Mansour Javidan Oral History Interview

SCARPINO: Today is Thursday, October 12, 2023.  My name is Philip Scarpino, Professor of History at Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI); and Director of Oral History for the Tobias Leadership Center also at IUPUI. Today I have the privilege to be interviewing Dr. Mansour Javidan at the annual meeting of the International Leadership Association, which is taking place in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre. This interview is part of a joint venture undertaken by the Tobias Center and the International Leadership Association. In the interest of full disclosure, I note that as part of my background research I talked to two of Dr. Javidan’s professional colleagues: David Waldman, Professor of Management, W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University; and Dennis Baltzley, Senior Client Partner, Global Head of Leadership Development Solutions at Korn Ferry, a global consulting firm.

 Dr. Javidan was born in 1953 in Iran. He earned his Bachelor’s Degree at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 1976.

Sharif University, which opened in 1966, is an elite school of technology, which I have seen described as the MIT of Iran. He has a Master’s from the University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management, 1977; and a PhD from the University of Minnesota, also Carlson School of Management in 1983.

Dr. Javidan has areas of expertise in Leadership Development, Organizational Development, Intercultural Communications, Business Strategy, Consulting, and Executive Coaching.

Dr. Javidan’s employment history includes the following:

March 1, 2011 to the present: He is presently the Garvin Distinguished Professor and Executive Director of the Najafi Global Mindset Institute, Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University.              

January 1, 2017 to the Present: He is Project Director and Principal Co-Investigator for GLOBE 2020 Research Program. GLOBE stands for Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness.

July 1996 to June 2000: He was on leave from the academy where he was a Senior Advisor on Strategic Issues at the Vice President level, Office of the CEO, TransCanada Pipelines.

1993 to 1997: He was a member of the GLOBE Consulting Team.

He has published a large and impressive body of scholarship on national, international and cross-cultural aspects of business management and leadership. He is the co-author or author of about 28 book chapters and dozens of journal articles. He is also co-author, or co-editor, of six books; recently, Robert House, et al, Strategic Leadership Across Borders: The GLOBE Study of CEO Leadership Behavior and Effectiveness in twenty-four countries, 2014.  

According to Research Gate, his 97 publications have been cited 18,365 times. He has won numerous awards and recognitions for his scholarship, including:

In 2020, recognized among the top 20% of most cited scientists in the field of business and management in the world.

2018, recognized as among the top 100 most influential authors in Organization Behavior in the world.

The recognition that brings us here today is the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the International Leadership Association.

So, now, I’m going to ask you for permission to record this interview, to transcribe the interview, to deposit the recording and transcription in the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives, where they may be used by patrons, including posting all or part of the recording and the transcription to the website of the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives; and also deposit the recording and transcription with the International Leadership Association and the Tobias Center, where they may be used by patrons with the understanding that they may be posted, all or in part, to those organizations’ websites.

Can I have permission to do all those things?

JAVIDAN:     You do.

SCARPINO: Alright. I’m going to start, like I said when the recorder was off, by asking you some basic demographic questions, and then we’re going to talk about leadership and work our way through your career more or less chronologically. Part of the fun of doing this is that I have a set of questions, I know where we’re going to start, I don’t always know where we’re going to end up. And, again, thank you, with the recorder on, thank you very much for being kind enough to sit with me.

JAVIDAN:     You’re welcome.

SCARPINO: Alright, I’m going to come back to leadership, but I want to talk about you first. When and where were you born?

JAVIDAN:     September 24, 1953.

SCARPINO: And, where?

JAVIDAN:     In Tehran, in Iran.

SCARPINO: Where did you grow up?

JAVIDAN:     I grew up... well, I lived in Iran until 1976, so I grew up, I went to high school, elementary school, and undergraduate university in Iran.

SCARPINO: Do you have any brothers and sisters?

JAVIDAN:     I have one brother who actually lives in Vancouver, and he just retired as a professor of neurology at University of British Columbia.

SCARPINO:  He did well. And so did you. Who were your parents?

JAVIDAN:     My father was Iranian. He was born in the city of Tabriz in northwestern Iran. He was a retired Army general in the previous regime. And he was also a lawyer. My mother was born in Russia, in Moscow. She and her family fled Russia after the 1917 Communist Revolution, and they moved to Iran.

SCARPINO: By the previous administration, do you mean the Shah?

JAVIDAN:     Yes.

SCARPINO: Alright. What did your mother do?

JAVIDAN:     She was a homemaker. She was an interesting character. She was very clear in terms of her values and what she wanted in life, and she communicated that quite clearly to all of us. There were seven of us.

SCARPINO: She had plenty to do.

JAVIDAN:     Plenty to do, yes.

