Innovation Blog

Additional Author 1: Oswaldo Yoshimi Tanaka

Dr. Oswaldo Y. Tanaka (KILP 1), Deputy Minister of Public Health for Sao Paulo, Brazil.

This article was originally published in the Septemeber 2004 issue of the KFLA Newsletter.

”A crisis is always an opportunity to grow, to understand life. It is there for our growing process. Go deeply in any crisis that presents itself.”

Sao Paulo State sits along the Atlantic coastline of Brazil, just south of Rio de Janeiro. Originally a highly productive coffee plantation state, it is now the industrial and financial center of Brazil, generating more than 30 percent of the GNP.

Dr. Oswaldo Tanaka works and resides in the capitol, Sao Paulo, which sits 45 miles inland on a plateau. The city of close to 10 million people is one of the largest in the world, and the metropolitan area of close to 18 million people is certainly the largest in South America. Here, Tanaka (as he prefers to be called) serves as Deputy Secretary of Health for the State of Sao Paulo. His primary charge in this populous area of the country is to develop competence and skills in health workers to allow better service delivery, in both volume and quality.

In his role, Tanaka is involved in implementing evaluation as a managerial tool in various levels of the health system to aid in the decision-making process. In working to bring about these improvements, Tanaka strives to invite all points of view and uncover the motivations that will mobilize health professionals.

”In any field, the most important thing is to choose strategies to mobilize resources, human, material, and financial,” Tanaka explains. ”The best approach is to listen carefully, try to understand what others have to teach, and uncover what actual motivations there are to deal with the problems we face.”

In servicing 37 million people living in Sao Paulo State, he has had to face political pressure from those advocating for health services that are not cost-effective. ”Today, health is a big challenge because it is expected to be provided by the state,” he says. ”The highly technological procedures have been extremely expensive and they compete with the primary health care needs. To balance between those needs has been the most difficult challenge.”

The relationships that Tanaka is able to build from each contact he has in his personal and professional life help sustain him in his work. Even in crisis situations that have called for his leadership, he acknowledges the opportunities presented in building human capital. ”A crisis is always an opportunity to grow, to understand life. It is there for our growing process.” He advises, ”Go deeply in any crisis that presents itself.”

Tanaka attributes the milestones he has achieved in his career to his experience with the Kellogg International Fellowship Program. ”Leadership is a process of relationship construction,” he says. ”The opportunity the Kellogg International Leadership Program provided me to learn to respect different values and ways of thinking opened up new possibilities to me. To be able to listen respectfully and learn from others brings about success.” 

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Written by Kellogg Fellows Leadership Alliance

Additional Author 1: Patrick F. Bassett

Patrick Bassett, KNFP-7, President, NAIS (National Association of Independent Schools)

This article was originally published in the August 2003 issue of the KFLA Newsletter.

How have you, though your leadership, made a difference in one of your communities?

A key Kellogg lesson is to think globally, act locally, and I have attempted to do just that. Much of our work at NAIS is to assemble research and conduct environmental scanning to assess what’s happening in the world of education and consider scenarios for the future. We assemble braintrusts to debate and deliberate and publish monographs on our website and conduct institutes based on the results. We know what good leadership and governance looks like and publish Principles of Good Practice to set standards. But ideas don’t stick without personal contact, so we travel to cities all over the country and world to assemble leadership and engage in conversation about change to improve our educational system, to model best practices, and to find ways to manifest the public purpose of private education. On the immediate local level, I tutor weekly at a charter school in downtown DC.

What sustains you in your practice of leadership and your commitment to change?

In most organizations, especially schools, change agents are almost always punished. Yet the change agenda is so critical to the life and growth of organizations that to avoid the responsibility of leadership to support and initiate change is not to lead at all. What sustains me is the ability to transcend the niceness of consensus at times to build coalitions of the willing to take on the challenges that need addressing. I am reminded often of the Kellogg seminar on cycles of change and the predictable stages of resistance and mourning that accompany change. I remind myself often of the Margaret Mead observation, Never underestimate the power of a handful of individuals to change the world. After all, it’s the only thing that ever does.

How do you practice good self-care?

Exercise vigorously early every morning. Call the grandchildren every other day.

