Dean Bruner's Blog

A … challenge that the new age brings to each of us is that of achieving excellency in our various fields of endeavor.  In the new age many doors will be opening to us that were not opened in the past, and the great challenge which we confront is to be prepared to enter these doors as they open…

In the new age we will be forced to compete with people of all races and nationalities.  Therefore, we cannot aim merely to be good Negro teachers, good Negro doctors, good Negro ministers, good Negro skilled laborers.  We must set out to do a good job, irrespective of race and do it so well that nobody could do it better. 

Whatever your life’s work is, do it well.  Even if it does not fall in the category of one of the so-called big professions, do it well.  As one college president said, “A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.”  If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music; sweep streets so well that all the host of Heaven and earth will have to pause and say, “Here lived a great street sweeper, who swept his job well.”

-          Martin Luther King, Jr., December, 1956.[1] 

In so many ways, Martin Luther King was a visionary whose words transcend their time and place to inform and inspire us today.  As he spoke in 1956, America was shedding a legacy of racial segregation that had divided whites from blacks with a doctrine of “separate but equal.”  King was leading the movement to integrate the races in American society.  In this particular speech, he paused to look forward, to comment on the “new age” of equality between the races.  The “us” to which he refers were the African-Americans.  The future, he said, would be “an exciting age filled with hope.”  Yet he acknowledged that integration would bring challenges: we must learn to live together; we must find forgiveness and good will; and we must acknowledge the implications of a newer and more level playing field for our talents.

With hindsight of 54 years, we would have to say that King was right and that his message is more relevant than ever.  The rising generation of students will encounter a society that is incredibly more diverse than that which has prevailed in the last half-century.  At the rate of current demographic trends, whites will cease being the majority (50%+) race in America a few decades from now.   At the rate of current economic trends, China, India, and Brazil (who already outdistance Europe and America in rate of growth) will eclipse us in economic size by mid-century.  And the role of women in society is liberalizing rapidly around the world—my own institution just announced the appointment of the first woman President in its history of nearly two centuries.  It seems likely that by the centennial of King’s speech, the outcomes of this growing diversity will have come to full realization.

King’s speech implies that he foresaw that racial integration was just a piece of the larger integration that would take place in the world.  Technological innovation permits conversations and the exchange of ideas outside of the former mainstream media—as Iran and China discover today.  A rising standard of living induces democratization—people want a say in governing their own institutions—and engages minorities into the governance processes.  Economic integration globally, regionally, and locally hastens the exchange of ideas and best practices, and disrupts old economic conditions.  Cultures will change and liberalize: for instance, Darden alumnus, V.N. Dalmia (D’84) is leading a commission to integrate India’s caste of Untouchables into Indian society.

King said, “In the new age we will be forced to compete with people of all races and nationalities.”  No country can build a wall high enough to keep out the impact of these changes in the world.  We must get out and compete in this world, not hide from it.

In the face of these changes, King would say that it matters less how big and powerful you are.  It matters how good you are.  What is the quality of your work?  How effective are you?  What is your reputation? 

King would also ask, “Are you doing your best wherever you are?”  At Darden, we teach that you must lead from where you happen to be.  A misconception is that you must wait until you have the mantle of CEO or some high government office to be a “leader.”  In fact, anyone anywhere can “lead” by setting an example, by challenging assumptions, by offering helpful solutions, and so on.  In this sense, King’s focus on the example of a street sweeper was brilliant.    

January 18, 2010 is Martin Luther King Day in the United States, an occasion on which we celebrate his life and contributions to humanity.  He is relevant to business professionals and business students as he is to everyone else.  “We must set out to do a good job, irrespective of race and do it so well that nobody could do it better.”  In a world of growing diversity, this is outstanding advice.

Last week, my colleague, Elliott Weiss, took me to a plant operated by Danaher Corporation, where a small group of our students had joined kaizen (continuous improvement) teams among the front-line managers at the plant.  What I saw was inspiring about Danaher, Darden, and the future of manufacturing.  These teams were rearranging the process flow—literally building new work benches and shifting the production line—all with the aim of ferreting out the unnecessary inventory, floor space, and motion, and all the while enhancing safety and product quality.  One team worked through the night to get the line ready for the workers the next day.  Kate Ryan (D’11) wrote to me afterward, “Each group reached the goals that they set at the beginning of the week, and I think that the new processes will help the factory.  It was a fantastic event that was both a great learning experience and chance to network with Darden alumni.  I never expected the event to be as fun as it was.”

