Everyday People Who Led Momentous Change

CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch, in for Sarah Green Carmichael.

[Opening music from CBS documentary The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson]

ARCHIVAL TV BROADCAST: CBS Reports: The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson

CURT NICKISCH: The year was 1963. Biologist and author Rachel Carson warned millions of U.S. television viewers about a new danger in the land, air, and water.

RACHEL CARSON: We’ve heard the benefits of pesticides. We’ve heard a great deal about their safety, but very little about the hazards, very little about the failures, the inefficiencies, and yet the public was being asked to accept these chemicals, being asked to acquiesce in their use and did not have the whole picture. So, I set about to remedy the balance there.

CURT NICKISCH: Her remedy was to write Silent Spring, a carefully researched book on the widely-used pesticide DDT. The best-seller infuriated the chemical companies, spurred Congress to investigate, and inspired the environmental movement.

Carson is just one of three social change agents we’ll be talking about today. While she wanted to protect the Earth, pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer aimed to topple the Nazi regime. He died in a concentration camp. His writings continue to inspire others to live with conviction and humility.

And in the 19th century, former slave Frederick Douglass campaigned to end slavery in the United States.

The journey of each of these social reformers holds lessons for business leaders, says our guest on the show, Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn. Her new book, Forged in Crisis, chronicles how these individuals overcame self-centeredness and fear to achieve and inspire social change.

Nancy, thanks for coming in and talking with the HBR IdeaCast.

NANCY KOEHN: I’m delighted to be here.

CURT NICKISCH: You are a leadership historian, right, at Harvard Business School. And three people that we’re going to talk about today—Frederick Douglas, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rachel Carson—three people that you profile, three people who led social change, none of them are business people.

NANCY KOEHN: No, they weren’t business people. They rocked the world. They exemplify all kinds of leadership skills and learned behaviors. And they interacted with business. But that wasn’t their calling, and that wasn’t their stage. And yet they made a huge difference on the world stage as leaders of social activism and leaders of social purpose.

CURT NICKISCH: Is that a warning, maybe, for our business audience that if they want to have a big impact, maybe business is not the place to do that?

NANCY KOEHN: Not in any way. So, what I think it is, is a reminder, as so many of the folks in our audience know, that business problems, business challenges, the satisfactions of business leadership don’t come in little boxes that are neatly tied up called business. More and more, every single day, the challenges of leading a for-profit enterprise are challenges that involve issues of social change, issues of scientific and environmental magnitude, issues of political and economic, broadly defined economic stakes, and people and communities.

And so, as the world grows more integrated, as the resources that business leaders command grow more pressingly urgent in other spheres, as just the firefighting of starting a business or maintaining fiduciary responsibility at a moment of great disruption increase, business leaders fully understand studying that they are also becoming leaders in the social realm and spokespeople for political and other environmental issues.

CURT NICKISCH: We talk in business a lot about narcissistic leaders, and we have a negative view of that. But all three of these people who lead social change, you say, kind of started out as narcissists.

NANCY KOEHN: No question. I mean, Frederick Douglass want to be famous. I mean, he wanted to make his mark. He wanted to rise way above what was possible as a boy born into slavery. I mean, he wanted to learn to read, something that was illegal in many states; it was illegal to teach slave to read.

We can all appreciate why that was: put words and ideas into their purview, and they’ll be running away with themselves. But he wanted to be extra special. He wanted to be the slave that, even though it was illegal, figured out a way, in some cases, by bribing white boys with food to teach him the alphabet. Getting his hands on the Columbian reader. This book of rhetoric and famous speeches.

CURT NICKISCH: I loved that part, because he would recite famous speeches that, like Cicero and Cato, read, and I just imagine, like, this boy in the countryside, ending a speech with, and Carthage must be destroyed.

NANCY KOEHN: Exactly. And, again, this is not the vision of a young person trying to push social change. This is a vision of a young person trying to break out of the confines that were restraining him.

Carson, from poor beginnings, wanting more than anything else at the very beginning and different times in her life, to be a best-selling author. None of those agendas initially were about social change. They were about what many of us understand—certainly I understand—

CURT NICKISCH: And many people in business understand—

NANCY KOEHN: Many people in business understand: what drives many of us. I want to make my mark. And I want to prove to lots of people, including myself, how worthy I am. And I’m going to push myself on what lots of very credible folks would call, the narcissistic drive.

