Leading with purpose: Crafting a vision and cultivating courage
Focusing on the powerful interplay between vision and courage in leadership, Tina Seelig and John Hennessy examine how bold visions are crafted, refined through feedback, and brought to life despite significant challenges. Examples like the Stanford Challenge and responses to financial crises highlight the importance of committing personally to a vision, understanding and balancing different types of risks, and acting decisively when it matters most.
These insights offer valuable lessons for leaders seeking to navigate complex environments and drive meaningful change.
Four key episode takeaways:
- Refine your vision with input from others.
- Demonstrate your commitment to build trust.
- Leverage diverse perspectives to navigate risks.
- Act decisively in times of crisis.
Hosts
Tina Seelig is Executive Director of Knight-Hennessy Scholars, the largest, university-wide, fully-endowed graduate fellowship in the world, and Director Emeritus of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. She teaches courses in the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) at Stanford and has led several fellowship programs in the School of Engineering that are focused on creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
Dr. Seelig earned her PhD in Neuroscience at Stanford Medical School, and has been a management consultant, entrepreneur, and author of 17 books, including inGenius, Creativity Rules, and What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20. She is the recipient of the Gordon Prize from the National Academy of Engineering, the Olympus Innovation Award, and the Silicon Valley Visionary Award.
John Hennessy is co-founder and Director of Knight-Hennessy Scholars. He is Chairman of the Board of Alphabet and serves on the Board of Trustees for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Hennessy has been on the faculty of Stanford University since 1977 and previously served as the President of the university for 16 years after roles including chair of Computer Science, dean of the School of Engineering, and university provost.
He co-founded MIPS Computer Systems and Atheros Communications. He and Dave Patterson were awarded the ACM A.M. Turing Prize for 2017 and the National Academy of Engineering Draper Prize in 2022.
Full transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated by machine and lightly edited by humans. They may contain errors.
[00:00:00] Tina Seelig: Welcome to Leading Matters, a podcast from Knight-Hennessy Scholars, a multicultural and multidisciplinary graduate fellowship program at Stanford University that focuses on leadership.
[00:00:23] I'm Tina Seelig, your host and executive director of Knight-Hennessy. Throughout these six episodes, I'll talk with John Hennessy about his experiences in different leadership roles, including as a faculty member, entrepreneur, president of Stanford University, and founder of Knight-Hennessy Scholars.
[00:00:43] John.
[00:00:44] John Hennessy: Tina.
[00:00:45] Tina Seelig: Today, we're going to focus on two important aspects of our leadership model at Knight-Hennessy Scholars. Those two are vision and courage. That is the ability to develop really clear goals, sometimes in the face of opposition, or challenging execution, or sometimes even the risk of failure.
[00:01:04] I've seen you lead the university as president for sixteen years and have always been incredibly impressed with your willingness to take really big bets. For example, as soon as you came into office, you crafted this really bold vision of the Stanford Challenge and took it on the road. In fact, you called the whole road show Leading Matters, which was an inspiration for the name of this podcast.
[00:01:26] I'm curious, can you tell us a little bit about how the Stanford Challenge came to be? Who and how you created the vision? How did you go about bringing it to life?
[00:01:37] John Hennessy: The Stanford challenge was first and foremost, a strategic plan for the development of the university over, say, a ten to fifteen year period. But it was also a vision that we could garner support from alumni and friends so that we could do something really powerful and transformative in the university. The Stanford Challenge was created over a period of time. With both some bottoms up thinking that bubbled up from the faculty in the university, things they thought we should be doing. And some top down guidance, too, in terms of what we thought would make a compelling set of goals and objectives for the university.
[00:02:19] So we kind of combined both of them as we went along, and we were driven by an observation that Stanford had reached a point in its evolution where it could think boldly about what it might done. We had finished a big campaign focused on undergraduate education that really solidified both financial aid and the quality of our undergraduate program.
[00:02:42] So we began to think about how do we take this incredible set of schools here, all ranked in the top few in the country in their fields. And really leverage that broad capability to reach and begin to address the really big problems that society has and be problem solvers with respect to those issues.
[00:03:04] Tina Seelig: So what were the big challenges you took on?
