Collaboration and decisiveness shape effective leadership.

Tina Seelig and John Hennessy examine the key leadership qualities of collaboration, analysis, and decisiveness. Their conversation highlights how effective leaders unite diverse teams, perform comprehensive analyses to make informed decisions, and take decisive action when the stakes are high. Drawing on real-world examples and lessons, the episode offers valuable insights for those seeking to strengthen their leadership skills and drive impactful change within their organizations.

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Chapters:

(00:00:00) Introduction

Host Tina Seelig introduces John Hennessey along with the episode’s focus on collaboration, analysis, and decisiveness.

(00:00:57) Crafting a Team for Collaboration

The importance of team-building, focusing on collaboration and complementary skills.

(00:01:31) Strong Working Partnerships

How a long-time professional partnership developed into a strong and effective working relationship.

(00:03:08) Decision-Making on Stanford’s New York Campus

The tough decision to evaluate and ultimately walk away from a potential campus expansion in New York.

(00:05:55) Knowing When to Walk Away

Insights into the process of pulling the plug on a major project when the risks outweigh the benefits.

(00:09:10) Leadership in Everyday Decision-Making

Balancing daily decision-making while overseeing larger projects within a big organization.

(00:11:22) The Role of Delegation in Leadership

Exploring the importance of delegation and fostering an environment of transparency and trust.

(00:13:39) Incentives in a Decentralized Organization

Levers of influence and how incentives can help guide faculty in a decentralized environment.

(00:14:47) Prioritizing Long-Term Building Projects

Prioritizing and executing large-scale building projects, including considerations for long-term growth.

(00:16:51) Navigating Stanford’s General Use Permit

The negotiations surrounding the university’s general use permit and its implications for future development.

(00:19:08) Big Bets at Alphabet

The decision-making process behind significant business investments.

(00:21:39) Advice for Making Hard Decisions

Improving the ability to make difficult decisions and the value of learning through practice.

(00:24:05) Episode Takeaways

Four key lessons for listeners from this episode.

(00:24:35) Conclusion

Welcome to Leading Matters, a podcast from Knight-Hennessy Scholars, a multicultural and multidisciplinary graduate fellowship program at Stanford University that focuses on leadership.

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.

Hi, John.

Hi, Tina.

How are you today?

I'm great.

Today, we're going to focus on several important aspects of the Knight-Hennessy leadership model related to bringing ideas to fruition.

And those are collaboration, analysis, and decisiveness.

Let's start with collaboration.

Collaboration, of course, is, involves working with other people.

And I'm really curious what you think about crafting a team.

Do you look for people who are very similar to you, make it easy to work with?

Do you look for people with complementary skills?

What are the things you're thinking about when you're putting together a team?

I look for people whose skills are complementary, but who I think we can work well together.

And then we try to establish a strong working relationship where each of us can play to our strengths and can make important contributions.

I'm curious about your partnership with John Etchemendy, who is the provost when you were the president, everyone, you know, the two Johns, you guys had just amazing rapport and collaboration.

How did that work?

You're absolutely right.

I mean, we served for sixteen years.

He was my provost for the entire time, which the provost job is extremely complex because at Stanford, you basically are the chief budget officer at the university, as well as the chief academic officer of the university.

So it's a very complex job.

One of the marvelous things was John was really excellent at the job.

And because he learned it over a period of time, I didn't find myself constantly having to retrain somebody in this difficult job.

We would meet twice a week and if we didn't have anything to talk about, fine, we'll cancel that meeting.

But that kept us on the same page.

And then we really did delegate.

We tried to avoid situations where we both had to be at the same meeting.

That enabled us to spread ourselves out and deal with more issues around the university.

He came with a very different background as a philosopher and you're an engineer.

How did that work?

So we had one common grounding.

He's a philosopher, but he's a logician and I'm a computer scientist.

So logic and making logical decisions is something we shared in common.

But the fact that he complimented my skills, I was the first engineer to ever be president of Stanford.

Having him complimenting my skills and understanding the humanities and social sciences much better than I understood them was extremely valuable.

So let's start diving into some examples of some really hard problems and how you collaborated and analyzed and made some really hard decisions.

As president, you explored the possibility of opening a campus, a Stanford campus, in New York City.

And I was fortunate to be on the front lines here because I was on the team and got to see this right up close as this project was being evaluated.

It would be really fascinating to understand your perspective about why this was something that you even considered in the first place and how you went about evaluating this opportunity.

Well, the opportunity arose when Mayor Bloomberg proposed that a university be able to build a campus on Roosevelt Island, which sits in the East River, New York City, right?

Midtown, upper Midtown.

And they had an incredible location and he wanted a university that would help bring New York into a stronger position with respect to technology, entrepreneurship, and really take advantage of that.

So I became interested because I thought, why does university have to be in one physical location?

