Impact everyone else. He conducted indepth interviews with 550 government and Business Leaders. To find out how they operate. This event was hosted by the Trinity Forum, Nonprofit Organization based in washington d. C. Good evening, everyone. Good evening, and welcome to the evening conversation tonight with d. Michael lindsay on view from the top an inside look at how people in power see and shape the world. We are thrilled by the turn out tonight and if you are Still Standing there are a few seats right over a year, one or two right there as well. Make your way to a spot where you can actually sit comfortably for the rest of the evening. I am the president of the trinity for a manned we are excited to partner with gordon in hosting tonights presentation. I would like to thank the gordons board and staff for their willingness to partner with us and delighted we are joined by trustees from gordon including susie young as well as Trinity ForumBoard Members and holiday and bob kramer, Advisory Board member Peter Mcdonald and treated before ands Academy Trustees hearty and carol and gardner. I am delighted so many Academy Alumni and gordon alumni are here tonight. We are delighted you are here and finally we are excited that each and every one of you are here this evening. We think you are going to find this discussion very compelling and since there is not enough time to answer all the audience questions we want to let you know we will be live logging this event so you can follow along on social media on our face book page or on twitter using hash tag trinityforum or hash tag youfromthetop. In addition to being broadcast live on cspan2 tonights presentation will run throughout the weekend on cspans booktv. For those who are not familiar with the forum we provide a space and resources for leaders to engage lifes greatest questions, we believe ideas have consequences and as part of the christian mandate of loving god with all of your mind requires fought for contemplation of the great ideas and questions of our time so it is our mission and our joy to provide publications and programs such as the one tonight to help leaders engage those Big Questions and ultimately to come to better know the author of the answers. It has been said the Great Questions of life essentially boiled down to just three, what is a good person . What is a good life and what is a just society . Our conceptions of and hopes for all three of those questions are necessarily influenced at least in part by the individuals, institutions that shape our lives. So grappling with those Great Questions ushers in another line of inquiry. What is the nature of good leadership . Is it possible to lead wisely and well . It is a question of the enormous importance and perhaps particularly in our time when public trust in leaders in business, government and virtually every institution has plummeted to new lows in the wake of leadership failures. As a supply of trucks were the leaders edens ever more elusive the need to understand how to cultivate and develop such leadership is more urgent and few can address that need with the expertise or insight as our speaker this evening, dr. Michael lindsay. Michael is a prominent sociologist, author and president of Gordon College located outside boston, mass. A graduate of baylor with theology degrees from princeton and oxford as well as the ph. D. In sociology from princeton michael has devoted much of his academic career to the study of leadership. As a professor at Rice University he directed the program for the study of leadership there as well as published his Pulitzer Prize nominated book face in the halls of power which was listed as the best book of 2007 by Publishers Weekly and widely profiled in the new york times, wall street journal, usa today, cnn and cal was other assets. Since assuming the presidency of gordon might collapse leadership expertise has become increasingly practical as well as academic. His relatively short tenure has been accompanied not only by a dramatic increase in application, enrollment and donations for which im sure your trustees thank you but also a new emphasis on chief helping, inspiring a new generation of leaders. Towards that end he has developed, introduced two new programs including the gordon president ial Fellows Program which is modeled after the white house Fellows Program, and what he calls a weeklong leadership laps. He has also just completed the largest ever interviewed based study of leaders the results of which he details in his newest book the view from the top an inside look at how people in power see and shape the world which we invited him to discuss here today. In the conclusion of his remarks he will be joined by his coauthor, m. G. Hager, who i am proud to say is an alumnus of the 24 academy. We are proud to claim her and together they will take audience questions. Michael, welcome. [applause] thank you very much. I wish my folks were here, my dad would be so proud and my mom would actually believe what you said. Tonight i am going to share with you what the last ten years of my life focused on, trying to understand what makes great leaders, what are the motivations that draws them to assume positions of responsibility, how do they manage the challenges and opportunities they encounter within their positions of responsibility, and how do they seek to create a legacy that extends beyond their term in office . A lot of people ask me how did you get a chance to interview 550 amazing individuals . It was a wonderful project that started out as my dissertation at princeton. I am living proof you can write a dissertation your wife will describe as actually interesting. Sold much of the interviews is a matter of being in the right place at the right time. I was out at Silicon Valley conducting some interviews and had a couple hours to kill so i went to the bookstore at stanford university. I had been in the store couple minutes and looked over and out of the corner of my eye, i saw a woman i have been trying to track down for years. A woman who