CURT NICKISCH: When does that narcissism change? When does it when does it become something different?

NANCY KOEHN: So, Douglas discovers once he’s free and he’s living in Massachusetts he ends up at some abolitionist meeting. He’s like, Well, now here’s my purpose: to be to be a spokesperson for the abolition movement.

He gets all the fame he could have wished for. Hundreds and hundreds of British social activists flocked to see him, many of whom become his friends. All of them encourage him to stay in England and continue doing abolition work there. And he says, at the end of two years, I’m going back, because if I don’t go back, I can’t be in the thick of it with my brethren.

I don’t think that’s primarily about Frederick Douglass being famous. I think that’s about Frederick Douglas saying, Where can I make the greatest difference to a cause that is much bigger than I?

CURT NICKISCH: You also say that one of the things they all have in common is that they showed they showed courageous leadership in their day to day living. What about Bonhoeffer? How did he show courageous leadership in his day-to-day living?

NANCY KOEHN: So, Bonhoeffer never shied away from what he knew were the dangers of being someone opposed to an increasingly aggressive, increasingly authoritarian regime. He never shied away from it.

CURT NICKISCH: He ran towards it. He came back to Germany.

NANCY KOEHN: He came back to being part of it. He believed the calling was too strong to stay in America. He writes this letter before he leaves America saying, I cannot live in safety knowing that my brethren are involved in a fight that will define right German civilization going forward, and I can’t protect it, you know, as a Nazi civilization; I have to fight that.

And he shows up also as this very kind, empathic person someone who was known when he was teaching clergyman how to reach ordination to help them and make them breakfast when they were sick, bail them out of jail if the Nazis posted bail for some offense they did, take folks to the opera, compete with his students in table tennis.

And so, here’s someone, again, who’s very human, you know, completely relatable to you and to me and yet also fighting a very serious, very high stakes battle to try and destroy what many of us, you know, looking backward and certainly people with time, thought was a monstrous regime.

And so, the way he shows up, not just in terms of embracing a big mission, not just in terms of the bravery we know he summoned—his diaries in prison have lots and lots of fear in them—but also in terms of the humanity and compassion and empathy and humor he brought to those around him. He was considered a great teacher, an inspiring, quietly inspiring man. That’s all about, you know, “My life is my message,” as far as I can understand that quote from Gandhi.

CURT NICKISCH: Each of these people had what you called “gathering years.” So, this is time away from writing or speaking or organizing or doing what they would eventually really become known for where they built up energy—and ammunition, maybe—for that for that fight. What did you make of that?

NANCY KOEHN: In most lives, there are these periods when you feel like—especially in our modern age where we’re so we want everything three minutes ago—we forget that a lot of what we come to use as we really get called to a big mighty purpose are assets or resources or behaviors or lessons that we’ve learned actually during these gathering periods, when you’re taking the ideas about yourself; you’re learning from other people; you’re gathering important insight perspective—even a sense of how long this might take, even just changing your timeframe for yourself. And you’re gauging yourself: How long will I wait? What will I do?

And those periods are something that, when we’re in them, we can actually start thinking about them that way, make sense of them that way, lessen some of the impatience, maximize some of what we learn,  and then be completely confident that we’re going to use this, even if we don’t know exactly when and how right this second.

CURT NICKISCH: How much do you think their ability to communicate was instrumental to their being great leaders. It was really important.

NANCY KOEHN: It was critical. They all learned how to do this. Douglas teaches himself everything. He teaches himself how to write it. He gets other people to help him with those things. He, like, practices how to speak.

Bonhoeffer, the same way. Now, again, he probably had some good communication genes. His parents were both writers. But he worked very, very hard most hard on his writing and learning to write in a way not so academic that it can’t be widely accessible, that contains emotional currency, as well as intellectual or analytic currency, and that has a real-life application. None of his genes, none of his training were oriented toward those things. He’s constantly honing those kinds of skills, even when he’s locked up in prison.