We could be in more than one location.

And where is the location that's complimentary to what we do, but probably one where we could manage a university that was in two locations.

And New York is kind of the complete opposite of what the Bay, what we look like on our bucolic campus here at Stanford.

So it was very attractive.

We knew that there was a talent pool that wanted to live on the East coast that we could tap into if we had a campus there.

So, we began to really explore how to make this work.

What was the analysis?

What were the types of data, the information you needed to make this decision?

There were two categories.

What were the key principles that the faculty were going to insist on if they were going to support this?

And there, the key principle was a novel idea.

There's one university, there's one computer science department.

It has faculty in New York City and it has faculty in the Bay area.

There's one electrical engineering department, same thing.

That alleviated the challenge that existed that people were worried that this would be a second tier institution.

It wouldn't be as good as Stanford.

So by saying there was one faculty, one set of students and a graduate student might spend two years in New York and then two years on the main campus, for example.

So we had a model that really faculty could support.

The other part of the analysis was financial.

It was a very expensive undertaking.

And while the city was going to provide a hundred million dollars, our vision of what we wanted to do would probably require a ten year investment in excess of a billion dollars.

So we had to kind of figure that all out and understand it.

Well, we all know there is no campus in New York City.

So that decision was made to not go forward.

Watching that decision being made was fascinating, I personally was incredibly impressed with your ability to pull the plug on the project at the very last minute.

Can you talk about what happened and how you made that decision?

So, the city decided that it would take the two finalists, Stanford and Cornell, and negotiate with both of them before it picked who the winner was.

So they began a negotiation process.

During that process, several issues showed up.

One was a old medical waste dump that was under the site, which had an old hospital on, and reluctance by the city to cap the cost of cleaning up that waste dump and what that might cost.

And then there were issues about guarantees the city wanted on how fast the institution would grow, how many faculty we would hire.

And our view was we had made, I had made a commitment to the faculty that they would control the quality of appointments.

And we simply couldn't guarantee that we would be able to hire at a certain rate.

We could have a goal to do that.

But the city wanted an ironclad agreement where potentially we would have to give up the lease on the campus.

So we were reluctant to do that.

In the end, I concluded that it was too big a stretch for Stanford, both financially and in terms of the core commitments that we made in thinking about the organization.

I decided after talking to my team, they come back from a negotiation session, I met with them and we made the decision in about an hour to just, it's a bridge too far for us.

Risk is too high.

And while there were benefits, they weren't worth the risks that were exposed.

The thing that was so interesting from my perspective is that you had really used a lot of political capital for this project.

It was very public.

It was something every, the university knew it was in the newspaper every day.

And the ability to make that hard decision was really remarkable.

I have to say, you know, there are a lot of people who would just keep putting essentially good money after bad, but you were willing at that last minute to say, you know what, this is a bridge too far.

Yeah, there was a lot of positive press in New York.

When we first put the Stanford proposal in, there was a lot of excitement in the New York press about it, and we decided that it just been too far.

And I made the decision.

I called the people in New York city and a half an hour later, it was dead.

I mean, the trustees were actually happy that I had made the call because they were nervous about exactly the point you've committed.

We spent a million dollars putting the proposal together.

It was probably eight hundred pages of material.

So it was a big effort by lots of people, you included, to really put it together and make something that made sense.

And I thought it was a great proposal.

We know that on the basis of the academic panel that evaluated their proposal, they really liked our proposal.

They thought it was really terrific.

But in the end, it was not the right thing for us to do.

So that project, the New York City campus was a big, huge, you know, once in a lifetime decision, once in a career decision.

However, when you're in a leadership position, you're making decisions every single day.

It's important to have your finger on the pulse of the organization and to be making those decisions that keep the trains on the tracks and going in the right direction.

As president, what data were you getting on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis that allowed you to keep your finger on the pulse of what was happening at the university?

Well, certainly I mentioned that the provost and I would meet often.

So we would hear things from one another.

I would meet with my chief of staff frequently, multiple times during the week, and we'd drop in, he'd drop in my office all the time if something came up.

So that was kind of a daily pulse.

The daily pulse is mostly when you're in crisis.

That's when you need the daily pulse, right?

There's something happening or some problem.

Weekly, I would certainly meet with my senior direct reports and the provost weekly.

But the other way I got input was I started, when I became president, doing a set of luncheons and I would invite faculty from various parts of the university.

And I would do one or two of them a week every single week and I told the faculty just come.

I want you to think about two or three things that we could do at the center of the university that would make your research and teaching better.

That was a great way to stay in touch with my colleagues.

And to hear about things when they were a little bit of smoke and maybe a little fire beginning.

But before it became a major conflagration.

That was extremely helpful in diffusing some problems before they became major crises.

Interesting.

That is the ultimate management by walking around.

It was management by walking around.