looked exactly like karen hughes. You remember karen hughes . She served as counselor to the president for george w. Bush. I had been trying to get an interview with her for four years and here she wasor so i thought in the flesh. I wasnt positive it was karen hughes. I decided to wait until she spoke so i just sort of eased up beside this woman ended a couple of minutes she said something and i instantly recognize that raspy texan voice and thought this is my big break. And then i realized i have never asked somebody for an interview facetoface. It is like asking somebody out on a date facetoface. What if they say no . Then it is embarrassing. I needed to get my nerves up so i decided to circle around karen hughes which i did, i got to the end of the first circle and decided i am not ready to do this oil will do it a second time. I circled around karen hughes a third time, fourth time, i circled around karen use five times at sanford explore thebook store. At the end of the fifth cycle i decided i am out of here, i left the store. There is a large plaza outside the bookstore and i am out there thinking what was that all about . Why was i so intimidated and concerned with what she would think of me . What if she says no . She will forget it in five minute and i will remember the rest of my life. I decided to go back into the bookstore and went looking for karen use and i cant find her. I thought this is divine punishment. I didnt have the courage early on. Eventually i noticed she is on the second floor at the coffee bar so i start walking up and as i am walking up the stairs i am thinking how the line address her . To whitecollar madam counselor or counselors use, mrs. Hughes . Hey, karen . What am i supposed to say . I was still sorting that out in my mind as i reached her and didnt know what to say so i kept her on the shoulder. Turnaround and i have this habit when i get nervous of having red splotches appear on my neck. I knew i had about 60 seconds before my face would be be read. So i said mrs. Hughes, my name is d. Michael lindsay, i am conducting a study on leaders and will you give me an interview . Said i am not here looking at colleges for my son so this is not a good time but i will give you my phone number and you can call me in a couple months and i would be happy to sit down with you. I took her number and a couple months passed and i gave her a call, i dont know if you remember me, d. Michael lindsay. Yes, the young man who turned bright red at sanford. I said yes, that is me. She gave me an interview, we did it at the adams hotel across the street from the white house and was an amazing interview. Because here was a woman who really was as surprised as anyone that she was in the inner circle of political power. She had not spent her life trying to get there. She happens to be good friends with a man who ran for president , he ended up winning and he invited her to work with him. Once she was in that office, however, she began to wonder is this how i want to live my life . She was working crazy hours, had a teenage son she was never seeing and if you know her story she ended up reminding resigned her position, moving back to austin and at that time i conducted the interview with her. Was grappling with the questions about location and calling, responsibly and influence and she ended up deciding to go back to washington, worked in the state department for a couple of years, she represents in miniature what i found across 550 people i was blessed to get a chance to meet, extraordinary individuals, each of them have their own stories, it had interesting things to offer as we try to understand how does leadership worked in our culture today . I wrote view from the top an inside look at how people in power see and shape the world in the hopes it would inspire the next generation of leaders. It is a book if you are in a position of responsibility will find it resonates with your experience. A lot of the people i have interviewed i picked up copies and send me some emails, theyre not all hate emails. I take that as a good sign. What we tried to do in the story is represent peoples experience as truthfully and honestly as we could and at the same time apply the critical analysis of the social scientists, stories of numbers, big numbers of folks who are represented in the study but also individual experiences and journeys. Four things i thought might be helpful tonight to share that i walk away from the study after ten years thinking is really important. One is the significance of institutional leadership. George hallmeyer is an extraordinary man. And engineer who grew up not far from the university of pennsylvania. His parents were immigrants to this country. He didnt have a lot of money. His dad was a janitor. But he went to college, studied engineering and got a job working for rca. Well he was an engineer very discover the technology that would allow liquid crystal displays, something that we use today. The problem however is george discovered this in 1964 and the leadership at rca wasnt convinced it was all that interesting. So while he tried to persuade his colleagues, in the end he wasnt successful. And the u. S. Lost its competitive advantage. It was the japanese who brought liquid crystal displays to the marketplace in the 1970s and 80s. George is an extraordinary individual but without institutional backing he wasnt able to make a longterm difference the change human history. He still gets the credit for coming up with the invention but most people dont even know his name. Institutions matter far more than i expected starting to study. I thought interviewing 550 people, i would be studying about extraordinary personalities, people with a certain persona. Actually what i found is most of the power in our culture is housed within institutions. So if you dont have that sort of inside connection with the leadership position in an institution you have little chance of making a longterm impact on culture. One extraordinary person i met named marty evans was the first female rear