I didn’t realize how hard he practiced to communicate what he would say to the Gestapo interrogators in these one-on-one questioning sessions. How are you going to say it? He even practices, like, body language in his cell the night before, right? Practicing, like, is he going to tremble? Is his foot going to shake? How’s he going to sit? I mean, this man, like all the people in this book, was a work in progress, and he was his own best teacher as a means of preparing himself to communicate in lots of different instances.

Carson, you know I think probably what’s born with some real literary grace. She was a childhood writer. She wrote for St. Nicholas magazine and was well published by the time she was 14. But she is in the same exact way always working on how to write for a popular audience, how to marry the rigors of biological research and findings to the poetry that she unearths within herself so she can tell a story that’s both scientifically rigorous and yet can be read by any American and understood.

So, the bottom line is here, we’re not born great communicators. We teach ourselves how to do that. And these people learn how to do that.

CURT NICKISCH: Would those people be possible today?

NANCY KOEHN: Oh, I think so. I think they do have podcasts today. And they have blogs. And they’d be working as hard years as they did in their own times to reach the people they thought they need to reach. And I think most of them would have wanted to both reach as wide an audience as possible and to elevate that audience.

That piece is a great takeaway for our moment right now when there’s a kind of race to the bottom in terms of how people are speaking and talking and addressing each other, even from you know very, very high levels of our society right now. These people would have wanted to arrest that and raise it.

CURT NICKISCH: Rachel Carson dealt with a burden on top of being somebody trying to lead social change, something that Douglas and Bonhoeffer didn’t have to deal with, and that was she was a woman, and she spent a great deal of time caring for her family, sick family members. So, what can we learn from her about leading social change, being a leader, but also managing the demands of modern life?

NANCY KOEHN: I think she found herself in putting other people before herself. So, her whole life is very wrapped up in her birth family. She is at one point the economic breadwinner for her house. She is doing at least a third or half of the caretaking for nine people, including a couple of little kids, her sister’s kids. And at the same time, she’s trying to find a pathbreaking topic to write on for a dissertation. There are a whole lot of mostly women among our listeners that know exactly what this is like.

She shoulders that burden throughout her life. She’s not a case study in how to take care of yourself when others depend on you, which every leader—parent, mother, CEO, general manager, coach—has to be thinking about: If I if I fail, if my system flags, if my health gives out, a lot of other people will be affected by it, the people I care about. And so will the mission.

But the second piece of Carson is a really great, important piece about what we can learn. And that is, she drew so much energy from the nurturing that she gave. So, we don’t write in business publications about how women draw strength for leadership from the giving and caretaking they do at home, for the creatures that they’re responsible for.

But let me tell you every woman I know, if you ask her candidly, will talk about that. Many men understand this very, very well, and it was an important gas tank for what she did as a momentous leader. So, we draw two things: one feed in water yourself, even if Rachel didn’t do such a great job of that on a consistent basis; and two, understand that we live one life. It’s one life it’s not a work life balance act. It’s one life.

CURT NICKISCH: How do their stories challenge commonly held notions of leadership?

NANCY KOEHN: I don’t think most people would describe Bonhoeffer or Carson as charismatic in the way we use that word today. They certainly wouldn’t describe her or him as hard charging or fast acting. All the people in this book, when it really counted, when the stakes were really high, moved much slower than they usually moved. Because when the stakes are high, you really want to do the right thing. You want to be a really smart steward and change agent, and you can’t do that if you’re just moving real quick, in a kind of default way, checking things off a list. But they’re not charismatic, and they’re not hard charging. They’re more quiet and reflective. And they were astoundingly effective.

And here’s the really interesting ironic piece: people were partly attracted to them because they were good listeners, and they didn’t by default take up all the oxygen in the room.

So, one of the things we can learn is you don’t have to be an extrovert; you don’t have to be hard charging. You actually don’t want to be fast acting as a default, and you don’t need a huge slug of charisma to have an energy, a cause, an appeal that draws followers to you. So that’s the first thing.

Second thing: all three of these people were not we’re not particularly glamorous. So, I think one of the things that we’ve been very attracted to around leaders, particularly in the hyper-connected age we live in, is a kind of bling—I call it leadership bling. Are they on the red carpet? And we actually do see leaders trying, you know, recently, walking down the red carpet. Who do they know that’s rich and famous and glamorous and sizzly? And how fast did they make their money? And how much did they have it? Those were not aspects of these people. And they didn’t need them to be extraordinarily powerful and influential in moving their mission forward.