If you had to give an aspiring leader one piece of advke, what would it be?

Funny you should ask, since just this evening I gave an opening address to the latest group of new school heads at the Institute for New Heads. My main advice was this: new leaders fear they do not have the technical skills (fundraising, finance, planning, etc.) to do the job, that they are impostors waiting to be found out to be wanting. In fact, leaders are seldom chosen for a set of technical skills but rather for who they are. Leaders learn the technical skills as they go, on the job. What makes leaders successful is the ability to capture and convey the essence of their organization’s mission in a handful of compelling stories and to emanate and perpetuate the positive values (and ameliorate the negative ones) of their organization’s culture.

Are you a better leader than you were five years ago? How do you know?

Yes, because I’ve discovered that the essence of leadership is to surround oneself with extraordinary people, to set the highest standards and expectations for the organization’s success, and then create the environment where talented staff have the freedom and confidence to do dramatic things. We know leadership is working by the extraordinary output of products and services the various teams at NAIS have produced, by remarkable growth and positive feedback in our membership, and by financial success that far outdistances anything achieved in the past.

How do you lead through a crisis?

Nothing makes a crisis so much as seeing it as one. Having the plan in place for addressing extraordinary circumstances and knowing the right folks to bring on board for counsel allows a leader and his or her organization to address the vicissitudes that present themselves in as routine and confident a matter as possible. Projecting that modality reassures everyone and moderates the amplitude of the wave.

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Written by Kellogg Fellows Leadership Alliance

Additional Author 1: Paul Hill

Paul Hill, Jr., KNFP-10, CEO/President, East End Neighborhood House

This article was originally published in the April 2003 issue of the KFLA Newsletter.

Paul Hill Quick Fact: 2002 recipient of 100 Black Men Mentor Award (Cleveland, OH)
Recently completed an 18 month professional training program – Organization and Systems Development via The Gestalt Institute of Cleveland
Hill, P (2002), Africentric Rites of Passage: Nurturing the Next Generation, Counseling African American Families, 61-71

How have you, though your leadership, made a difference in one of your communities?

In 1993, I founded The National Rites of Passage Institute (NROPI). The purpose of NROPI is to create a critical mass and community of adults to serve and develop youth. Since 1993, NROPI has provided training to 732 men and women from 20 cities and the District of Columbia. They have been actively involved in rnentoring and supporting a minimum of 10,000 children and youth in neighborhood and community based programs.

What sustains you in your practice of leadership and your commitment to change?

The understanding and practicing the concept of sankofa. I am, because we are and therefore I am.

What is your passion?

Family and community.

How do you practice good self~care?

Treating my body as a temple.

How do you measure success?

Success is based on the fruit we bear in the October of our lives. October answers to that period in our lives when we no longer depend on our transient moods, when all our experiences ripen into wisdom and every root, branch and leaf glows with maturity. What we have been and done in spring and summer appears. We bear fruit.

If you had to give an aspiring leader one piece of advice, what would it be?

First, live a full and balanced life! Second, there is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the practice of freedom.. .the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with the reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

How are you different or what do you do differently as a result of your experience as a Kellogg Fellow? Why?

I am more global and have a better appreciation of other people and their cultures.

Are you a better leader than you were five years ago? How do you know?

I am a different type of leader; I have transitioned from the warrior-king to the spiritual-guide. I am in a generativity period of development and leadership. I know because my Gestalt experience has afforded me the opportunity to bump-up against myself which resulted in an aha!

Can leadership be invisible? How and why have you practiced invisible leadership?

Yes! Leadership is situational and developmental. My leadership style has transitioned from being provocative to being evocative in my generative and spiritual-guide developmental period of life.

How do you lead through a crisis?

By being informed, strategic, decisive and with meditation and prayer.

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Written by Kellogg Fellows Leadership Alliance

Additional Author 1: Peter R. Linkow

Peter Linkow, KNFP-4, President, Work/Family Directions (WFD)

This article was originally published in the April 2003 issue of the KFLA Newsletter.

Peter Linkow How have you, though your leadership, made a difference in one of your communities?

It is difficult to assess whether I have made a difference in any community where I am a leader. I rarely have a straight enough line between my actions as a leader and a difference in the community to conclude that I have made that difference.

