Foreword

Peter M. Senge

In The Great Learning, Confucius said “To become a leader one must first become a human being.” I believe Confucius’s statement means little today because we have lost the sense of our life’s journey as one of becoming a human being. And, with that loss, we have lost the foundation of lived experience for developing as leaders.

As much as anything, I believe it is this loss that has motivated the extraordinary interest in Robert Greenleaf’s work around the world in the past two decades. When Greenleaf wrote his essay, The Servant as Leader in 1970, he could hardly have imagined the growing interest the next 30 years would bring. Initially, the essay predictably attracted a small group of ready converts from religious organizations, from organizations, like some in the military, where values-based approaches to leadership were well established, and from people already drawn to a developmental approach to leadership. But today, the interest is far broader and more diverse, and it has spread well beyond the US, even beyond the Judeo-Christian tradition that was so important for Greenleaf’s inspiration. The Servant as Leader has been translated into more than a dozen languages, and the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership in Indianapolis is now a global hub for operations in Australia/New Zealand, the UK, Canada, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Singapore, Japan, Korea, and South Africa.

But there are many reasons for the growing interest in leadership, and it is easy to force-fit Greenleaf’s work to fill needs for which it is ill-suited. Much of what is written today on the subject focuses on power, either explicitly or implicitly. This occurs because leadership has, in its colloquial use, become a synonym for “boss-ship”—as when we use the word “leader” to refer to a person in the position of greatest authority. This is tragic and undermines progress in developing real leadership. If the word “leader” is a mere synonym for boss or positional authority, it has no meaning at all. Two words to describe the same phenomenon mean that one is redundant. Moreover, being a boss hardly guarantees being a leader. Many occupy positions of great authority and contribute little leadership. I believe much of the contemporary fascination with leadership reflects our obsession with positional power, and with the wealth we expect to accompany it. This is why so much of what is written about leadership focuses on presidents and CEOs —and why this writing contributes so little.

Still, despite frequently misusing the word as a marker for positional authority, it also points at issues we all sense as crucial. Indeed, leadership, or the lack thereof, seems to relate to many ailments that we see everywhere in the modern world—abuse of power, obsessive focus on the short term over the longer term, and a profound loss of purposefulness.

These problems sit much closer to Greenleaf’s concerns, but I think it is a mistake for people to look to “servant leadership” as a kind of formulaic solution to them. Many seem to treat the recent corporate malfeasance witch hunt catalyzed by the Enron, Worldcom, and Tyco scandals as a singular occurrence. But it followed by only a decade the infamous “junkbond” scandal in the U.S. that put Michael Milliken and other highly successful dealmakers into jail. I recall much chest thumping by business schools about integrating ethics into their programs in the early 1990s— and even a few endowed professorships on the subject. Yet it would take some pretty strong rose-tinted lenses to assess any real progress in business practice that resulted. As concerns with abuse of power rise to the surface once again, it is a mistake to look to Greenleaf as a dispenser of an ethical antidote. Ethics became a kind of moral window dressing on MBA programs in the 1990s because these programs still held to premises that remain unchallenged—such as unquestioned views that the purpose of business is to make money and that those most successful at it are those whose passion for this purpose runs deep. Challenging such assumptions lays closer to Greenleaf’s real concerns. For above all, Robert Greenleaf’s writings were concerned with what motivates us and how we might cultivate deeper sources of motivation.

I first read The Servant as Leader in 1982, and although there are many ideas I keep rediscovering when I return to the essay, there is one that I have never forgotten from that first reading.

At the end, Greenleaf relates a vignette from the Herman Hesse story, The Journey to the East, around which he weaves many key points of the essay. The scene comes at the end of Hesse’s story, after the narrator has found the secret spiritual order for which he had searched for years, and after discovering that his servant Leo, without whose physical and spiritual ministrations he would have succumbed during his odyssey, is the head of the order. As he ponders a small sculpture of him and Leo, he notices that “it seemed as if my image was adding to and flowing into Leo’s… It seemed that in time… only one would remain: Leo.” Hesse then adds, “As I stood there and tried to understand what I saw, I recalled a short conversation I had had with Leo during the festive days at Bremgarten. We talked about how the creations of poetry become more vivid and real than the poets themselves.”

I will never forget reading that last line. I can remember vividly where I was when I read it—sitting in an airplane window seat on a nighttime flight to Houston—and what I was doing—traveling to conduct an opening workshop for the new American Leadership Forum organized by Joseph Jaworski, who had asked people to read the essay as background. I can feel how it moved me even now. It simply took my breath away, and brought simultaneously an immense sadness and a profound sense of calm and clarity. As I look back on this, this simple thought, “The poem becomes more vivid and real than the poet,” seems to have signaled three awakenings for me.