[00:03:06] John Hennessy: First and foremost was thinking about the environment and sustainability issues. But we also thought about issues about globalization and what was happening in the world and peace and security. The rise of democracy around the world and how do we ensure that. We thought about issues in healthcare and biomedical technologies.
[00:03:26] And then we had another direction that came up actually from the faculty planning group. Which was to invest in the arts in a big way. Stanford had never made a really large commitment to the arts of the scale of what our East Coast competitors had done. We thought maybe this is the time to do it. And I knew that we had some alumni and friends that were enthusiastic about doing something there. So if we could craft a vision we could really elevate Stanford's position with respect to the arts.
[00:04:00] Tina Seelig: That's a really interesting point you bring up, is that these things had to actually happen with support from the community, whether it's alumni or other generous community members. How big a role did they play in having a vision that they shared?
[00:04:17] John Hennessy: We started by formulating what we thought was a rational plan, working largely with the deans of the schools and these interdisciplinary faculty planning committees. Then we began to shape that. I wrote a thought paper as often to try to coalesce a vision. I find when you have to write a paper and may only be three, it was four or five pages. But it forces you to really think about what your vision is and to be a little more concrete than you would otherwise be.
[00:04:46] So I wrote that and then we started to circulate that first with a small group of trustees and former trustees who were close to the university. And then with a larger group, we did a series of events, mostly in people's houses over dinner, where we talked about the vision and we shared it with them and got feedback and saw what people thought about it.
[00:05:06] And so you hone it that way so when you roll it out to tens of thousands of alumni, it's really well thought out and it's tested by that process.
[00:05:16] Tina Seelig: I was fortunate to get to go on the road show, the Leading Matters road show, to a number of the destinations. And I can tell you that at the end of each one, I personally was moved to tears seeing this vision and also seeing these incredible stories of students who are working on these really, really impactful projects.
[00:05:36] I know that it still sticks with me. It was such a powerful messaging about what the university could do and the impact it could have on the world. Speaking of impact and transformative, you've been an academics your entire career. And most academics think of the fruits of their labor as research papers that get measured, bought in impact by the number of citations.
[00:05:58] But you have not stopped there. You've been involved with spinning a number of companies out of the university. Either as a founder yourself and also supporting other colleagues as they've spun out startups.
[00:06:09] Can you talk a little bit about that vision? How do you craft the vision to say, I'm not going to just look at this work as something that's an academic endeavor, but something that actually is going to turn into a company with real products that we're going to sell to the world?
[00:06:26] John Hennessy: The first time around, when I did this with a company that was named after our Stanford project, which was called MIPS, I was a bit of a reluctant entrepreneur. I actually thought publish the papers. The results were so stunningly good that five graduate students could build something that was better than what industry was building with teams of fifty, sixty, a hundred engineers working on it.
[00:06:49] We initially thought people will pick this idea up and they didn't, there was a reluctance. It probably had the extra difficulty that it obsoleted their existing products. So they were, there was a little bit of not invented here syndrome operating as well. And they could see what I would call, it was an academic prototype so they could see the shortcomings.
[00:07:11] We thought the shortcomings were small. This was an academic prototype. We knew how to fix those kinds of issues. So in the end, we decided to start a company to prove this. And that was a powerful learning opportunity. I wish I knew more about entrepreneurship. I wish I had taken some of the courses that you've taught, Tina, uh, before I did it, because we made a lot of mistakes along the way, but the technology was so good and so far ahead of what was happening in industry that that took us through a lot of mistakes and foibles that we made along the way.
[00:07:42] Tina Seelig: Right. And you took a couple of years off, didn't you?
[00:07:44] John Hennessy: I did. I took about eighteen months on sabbatical. And then I was back on a one day a week consulting thing. And I spent a couple of days a week during the summer. I became the Chief Scientist, it was a great title. Nobody reported to me, but I could represent the company and where the technology was going.
[00:08:01] Tina Seelig: Both the example of the Stanford Challenge and spinning out these companies are examples of seeing and seizing amazing opportunities. But we both know that in leadership positions, you know, problems bubble up to the top.