SCARPINO:  What stands out about the values that she communicated to you, as you’re an adult looking back on that now?

JAVIDAN:     Perseverance. Resilience. Having seven kids and a big family moving from another country to Iran, learning a new language and a new culture. The one thing that was so obvious about her was how resilient she was. And it was important for her to make sure the children understand how important it is to be resilient in life. And all of us pretty much have stuck with that. You know, my brother moved to Canada, and I moved to the U.S. My sisters live in different parts of the world, so it just became natural with us.

SCARPINO: Now your sisters live in Iran, now?

JAVIDAN:     Two of my sisters are Canadian citizens, and they live half of the year in Vancouver, and the other half in Tehran in Iram. Right now, they’re both in Iran.

SCARPINO: You talked about your father. What kind of an impact, would you say, your parents had on shaping the adult you became?

JAVIDAN:     I would say that my dad had the most, the biggest impact on me. He was a very religious man, religious not in the sense of forcing others to pursue religious ideas. He, himself, was a devout Muslim. He also wrote a bunch of books. He believed in ethics and morality. So, if there is one word I would use, or anyone would use about my dad, was, an honest person. Anyone who knew him. He actually started a foundation. It’s a charity organization that, even today, has twelve thousand members. The other thing about him that has stuck to all of us, is being helpful, helping other people. So, honesty, and helpfulness. The interesting thing is that is not something that my brother or I, or my sisters, have to work at. If you ask people who work with me, they would probably use the same kind of words. My brother is a devout Christian. He runs free clinics for people in this city and does all kinds of things to help other people.

SCARPINO: You mentioned starting a charity organization, what was the name of that organization?

JAVIDAN:     There is a small town in northwestern province in Iran, it’s called Benis – B-E-N-I-S – and my dad had a lot of friends who were born in that city. And he, himself, had relatives from that town. So, they put the name of that city on that charity organization because, initially, their interest was to build hospitals and schools and other facilities for people in that town. But then it expanded, they did the same thing in a whole bunch of other small cities in Iran.

SCARPINO: I’m going to switch to education in a minute, but as you think back on growing up in Iran in your youth, can you talk about early experiences that helped shape the adult you are? What did you experience there?

JAVIDAN:     Yeah. There are some experiences that had a really big impact on me. One was the Iranian culture itself, which is a very hierarchical culture, autocratic culture. So, the notion of deference and compliance. The word compliance, or the Persian equivalent to it is something that’s constantly communicated to children as they grew up in that culture. In order to be respected, you have to follow, you have to show that you’re complying with your parents, with elder people, with the government, all of... it just continues. And the impact on me was exactly the opposite because I saw the dysfunctional consequences of how people’s motives, values, aspirations can be so drastically constrained when you don’t allow them to open up, when you don’t allow them to have a voice. It doesn’t mean everybody has a good voice, so there’s obviously pros and cons. But what I witnessed was all the talent, all the ambitions that were being wasted because of this pressure for controlling. And, so, as an individual... and this was not really by design, my natural tendency was like that. And, then, as I witnessed what is going on in the society, and then I moved to the U.S., I realized, wow, there is really another way of doing things, and this new way, to me, is just to allow people, to empower people - this comes back to leadership at a later time – to engage, encourage and empower people to speak up, to have their own independent views. In fact, I can tell you that even the last few years that I was in Iran - I left Iran when I was 21, 22... but the last couple of years that I was living in Iran, my whole family was using the word ‘rebel’ to describe me. Now I understand why they used that word, but at that time, at 20 years old, now that I reflect on it I was just telling everyone, hey this is the way I want to do it. If you don’t like it, that’s your problem. I’m going to give you a very simple example.

SCARPINO: Good.

JAVIDAN:     In the Iranian culture, when we’re sitting in a room like this and an elder person walks in, everybody stands up to show their respect. I wouldn’t. Many times, I was told, you are being disrespectful. And I would say, I don’t understand, what is this? Why should I stand up? I don’t get it. Somebody needs to explain things to me. And they would get irritated. At some point they all gave up. My parents gave up on me. My relatives gave up on me. But that, I mean, the act of standing up is a very simple thing, but the philosophy behind it, it was something that I was really, I guess, rebelling against. I just felt, you cannot try to force human beings, you shouldn’t force human beings to be something they do not want to be. And that was a huge impact on me. Can I give you another example?

SCARPINO: Absolutely.

