bestselling author and one of america's true heroes. general anthony zinni. general zinni served a distinguished career in the united states marine corps including two tours in vietnam where he was severely wounded as well as operations in the philippines, turkey, somalia, kenya, iraq, and the persian gulf. he has received 23 military service awards including the defense distinguished service he has received 23 military service awards including the defense distinguished service medal is oak leaf cluster. he's also participated in numerous presidential diplomatic missions. his latest book "leading the charge: leadership lessons from the battlefield to the board room" includes a visionary approach to leadership and challenges of the 21st century. this is a book about what future leaders must know. and they must be effective in our dynamic and rapidly changing environment so please welcome general anthony zinni. [applause] >> first, let me say it's a true honor to be here. i really want to commend tucson and the daily star and the university for this unbelievable event. i mean, i spent all day walking around and the number of people who have come out -- the interest in reading and literature just warms my heart. and it's great to see the young people out here especially. i know many of us who are a little more senior would obviously come but to see so many young people interested in books and reading and authors and lectures, i think, says something. this book "leading the charge," came about almost unintentionally. several years ago i wrote a book called "the battle for peace," and it was a book about how the world was changing around us. ever since the collapse of the soviet union, sort of a confluence of things, a perfect storm, the soviet union collapsing, changing the power structure, the rise of globalization, mass migrations of people seeking greater opportunity and a whole set of things that i watched for my last 10 years in the military and then 10 years out in the business world, academia and other places. and it struck me when i wrote this book, that we weren't getting it. the world was changing drastically and becoming more complex and complicated that we're missing this and we're still operating under the old ways and systems and organizations. ting under the old ways and systems in organizations. in the course of going around in the book tour for that book, with audiences like yours, and in the q&a period, review questions and comments about leadership. and it struck me because of the number and frequency of those kinds of comments and questions in the just of what people are saying is it's not just a matter of the world changing and our environment changing, our leaders are failing us. they don't get it. and i walked away from the weeks of the above two are saying, you know, this has been impressive by just the nature in the consistency of those comments that i wanted to see if that was really more than the anecdotal information i was picking up. people really feel that way, is there a sense there is a crisis in leadership. so like a good writer, you research everything. i went online to a number of organizations that do leadership surveys and that for years, that sort of take the pulse of people not only in the united states but globally about their feelings of leadership and every aspect of society. and frankly i was shocked what i found and this was late 2008. but from 2008 on back to sate beginning of the century, continuously there's been a rise in the percentage of people that feel we have a crisis of leadership. in 2008, 80% of americans polled said we have a crisis in leadership. and not just in political leadership or where you might expect it, you know, events might drive that sort of opinion but across-the-board. as i drilled down into the research, when they were asked about different aspects of society, the clergy, business leaders and military leaders and all others, in 2008, not one group achieved higher than 50% approval rating. and that particularly struck me personally 'cause it was the first year that military leaders dropped below that percentage. and so i went to look at globally how people felt about leadership. is it just a united states, an american phenomenon or is this the way people felt around the world. and several of the surveys i found not one political head of stated achieved above 50% approval rating by his or her constituents, their people. and so to me it was a clear indication that there is a sense if not a factual realization that leaders are failing us. why? i wanted to understand what is happening, you know, we have created such phenomenal leaders in the world in our own nation in the past in almost every field so why is this sense out there? and not everybody could be failing. i mean, obviously there are leaders that are making it. and i particularly wanted to look in areas where the vast majority of leadership was rated very low. why do you have the one standout that seems to go against the tide and people feel are strong leaders? what makes them different? so the gist of the book was about my views or observations as to what makes good leaders today. and why other leaders are failing. and i broke it down into about 11 areas. my partner on the book about halfway through said since -- for half a century you've been a supposed leader. why don't you throw a few of your views in here, too. so i took him up on it and i salted it a little bit with my own personal views or experiences on leadership. good and bad, trial and error over half a century. that particular part of it made me think about leadership in another way. at the same time all this was going on i was asked to teach a course at duke university at their stanford leadership center so i was preparing for the course. and i decided to look at how i was trained, if you will, or educated to be a leader. not just the experiences what did my service, you know, the military do to train and prepare me. did it work or didn't it work and what did i find out? and it caused me to look at leadership development programs in business. i'm the chairman of a board of a major company and we have a leadership program and i've been involved in several others. and how do we develop leaders now? and the other aspect i wanted to look at is something very strange that struck me because of something i read. the history of leadership. you know, it's something we don't think about. but we really decided we needed to create leaders from the masses about the beginning of the last century. if you think about history, that's about the time monarchies and