Leadership Profiles

“If we're going to do good work with these young people, it cannot be bound by physical infrastructures. It’s got to be relationships and community. You’ve got to have a community of educators that are paying attention and talking to each other regularly as we look to figure how to move the needle in that development.”

“You know, we’ve stayed in the road, you know, we could’ve quit, we didn’t. There have been a lot of times over these twenty years, like, what are we doing and why? But every day we just got up and stayed at it.”

“It got to the point that if we wanted to keep our hospitals open and schools operating and other things like that we had to haul coal. So I called out the National Guard and utilized our state policemen and we hauled coal and we averted a real serious potential catastrophe.”

“I think for me personally, the primary leadership issue was, was I going to stand up for the values of the institution and put the university first or not.”

“You’ve got a three-legged stool standing on two legs. And so they began to triage the state services and decided, quite purposefully, that higher education was not a priority.”

“Now, you can engage in conflict just for the sake of conflict, and you have no idea how we’re ever going to come together and work together, and that’s not the goal of the conflict. But these effective leaders, in my mind, engage in conflict as one way of reaching a sure base for collaboration.”

“Leadership is having followers. But I think, in my work, what I’ve tried to do is differentiate between leadership management and command, which means I end up with a strange definition of leadership, which is more to do with getting the collective, however that is defined, getting the collective to face up to and respond to what we would call wicked problems or really complex issues that don’t necessarily get resolved very easily. So, I try to differentiate between management, which is the dealing with tame problems where we know what the process is and we know how to fix them, from leadership, which is about a collective response...Command is just dealing with crisis and, in some ways, command is the opposite of leadership. So, if leadership is about getting the collective to engage with a particular issue, command is telling the collective what they’re about to do.”

“I think leaders are developed over time by facing different crises and solving them pretty much in the right way. Each time you solve a tough crisis you exercise leadership and you learn more about it.”

“I’m saying that you really have to get to know the person, and you have to be fair with that person. You don’t have to love them. You don’t have to like their personality, but you have to respect them as a human being. Once you do that, a lot of barriers fall away.”

“I was in the basement of the Marott Hotel at the time I got word that Martin Luther King had been assassinated… Many people pointed out that of all the cities in the United States, Indianapolis had remained calm and had continued the conversation.”

“[C]onflict mobilizes followers.”

“Sometimes in a crisis, you’ll find that somebody will emerge who nobody expected to be and will grab leadership needs and do something with them. So you never quite know. So you could be born with all kinds of capabilities that could come out in all kinds of strange ways, but in my experience a lot of the people who think they were God's gift to leadership and everybody around them thought they were God's gift to leadership have not turned out to be very pretty.”

“It is a real pitfall if you will not invite dissension, people who disagree with you, you know, listen, because if you're really about the cause and are trying to find the best pathway, you need enough information to – you need the information on all sides in order to help make good decisions.”