JAVIDAN:     I’m trying to remember the years. I think it was years 2014 to 2017, Harvard Business School would have an invitation-only conference, about 70 or so professors. The dean of the business school would invite us to get together in Boston, in June. And we would spend three days debating, discussing things. In one of the meetings, in the instructions we received for that conference, one of the instructions was: Bring with you a symbol of what your childhood stood for, and what your society when you were growing up stood for. When we arrived, they put us in small groups and they told us to have a conversation about those relics. I didn’t have anything. So, people asked me, what is yours? I said, well, it was really difficult for me to bring it with me. They said, well what is it? I said, it’s sheep. I couldn’t bring a sheep with me. And they said, what do you mean by that? I said, well, in that culture, people are treated like sheep. When I was growing up, one way or the other... in fact, the word sheep, the Persian version of it, you would hear it on a regular basis in the society. Political leaders always referred to the people in the society as sheep. Parents referred to their kids as sheep. So, I said, I couldn’t bring a sheep with me, but this is an important element of my upbringing, a symbol of life as I experienced it in my childhood.

SCARPINO: Do you think that... just sort of a segue into leadership a little bit... that people who are imbedded in a culture like sheep that that presents both opportunities and challenges when you have leaders that want to go in a direction that may not be good for the society as a whole?

JAVIDAN:     Autocratic cultures, and there’s quite a few of them, can be quite efficient in moving, because it doesn’t mean they support it, it doesn’t mean they like it, it doesn’t mean they understand it, they just move because the sheep is told by the shepherd, this is the direction where I’m going. So, there’s efficiency in decision-making, in movement. The endpoint can be positive, can be negative. Look at Singapore as a good example. This is a culture by design. It is an autocratic, hierarchical culture, but it’s all moving in a good direction. It has turned a little village into a magnificent human experience. I used to live there. And then, you look at some other cultures that are very autocratic and they’re just being constantly decimated, because all that talent, all that emotion, all that ambition is being suppressed and oppressed. Efficiency is there. Speed is there. But the direction can be in a good side or in a bad side.

SCARPINO: When you were growing up in Iran, were there individuals other than your parents, who we’ve already talked about, who had a significant impact on shaping the adult you became?

JAVIDAN:     Some of my high school teachers. One of them, this may sound very weird, one of them was a... (INTERRUPTION) ... one high school who had a big impact on me was a teacher who was teaching Persian literature, Iranian literature. Now, this is a little strange because in high school I was in the mathematics part. I don’t know what they call it. In Iranian high schools you would specialize after ninth grade. You could go in natural sciences, you could go in mathematics, or other social sciences, etc. I was in the mathematics stream because I loved it. But at the same time, we still had humanities courses and literature. The thing about this guy was, he always, he was a very religious guy. In fact, he was a... the word mullah, he was dressed in the Islamic attire. But it wasn’t his religion, religious views, and he never promoted those. The way that he described things, and he used literature to help shape us as teenagers. So, every time we would study a Persian poet – Persian literature is full of really fantastic poets and writers – his objective wasn’t just to learn these poems or read this, his objective was... he had to be very subtle about it because it's teenagers. If he would ever ask me, what are the implications of this poem for you as a human being? I would have no idea what he was talking about. But he used a language that communicated that to all of us, and it was just fascinating to me. He turned Persian literature into a source of aspiration and inspiration for me. I’m not exactly sure how he did it other than the way that he was communicating, other than the way that he was explaining things. By the way, he became my inspiration to be a teacher, myself. This thirst to teach started developing in me.

SCARPINO: The man who was really headed on a track of math and science was influenced by a humanities teacher... powerfully influenced.

JAVIDAN:     Which is pretty strange, isn’t it?

SCARPINO: I’ll be telling my students about the value of humanities and using you as an example. Any other individuals that come to mind?

JAVIDAN:     My university professors, as you mentioned in your introduction. The university that I went to was at the time, and continues to be today, the most elitist university in Iran, because the way that students are admitted to universities in Iran is not like the U.S. or Canada. You have to take it one-day, or two-day, I think it was, national exam. Hundreds of thousands of high school graduates from all over the country take this exam at the same time. I don’t remember if it was one day or two days. And the exam would cover mathematics, IQ, literature, all kinds of things. Then, before you take the exam, you were given a list as a student of your top 10 university choices. So, you pick what you want. And then, the way it would work was, at the end of the exam you would get a grade and, depending on your admission to a university or a program that you have selected depends on how competitive it was. If you had a very high grade, you could go to medical school or you could go to this university. If you had lower grades then you could go to other colleges, other universities. So, it was a very competitive game. This university that I attended happened to have some of the most talented, educated professors that I had ever experienced. And they were kind of handpicked from MIT and Harvard and Stanford, and a whole bunch of other very high-quality universities in the U.K. and U.S. They were all Iranian. And they all became a source of inspiration for me because as individuals, they very cold, you know... and we had big classes, and, so, it was very difficult for them, and because of the hierarchical nature that the professor is god and everybody else is mortals.