dictators and other things were beginning to fade from the world but about the beginning of the 20th century if you're democratic and has representative government and everybody is going to have a fair chance and you can rise in the ranks obviously we have to find a way to train you. it's not bloodline or a class of elites. what did we do about that? you can look at business and industry. you can look at military and other large iostitutions and their approach and the approach was interesting. in the beginning of the century we felt if you build a good character, you build a good leader. if you looked at our training early on you would see it was character-building to build leaders. it was the boy scout traits, clean, irreverent. i remember when i joined the military i had a card and i had to memorized traits. there was a platoon sergeant who will make sure you memorize this or else but this idea of building good character was the first approach to leadership and certainly there was nothing wrong with that. we want good people to be leaders. and we found out about several decades into the century there's more to it. we began to educate leaders. and we found out toward the end of this century there's a third component. and maybe the most important. and that's giving potential leaders experience. , you know, you look at the military and those of you who have served in the military you know that every couple of years we have to pack up and move. you're going to have a different experience. a different assignment. if you're promoted you're going to go to a different position and the purpose of all that is to give you a variety and a breadth of experiences to develop the few that we're going to keep in that senior leader mode. i can tell you in my company we have an extensive leadership program which is built progressively from the junior leaders to the midlevel leaders to the senior leaders and we actually rotate them around. we have rotational positions in marketing, in finance where we try to give them that wide breadth of experience. one of the experiences we don't want to see is tall thin people. that isn't an anatomical criticism. it's people that come and do well in one area, like an engineer, and you see potential in that person that he or she could be a leader at the top level. but they say because they like what they do in one area. they're so narrowly developed they don't get that breadth of experience that you want across-the-board. so the latter part of the last century we began to emphasize this idea of experience. now, the first problem we run into how much experience can you give people? how many different jobs and moving them around and disruptive nature of doing those sort of thing. we learned it in the military. certainly we did. you know if you haven't been in the military field exercises, computer simulations, tabletop games and actually other fields have gone into this. how can i create training environments, experiential environments that aren't real. they're temporary but i can expose you to a variety of positions. so all this came in to looking at leaders today. and what i found -- and i'm going to go through the things i thought were most significant about success and failure in leadership today, but what i found basically is that some of the traits that you would naturally think leaders should have and certainly have demonstrate in the past but do carry in the past but some need to be emphasized more and there are certain other kinds of things or traits or characteristics or applications to leadership that are unique to this new century. and let me talk about some of them. first, i want to talk about the leader himself or herself. we have invested a lot lately in almost every field in building leaders. in the past we kind of said, you know, the good people will pop to the top. there's something natural in a leader. there's some sort of born to lead. give them enough experiences or give her enough -- different positions and you'll see it come to the top. and there's a realization that it's become much more complicated. and the breadth of knowledge and experience as i mentioned necessary to lead requires more than that. so you're seeing now more investment in what's being termed "leader development" in almost every field. and the fields are the places where you don't see that. you tend to see some of the problems. now, obviously these leader development programs are done in a way to expose potential leaders to several things that they might not otherwise get. one of it is mentoring. it's sort of that access to senior leaders who have succeeded that offer their time, that offer relationship to a young leader that helps that leader develop. that is a sounding board. that offers advice to provide critique. critiques. if you look in business now, when we look at a young leader that maybe has something he or she needs to work on, we assign a coach. there are people who have consulting agencies that do coaching. and we very specifically select coaches for certain areas that we want these leaders to improve on. and to work on. i have a friend of mine who recently retired as the coo, the chief operating officer of the bank of new york. and i asked him, because of his, you know, 40 years in the banking business -- i said, don, what's the biggest change you've seen from the time you came in till now? he said the biggest difference is the amount of mentoring and coaching that i had to do as a senior leader and we demanded of our senior leaders and your young up and coming leaders want it or need it. that's one aspect of the leader development program. and the other is what i mentioned try in that program where you spot a young leader with a lot of potential to give that variety of experiences. the third part maybe the most important part is to provide a means for that leader to reflect on who he or she is. when i taught my class at duke and when i've done leadership coaching and counseling, i have a little drill i put my students through. i give them a piece of paper. and i make them believe i'm going to collect a piece of paper. i have a place at the top of the paper with name. i have a line through the center of the paper. and i said there's going to be two questions i'm going to ask that you're going to answer on this paper. one on the top and one on the bottom. the first question -- you have 15 minutes to answer it. who are you? and, of course, students look at you like another weird professor in the room, you know, who are you. and i don't take any questions or hand-raising comments and tell me who you are and they right away