And so, one thing that these stories indirectly but unmistakably point to is that we want to think about what constitutes courageous leadership. Because we just have to get as citiziens and as employees and as, you know human pilgrims, travelers on the road of life, we have to get more discerning here about the people we’re entrusting so much to.

CURT NICKISCH: I mean, you look back on these leaders who were forged in crisis and lived in these incredibly interesting, meaningful, turbulent times that shaped how we live today. And I wonder where you think the Rachel Carson, the Frederick Douglass, the Dietrich Bonhoeffer are going to come from today.

NANCY KOEHN: Crisis calls forth what I like to say, leaders out of the mist. Very few people had heard of Frederick Douglass, for example, even in 1850. It would really take the simmering cauldron of slavery, the run-up to the Civil War, to make Frederick Douglass as influential as he would ultimately become by virtue of his fight for the public mind.

Our job, if you’re a leader in the wings, is to think about, is this your moment, and what are you going to lead toward? If you’re not waiting to be called onto the stage, then that is my job to get very discerning about what I think we need in terms of character and calling and an integrity and practicable skills. These people were pragmatists. These people really got it done. So, we’ve got to get much more discerning about what we we’ve—and teaching our kids about what we think constitutes real leadership. We owe the future that, not to mention ourselves.

CURT NICKISCH: Is it possible for leaders who advance social change, like these individuals did, to come from business today?

NANCY KOEHN: Absolutely. I mean, think about someone like Paul Polman at Unilever, right? There’s a huge public company that is making a major impact on environmental sustainability, water use—and Paul Polman is betting not only his tenure as CEO of Unilever, he’s betting the company on the long game, that going forward, public corporations can’t be bystanders with regard to not only pressing problems that don’t come in nifty file folders called business, but also can’t be bystanders in regard to which people they serve and which they don’t. It’s a global village.

Howard Schultz at Starbucks, who’s taken Starbucks you know into all kinds of issues, from veterans’ livelihoods to race to political divisiveness and then that company there and the brand with an idea that Starbucks impact—you know, some 90 million people go through Starbucks stores every week—is not impact that’s political qua political; it’s impact that’s a business, that’s a commercial enterprise and that that impact matters. And these are just two of the more prominent people doing this.

Think of the CEOs that recently stood up and said, We don’t agree with how President Trump handled the tragedy in in Charlottesville, and we are going to make our opinions known and stand down from presidential committees or for presidential groups.

That was not the beginning but part of a very important growing force—not trend—force, historical force, about the necessary social activism of business leaders. So, absolutely, we will see some of the greatest social change come from the corner office in the coming years, no question about it.

CURK NICKISCH: What do you want people who are listening to this to know about these three leaders of social change?

NANCY KOEHN: Each of them were more like any of us than they were different. They are people that no one would have identified at birth as being major change agents—not a one. And yet they made themselves, largely through disappointment and stagnation and difficulty and in some cases danger, into leaders capable of doing something incredibly compelling, incredibly satisfying, and extremely important in terms of moving goodness forward.

So, we can do that. If we think about our own lives and how challenging they are, we can read these stories and realize that these people’s lives were equally challenging and that a huge amount of what made them into such influential individuals was their resilience. They kept working on like a muscle.

And they did it by saying, I’m going to make myself better: stronger, more honorable; my spirit is going to get bigger and play to my better self more than it’s going to get smaller and play to my baser self. And that’s something we can all have a choice over. We may have a choice of over exactly what happens to us each day. We have choice over how we respond to it.

And the last thing that, again, is so ordinary about these people is that they lead from their humanity. We think of leadership as this pursuit that is something we need to study and analyze and then download. And what this book suggests is that it’s as much from the inside out as it is from the outside in. And that it begins with the best part of our messy, wild and precious and often exhausting humanity. And that’s a resource, not a hindrance, to being a great leader; and these stories unpacked that, warts and all.

CURT NICKISCH: Nancy Koehn, thanks so much for coming in to tell us these stories.

NANCY KOEHN: It’s a pleasure and a privilege, Curt.

CURT NICKISCH: That’s Nancy Koehn. She’s a historian at Harvard Business School. Her new book is Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times.

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Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Curt Nickisch.