SCARPINO: We don’t do it that way.

JAVIDAN:     Yeah, it’s very different. So, there was no personal connection, except one person that I’m going to tell you about. But, just listening to them and learning from them, it was an incredible experience. And it just highlighted for me as a human being what a fantastic opportunity it is to teach other people, to help other people, to educate other people. Now, there was one professor who was a... my degree was in industrial engineering. This guy had his degree, a PhD in industrial engineering from Stanford, and he was an incredible guy, very successful in consulting, in teaching, in research. So, I said to him, I need to come and talk to you. He said, oh yeah, come to my company office. I spent half a day with him. And he just asked me so many – because I wanted to know, I told him, I want to go to the U.S. I want to get my master’s degree. I want to get my PhD degree in the U.S. I don’t know a whole lot about the U.S. So, he spent that whole morning sharing a lot of information with me about, well, you know, these are the different places. This was 1975. In those days MBA programs were just beginning to come into the scene, and he told me about it. After he listened to me, he said, you know, Mansour, you have more of an interest in the interface of humans and machines, so think about an MBA degree. And I didn’t really know anything about it. So, he gave me information, told me about it, helped me find more information about it, and that’s how I got into an MBA program, because of him.

SCARPINO: Well, then, he had a big influence on you, didn’t he?

JAVIDAN:     Absolutely.

SCARPINO: Why did you want to go to the U.S.?

JAVIDAN:     My parents asked me that question so many times. As young as 10 years old, I knew I had to go to the U.S. And when I was asked why, the only answer I could give was to acknowledge that I wanted to go to the place which is the source of the greatest innovations in technology. I didn’t really know a whole lot about the American culture, the American society, but I knew I was going to go to the U.S. My parents were not rich. There was no way that they could support me going to the U.S. and studying. So, when I was in the second year of my engineering degree, I started teaching English to the cadets in the Iranian Air Force, six hours a day. I would be at my university until about 1 p.m., and then my classes at the air force base would start at 2 p.m. to 8 p.m., five nights a week. That was, by the way, the first opportunity for me to start teaching. It wasn’t easy, I must admit this. Particularly the first few months it was kind of strange, a 20-year-old, 19-year-old kid standing in front of pilot cadets teaching them English. But I got used to it, and I really enjoyed it. But that was the source of funding for my travel to the U.S. The money I saved ended up helping me because my dad couldn’t afford it.

SCARPINO: As you look back on it, did you learn anything about leadership teaching military cadets?

JAVIDAN:     You’re familiar with unconscious bias...

SCARPINO: Yes, I am.

JAVIDAN:     So, I had an unconscious bias. I use the word ‘had’ because now I know, so it’s not unconscious anymore. I had an incredible respect for military people, partly because of my dad and what I saw in him, partly because of my experience in the Iranian Air Force. I mean, these people were so dedicated and the emotional attachment I saw in them to their profession, I’ve never seen in any other place.

SCARPINO:  That’s interesting.

JAVIDAN:     For many years, it was very unconscious. Every time I saw someone from the military, I didn’t care what military, just, I would be so respectful and so attentive. I just wanted to show them my appreciation... until I learned about the unconscious bias literature. Since then it’s not unconscious anymore, but I still have that level of admiring this particular profession.

SCARPINO: I’m going to talk to you about your education and get this all-in-one place. Do you remember the name of the high school you attended?

JAVIDAN:     Yeah. Actually the English translation means ‘Iran of Tomorrow.’ That’s the name of the school: Iran Farda – ‘Farda’ means tomorrow.

SCARPINO: In Tehran?

JAVIDAN:     In Tehran, yeah.

SCARPINO: The way you described it, it had disciplinary tracks the way our undergraduate colleges do, right?

JAVIDAN:     Yes.

SCARPINO: You go to college, you can do math or humanities or whatever, yeah, okay. What year did you graduate from high school?

JAVIDAN:     1972.

SCARPINO: Okay. Did you get to pick a high school, or were you assigned to one?

JAVIDAN:     My parents... it was a private school. In the Iranian educational system, and I believe it’s still the same, there’s a whole bunch of private schools, and then there’s the publicly-supported schools. This particular school – elementary all the way, I spent twelve years at that place, started in grade one and finished in grade 12. It was a 10-minute walk from our home. I think that’s the only reason. My brother went there until grade 9 and then he moved to another high school, but I stayed there.

SCARPINO: You got a good education there.

JAVIDAN:     I got a very good education.

SCARPINO: As you think back when you graduated from high school, where did you imagine your life was heading? What did you hope was the future, or your future?