[00:08:15] And sometimes the vision has to come in response to a big challenge. And I think back to 2008, where the university was faced with a real huge financial crisis after that financial meltdown on Wall Street. And it was fascinating to see how you and your team address this. Can you tell us a little bit about what happened and, you know, give us a peek inside your office and the conversations that were happening and how the decisions were made in response to this crisis?
[00:08:47] John Hennessy: Well, you're right. It was a big financial crisis. We lost about thrity percent of the value of the endowment, which at that time was somewhere in the range of seven or eight billion dollars, vaporized. A large amount of our cash portfolio, also our cash vaporized at the same time, which was a buffer and also our earthquake insurance.
[00:09:06] So the provost and I immediately concluded we needed to do something. And we actually got a lot of support from our trustees because many of them had been in business, were used to these kinds of setbacks and knew they had to be addressed. There was more reluctance across the rest of the university because our view was we've got to cut budget, which means we're probably going to have to do layoffs. We decided to stick to a couple of core principles. We decided not to cut student financial aid because this was a crisis time for many families. And in fact, just the opposite happened, our financial aid needs went up. Because lots of families lost one of two jobs, for example, if both parents were working.
[00:09:48] And we decided not to cut any faculty positions, although we froze all faculty hiring for a period of time. And then we had to figure out how to get the rest of it to work. And we had to ask the staff to do a bunch of layoffs and early retirements. But we spread it out, we let each unit make the decision themselves what was the best way to get a ten percent reduction in their budget.
[00:10:13] There was some initial resistance, but what it did for us is it got us through this dark period very fast. So we emerged a year later, our budget was in good shape. And as the endowment began to rebound, we could go out and hire again, while many other institutions that had not acted and instead just kind of decided to coast, found themselves hampered for another three, four, five years while they had to wait for recovery to occur.
[00:10:42] Tina Seelig: There's the famous quote, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. And I wonder, are there things that you could do during this crisis that you would not have had the political capital to do during quote unquote normal times. Where you could have made some decisions that you now could execute that you wouldn't have been able to do before?
[00:11:00] John Hennessy: It's very hard to do a layoff in a university and have a reduction in force in a university. So getting people to align and agree to do that was key. The first thing we had to do was convince them of the depth and the critical nature of the problem. We made a decision, the provost and I, to cut our salaries by ten percent. And we asked all the deans and vice presidents to take a five percent salary reduction. That sent a message to them, we're not kidding, this is serious. And by cutting our salaries, we can save a few jobs in that.
[00:11:34] The second thing we had to do was we had to do a series of events around campus. Starting with the academic Senate to explain to the faculty why this was necessary. But then do a set of town halls, work with the various schools so that they could do this in the way that would have the least impact on their program. And get the budget aligned.
[00:11:55] And in the end, it took a few months, but we got it done. I actually felt that we were a better running university once we had taken that step. And so the crisis actually helped us. And then we could rebound and we could reposition things. And I remember when we got to the end of it and things began to get better, they said, well, now give us back our money.
[00:12:14] I said, no, I'm going to give you money, but I want you to tell me what you're going to do new and different that makes it interesting. So you can reposition what you're doing in that process.
[00:12:25] Tina Seelig: Now, I love the fact that you dove right into the center of this problem, as opposed to sort of waffling and just being anxious and making little salami tactics of little tiny changes. And you really drove into the middle of it as opposed to avoiding it. Did you have any experiences that set you up to be able to make this really hard decision?
[00:12:46] John Hennessy: Yes, absolutely. We had a financial crisis at MIPS, the company I started early on. We had to do a layoff of a third of our staff. So much more difficult but we realized that doing it quickly, think of this as a dark tunnel you're going to have to go through. Because of course people are going to lose their jobs and things, where you want to get through that dark part as quickly as possible and emerge to the other side where things are better. And I really learned that in a startup environment where you don't have a choice. You've got to do it, right? It was make it, or the company was going to die. So in the context of the university, we said, let's do this quickly. In fact, we made an announcement, made the announcement sort of at the beginning of April. And we said, by June, everybody has to identify how they're going to make their budget cuts and begin doing them by the summer. And that really helped us get through it quickly and then reposition the university going forward.