admiral in the u. S. Navy. You went on to serve as the head of the american red cross, commissioner of the ladies professional golf association, been on a number of corporate boards. Remember the tailhook incident that happened in the u. S. Navy and the 1990s . It was an embarrassing situation where there was clear gender bias occurring within the military. Marty was the person who was tasked with leading the task force that would help the u. S. Navy figure out how to create more space for women to serve in combat or leadership positions in the u. S. Navy. Because she was an insider at the institution she was able to bring about a significant change to the u. S. Military. One of the key lessons i tell my students that borden is if you want to have a Lasting Impact you have got to be in the room where decisions are made. That is why institutional leadership matters. The second key element of leadership that we encountered over the course of the study is the value of her leadership. Here is the interesting thing. We found that really doesnt matter much about what you do before age 20. There is no statistical significant relationship between any variable you could imagine and the likelihood of becoming strategic leader later in life. Doesnt matter if your parents were rich or poor, doesnt matter if you were a varsity athlete or student body president. Doesnt matter if you were popular or a nerd. None of those things matter. What does matter is that some time in the early adult stage, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, in the College Years in particular, you need to find a mentor, somebody who will help raise opportunities for you, introduce you to different networks. Theres a wonderful social scientist who wrote a book in the 70s called getting a job. The key finding from his research is it doesnt really matter if your family and friends help you make connections when applying for jobs because they dont have a longterm impact. And said he discovered what he called the strength of weak ties. We get jobs because of the clintons networks. Friends of friends who help make introductions that give us opportunities and in fact that is what i found over the course of my city. Many of the folks who got a leg up in the world achieved that because they were a friend of a friend who made an introduction. One of the key findings of the study is young people have to learn how to maximize the opportunities they are given. Not everybody has the same repertoire of skills or talent but you use what you are given to the maximum potential. Kevin plank was a Football Player at the university of maryland. Kevin wasnt the best student in school, he wasnt the best athlete. Number of his friends were getting drafted to the nfl and he didnt have didnt think it was going to be a possibility. Kevin had always been good at sales. Iran in college of Flour Service where guys could buy roses for their girlfriends on valentines day, ran it out of his dorm room and made a lot of money so he knew he could sell things. One day at the end of the practice, two day practice he was having in late august, in his senior year, he realized he took his shoulder pads off, his tshirt was just waited down with sweat and he thought there has got to be a way in which you can invent a fabric that could somehow with the way the moisture so that you would not have this 5 or 10 pounds youre carrying when trying to perform as an athlete. He literally invented the industry of performance apparel. He took his last 600 while he was sleeping on the couch and his grandmothers house, invested in six different fibers trying to see if this would be the key and it ended up working and that, ladies and gentlemen was the start of under armor. You never know how you take opportunities and backgrounds and experiencess you have got, maximize and leverage them to have a Lasting Impact. Surely leadership, we found, make it huge difference. You have to experience what we call a leadership catalyst. One of was a faculty member at rice we were trying to figure out how could rightcenter into the top 10 institutions nationally ranked. Rice is a wonderful school, number 16, 17, 18 for number of years and they wanted to go to the next level. One of the areas they thought they might invest in what rigorous Leadership Development program that would help elevate contributions of the young people they were serving. Imus task with given the opportunity to look at all volusia Development Programs being running universities in the private sector, Public Sector and see what was working effectively. I looked at 25 that had a lot of promise and actually concluded there was one that was very significant called the white house fellowship, it was started in 1964 by president johnson. Is a program where folks in their 20s who are promising emerging leaders, resign whatever job they had the time, move to washington and come to work for u. S. Cabinet secretary for one year. In that role they are given a chance to see up close how does leadership really work and they take the experience back with them to their respective jobs. The idea according to president johnson is this would raise the leadership quotient of those folks who would go on to occupy Senior Leadership roles, commerce, technology, entertainment and government, not just over the next ten years that the next 50 years. Has been amazingly significant. I was able to be involved in the selection process. I will convince this was extraordinary. Across the table from a guy who was chief of surgery at Johns Hopkins medical school. He wrote a textbook that is using 40 of medical schools across the country and the regular contributor to cnn. He got rejected for the white house fellowship. I decided that is what the rejects look like and i have got to study this program. It is wonderful because some years there will be as many as 2 or 3,000 people who will apply for the white house fellowship and i will narrow down to 30 national finalists. If i never went down to 30, it is hard to tell who should be selected and who shou