JAVIDAN:     I had a very clear picture of myself being an engineer and working for a large technical firm. That was, I have to be an engineer, when I was in high school. When I was in the engineering program, there was a little bit of a change of mind, but that’s why I entered the mathematics stream, because you couldn’t really win a seat in any of the engineering colleges without a degree in anything else other than mathematics.

SCARPINO:  Did you ever realize how unusual it is for a teenager in high school to be that academically focused?

JAVIDAN:     It was very strange.

SCARPINO: I didn’t mean strange, I mean that’s...

JAVIDAN:     No, it was unusual, but my brother was exactly the same, but in medicine. He knew he was going to be a doctor. And I knew I was going to be an engineer. And our parents really didn’t care as long as we worked hard. Both of us were very focused. My brother knew when he was, like, 10 years old, that he was going to be a doctor, and I knew I was going to be an engineer. But my friends, our friends, nah, they didn’t care. So, it was unusual, yeah. Why? I’m not sure. I mean, I’m going to ask my brother why did he know? You just asked a question that I have never thought about actually. I don’t know the answer to that. It just happened.

SCARPINO: As a person who teaches young people and raised a bunch of them, smart, raised some smart ones, that’s relatively unusual for a person to be that focused at that age. Harvard Business School, you were there. This is just out of curiosity, was Richard Vietor, Tom McCraw still there when you were there? Alfred Chandler?

JAVIDAN:     Those names don’t ring a bell.

SCARPINO: Okay.

JAVIDAN:     We would go there only for this invitation-only conference.

SCARPINO: I used to spend a lot of time there because Vietor was on my doctoral committee and then later, as we both grew up, he became my friend. You talked about people who had an impact on you when you were at the high school age in Iran, you talked about teachers and so on. Anyone else? Clerics who have an impact on you? Other individuals? Relatives?

JAVIDAN:     Okay, clerics, no, I’ve never been a religious person. I’ve had my own challenges with religion. I’m having a hard time with it. I always had a hard time with it, even though I practiced some Islamic rituals when I was a teenager with my dad, because I wanted to spend time with my dad, he was my idol. But I never really had much time other than that for religion. Family members, nah, not really.

SCARPINO: I’m looking for the date when you were in high school. Just remind me...

JAVIDAN:     1972 I graduated.

SCARPINO: In 1968 to ’72 when you were in high school, were there events or experiences going on in Iran that not only shaped the adult you became but really persuaded you, it’s time to go.

JAVIDAN:     ’68, late ‘60s, all the way to ’76 when I left the country were the booming years of the Iranian economy. Oil prices went from $1.50 to $11.00.

SCARPINO: A barrel?

JAVIDAN      Yeah, the barrel, in the space of less than a year. So, there was a huge influx of money coming into the economy. The Shah’s government was really intent on building the infrastructure, building the... The Shah had this historical vision of the Persian Empire being rebuilt in a new version through economic prosperity and military power. Those were the two pillars of his vision. He wanted Iran to be a military power built and supported with a very strong economy. Those years, all I saw was growth, prosperity, home prices were just crazy. Anything, any asset prices were just going crazy. I, myself, went through university on scholarship because I always in the top five students at the university. So, I would receive congratulatory cards from the prime minister - think about that - just telling me how excited he is to see my progress, my success. I was actually invited to work in the prime minister’s office for one summer. It ended up being a pretty useless learning experience for me because the people who were working in the office that I was assigned to weren’t doing anything, so it ended up being a waste of time. But, I mean, it was an interesting experience for me as a 19 year old. So, those years left a very important impression on me about Iranians and the Iranian society. Number one, prosperity. It wasn’t just economic prosperity, it was the fact that Iranians were being so respected all over the world. I mean, I’m going to tell you something that’s going to really surprise the hell out of you. You know how I arrived in the U.S.?

SCARPINO: I do not.

JAVIDAN:     So let me tell you. Because my father was a general, I was allowed to purchase a ticket to fly to the U.S. on a brand new 747 cargo plane belonging to the Iranian Air Force. These planes were purchased, and their job was to come to the U.S., pile up whatever military equipment that the Iranian government was buying, and take it back. In this 747 plane, were five first-class seats at the end. That’s all. The rest was open space.

SCARPINO: For cargo.