Because the right measure of difference is so hard to know and ascertain, I am suspect about declaring that I have made a difference in a particular community. Ultimately, for me, making a difference has a face. An experience I had early in my career serves as my guiding metaphor for making a difference. At a teen center I led, I found a fourteen year old girl smoking marijuana one afternoon on the back step. Her older sister was a drug addict and her older brother was in jail. Her father had climbed into bed two years earlier and essentially remained there. Her mother had a great vitality and spirit that had been shrouded by too many years of poverty and family distress. Hidden within this girl were a practical intelligence, a self-confidence, and a thirst for survival. Over several years, with assistance from many others, she found a more positive path. My contribution was to believe in her, provide her with decision making tools and skills, help her surface the path that was in her, and nudge her back on that path when she was in jeopardy of falling off. Today she is a gifted teacher and parent.

I regret sometimes that making a difference has become so much more abstract and complicated as the scope of my leadership responsibilities has increased.

What sustains you in your practice of leadership and your commitment to change?

My commitment to change gets so intertwined with ego and making a living and the everyday circus of survival that I find it difficult even to be so lofty as to think of leadership as a practice. Ultimately, I suppose, it is the same as success; it is to make a difference one life at a time. Leadership provides a potent instrument for making those differences.

HOW do you measure success?

As I said earlier, the first measure of success for me is making a positive difference in someone’s life. My second measure of success is empowerment, enabling people to control their own destinies.

In his oft-repeated quote, Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, made a powerful connection between leadership and empowerment which works for me. He said, ”A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.‚”

In this era when leadership is close to being a cult, Lao Tzu’s maxim has a danger. The truly gifted, empowering leader, who makes leadership invisible, may not be noticed by anyone at all.

If you had to give an aspiring leader one piece of advice, what would it be?

Be sure to distinguish between rules of leadership practice and leadership principles. Immutable rules of leadership practice probably don’t exist. Leadership practice must fit the context, the unique dynamics and challenges of the situation requiring leadership. You have to become skilled at managing all sides of apparent contradictions–like being directive versus facilitative or operational versus strategic, and be able to embrace a leadership approach that fits the context.

On the other hand, you must have leadership principles that are immutable. To rephrase a quote by Thomas Watson Jr., the great leader of IBM, I firmly believe that any leader, in order to survive and achieve success, must have a sound set of beliefs on which he premises all his actions. Next, I believe that the most important factor in leadership success is faithful adherence to those beliefs. And finally, I believe that if a leader is to meet the challenges of a changing world, she must be prepared to change everything about herself except those beliefs as she moves through a life of leadership. Principles like ”See difference as a source of advantage” or ”Pursue fairness and justice” transcend the context.

I have asked a lot of leaders what their Principles are and I have been shocked by how few have been able to directly answer that question. Yet, they are often very dear about their rules of practice, even though those rules no longer apply to the context in which they find themselves.

Are you a better leader than you were five years ago? How do you know?

This is another question I find difficult to answer. One of the things that I have discovered is that as your leadership capabilities grow, so, often, do your leadership responsibilities. The trick is to keep up with your responsibilities. If anything, I was a better leader five years ago than I am today.

I have been vested with the responsibility to lead an organization with an eminent history through a tough recessionary period. This environment has put me on a steep learning curve, stretching my competencies and skills and knowledge to the limit. I am being challenged to grow as a leader at a time in my life when I would like to be playing more to my strengths.

Please ask me this question again in a year or two.

How do you lead through a crisis?

You'll have to take my answer with a grain of salt. I have been leading an organization through a crisis and we haven’t achieved success yet.

I follow three principles in a crisis: maintain integrity, act quickly, and don’t ever forget.

It is a struggle not to place blame for my leadership travails. Maintaining integrity requires accepting responsibility. Responsibility means owning my actions and focusing on those areas that are within my focus of control and taking action on them.

Crises require tough decisions. Delay in facing tough decisions often makes them worse. I have found, for example, that in times when layoffs are required, it is far kinder to everyone to act quickly than to hold out hope that things will change. For those who go, you typically have more resources today to ease their transition than you will tomorrow. Those who stay avoid the morale loss that comes from the interminable downward spiral. Further, they enter and complete the grieving process sooner.