One of the great things about being president is I could call up some faculty member and say, I hear you're doing great research.

I'd like to come over and see your lab when they were happy to.

We discovered some really great insights, some great opportunities to really push our research forward because people were discovering breakthroughs that were really transformative.

I remember when you were president, I often thought of you, wondering as I walked through campus, did John know what's going on over here?

Does John know what's going over here?

I mean, clearly when you run a big organization, you don't see everything that's happening.

And essentially there are things happening that are not right under your eyes.

What do you think about delegation and what are the levers that you have to influence the community that is so large?

You're certainly right in a large institution, whether it's a large company or a place like the university or a government for that matter.

You can't know everything going on and there are things going on that are probably not what would be the way you'd like things to occur.

So you've got to think about how do you delegate?

How do you ensure that somebody who works for you is going to bring up a problem rather than try to bury it?

This is particularly, there are parts of the university that are higher risk than others.

Athletics, for example, could be higher risk.

Obviously, we operate a medical school and a hospital.

There's higher risk there.

How do you ensure that they bring the problem to you?

And I used to tell my direct reports, you'll get fired if you bury a problem.

You won't get fired if you bring it up, even if it happened under your watch.

That helped, but you also have to be aware that some things may come up that you're not aware of.

And at one part, we had a set of students protesting for a living wage act.

We believed, and my staff told me, everybody on Stanford makes more than what the local living wage proposal.

The students together, working with some of the workers on campus, uncovered situations where people were obeying the explicit language of the law, but we're not in compliance with the spirit of the law.

And as a result, were able to pay people less than what we thought was the wage standard for the university.

So I was grateful the students, they exposed something that we were not aware of.

And again, you can't know it in this large university.

But then you can put in place some policies that make sure it doesn't happen again.

And that's what we did.

So thinking about policies, clearly the levers you have when you're a university president are really different than levers if you're in a company.

What are the levers that you have when you are running an organization that's so decentralized, where people are raising their own money, where people really have a tremendous amount of independence?

It's true.

And in fact, you have tenured faculty, uh, that you couldn't fire even if you decided you wanted to.

So it's a very different situation.

There's this old story about a president of a university is like a caretaker at the cemetery.

There's lots of people under him, but nobody's listening.

Uh, there's some truth to that.

You don't have very many sticks.

Occasionally, you can use a stick where there's a question of integrity or ethics involved.

But mostly you have to think about what carrots can you offer?

What incentives can you offer for people?

So we would, and for a university president, fundraising is often the way you get an incentive.

You get a way to bring people to a new vision and get them to stretch and try something different.

When I think about some of the big decisions you made when you were leading the university, a lot has to do with building projects, the number of big projects that happened under your watch, a new med school, a new business school, a new arts center.

It goes on and on and on.

How did you think about those priorities and which ones you were going to tackle?

Some things were problems we had to solve.

When I came in as president, some parts of the campus were still left over from its boom period of the fifties and sixties.

And these were buildings that were no longer capable of doing state of the art scientific work.

I can tell you, as an alum of the medical school was in desperate need of renewal.

Right.

We needed to do some renewal.

For example, the art department was in one of the most ugly buildings on campus, half of which was underground.

I mean, this was not a great inspirational place for an art department.

And we had a dramatic shortage of studio space.

So we had to find a new way to build a new building for the art department.

We didn't have a good concert facility.

Sometimes you're inspired by something.

I got inspired by an event that occurred, Itzhak Perlman, the famous violinist, was on campus.

And at that time, the only place we had where he could perform was Memorial Auditorium.

It's an auditorium.

It is not a concert venue.

So I went back at halftime of the show during a break and he said to me, Mr.

President.

Stanford is a great university.

But you have terrible performance facilities and you should fix that.

So that was a great story because I had it from a master artist that we need to fix it.

And eventually we found a good friend, a longtime friend of Stanford University, Peter and Helen Bing, longtime friends.

Together with a group of other people really helped us build a great relationship great facility.

One of the great medium sized concert facilities in the country now.

So we were able to do some big things by making those kinds of changes and stretching ourselves.

Super impressive.

And I know the university is so much better off for all of this vision and execution on your part.

Now, I know the university has a really close relationship with the surrounding communities.

And the university can't just do whatever it wants.

There is a general use permit or a GUP.

I remember when I learned about this, I was very surprised.

Can you talk about what a GUP is and how the university collaborates with the surrounding community?

The general use permit is the thing under which the university operates, but also allows us to build new facilities and buildings.

So what we do is every twenty years or so, we go through a process where we propose what development the university is going to do over the next twenty years.

We do a big environmental study, everything, we're adding this much classroom, we're adding this much housing for students, we're adding these kinds of things.

And we do a big study around that looks at traffic and other impacts on the community.

And then we try to put together a proposal and negotiate that with the county in the end.