JAVIDAN:     So, I got one of those seats for a very cheap price. My dad bought it for me. And we landed at an Air Force base in northeast U.S. I don’t remember the name, unfortunately, of what that base was, but it was an Air Force base. And when we landed – there were four passengers on that plane; myself, an Air Force general and his wife; and the wife of another Air Force general. And the plane had a stop in Madrid so we had the night over in Madrid and then flew to – I wish I could remember this base. When we landed, there were two black Cadillacs on the tarmac: one for the general and his wife, and one for the wife of the other general. So, we landed, I had my suitcase. The pilot said goodbye. They were all very nice people, very friendly. These passengers went away. I was standing next to this humongous 747 on the tarmac having no idea what the hell I was going to do. The only thing I had done was, I had told my friends who used to live at that time in West Virginia, I told them this is where I’m arriving, can you guys come and pick me up? And they said, oh, yeah, we’ll come and pick you up. So, when I landed and I was standing on the tarmac, I had no idea what is going on here. And I saw an American officer walk by and I said, hi, please... and he said, what’s going on? And I said, well, I just arrived here. I know my friends are picking me up. I don’t know where, I don’t know where to go. He said, Oh, I think where, there’s a meeting area. So, he gave me directions to go and stand there, which I did. And, yeah, my friends were there, and they picked me up. Now, imagine an Iranian arriving at an American Air Force base, imagine if that could be possible today, but that was the nature of relationship.

SCARPINO: Not today, no.

JAVIDAN:     Not today... a lot of machine guns are going to be in front of you. But that was how close the relationship was between the two governments. And, in fact, the funny thing is, when I applied for citizenship in the U.S., I’ll never forget this, the officer who was interviewing me, she said, we have a problem with your records. I said, what do you mean? She said, well, we know, as soon as you arrived at Minneapolis, we have all the records of what you did, where you go and where you went, etc. but we don’t know how you arrived in this country. So, I had to explain to her, because there was no immigration office on that base. So, I just entered this country without even realizing...

SCARPINO: They just let you in.

JAVIDAN:     Yeah, I was let in.

SCARPINO: That wouldn’t happen to anybody now.

JAVIDAN:     Exactly, yeah, just imagine how things were different. I had no idea even I had to go through immigration. I didn’t know. I was just 19 years old. But this base was my entry into this country.

SCARPINO:  You finished high school, attended Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. Graduated with a bachelor’s in 1976. For anybody who uses this interview, Sharif University opened in 1966. It is an elite school of technology, which I have seen described as the MIT of Iran, and I just chose to believe that.

JAVIDAN:     It was modeled, and it was modeled after MIT, and it was built with MIT support.

SCARPINO: Why that university? I mean, your grades and your scores, or...?

JAVIDAN:     If anyone wanted to be an engineer in Iran, that was the ultimate. Just to get in meant you are a member of the elite of the society, just to be a student in that university.

SCARPINO: An elite socially? Or elite in terms of grades?

JAVIDAN:     Elite in terms of your educational capabilities.

SCARPINO: Did you have to pay tuition?

JAVIDAN:     No, I was on scholarship from the prime minister’s office.

SCARPINO: I guess a better way to ask you, do they charge tuition?

JAVIDAN:     Yes, they did charge a very minimal tuition, and everything was subsidized.

SCARPINO: You’re studying engineering...

JAVIDAN:     Industrial engineering.

SCARPINO: Industrial engineering. How would you say that the experience of attending that university impacted you going forward afterwards, shaped the person you became?

JAVIDAN:     It nurtured and reinforced a number of things in me. One, how important education is. Two, to be competitive as hell, I mean, beating each other. Let me tell you another thing about the Iranian culture. In all my experience, from elementary school to the end of my undergraduate degree in engineering, I never ever spent a minute working in a group. That concept does not exist in the Iranian culture. This is one of the problems of this culture, it’s all individualistic, it’s all competing. I’m the best, I want to be the best. Being in that university among the most smartest that the population could produce, and wanting to be number one or number two among them, it was a constant battle. We all learned to be individually competitive. By the way, the graduates of that university had our first reunion in San Diego.

SCARPINO: Recently?

JAVIDAN:     This was about 10 years ago. Thousands of the graduates of that university live in the U.S. and Canada. You go to Silicon Valley, some of my former classmates are billionaires right now. So, it became a source of really producing very highly educated talented people. But it just constantly enforced this idea of being competitive.

SCARPINO: Were you number one or number two?

JAVIDAN:     I was always in the top three.

SCARPINO: Something occurred to me while you were talking about your university experience. You were describing, when we first began to chat, Iranian culture and you were talking about things like conformity and getting along and all that stuff. Then you go to university, which seems ruthlessly competitive and emphasizing the individual, is there some kind of conflict there, did you have to learn how to do that?