Crisis often demands serious change and serious change has a profound impact on people’s lives. I try to never forget that I am holding people’s self-esteem in the palm of my hand and that it is vital to hold it with gentleness, care, and compassion.

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Written by Kellogg Fellows Leadership Alliance

Additional Author 1: Richard A. Jackson

Rick Jackson, KNFP-8, President, Center for Teacher Formation

This article was originally published in the June 2003 issue of the KFLA Newsletter.

Rick Jackson Quick Fact: Rick co-directs the Center for Teacher Formation with his wife, Marcy Jackson. Parker J. Palmer is the senior advisor. Rick recently published, ”Courage to Teach: A Retreat Program of Personal and Professional Renewal for Educators,” with Marcy Jackson in ”Stories of the Courage to Teach: Honoring the Teacher’s Heart,” edited by Sam Intrator (KNFP-14). Rick will soon have a chapter in ”Teaching with Fire: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Teach,” edited by Sam Intrator and Megan Scribner, a project of the Center for Teacher Formation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Jossey Bass Publishers.

How have you, though your leadership, made a difference in one of your communities?

The Center for Teacher Formation prepares facilitators to lead Courage to Teach renewal programs for teachers and leaders in education– those on whom our society depends for so much but for whom we provide so little. Teacher formation is rooted in the belief that good teaching flows from the identity and integrity of the teacher. The formation process makes connections between the renewal of a teacher’s spirit and the revitalization of public education. Since 1997, the Courage to Teach program has grown, with programs now offered in communities around the country.

What sustains you in your practice of leadership and your commitment to change?

The principles and practices built into ”formation work” are the heart of what I find personally sustaining. Namely, it is important to honor and uphold the identity and integrity of individuals, each of whom possesses an ”inner teacher” with insight and wisdom to be tapped regarding life‚’s most important challenges. It is refreshing to remember that good leaders do not, in fact, need to themselves have alt the answers, and that oftentimes people prefer to be shown respect in the form of attentive listening and the asking of open honest questions rather than be ”set straight” with advice. What sustains my practice of leadership is the belief in this deeper meaning of vocation: drawing out the inner gifts, skills, and knowing inherent in each individual.

What do consciously say to yourself or do that helps you stay on track with your goals?

We follow a ”movement model” of change. Rather than the familiar linear planning inherent in most approaches to ”strategic planning,” the movement model builds upon the acts of integrity taken by responsible individuals. Such individual acts oftentimes begin to attract others (nothing attracts like integrity), and communities of congruence are formed around deeply held values and beliefs. Over time, such communities of congruence gain strength, develop new language and leadership, and ”go public,” when ready, to engage in the rough and tumble of organizational development and democratic change. Through such engagement, tasting change can be initiated and institutionalized.

What is your passion?

Helping individuals, especially young persons, discover their innate gifts and talents; helping individuals, especially young persons, creatively give their gifts and talents to others in the world through service.

How do you practice good self-care?

I lead renewal retreats, and find that these actually renew me as well As I grow older as an extrovert, I notice that I too enjoy more periods of silence and solitude, so I carve more time for such occasions into my schedule. Best for recharging my batteries is to spend time with young adults. I love the caring and can do attitudes so many of them possess.

How do you measure success?

I measure success in terms of faithfulness to one’s personal gifts and vocation in the world. While I value some ”quantifiable outcomes,” I believe too much is made of measures, and the tests upon which they are often based. Good people doing work that is right and timely for them to do are inherently dedicated, committed and powerfully responsible to achieving results. I look for ”aliveness” on the part of the people. In any organization– creativeness within individuals and among colleagues in relationships. That is the first and, in my book, most important measure of success.

If you had to give an aspiring leader one piece of advice, what would it be?

Don’t trade short term rewards for long term integrity. Stay true to yourself.

How are you different or what do you do differently as a result of your experience as a Kellogg Fellow? Why?

I’ve always had a deep sense of personal responsibility for my work. My Kellogg Fellowship supported the increase in the scale of efficacy–what I should reach and could actually accomplish. At the same time, it reinforced my belief in the power of well aligned individuals doing the work of their head, hands, and heart.