Because they can determine whether or not and what we can build going forward.

Well, what do they want?

They wanted a set of concessions in the process.

In particular, they wanted us to permanently dedicate part of our land for a public park, essentially, or open space that could be used by the public.

And the problem with that is that the land was given to us by the Stanford's in permanent use for the university.

So we couldn't make a permanent dedication.

We could agree not to build on certain areas for a period of time for the duration of the GUP even.

But to do it permanently, we couldn't do it.

That was a line we just couldn't cross.

There were other things we could do, we could provide money for traffic improvements and various things on campus as well as off campus.

But there were limits on how far we could go.

I remember these negotiations being extremely tense and tricky and long.

They were long, they took a long period of time to get the GUP and they kind of went through a big moment as we went to the final negotiation and had to sit down with the county and negotiate it.

Well, outside of Stanford, if we move a little further than just the county, you play some big roles in the community as the chairman of the board of Alphabet.

Can you share some examples of some big bets and big decisions that were made under your leadership and your watch there and how those decisions were made?

When I joined the board of what was then Google, now Alphabet, it was a relatively small company with a few thousand employees, roughly one fiftieth of the size that it is now.

So it's grown a lot over that time, but we had some key points probably the first one early on.

Well, first of all, we had to go public.

It was before the company had gone public and we decided on a, because so many people who were Google users wanted to buy stock.

We had a non conventional IPO that allowed individuals to buy stock very easily.

In most IPOs it's very hard for individual users to buy the stock of the company because it's handled by big investment banks.

So that was the first thing.

The second thing was the decision to buy YouTube.

At the time we bought YouTube, which we paid a few billion dollars for, YouTube not only didn't have any revenue, it didn't even have a plan on how it might eventually get revenue.

So there was a big bet.

And I still remember how we decided to make that bet.

One of our colleagues came in, I remember what she said, video is to the next generation, what email was to our generation.

And it was really compelling.

And we decided to make the bet.

It took probably ten years of further investment to make that bet one that was obviously great, but I think it was that commitment to do it.

More recently, I think the decision to make AI, to make a big investment in artificial intelligence technology became really critical.

It's really interesting because both at the university and at Alphabet slash Google, these decisions are long range decisions, right?

These are decisions that are not just going to affect the next week or the next quarter or the next year.

These are decades long decisions where you won't actually see the result for quite a long time.

And I used to tell my colleagues at the university don't bring me an idea unless it's going to be at least a twenty year commitment.

Because it will take us five to ten years to ramp up the investment, really get it operating and to see the benefits.

So I want to hear about things that are going to have a tremendous impact, even if it takes twenty years.

That reminds me of Knight-Hennessy Scholars.

And when I think about collaboration and analysis and decision making at KHS, I think actually about our admissions process.

Each year we go from thousands of applicants to approximately a hundred Scholars who are admitted.

And this is an incredibly collaborative process with team members with really different perspectives.

We do a tremendous amount of analysis and we have to make a lot of really hard decisions.

I find that having a really clear vision and a shared vision that we work on allows us to get to that goal together.

And this actually ties us back to the prior episode where we talked about creating a vision.

And what I've learned is that by clearly communicating a vision, so many other aspects of leadership fall really into place.

As we close, I want to ask you for some advice.

Advice for me, but also for everyone who's listening about how do you get better at making hard decisions?

I think this is an area where practice does help make perfect, it makes better.

So trying to learn how to make difficult decisions along the way when the stakes are smaller.

And maybe things are a little more black and white.

Because as you make decisions at increasingly larger organizations that affect larger groups of people, there's inevitably some grayness and fog that comes into the process.

So you can't really understand the implications as clearly or decision is not black or white.

So you can then begin to develop the skills of how do you do that and how do you not get frozen.

Because not making a decision can be as bad as the wrong decision in many cases.

So thinking about that and where is your perspective and how long are you thinking?

Think about when we choose Scholars.

I think the first thing we say is, is this somebody who we can envision twenty years from now really doing earth shattering work and making a positive impact?

Is it somebody who will contribute to the development of our community and help the rest of our Scholars get better?

We're trying to project those things, and obviously those are tough decisions to make.

And we take that application and all the information we get and the letters of reference we get.

And we debate how to make those decisions and how do we pick the very best people we can to make up the next class of Scholars.

Thank you so much, John.

That was wonderful.

Thank you, Tina.

There are four important insights from this discussion.

First, be willing to walk away from something that isn't working, even if you've invested a great deal, if it isn't the right thing to do.

Second, as your span of responsibilities increases, you have to learn to delegate and to build an environment where people feel comfortable surfacing problems.

Third, invest in long term transformative projects.

And finally, not making a hard decision can be worse than making a bad decision.

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 @KnightHennessy and on our website KH.Stanford.Edu.