Kate and her classmates were doing this without pay and on vacation time.  Yet she said it was fun.  There is hope for the future of American manufacturing here.   I’m inviting Elliott and all these students to lunch—along with part of Darden’s leadership team—to celebrate this and aim to get more of it into Darden’s “high touch” MBA experience.

I believe that at the heart of this is a story about leadership development and the leadership of change.  The Washington Post asked a group of panelists including me to reflect on this question: “Last year was a tough one for many organizations, with fewer employees required to do more with less.  How can leaders of such organizations motivate their people as they head into 2010?”  So my comments in today’s Post argue that doing more with less is significantly a matter of leadership, of framing the possibilities or alternatives for an enterprise.  Today, the only way forward for many organizations is to think lean, to use resources more sparingly while achieving equal or better results.  But fundamentally, lean thinking isn't about cutting costs or people. Rather, it is about getting the waste or "stuff" out of our lives and operations: unnecessary meetings; approvals in triplicate; oversized inventories; delays of all kinds; bloated expense accounts; and the notorious three-martini lunches.

Anything that does not add value to customers is waste, and the Japanese have an evocative word for it: muda.   Getting the muda out of our lives and work places can actually make for more satisfying work and higher morale: fewer "redo's," less bureaucracy, lower frustration, greater identification with those we serve; and a stronger sense of belonging to a high-performance organization.  Early January is a wonderful moment, a time of New Year's resolutions, to get rid of the muda around us.

The evidence is that lean thinking is an effective approach to raising quality and reducing cost and time.  The folks at Danaher described to me some very significant improvements in performance achieved through lean thinking.  The ascent of Toyota to world-class stature was attributed to its lean manufacturing practices—see the classic book, The Machine that Changed the World.  In the service sector, major hospitals (such as Virginia Mason in Seattle and Parke Nicollet Health Services in Minneapolis) are employing lean practices to gain significant improvements in performance.  Even in higher education, there are exemplars: the University of St. Andrews says that “Lean strengthens [its] processes, frees staff time & resources and builds a culture of continuous improvement.”

Public universities are at the forefront of the need to do more with less. The University of California system is the poster child of the new conditions: less money available yet the public demands greater access and more services.  The attendant riots, sit-ins, and picketing are but symptoms of the larger stress on higher ed.  What can we do?

A year ago, I launched a lean thinking initiative at the Darden School—I met with the faculty and staff at three points in the year to discuss the consequences of the economic crisis around us and our need to “reinvent, renew, and re-imagine all that we do.”  Our leadership team read and discussed classic books on lean thinking and case studies of successes. I facilitated three focus group meetings with front-line supervisors and employees to discuss ways to “go lean” in travel planning, student services, and external relations. We called on the expertise of some of our alumni and members of our faculty. We invested prudently in new technology and ran a special pilot program with the Amazon Kindle.  Our students got into the act with projects around environmental sustainability (yes, that's lean thinking too.)  Our faculty embarked on a deep review of our full-time MBA program.

One year into it, the net effect of our lean initiative has been to generate some five dozen kaizen (continuous improvement) projects.   For instance, Randy Smith, Darden’s Chief Technology Officer said that his team is looking to automate the “routine repetitive work so that the staff of our business-owner partners can engage in higher level work.”  So far, our kaizen projects have generated some small early wins; more wins are in prospect.  More importantly, our lean initiative has generated increased self-reflection about the way we do things.   We have a different mindset as we head into this year’s planning and budgeting cycles.  In any event, the gains will begin to accumulate, to build on one another and to suggest opportunities for further improvements in quality and cost.

The dire challenge posed by the financial crisis and our experience in responding to it offers at least three lessons.

Leadership.  Going lean is not an exercise to be relegated to the time-and-motion experts.  Leadership is indispensable.  The leader (at the top, middle, or at the front line of the organization) has to set the tone of lean thinking--it can't just be about cost cutting; it must be about transforming the organization for high performance; it can’t just be thinking about doing with less money, it must be about working differently.  If all you want to do is cut costs, then you don't need a leader; you need a technician.  This is the central difference between the lean thinkers and the cost-cutters.

Harness the network.  As the saying goes, there is more knowledge in the network (such as your community or the Internet) than in the heads of the few people immediately around you.  The best ideas come from people distant from the CEO (such as the front line).  Therefore the leader must learn to listen well.  Going lean isn’t simply a matter of a top-down directive.  This means that the senior leader has to engage in outreach and facilitation with a cross-section of people.  As we teach at Darden, the term, “leader,” isn’t reserved for the supremo at the top of the organization—leaders can be found throughout organizations.  You must lead from where you are, wherever you are.  From there you must work the network.