Are you a better leader than you were five years ago? How do you know?

Yes. Mostly because what I am doing now is an even closer fit with my own skills and abilities. I’m doing fewer things, but with more forethought, greater choicefulness, and more wholeheartedness. Guess you could call it both “working harder” and “working more deeply.” There is a line in “The Woodcarver,” a 2,500 year-old poem by Chuang Tzu, that expresses it well. I am “guarding my spirit, and not expending it on trifles that re not to the point.” For me, this is a combination of acknowledging my age (53) and stage in life, and also my growing belief that the best work, for all persons, arises when our inner work of mind and spirit is aligned well with our outer work of service in the world. Another way of saying this is my identity and integrity are now more fully in “plumb line” with my professional work, which is itself about helping others name and claim greater “soul/role” alignment.

Can leadership be invisible? How and why have you practiced invisible leadership?

Yes, some of the best leadership goes hardly noticed. I think of the image of a great theatre or film director, a person the audience never sees. Yet it is their capacities to envision, and to see abilities embedded within the talent they have to work with, that makes for a great outcome. Good youth workers are like this as well, seeing capacities in youth long before young people see them within themselves. Good teachers do this all the time, namely, see the birthright gifts in their students and bring them to light. And good leaders combine passion and humility, often in quite invisible ways.

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Written by Kellogg Fellows Leadership Alliance

Additional Author 1: Roger N. Casey

Roger Casey: (KNFP-14), Dean of Faculty, Rollins College, Florida

This article was originally published in the July 2005 issue of the KFLA Newsletter.

As the 21st Century rolls in, Roger Casey is helping to ensure that the small, liberal arts college where he oversees faculty and curriculum stays at the crest of the new era’s advancements and changes. In working to create a liberal arts curriculum appropriate for the emerging century, Roger has identified four over-arching themes: community engagement, leadership, diversity, and internationalization. In the coming academic year, Rollins College will engage in a conversation about how to structure its curriculum and programs to encompass those four principles. ”So often, programs in higher education are in silos with little conversation between them,” says Roger. ”I envision a model that is circular similar to the yin/yang in which all the forces work with each other.”

Before coming to Rollins College five years ago, Roger was associate dean for teaching and international programs at Birmingham-Southern College, where he worked for 10 years. There, with assistance from other Kellogg Fellows, he helped launch a center for leadership and service learning, taking students to study in Mexico and Belize. Once at Rollins, Roger started a community engagement initiative to connect students with both local organizations and international programs. ”My passion for service learning programs came out of my Kellogg experience,” he says. ”My goal is to saturate our curriculum with these opportunities.”

In 2003, Roger took part in a Kellogg Fellows trip to the Galapagos. The following year, he took 16 students on the same trip to ”recreate some of the learning experiences I had with the Fellows,” he says. This year, he returned with a group of faculty. Roger explains, ”My goals are to internationalize the faculty and students, to allow them to experience the community that is created by living on a small boat for 10 days with a group of people, and to have people think about the natural world and the issues of sustainable development.

The Galapagos also have personal significance for Roger. ”The Fellows’ Galapagos trip was the last time some of us got to spend with Ray Gatchalian. Ray died in an accident about a week later. A lot of what I’m now doing in the Galapagos is in tribute to Ray.” He adds, ”I keep a photo of him on my desk to remind me of his unbounded energy and commitment.”

Roger has also worked with a Rollins chemistry professor to establish a water purification project in the Dominican Republic. Students assemble and teach people how to use water purifiers, and also conduct research on the affect of the purification project on infantile diarrhea and other ailments. Roger’s style of leadership is such that ”no one recognizes the guiding hand that made it all possible.” He explains: ”There’s a verse in the Tao Te Ching that reads, And when the work is done, the people say: Amazing! We did it ourselves. As a leader, that’s the measure everyone involved feels an ownership.”

His advice to aspiring leaders in his field is: ”Ignore structure. Structure in higher education is the biggest impediment to getting anything done,” he says. ”Do everything you can to smash down the walls and ignore the rules. Then,” he says, ”whatever it is you’ve set out to do will probably have a good result.”

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Written by Kellogg Fellows Leadership Alliance