[00:13:40] Tina Seelig: It was really impressive. Having been there and seen this, it was really executed beautifully. In my classes, I teach a lot of sessions about risk taking and failure and resilience. And I often ask the students, are you a risk taker?
[00:13:56] Some of them raise their hands. Some of them don't because they think that risk taking is binary, that you're either a risk taker or you're not. But then we start parsing it and I help them understand that risk taking is actually much more nuanced. There are really different types of risks. There are financial risks and social risks and emotional risks and physical risks and ethical risks and political risks and intellectual risks.
[00:14:17] When you think about yourself as a leader, what type of risks do you feel most comfortable taking and which are you kind of uncomfortable taking?
[00:14:27] John Hennessy: When I think about taking risk, I immediately think about what is the reward in regard to taking this risk. There are some risks I don't take, are very hesitant to take reputational risk or ethical risk. Because I think those can have long lasting damage to an institution or a group you're leading.
[00:14:46] Financial risk. Take financial risk. We take financial risk. I would say to the endowment management group, I'm willing to take more volatility in terms of how the endowment is performing if you can give me better returns over a long time. Because over the long term, then I can invest that and I can live with if we get a sudden downturn, that's larger than expected and we have to do a budget reset, we'll figure out how to do it. I'm playing for the long term upside in that case.
[00:15:16] Tina Seelig: Do you find that it's really important to surround yourself with people with complementary risk profiles so that you balance each other out? So that you have some people who are not financial risk takers who say, hey, hey, hey, here's a downside. Let's consider this.
[00:15:30] John Hennessy: I do. So I like to have people who tell me about that. And the people who do, for example, the university budget don't like this kind of volatility as much. But I'm playing for the long term. I want to know that five years from now, I'll be able to do something that I couldn't possibly have done had I been more conservative during that other period.
[00:15:51] I also used to look, I mean, certainly the general counsel of the university, right, as a lawyer. The lawyer's job is to bring all those risks forward to you. And most of the time I would agree with the general counsel and occasionally I would say, no, we're going to take this risk anyway because there's something more valuable here that we're after.
[00:16:10] Tina Seelig: I'm curious if you've taken any significant political risks. Thinking back in my memory, you were really active in supporting the DREAM Act, which certainly had political ramifications. Help us understand what the DREAM Act was and why you were so passionate about it.
[00:16:28] John Hennessy: The DREAM Act was a movement, which hopefully would have eventually led to legislation that would have given people who came to the US undocumented as children access to permanent residency and eventually even citizenship in the United States. We became concerned about, and saw its growing importance, as Stanford started to see more undocumented students among its undergraduate population. And we became worried that we were going to educate these incredibly talented students who would often overcome incredible hardships only to see their future career frustrated because they couldn't remain in the United States.
[00:17:08] And this was a country for many of them. This was the only country they had known. They had come to the US when they were three, four, five. So we felt very strongly about it and we worked hard to try to get Congress to pass it. We got positive hearings from both sides of the aisle, but getting a piece of legislation they could agree on turned out to be very hard. So I have great regard for the people who can get things done in politics because I think it's extremely difficult.
[00:17:33] Tina Seelig: John, when you left the presidency, you weren't done. And you really wanted to continue to have an impact and then created the vision for Knight-Hennessy Scholars. How did that vision come to life? And what sort of risks did you consider when you started thinking about this new endeavor?
[00:17:55] John Hennessy: Well, the initial thoughts would go back to a very brief sabbatical I took from the presidency of about three months where I did some travel and I spent a lot of time reading books on higher education. Many of them talking about the failure that higher education had not solved a number of key problems.
[00:18:14] And I became increasingly concerned with the issue of leadership around the world. And we had seen deadlock in Congress, we had seen the failure of the Arab Spring, we had seen the financial crisis you mentioned, things where I really think we didn't have the quality of leadership that we needed. So I began to think about what could we do as an educational institution, as a university, to create an opportunity to develop better leaders that would address these complex challenges we face around the world. And that was the very beginning. I then began to socialize it with the provost and the deans and again, wrote a thought paper. It was called Project S and that was the name of the project at the time. And I circulated it to a few small number of trustees, people that I had close relationships with the chair of the board was then Steve Denning, for which Denning House is named. That was kind of the beginning. And then the key moment was on a trustee retreat. It would have been my last retreat. It's 2015 and I was getting ready to leave the presidency. I took it to the trustee retreat and I gave a presentation after dinner and said, here's the vision.
