 |
Dr. Warren Bennis (Antioch College, Class of 1951) is one of the nation's foremost authorities on organizational development, leadership and change. He is currently a distinguished member of the Ph.D. Program's Panel of Visitors, and was a member of Antioch University's Board of Trustees (1968-71).
Warren first became a student of leadership while observing his twin brothers, one whom had natural leadership abilities while the other "couldn't influence his way into a stickball game." Later, as a young Army lieutenant during WWII, he began to study the topic more seriously. He learned how to lead from his own soldiers, who taught him "everything from how to hit the ground and dig a foxhole to how to direct [his] scouts," and from his superior officer he learned how to survive and lead others on the battlefield.
Upon his return from the war, Warren attended Antioch College on the GI Bill. At Antioch, he learned to have opinions. "That may not sound very important," says Warren, "but it amounted to a personal paradigm shift. What freedom, what liberation, to have opinions, sometimes based on reason and evidence, sometimes based on nothing more than the liberal campus zeitgeist. Having opinions was, at least for me, tantamount to developing a personal identity." The three things that influenced Warren most during the Antioch years were: first, the cooperative education program (Antioch's distinctive work-study curriculum) and the "the relationship or lack thereof between theory and practice" second, the desire to achieve personal satisfaction while, at the same time, living a life of civic responsibility; and third,
obtaining a healthy skepticism of totalizing theories that eliminate the opportunity for independent thought." Finally, it was at Antioch where Warren met his mentor, Antioch College president Douglas McGregor, founder of the school of industrial psychology at MIT.
Bennis went on to earn a Ph.D. in economics and social science at MIT and then taught at its Sloan School of Management, also founded by McGregor. His academic career continued when, in 1967 , he became provost for SUNY-Buffalo. "I was haunted," says Bennis, "almost obsessed, by the need not just to teach and research management and leadership but to experience it firsthand." Of his stay in Buffalo as provost, Warren writes, "I learned that unless vision is sustained by action, it quickly turns to ashes. In ways that only later became clear, we undermined the very thing we wanted most. Our actions and even our style tended to alienate the people who would be most affected by the changes we proposed.There are no clean slates in established organizations. At Buffalo, we newcomers disregarded history. But without
history, without continuity, there can be no successful change. Alfred North Whitehead said it best, "Every leader, to be effective, must simultaneously adhere to the symbols of change and revision and the symbols of tradition and stability.'"
In 1971, he became president of the University of Cincinnati (1971-78). At UC he wished to lead, rather than simply manage. In order to do so, he established an "executive constellation," essentially a cabinet, to more readily take advantage of the expertise of others and allow the leaders under him to realize their own potential. He also resolved to no longer be everything to everyone. "I realized I was trying to be everything to the organization father, fixer, ombudsman, policeman, rabbi, therapist, and banker." Looking back on his experience at Cincinnati, Warren compares it with psychoanalysis. "I wouldn't have missed it for the world," he writes, "and I would never go through it again. In becoming a leader, I learned a number of important things both about leadership and myself. As Sophocles observes in
Antigone, "But hard it is to learn the mind of any mortal, or the heart, 'til he be tried in chief authority. Power shows the man."
Since 1979, Dr. Bennis has served as University Professor and Distinguished Professor of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. He considers that he has entered a truly generative stage in his life, one in which he pursues his greatest joy, writing, while also mentoring and taking pleasure in "people growing."
A few of Bennis's many books are:
* An Invented Life: Reflections on Leadership and Change. (1993) (All quotes above are from the introductory essay, "An Invented Life: Shoe Polish, Milli Vanilli, and Sapiential Circles.")
* Learning to Lead: A Workbook on Becoming a Leader (1997) with Joan Goldsmith
* Managing People Is Like Herding Cats: Warren Bennis on Leadership (1997)
* On Becoming a Leader (1994)
* Organizing Genius : The Secrets of Creative Collaboration (1998) with Patricia Ward Biederman
* The Corporate Culture Survival Guide (1999)
* The Temporary Society (1998) with Philip E. Slater
* Why Leaders Can't Lead: The Unconscious Conspiracy Continues (1997)
| |