JAVIDAN:     Well, this is the beauty, the complexity and the difficulty of understanding what cultures are all about. Competition, critical, individual competition. I’ll give you an example. In Iran, when I was growing up, I think it’s still the same but I haven’t seen it, sometime in May every year, when you open the national newspaper, you would see the picture of a seven-year-old kid with parents proudly announcing that my kid received a grade of 20/20, received the number one award in his or her class – grade one. That’s how competitive. Education has always been the critical part of the Iranian culture. Parents just push their kids, particularly boys, to be the best in education. Funny enough, what happens after that nobody seems to care. This is where the culture falls apart. Because the same talented people who stay in that country quickly learn after they’ve gone through the education, to make money in this society you have to do other things than performance: politics, networking, corruption, bribery. And they’re very smart so they figure it out very quickly of how quickly they can achieve success in that society. But when they come to the U.S., they can be very successful as businesspeople, as other things that they want to be, as professors, etc. So, conformity on the social issues, conformity on the importance of education, and conformity on making sure you’re the best.

SCARPINO: Which requires you to be a strong and focused and energetic individual.

JAVIDAN:     Yes.

SCARPINO: You made the decision to leave Iran. You earned your bachelor’s in 1976, and I think one year later you left, 1977?

JAVIDAN      No, I left in ’76.

SCARPINO: In 1977 you received your master’s from the University of Minnesota. I am going to put a few points in this record because I am absolutely certain people who use this are not going to know much about Iran. I know you know these things and I don’t want to insult you by telling you stuff you already know.

JAVIDAN:     That’s fine.

SCARPINO: Alright, Reza Pahlavi?

JAVIDAN:     Yes.

SCARPINO: Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was the last Shah of Iran. He was the ruler from September 16,1941, until he was overthrown in the Iranian Revolution, February 11, 1979. I would describe him as a brutal ruler who was supported and backed by secret police. He was also supported and propped up by the United States. By the late 1970s, open opposition and dissent against the Shah’s rule was rising in Iran. September 8, 1978, the Shah’s security force fired on a large group of demonstrators, killing hundreds and wounding thousands. Two months later, thousands of Iranians took to the streets of Tehran, rioting and destroying symbols of westernization, such as banks and liquor stores. Ayatollah Khomeini, then in exile, called for the Shah’s immediate overthrow. December 11, 1978, a group of soldiers mutinied and attacked the Shah’s security officers, and the Shah’s regime collapsed. He fled with his family. The Islamic cleric opposition leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, returned from 14 years of exile in Iraq and France. August 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran was proclaimed following a referendum. November 1979, Islamic militants took 52 Americans hostage inside the US embassy in Tehran demanding the extradition of the Shah, who was in the U.S for medical treatment. The hostages were held for 444 days until January 1981. The hostage crisis played an important role in making Jimmy Carter a one-term president, who lost to Ronald Regan in the election of 1980. September 22, 1980, was the start of Iran-Iraq war, which lasted for eight years. Prolonged and devastating war. The numbers killed on both sides were likely in the range of half-a-million with casualties in the 1-million to 2-million range. I have seen this war described as one of the most destructive conflicts in the late 20^th century.

Just for people to know. Now, I want to go back and pick up the story of you leaving Iran. You left in 1976. Did your entire family go with you, or just you went alone?

JAVIDAN:     Just myself. I had married my fiancé. Our wedding was on March 3, 1976. And then I left Iran, I believe March 13, so 10 days after, and my wife joined me a few months after that.

SCARPINO: Did you have to get permission from the Iranian government to leave Iran and attend graduate school in the United States?

JAVIDAN:     Yes. Because, the Iranian regime, and I think it still exists, we have mandatory conscription in Iran. So, anyone who reaches the age of 18 had to go - I don’t know what the rules are now – had to go to military service for two years unless they’re attending university, either in Iran or outside of Iran. The four years that I was in university, my conscription was delayed, postponed. Then after I received admission from University of Minnesota, I had to submit it to the Iranian government – there was a special agency in Department of Education in the Iranian government – to receive their approval to leave the country, because I hadn’t done my military service. They issued a special permit that allowed me to go to the U.S. and continue my studies.

SCARPINO: Why the University of Minnesota? I mean, I’m imagining a young person in Iran going, ‘I think I’ll go to Minnesota.’ I don’t want to sound flip, but I imagine there are probably a lot of people in nations outside the U.S. that don’t even know where Minnesota is.

JAVIDAN:     Exactly.

SCARPINO:  I mean, half of my students don’t know where it is.

JAVIDAN:     I didn’t know a whole lot about it either. But remember the professor from Stanford that I told you about, in the meeting I had with him, he kept telling me about this MBA program at University of Minnesota that he happened to know quite a bit about. And given what he knew about me, he said, hey, this is an emerging MBA program, they are going to be very interesting to you, and interested in you. So, he was the reason why I ended up at University of Minnesota. What he didn’t tell me was the minus 40 degree temperatures.