Firstly, it confirmed the essence of the work we had started to do on the nature of vision. Although the word later became widely used, and indeed overused, its meaning was rarely appreciated. Although it functions as a goal, a vision is more than just a goal. It is a goal that comes from our deepest sense of purposefulness. It also becomes a vehicle for living purposefully, because a sense of purpose is only as real as the effort one gives to bringing it into reality. A vision focuses that effort. Greenleaf seemed to understand all of this profoundly, and reading his words was an enormous encouragement.

Secondly, although we understood the spiritual significance of this work, we rarely talked about it. Yet, here stood such a simple and direct acknowledgement of the essence of a spiritual undertaking: when we truly give ourselves to creating what springs from our deepest source, who we are disappears. There are many ways to define spirituality but one of my favorites is simply seeing that who we are transcends—transcends what we do, transcends what we believe, transcends our personal history, transcends our physical form, and ultimately transcends all thought, including our images of who we are. Being genuinely committed means knowingly taking action that shifts the locus of my attention toward what I seek to create, and away from my self and what my creating will bring me. This represents a radical departure from self-serving goals that preoccupy most of us. Years later, I discovered Robert Frost’s admonition on creating, “All great things are created for their own sake.” It is no wonder he was one of Greenleaf’s favorite poets.

Lastly, Greenleaf had the courage to say all of this—that your individuality will burn in the fires of creation—so directly, in a culture that often seems to value the worth of the individual over all else. To the extent we give ourselves to be truly generative, we will be less real than what we create. These are not the rules of sacrifice, but the principles of generativity, and they transcend culture.

As I look back at this now, I understand that Greenleaf was also reminding us of the profound paradox of leadership; simply put, who is the “we?” On the one hand, vision and leadership are intimate and deeply personal matters. On the other hand, our normal sense of self may be diminished in the undertaking. In this simple reminder about what becomes “most vivid and real,” Greenleaf was subtly reminding us that leadership ultimately calls forth a different ‘self.’

For those like me who have found The Servant as Leader to be a deep well of continuing insight and inspiration, knowing better Robert Greenleaf the man and how he grew his gifts is an extraordinary opportunity. For example, it is fascinating to discover Greenleaf’s own approach to using the power of “boss-ship”—such as how he influenced AT＆T’s eventual adoption of a radical new approach to personnel assessment through slowly, gradually influencing many people’s thinking rather than using his positional authority, or how he engaged those far from the centers of power in his ‘study teams’ when he was asked to develop new recommendations (chapter 12). Similarly, it becomes much clearer how Green-leaf’s understanding of the power of genuine vision grew during his years at AT＆T (chapter 7), when the company was still energized by the dream of universal telephone service and “the spirit of service” established by founder Theodore Vail.

Lastly, it comes as no surprise that Robert Greenleaf had little interest in drawing attention to Robert Greenleaf. Through mutual friends, I had some small sense of Greenleaf the Quaker, but it is reassuring to discover him here as a person struggling—to both find his distinctive voice (chapter 14) and then have to live with the personal attention his writings brought (chapter 20). It is easy to see Greenleaf’s discomfort with being the center of attention as modesty, but I think that motivation is secondary. On the other side of the doorway of giving up the self in creating, what is created develops a life of its own. Attention on one’s self is simply a distraction from what really matters— what is emerging. As Gibran said, “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.”1 Even to the end of his life, Greenleaf struggled to help people understand the problem of misplaced attention on him as “the creator” versus their own work as servants.

Confucius said that the first two “meditative spaces” in becoming a leader are “knowing how to stop,” and “stopping.” Gradually, the meaning of these words was lost, until they became reinterpreted during the Ch’ing dynasty, China’s last dynasty, as that one should know how to be respectful and subservient in the presence of authority. But, their original meaning was quite different: one must learn how to stop the flow of thought and then, when needed, do so.2 If this capacity is lacking, then we can only see what our past experience prepares us to see. We cannot see a situation freshly.

Becoming a human being, and preparing a foundation for leadership, starts with developing the capacity to see what we have not seen before. If this capacity is absent, actions taken in the face of novel circumstances will actually be reactions from our past rather than appropriate for the present. As the capacity to stop becomes developed, our actions start to emerge from a broader field, the field of the future that is seeking to emerge. Then, we attain what Lao Tzu called “non-action action, where nothing is done and yet nothing is left undone.” Or, as Greenleaf would have said, we become a “channel” for what is seeking to emerge.

The future taking shape today seems to be making Robert Greenleaf’s work more and more a channel for what might emerge—but only as we continue discovering what his life and thoughts mean for the servant in each of us.

Peter M. Senge

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Peter M. Senge is founding chair of SoL (Society for Organizational Learning) and senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is author of The Fifth Discipline (1990), and co-author of three related field-books: The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (1994), The Dance of Change (1999), and Schools that Learn (2000). He is co-author of Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future (SoL 2004).