Patience and persistence.  Lean thinking entails a culture change within an organization, and culture change takes time. Tangible progress may not be immediately visible.  The best lean operators are relentless in their pursuit of muda—and over time they show dramatic advantages in quality and cost over their competitors. 

Darden has embarked on a process that will take years.  The early results are encouraging.  A skeptic might say that any significant benefits are uncertain and off in the future.   But I don’t think that higher education has any better alternative than to go this way.  Public financial support is on a long-term decline; students and other stakeholders demand higher access and performance; the only solution is to think lean.  I can’t guarantee that, as Kate Ryan said, this will be fun—but it’s vastly more attractive than the alternatives.

"We can afford to lose money. We can afford to lose a lot of money. But we cannot afford to lose one shred of our reputation. Make sure everything you do can be reported on the front page of your local newspaper written by an unfriendly, but intelligent reporter.”

– Warren Buffett [1]

Last spring, a prospective student—someone who had been offered admission and was considering joining our community--approached me and said, “You talk a lot about ethics and integrity in your speeches, blog postings, and tweets.  Does Darden have an ethics problem?”  I replied, “No—precisely because we do talk about ethics and integrity pretty regularly.  They are not values that we store in a cupboard and only bring out on ceremonial occasions; they are part of our daily life.”  The person smiled politely and turned to someone else for conversation, giving no hint as to the kind of impression I had left.  A community of integrity is not everybody’s cup of tea; almost certainly, we lose some students who won’t make a commitment to a high community standard.  Thus, it was with a bit of surprise and satisfaction that I saw this person enroll last August.  Does all our talk about ethics help or hurt us? 

A truism in management and family life is “if you can’t talk about it, it won’t get done.”  Making progress on anything important is not a matter of giving orders: one must communicate, engage, enlist, and inspire others.  So it is with creating a community of integrity.  The best leaders get this and use plenty of opportunities to talk about integrity in the workplace.  For instance, Warren Buffett annually reminds employees at Berkshire Hathaway how vitally important are ethics and integrity in all they do. 

Working with integrity is hard--there are very few “bright red lines” that tell you what is right and wrong; rather, the worlds of business and academia offer blurry lines, and perhaps no lines at all.  A core notion in the Darden Community is that we are called to a higher standard of conduct than what passes for "average" in the business world.  What others do is no guide for what's right, a fact that was sadly discovered too late in cases such as Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and, more recently, in the subprime loan boom, Madoff Securities, and Galleon Fund. What's right may differ substantially from what's popular or convenient.

One hears many explanations for dodging the subject of ethics in the workplace: we have no training in business ethics; it is embarrassing to discuss these things; we’re too busy doing our work; it’s a dog-eat-dog world; it’s not in my job description, and so on.  If all this is true, why should we pause here at the start of the calendar year, to dwell on ethics? 

Let me answer it plainly:  manage, study, lead, and work with integrity because

1.      We want to create a sustainable legacy for Darden.  To incorporate ethics into our workplace mindset is to think about the kind of community that we would like to live in, and that succeeding generations will inherit. 

2.      Ethical behavior builds trust and dividends of trust are valuable.  The foremost dividend is an unimpeachable reputation.  Equally important, ethics and trust build strong teams and strong leadership.  Stronger teams and leaders result in more agile and creative responses to problems.  Ethical behavior contributes to the strength of teams and leadership by aligning employees around shared values, and building confidence and loyalty. 

3.      UVA and the Darden Mission Statement call us. We share expectations that create a community of trust.  Faculty members recently reaffirmed the Darden Mission Statement.  It commits us to graduate “principled leaders.”  The Board of Visitors of the University endorsed the University Code of Ethics.  It states that “We do not condone dishonesty in any form by anyone.”

4.      Darden can’t afford the costs of doing otherwise.   To echo Warren Buffett, we cannot afford to lose one shred of our reputation; we cannot afford to lose one talented member of our community, applicant, or corporate partner over an ethical lapse; and we cannot afford to lose our self-confidence and self-respect.

These and other reasons should motivate all of us to walk the talk.  

Here is what I ask of you in 2010.  First, encourage others around you to do what's right. We are not an "anything goes" community.  We have mutual expectations for exemplary behavior. No number of messages from the Dean can top the impact of peer expectations.  A community is only as strong as its most vulnerable link.  Help those who may be headed in the wrong direction.  Speak up for our values.