[00:19:28] You know, we need better leaders around the world, Stanford could really do this. We could build on the strengths of our graduate programs, which are incredibly strong and distinguished and really do something that was unusual. The trustees were incredibly enthusiastic about it. So we knew that we had an idea that people found really compelling.
[00:19:46] Tina Seelig: Did you see any risks in it? I mean, what were the potential gotchas?
[00:19:51] John Hennessy: The biggest gotcha was we needed a lot of money to make this happen. And we wanted to create a program that would be in perpetuity. Because we saw a lot of the value would be having students over many years and being able to build a network of alumni scholars over time that could really strengthen and learn from one another.
[00:20:12] So we needed to do something that had a very strong endowment as its base. We needed a gathering place to really try to build community and make community work. So we had to figure out a building and a location for a building that really kind of was centric in the campus. All those pieces had to get solved and luckily, I knew some people and starting with Phil Knight, who were really enthusiastic about the challenge and were willing to make the investment and making it happen.
[00:20:40] Tina Seelig: I love that you were using all of your entrepreneurial skills here to bring this to life.
[00:20:44] John Hennessy: Absolutely. Absolutely.
[00:20:46] Tina Seelig: No, because really and truly this was going from, you know, zero to one, right? This was going from just a vision and a short paper with some ideas to all of a sudden materializing this beautiful building and this community and all of the programs that we offer.
[00:21:01] As we come to a close on this episode, I wonder if you can share any insights that you've gotten from leaders in history. I know that you're such a history buff. When you've had really difficult problems to solve or even opportunities to take on, are there historical figures that you look to for inspiration?
[00:21:23] John Hennessy: Certainly, I mean, I look at the changes that people have been able to make in the world. I mean, as you know, I'm a big fan of Abraham Lincoln, and I think his determination to halt the spread of slavery and eventually to extinguish it was really remarkable. And he seized the opportunity. When the union won the battle of Antietam, he decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. His cabinet was absolutely opposed to him issuing that. But he saw an opportunity to make a change that would really improve the world in the longterm. And he grabbed it.
[00:22:02] Another person I think has an absolutely amazing story is Sara Josephine Baker. She became a doctor at a time when there were not many women doctors. And she really was responsible for implementing pediatric public health in New York City. This was a time when parents would regularly lose twenty-five percent of their children to infant mortality. And she campaigned for this. She fought tooth and nail for it. The establishment was opposed to her, didn't want to let a woman leader come in and do this. And she fought tooth and nail and she dramatically overpaid her time. She saved tens of thousands of lives of young people by improving the quality of public health and teaching young mothers, how to care for and take care of their children better.
[00:22:52] These kinds of people are really inspiring. You look at what Martin Luther King did for this country. And he was initially a reluctant leader because he realized being a leader in the civil rights movement could be dangerous and would take him away from a fairly comfortable life he had as a pastor in what had formerly been his father's church. And he realized that if he embraced leadership in the civil rights movement, it would be a difficult road to hoe. But he also became convinced that that road would be transformative and certainly he changed our country for the better.
[00:23:28] Tina Seelig: Well, it's clear that these leaders really did have an impact on you and I am giving a bet that your leadership is gonna go down in history, too.
[00:23:39] There are four key takeaways that I've taken from this conversation.
[00:23:42] First, craft a vision and then get input and feedback from others in order to refine it.
[00:23:49] Second, be willing to personally commit to your vision and to demonstrate that to others.
[00:23:55] Third, you need to understand your risk profile, what type of risks you're willing to take, those are not. And surround yourself with those who have a different profile so that they can complement your perspective.
[00:24:07] And finally, in a crisis, take the time to figure out what the right thing to do is, and then act decisively.
[00:24:14] Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Leading Matters. Please follow and like us wherever you listen to podcasts. And stay engaged with Knight-Hennessy scholars through social media @Knight-Hennessy and on our website KH.Stanford.edu.
Photo credit: Micaela Go
