In his latest book Still Surprised, CCLP Distinguished Fellow Warren Bennis reflects on his own path to leadership. The memoir traces the lessons he learned growing up in working class New Jersey, fighting in World War II, and running the University of Cincinnati.
The Wall Street Journal reviewed the book, available now through Jossey-Bass
Warren Bennis is one of the business elite’s favorite gurus. He writes about a subject that bosses care about passionately: themselves. And he routinely scatters practical advice about leadership alongside abstract theory. What makes a great leader? What do you do when you first take over? How do you avoid disaster?
Now Mr. Bennis is telling the story of his own rise to leadership in the memoir “Still Surprised.” It is a classic American success story: Horatio Alger updated for the age of the multiversity and the therapy session. Mr. Bennis was born in 1925, the child of working-class Jewish parents in New Jersey who did not even find the time to read to him–but still he clambered to the heights of American academia by dint of smarts and effort.
He encountered plenty of obstacles along the way. He spent years getting his hands dirty in academic administration–as provost at the State University of New York in Buffalo in the late 1960s and as president of the University of Cincinnati in the early 1970s–and he almost died of a heart attack in 1979 before doing his best work. But he carried on: Today Mr. Bennis’s books are read around the world–“On Becoming a Leader” has been translated into more than 20 languages–and the world’s most powerful politicians and business people seek his counsel.
Mr. Bennis goes out of his way in “Still Surprised” to show how much he owes to luck and circumstance. He was one of millions of Americans from hardscrabble backgrounds who were given the chance to reinvent themselves by World War II. He enlisted in the Army in 1943, at age 18, fought in Europe and was awarded a Purple Heart and Bronze Star. His speeded-up education during training at Fort Benning, Ga., and his experience in the field as an infantry officer provided him with an advanced course in leadership, showing him how to command men when he was hardly a man himself.
Thanks to that great agent of meritocracy, the GI Bill, he went on to Antioch College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later taught at Harvard, but he has always regarded his military service as his essential education: “I never heard anything at MIT or Harvard that topped the best lectures I heard at Benning.”
Still, he was fortunate in his postwar schooling. The president of Antioch was Douglas McGregor, one of the pioneers of the humanistic approach to management, and McGregor became a relentless champion of the eager and talented young veteran. McGregor encouraged his interest in psychology and pulled strings to get him into MIT. (“We didn’t exactly throw our hats in the air when we saw your application,” the great economist Charles Kindleberger, an MIT professor, told him when he first arrived.) And McGregor later helped Mr. Bennis land a job on the MIT faculty.
Mr. Bennis confesses that he was so in awe of McGregor that he imitated his mannerisms, smoked a pipe just as his mentor did and even wore a McGregorian moustache. But there was more to the Bennis story than patronage. He had the imagination to specialize in a subject–leadership–that did not really exist in academia. And he had the gumption to abandon a tenured position at MIT–a corner office with a view over the Charles River no less–for a career as a university administrator.
Worrying about the day-to-day running of a school must have been a nightmare of tedium for an intelligent man with a taste for abstract thinking. But Mr. Bennis’s administration jobs sharpened his insights into leadership. He experienced betrayal and back-stabbing firsthand. Intellectuals have a fatal weakness for big ideas; Mr. Bennis’s years as a university administrator taught him the importance of petty things.
“Still Surprised” is modest in both scope and tone. Early in the book Mr. Bennis endears himself to his readers by admitting: “I’ve lost patience with glacier-sized memoirs and biographies that start with the histories of both sets of grandparents.” He does a good job of portraying the fizzing excitement of postwar Cambridge, Mass. He introduces us to a constellation of academic stars, including the psychologist Erik Erikson and the economist Paul Samuelson, and recaptures an intellectual milieu where disciplinary boundaries were being crossed and new subjects invented. It is a far cry from today’s timid and Gradgrindian academic world.
Mr. Bennis also excels at capturing academia’s wacky side. He spent a small fortune on psychoanalysis while he was still at graduate school, in part because everybody was doing it, including the revered Douglas McGregor. And later, as a mature scholar, shortly after his first heart attack, he moved to a houseboat in Sausalito, Calif., and dabbled in Werner Erhard’s “est” seminars, “channelling” and astrology.
All very entertaining. But “Still Surprised” suffers from two shortcomings, one small and another not-so-small. The minor problem: Even Mr. Bennis’s relatively slender narrative drags. He doesn’t provide histories of both sets of grandparents, but he does dwell on tweedy nonentities and long-forgotten internal university politics.
The bigger shortcoming concerns the very subject that made Mr. Bennis’s reputation. A book with the subtitle “A Memoir of a Life in Leadership” might be expected to offer grand insights, after a lifetime of reflection, on leadership. But much of what the author tells us is commonplace. He says, for instance, that ambitious White House staffers should try to get an office as close to the president as possible. What is not commonplace is passed over all too quickly. He observes that leadership is “performance art, and most of us become leaders only when we are cast in that role.” But why do some people succeed while others fail? The answer will be found in other books by Warren Bennis.
Mr. Wooldridge is The Economist’s management editor and the author of its Schumpeter column.