Second, if you see something, say something.  The UVA Honor System provides representatives with whom students and professors can share their concerns on a confidential basis.  Similarly, faculty and staff members can share concerns with senior leaders, me, and/or Barbara Deily, Chief Audit Executive of the University (434-924-4110, deily@virginia.edu). The mark of a good organization is not that it never has ethical lapses, but rather what it does about them. At Darden we must get the facts and take appropriate action as fast as possible.

Finally and most importantly, at a personal level, make a commitment to go the extra mile for what’s right.  Mahatma Gandhi said, "you must be the change you want to see in the world."   If we want to live in a community of trust and integrity, we must live that behavior.

[1] Russ Banham, “The Warren Buffett School,” Chief Executive, December 2002, downloaded from http://www.robertpmiles.com/BuffettSchool.htm,  May 19, 2003.

“The biggest change over the past decade has been the growing realization of sustainability and its impact on world growth into the future.”

This morning, the Wall Street Journal carried this quotation of me in the inaugural segment of a series of articles on the decade just passed.  The journalist, Scott Thurm, wanted to know what I thought was a theme that defined the past 10 years.  As indicated, my vote goes with the concept of sustainability as a defining attribute of the decade.  Sustainability is commonly associated with our use of natural resources and our impact on the environment.  Scientists tell us that such use and impact cannot be sustained indefinitely without harm to our own way of life.  But the same concept could be extended to many fields:

·         Real Estate.  No, housing prices do not always rise.  The extraordinary growth in prices from 2004 to 2007 could not be sustained.

·         Corporate earnings.  Rapid rates of growth in excess of the economy cannot be sustained for long.  In the 1990s, Enron’s earnings per share grew at a compound rate greater than 30%--then it imploded in 2001.  I have written elsewhere about the evils of corporate strategies founded on a goal of high EPS growth.

·         Geopolitics of natural resources and food.  This decade saw the popularization of the concept of “peak oil,” the notion that production has reached a peak.  Writers are now extending the concept to metals and food--I’ve been reading Jeff Rubin’s new book, Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller and suggest it as a sobering representative of the genre. Nations are not strangers to this line of thinking: recall European colonialism of the 18^th and 19^th Centuries, America’s relationship with the Middle East and China’s current spree of acquiring global resource reserves.  Will the 21^st Century see a return to mercantilism? 

·         Health care and other entitlements.  Increases in the cost of health care have helped to motivate the massive reform legislation currently moving through Congress.  Health care accounts for 16% of U.S. gross domestic product and is expected to grow at 6.7% annually for the next 10 years, a rate well in excess of the growth of the U.S. economy.  We cannot sustain this.  One could point to similar economics with respect to social security and other entitlement programs.  It remains to be seen whether the current legislation will resolve or worsen the unsustainability of the health care entitlement.

·         The fate of the dollar.  Large and persistent U.S. trade deficits flood the global economy with dollars.  One consequence is a depreciation of the dollar versus other currencies. Thus, the dollar declined 20% versus the euro between March and December, 2009. But as the dollar depreciates, will the countries with large trade surpluses be willing to hold their reserves in dollars?  Will they be willing to buy U.S. treasury securities thereby recycling the dollars back to America?  The short answer to both is “no.”  Trade deficits and a strong dollar are inconsistent; this is not sustainable. 

·         Use of debt financing.  Going into the latest financial crisis, some enterprises were levered at 25 parts debt to one part equity; a few were in the region of 40:1.  Leverage that high is not sustainable through a downturn, as the spectacular bankruptcies and financial collapses have attested.

You get the picture.  Sustainability is a lens through which we can view many aspects of business and economics—it embraces the environment and so much more.  The “so much more” is what we have confronted so vividly in the first decade of the 21^st Century.  Sustainability should be one of the defining attributes of success of a strategy for a business enterprise or government—one should be able to prove that once launched, the strategy can be sustained.  Enriching and disseminating this view is where business schools can and should make a difference.  Already students at Darden and elsewhere gain the outlines of this broader view through aspects such as these:

·         Balanced scorecard rather than a narrow focus on profits.

·         Business ethics and corporate social responsibility.

·         Long term rather than short term performance measurement.

·         “Lean thinking” as a guide to the use of all resources going into business processes.

·         Economic value added rather than a focus on cosmetic accounting results.

·         A renewed interest in value investing.

·         …and a focus on the use of natural resources and impact on the environment.