diligently try to write who they are. at the end of that i stop and i say, okay, before we get into the second question, i want to tell you i'm not going to collect the papers. i'm not going to call on you to get up and say what your answer is. that question, who you are could have been answered in many different ways. there's no right or wrong. we're going to talk about it. now you're going to answer the second question at the bottom half of the paper. who am i? and you're answering this question to yourself. and they diligently write. and at the end i ask them to think about what they wrote on the top of that paper when they thought i was going to collect it. and what they wrote in the bottom if they were honest to themselves as for who they were. and we get into discussing in the class the ways you could answer this. you could describe yourself by your profession, your set of values, your family, your interest. there's many ways. and what does it say about you and was there a difference in the top when you may be selling yourself? was that your resume or was that at the bottom if you were being honest about yourself. but these are the sorts of things that allow individuals to understand themselves better. many certainly in the military and certainly in many businesses and other areas we give personality tests, myers briggs and others. the purpose of those tests is for the individual to understand who they are. you know, what are my limitations? what are my strengths? how do i act in given circumstances? how do i think and what are my values? and i think you see in successful leaders today, a much greater sense of reflection and appreciation and a way of constantly improving themselves that they seek. continued education, the ability to modify and improve and develop their leadership style. in the military, we have all our young leaders, officers, ncos write a philosophy of command. and now in businesses and in schools where we teach leadership, we have them write a philosophy of leadership. and we encourage them to develop a philosophy. this isn't a rubber stamp or template that everybody gets. but what is it that you want to become? what are the leadership traits, the values? how do you want to run an organization? how do you want your people to feel about you? you know, and when you write that, as i used to tell young officers and those that i've worked with at universities -- when you write that, go back and look at it. at least once a year or more. see what you've learned. have you lived up to it. could you have done better? and get feedback. again part of these leadership development programs is feedback. feedback is tough because when it's critical, it's tough to take. then the mentoring comes in you have to have sort of a safe way to receive that criticism. someone you trust. someone that necessarily say and this isn't for score or grade. this is for you. and where that person feels comfortable in expressing i haven't done this that well. i need to improve in this area. so the first thing i would mention of the traits of the leaders that are succeeding and maybe the need for those that are not is this sense of concentrating on being a better leader, improving yourself and being part of a -- some sort of development program that continues your education and development. the second thing is a realization -- there's a chapter i have in the book called "the led" who do we lead? very few leadership books talk about those we lead. and the purpose of leadership is made up of people. today that's much more difficult for a number of reasons. the led are much more diverse and different. there's obviously diversity that we understand, what i call horizontal diversity, ethnicity, race, a place of origin, sexual orientation. you take it. there's a whole bunch of things that you can see that make us different. and more and more a different group of led, a more diverse group of led is entering every field of endeavor and so that leader has to be sure from each person they lead who comes from a different background. besides that horizontal diversity there's what i call a vertical diversity. i'm still in the work force. i'm 66 years old going on 67, which tells you something 'cause i always thought you retired at 65. but you don't anymore. we're healthier, better, poorer and so we all have to work longer. and if you work longer the number of generations in a given organization is greater. i'm from the silent generation. prebaby boomer. you know, we were born before the baby boomers. then you have the baby boomers and generation x and the generation y the millennial generation and another generation about the new silent generation about to enter the work force or organizations. and so you have about six generations in the work force. they were named because they're exceptionally different. you come from my generation and you're the son or daughter of the depressionary-era parents. they taught you about financial security, job security. if you're a young person today maybe not so much. you're willing to take risks, you're willing to move. and this manifests itself in many different ways. i mentioned in the book an incident of someone i know who works for a major mutual fund company. and he was tasked with coming up with the awards and incentives program for the company and he decided he would poll all the employees to say what do you want? if you do a good job and we're going to recognize you in this company, what is it that you want? what he found was the older generation was put it in my paycheck and the younger generations were saying i want a picture with the boss, a certificate shaking hands. i want recognition which is even more important. you know, where you could count on those older employees who were settled in and wasn't ready to move in and wanted that job security and believe me i know this from the being in the business world for the last 10 years you're liable to find some young person coming in and say, boss, i'm out of here. i'm moving. why? what did we do wrong? you didn't do anything wrong. we would never have seen this from an older generation who sought security so you see this diversity from many forms and shapes and now a leader has to touch every one of those people. you know, has to communicate with them in a way that's very different. this first struck me in a job i got right after retirement. and i looked outside my hallway and i looked at all the people that were out there in the different cubicles and offices. and i'll tell you it looked like the united nations. the bar scene or star wars. it was so different out th