Forging a Unique Path in Leadership

Harry Davis: 00:01
Leaders need to continue to learn from their experience. And that requires trying things, experimenting, collecting data, reflecting on the data, talking to others, so that it's a very comprehensive set of skills and attitudes and attributes that I think have to be worked on for a lifetime.

Harry Davis: 01:09
This is the University of Chicago. We really admire work where we don't just have opinions but we bring some data to bear, some evidence to suggest that my view is perhaps closer to the truth than somebody who simply has an opinion.

Linda Ginzel: 01:25
I tell my students that in order to be wiser younger, to learn the lessons of experience, to create a better future self, you have to collect the data of your experiences. So we have to write things down because if you don't write it down, it doesn't exist.

Harry Davis: 01:38
It's very much a tradition of Chicago, this empirical tradition. There are an incredible number of opportunities every day for people to try things. I think that the day-to-day life of businesspeople is an incredible laboratory for self-growing, self-awareness, and self-discovery.

Linda Ginzel: 01:59
I give every student a green pen. And the idea is that it's a symbol, symbol of hope, to use this green pen to collect the data of their experience, and then what you're doing is you're creating feedback for yourself. You're becoming your own coach.

Seon Ahn, ’18: 02:13
Linda was one of my favorite because she made me think about myself in a different way. You are leading your life so you have to analyze yourself first.

Adja Diakite, ’18: 02:28
The leadership program within Booth completely enable you to think first which kind of leader are you going to be, it's not to looking at some other leader and just replicate what they are doing. I take more time to listen first and as well, I prepare a lot.

Mary Go, ’07: 02:49
I think it's important to experiment with a lot of different styles, especially when you're unsure which one is going to work. I think a trap is going exclusively with one approach that's comfortable for you, and there's a whole opportunity if you try different approaches to have different outcomes. Linda Ginzel, I remember vividly, stood on a table when she was presenting. And I remember looking around the room, she's a petite woman up on the table and she said, "This is quite unexpected. How many are uncomfortable?" And I raised my hand, and she said, "The risk of doing something like this is quite small, but what an impact this has made."

Harry Davis: 03:35
Encouraging experimentation is a real challenge. One needs to find interesting ways and maybe somewhat playful and creative ways to do it. I think one of the things that I've seen be very helpful is when the leader of an organization makes a commitment to experiment. Other people within the organization who work for that person basically conclude, "Hey, if she's doing it, maybe I should do it."

Mary Go, ’07: 04:07
I think my leadership style before I came to Booth was built on sort of business tenets, almost like you must do these 10 things to achieve certain boss-like tendencies. I was one of the youngest bosses and I was one of the few women, so it was very important to me in my mind to follow kind of those rules. Booth breaks down a lot of those barriers as well as the passage of time. And so you learn more about strength of ideas, and that's not a checklist of things.

Harry Davis: 04:39
My hope is that we will hold onto our belief in knowledge, our belief in an empirical approach to things. They will continue to discover and try things. We take change seriously in two ways: what's important that we hold onto and not change, and where are there areas that we can change and experiment.