There is no free lunch.  You cannot get something for nothing.  You cannot live today by borrowing indefinitely from the future generations.  My conversations with executives and investors suggest that the pendulum of attitudes may be swinging back in favor of this broad view of sustainability.

“Ah, well, I am a great and sublime fool. But then I am God's fool, and all His work must be contemplated with respect.”

                                      -          Mark Twain

In my posting this morning to the “On Leadership” blog at washingtonpost.com, I reflected on this famous quotation from Mark Twain and recent headlines about Tiger Woods, Max Baucus, Raj Rajaratnam, and Henry Blodget.   What do we do with a leader who fails us?  And when do we let a miscreant get on with his or her life? 

I said that it is complicated: the answer must depend on the gravity of the crime; restitution for anyone injured; propensity to repeat; truth-telling and transparency about the issue; sincerity of regret and commitment to do differently in the future; competence and reliability to tread a new and better path; the incentives your decision might create for the future.  The point is that we need to avoid snap judgments and actually “contemplate with respect” the miscreants we encounter.  See my posting for the full argument.

An added thought: was Mark Twain just being overly generous to miscreants?  Not necessarily.  Like all great writers, he produced enough verbiage for any good investigator to find a counteropposing view in his own words.  For instance, he also supposedly said, “The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.”

I first met Andy in 1992 as I was forming a Cub Scout den.  An African-American, he was the son of a single mother who was struggling to make ends meet.  He was taller and heavier than the other eight-year olds in the group.  And he was quick to anger.  But he had an incredible hunger to be with others.  This fueled the bond between him and me that lasted through years of get-togethers of one kind or another.  As he grew through high school, I saw less and less of him—I sensed that he was pulling away from me as any teenager would grow distant from adults.  But I did see him cross the stage at his high school graduation and clapped noisily as he took the diploma.  Afterward, I asked to take a picture of him with the diploma; but he seemed reticent.  It turned out that he hadn’t received the “academic diploma,” the high-octane kind of certification that he had fulfilled all of his academic requirements.  Instead, he received a “general diploma,” indicating that he had merely fulfilled some kind of attendance requirement.  Without an academic high school diploma, one’s employment prospects in the U.S. are limited. 

The next day, Andy and I marched back to the school to find out what it would take for the principal to upgrade Andy’s diploma to the full-strength version.  The answer: he had to pass courses in geometry and algebra; and the principal wouldn’t wait long.  Andy would have to pass summer-school courses that summer or else toil through a longer general equivalency process.  I started making calls: enrolled him in courses; lined up tutors; drove him from work to classes and tutoring; and celebrated the progress he made.  When Andy received his academic diploma at the end of the summer, the principal said to him, “You don’t know how lucky you are to have had the help you got.” 

That success juiced up Andy’s self-confidence.  He told me that he wanted to go to college and become a lawyer.  We found a school in Richmond that would accept him; I paid for his first semester and helped him arrange loans for the rest; and I helped him move in to the dorm.  Given the distance from Charlottesville and the distractions of college life, I saw much less of Andy thereafter.  Plainly he was struggling to adjust to an environment that required much more self-motivation than before; and the college in question proved to be more like a diploma mill and not much interested in helping the stragglers.  Two years later, Andy had dropped out, joined the Army Reserve, finished basic training, and started a tour of duty in Iraq.  He did return to Richmond safely, where I gather he is living and working.   I reach out to him every so often, but get no reply.  He is on his own.

This recollection came to me after watching the new movie, The Blind Side.  It is based on the best-seller by Michael Lewis and recounts the incredible intervention by Leigh Ann Touhy of Memphis, Tennessee, in turning around the life of Michael Oher, a poor African-American kid who with Touhy’s help finished high school and college and became a professional football player.  The movie presents some wonderful character portraits as well as some none-too-flattering stereotypes of well-to-do whites and poor blacks.  I commend the movie as a stimulus to reflection about the difference that intervention can make.  [I have read very favorable reviews of, but have not yet seen, another new movie, Precious, a work with apparently similar themes.] 

Recollections of my experience with Andy and the gush of recent books and movies prompt several reflections. 

First, intervention doesn’t always work, or at least not in the ways that you may idealize.  After seeing The Blind Side, one may feel inspired to go and do likewise.   But I can say from personal experience that this kind of intervention is very hard work, fraught with difficulties, and absolutely not guaranteed to succeed.  But maybe you should consider what “success” means: I doubt that Andy will become a lawyer, but he’s employable and employed.  He didn’t get a college degree, but he didn’t get mixed up with drugs or crime.  I’m proud of Andy’s come-back effort after high school. 

