What My Unplanned Sabbatical Taught Me About Life, Leadership and the Future of Capitalism
In July of this year I suddenly found myself with a lot of time on my hands.
To be sure, the sabbatical wasn’t exactly planned. I was stepping down from my role as a Chief Communications Officer for one of the world’s biggest companies because of an essay I had published in 1987. I was a 29-year-old junior navy pilot when I wrote it. The essay was an archaic, awkward and wrong-headed argument against women in combat, one that I grew out of even before the Department of Defense did. Nevertheless I found myself confronting it — the intellectual equivalent of a yellowed polaroid of me in bell bottom pants — when it washed up 33 years later.
My board of directors feared that such an anomaly in the history of their PR chief could create a PR risk. I disagreed. But I preferred not to be an additional worry on its plate. The company and I parted ways with mutual respect and regret.
So I suddenly I found myself without a job and a paycheck — but with something more precious: Time. Time to sleep. Time to clean my closet. Time to binge-watch West Wing and rediscover Diana Krall. But more importantly time to learn — to read; to connect with family, old friends and new acquaintances; to look hard in the mirror; to contemplate (don’t laugh) the meaning of life.
As I gear up to reenter the working world, I’m recording the things I’m learning from all that — and not just to record them but to make them part of who I am as a business leader. Because not to do so — as we in business like to say — is to leave money on the table.
Here, free of charge, are four of the things I’ve learned from my summer sabbatical:
First, it pays to assume people are basically good. I know that sounds ridiculous. Especially when we observe so many people to be anything but “good.” But that’s the point. What we observe about people cannot always be true, especially when what we observe is often no more than the labels we happen to see: political affiliation, skin color, occupation, class markers, education, scraps of outrage shared on social media. We can’t always know and rarely ask what fears, cares, beliefs, obligations and motives lie beneath the things we see in them. We leap immediately to judgment, and the less we know the more judgmental we are.
Time spent this summer with books like Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy and Plato’s Republic was a reminder to me of how hard it is to parse the good person from the not-so-good. So were conversations I had with people ranging from a European billionaire to the single Chicago mom who cut my hair; from Jesse Jackson Jr. to a senior executive in an online gambling company; from a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives to a high school survivor of attempted suicide.
They were all reminders of how constricting the perspective from a corporate C-suite can be, how incomplete — and even misleading — is the human data from which we make so many decisions. The binary algorithms we often use — this person is good or bad, that view is right or wrong, these policy choices will create or destroy value — can blind us to the kind of nuanced and intimate understanding of people, their needs and wants that success in the market demands.
Second, leadership is like sex. That is to say, human beings have exercised and responded to leadership — just as they have been figuring out how to mate with one another — since they began hunting, gathering and organizing themselves into pre-pandemic pods. To be sure, we have been critiquing, professing on, gossiping about and competing over leadership — just as we have over sex — since the beginning of time. According to Google, there exist some 57,000 books with leadership in their title, and my cursory review of a tiny fraction of them this summer produced a list of a few dozen suggested leadership attributes.
But none of them improves much on “the king-becoming graces” that Shakespeare enumerated in Macbeth four centuries ago: “…Justice, verity, temp’rance, lowlines/ Devotion, patience, courage, fortitude.” And since before the time of Homer, what made good leaders better than bad ones was not the number of books by Jim Collins they read, or corporate development courses they took, or social media platforms they appeared on, but rather the degree to which, simply put, they are committed to the well-being of the people they lead and the arc of human progress.
In short, leadership is a liberal art, not an algorithm; and the protein required to strengthen the leadership muscles we were born with comes from the study of philosophy, history and literature more than from sugar-rich airport bookstore business books or powerpoint bullets.
Third, companies that are serious about protecting capitalism need to be serious about protecting democracy. For a decade or more, the unique norms and institutions that make America’s political economy uniquely successful have been under assault. Our collective national well-being has been mugged by balkanized interests in the form of culture wars, identity politics, corporate rent-seeking, fights over the economic pie, and even to-the-death conflicts over the nature of truth itself. On top of all that, 2020 has added a pandemic, a surge in racial tension, climate-induced wildfires and a presidential transition crisis.
Some CEOs have begun publicly standing up for those norms and institutions. But it wasn’t until I picked up Paul Collier’s Future of Capitalism that I realized how critical their support is to the survival of our economic system. Collier describes the how the foundations of that system were laid immediately after World War II, when great companies hit their stride by generating wealth that raised many boats. Checked and balanced by the then-pragmatic workings of government and labor, corporate leaders brought organizational discipline and resources to the task of solving big societal problems. Along the way they helped create a physical, commercial and even social infrastructure that enabled a national sense, however imperfect, of inclusive possibility and progress.
But by the end of the 20th century, the role of corporations came unmoored from this common ethic of societal value. Milton Friedman’s celebration of profit as the one and only social role of business encouraged financial engineers to treat the corporation as something exclusively of, by and for shareholders. Politics came to reward ideological zealotry over actual governing. Lost in all this was the implicit contract by which American democratic capitalism earned the license to prosper.
No wonder, then, that today only half of young Americans view capitalism positively, that an avowed socialist nearly became a U.S. presidential candidate, and that 50 percent of Americans don’t trust business. This is the worry that should be at the top right corner of corporate risk matrices — that a system of wealth creation so critical to the success of the American project could lose both its way and its mandate.
Fourth, reputation is the product of ethical courage, not transactional expediency. My experience in four global Fortune 100 companies in three issues-rich industries has taught me that doing the right thing — based on a clear and respectful view of the truth of the matter, even when it could mean provoking an opportunistic squall of criticism — always delivers more reputational value over the long term than spinning, stonewalling and ducking for cover.
It’s time for me to get back to work, but I’m richer and better for the months I’ve spent thinking, learning, reading, growing. I recommend such diversions highly to anyone who may be contemplating — or unexpectedly experiencing — a break in the rhythm of your career.
