iedc.si/about-iedc/centres/conferences/leadership-and-tommorow

mailto:anders.ortenblad%40uin.no?subject=

http://www.euram-online.org/conference/2015/

http://www.egosnet.org/2015_athens/general_theme

http://leadershipeducators.org/NextConference

http://www.henley.ac.uk/events/7th-developing-leadership-capacity-conference-dlcc

https://www.naca.org/NLS

http://www.iamireland.ie/annual-conference/2015-annual-conference-nuigalway.html

http://www.bam.ac.uk/bam2015

http://sls.royalroads.ca/leadership-conference-2015

http://ila.memberclicks.net/assets/islc2015.pdf

https://ila.memberclicks.net/assets/CalendarEvents/leadingsocialsector.pdf

http://ila.memberclicks.net/assets/CalendarEvents/cfp%20s15.docx

http://digitalcommons.wpi.edu/oa/socjus_call.pdf

http://www.journals.elsevier.com/the-leadership-quarterly/call-for-papers/special-issue-on-gender-and-leadership/

http://www.journals.elsevier.com/the-leadership-quarterly/call-for-papers/special-issue-on-dynamic-viewpoints-on-implicit-leadership/

http://www.journals.elsevier.com/the-leadership-quarterly/call-for-papers/special-issue-charisma-new-frontiers/

mailto:Joseph.Lestrange%40gmail.com?subject=

mailto:Daniel.Gaken%40cmich.edu?subject=RFP%20Request



Upcoming ILA Events &

Important Dates

Leadership Education Academy Conference, Orlando, FL, USA

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Aug. 2-5Advancing Women in Leadership: Waves of Possibilities, 2nd ILA Women and Ledaership Affinity Group Conference, Asilomar Conference Grounds, Pacific Grove, CA, USA

Learn more | Registration Now Open

June 7-10

The Pursuit of Leadership: Remembering James MacGregor Burns, 2-Day Conference in partnership with George Washington’s Mount Vernon

Learn more | Registration Now Open

Apr. 9-10 CFP Deadline & Volunteer Peer Reviewer DeadlineLeading Across Borders & Generations, 17th Annual Global Conference, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

Complete CFP | Reviewer Info

Feb. 1

Leading Across Borders & Generations, 17th Annual Global Conference, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

Conference Home Page

Oct. 14-17

Acceptance status for Leading Across Borders & Generations will be emailed to all submitters by this date.

May 10

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Leadership Job OpportunitiesAssistant/Associate Professor in Leadership & Organizational Studies

Leadership Studies in Education and Organizations, Wright State UniversityDayton, OHClosing Date: Until FilledView Complete Description

Education Program SpecialistU.S. Department Of StateArlington, VAClosing Date: 2/3/2015View Complete Description

Sherry H. Penney Endowed Professorship of Leadership

University of Massachusetts, BostonBoston, MAClosing Date: Until FilledView Complete Description

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Member Connector - International Leadership … join us for this exciting and unique opportunity. Questions can be directed to Sean Thomas, Director of Leadership Programs at [email protected]