Second, the focus of the intervention has to be receptive, to want to be helped.  Andy listened and responded.  Many people in tough circumstances are obstinate, bone-headed, depressed, unmotivated, or worse.  As a teacher and now as a general manager, I have seen many people shrug off help or the second chance that might set them straight.  In the outstanding autobiographical novella, A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean, writes, “Each one of us here today will, at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question."We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed?" It is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us, but we can still love them. We can love completely, without complete understanding.”

Third, if you intervene on someone else’s behalf, you will change too.  In my 17 years of acquaintance with Andy, I learned a whole lot about the issues surrounding race and poverty in the United States.  The experience challenges assumptions one gathers over a lifetime like old belongings in an attic.  The point is that you need to listen and reflect as well as direct.   But whether you want it or not, you will emerge a different person—this was the ironic discovery of Professor Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s play, Pygmalion (and Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady). 

Fourth, opportunities to intervene don’t arise with much warning.  Andy’s graduation was for me a “firebell in the night”—I remember sleeping that evening with difficulty because of disappointment, anxiety for him, and not a little anger.  I had to do something just to deal with the way I felt.  As a general manager now, I see opportunities to do something every day.  The challenge is to listen for more firebells in the middle of a very noisy environment.

Finally, on this Thanksgiving Day, I am more mindful than ever of others who intervened in helpful ways in my life, such as parents, friends, peers, and teachers.   Three professors spontaneously suggested that I might make a fair academician; without their nudging, I might never have chosen this career path.  Even competitors and critics deserve a tip of the hat: their “interventions” made me think more keenly about what I do and why.  I strongly suspect that everyone in my sphere of work (faculty, professional staff, and students) benefited from someone(s) who intervened in their lives.   I’ll keep reaching out to Andy—ideally to help again but at least to learn more about ways to make a difference. 

This day, then, is a useful moment for thinking about the ways we can usefully intervene in the world around us—or receive intervention.  Much of what is practiced in business, and what we teach in B-schools, has to do with interventions of some kind.  If you see something, say something.  Much of good management is about how, why, whether, and when to intervene in the face of problems and opportunities.  Intervention is what defines a community and virtually all successful enterprises.  “No man is an island,” said John Donne.  The business manager as soloist, maverick, and Lone Ranger is a bad model for a rising generation of business leaders.   A good B-school experience should model the kind of engagement and intervention that builds a community. 

Who is the happy Warrior? …It is the generous Spirit…   [William Wordsworth]

Much was said about America’s veterans yesterday.  It was Veterans Day in the United States, a holiday originally established to remember the Armistice ending World War I and “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace.”  This year, the occasion was fraught with talk-show reflections about ongoing wars, last week’s tragedy at Fort Hood, and geopolitics.  We should have these conversations.  But on Veterans Day I wish the discourse dwelled more on the veterans themselves rather than on lofty abstractions.  What do we know about these people who put themselves in harm’s way to serve our country?  Each year, I meet plenty of men and women coming to Darden from the military of the U.S. and other countries.  Because of my proximity, perhaps I see things that the pundits and public speakers don’t. 

For instance, foremost in my mind yesterday was the attribute of generosity, the first quality mentioned by the poet, William Wordsworth, in his classic, The Character of the Happy Warrior.  This poem is great source material for students of leadership.  I see among our military veterans a tendency to lend a hand, form a team, find common ground, help a neighbor, and share ideas.  They tend to be optimists and at the same time realists.  They are people of proportion, willing to listen to all sides of a debate and yet think for themselves.  Military leaders tend not to get very far without basic expressions of generosity—nor do great business executives.   Wikipedia says that “Generosity is the habit of giving freely without coercion… spending time, money, or labor, for others, without being rewarded in return… looking out for society's common good and giving from the heart.”  In focusing first on generosity, Wordsworth got it right.  I think that Veterans Day should be about celebrating generosity.

Veterans enrich our learning community.  We actively seek excellent students from the ranks of the military.  For this reason, Darden participates in the Yellow Ribbon Program, a component of the Post 9/11 GI Bill. This program assists veterans in going back to school to re-tool, launch a new career, and/or continue their service to society in new ways.  The Veterans Administration provides matching funds equal to three dollars for every dollar provided by the Darden School and its alums.   Our capital campaign is aiming to raise the funds to sustain this wonderful outreach to veterans.