SCARPINO: And at that cold it doesn’t matter if it’s centigrade or Fahrenheit, that’s just cold. There probably wasn’t a lot of snow in Tehran.

JAVIDAN:     We would get very little snow in the wintertime, but Tehran has four seasons. Temperatures would go to, in wintertime, it would go may to low 30s, but never extreme cold. So I remember, I had admissions from a few universities; the University of Washington in Seattle; University of Minnesota; University of Florida, I think. You know, if I knew then what I know now, I would have gone to the University of Florida. I just love Florida. But I ended up, because of really, he was so strong in his recommendation about University of Minnesota and how they were building their MBA program, so I say okay.

SCARPINO: And you thought in terms of the education they delivered, that is what you hoped to get?

JAVIDAN:     Absolutely.

SCARPINO: When you left Iran to go to graduate school in the United States, did you expect that at some point you would go back to Iran?

JAVIDAN:     Yes, as a matter of fact, myself and I would say most... you know, in 1976 when I arrived in the U.S., the largest number of foreign students in the U.S. were Iranians. There were just massive waves of Iranian students supported by the Iranian government. I did not receive a... I did not accept a scholarship from the Iranian government because they had a lot of strings attached, and I didn’t want that. But, just, I think it was 47,000 Iranian students. I was just part of that wave, and a great majority of us wanted to go back. There were so many opportunities, the country was just exploding in terms of opportunities.

SCARPINO: That brings up something I was going to ask you in a minute, but I’m going to do it now. Now that you’re much older than when you left the country and you have your graduate degrees, a career and so on, as you look back, how would you rate the Shah as a leader? Heads of state are supposed to lead.

JAVIDAN:     Yeah, you know, history is an interesting thing, the way that a leader is evaluated immediately versus over time. When I was going through the university and being young in that country with all that opportunity, I also witnessed the brutality of that regime. They were really hard on university students because university campuses were the grounds for opposition to them; the Islamists, communists, all kinds. So, at the time, my reflection of my experience as a university student in Iran was very negative because there was so much tension between the government and these... I was not one of those students in any of these opposition groups because I was busy teaching and doing my home study, I had no time for anything else.

SCARPINO: But if stuff like that is going on, you can get caught up in it.

JAVIDAN:     Yeah, yeah, I witnessed it, how they would beat up students; how, particularly, the Islamic – there was an Islamic Student Association on every campus. And these people were very vocal, ruthless, too, at the same time. There was a constant battle between these groups and the government. So, my view at the time was very negative. I was relieved to be outside of the country to continue my studies, but I still wanted to go back, because I mean the notion of not going back never really… it was a natural thing to do to go back, period. But reflecting now as an adult, looking at the Shah regime and comparing it to the current regime and also to the history of Iran, I have become increasingly interested, and I’ve studied, I have spent increasingly more time on Iranian history. Unfortunately, it’s not a very pleasant history. I mean, it’s an empire, duh-duh-duh-duh-duh, but it’s just constant revolutions and infighting, and just brutality. So, in that context, the Shah’s regime reflected the Iranian culture of autocratic leadership. A regime that doesn’t know how to listen, a regime that believes everybody’s a sheep, we know what’s good for the society and we’re going to go there. Whether you come with us or not, we’ll force you. So, his vision, his strategy, it was all his. There was no real internal support. The population had no involvement in his regime. It was vertical. But at least it was going in the right direction, prosperity, poverty went down, huge. But people were not satisfied, they were complaining. It doesn’t matter how rich they were, they were still complaining. So, something was off, you know. Inflation was a big issue. In the U.S. we’re going through it right now, I don’t know how bad it is in Canada, but people are, I mean... if you look at Biden’s presidency, he’s done a lot of good things, but everybody’s down on him because of inflation. That one thing. And same in Iran during the Shah. People were dissatisfied with inflation, the cost of living was going up so bad. Because of huge demand, the supply was not always there. Just finding meat sometimes became a challenge because the world was out of it. Chicken, I remember, I once drove for an hour and a half to go from Tehran to another city because my dad told me, you need to buy some chicken for us, go and get it over there, I found some. So, that’s how complicated life had become.

SCARPINO: As you look back on it, what was going on in Iran, such that the sheep rose up in revolt?

JAVIDAN:     Religion. That’s the thing. The Iranian society at its core is a religious society. I’m talking masses. So, all that opposition was very repressed until Khomeini and the clerical community started putting oil on this fire, and started taking a religious view of, ‘It is your religious duty to fight this regime.’ It was the message. And it stuck. So, you have the population that’s unhappy in general, dissatisfied, doesn’t know what to do about it, there’s no two-way communication. There’s no election; I mean, there were elections but it was all nonsensical. And then here comes this religious guy whose only claim to fame is he has the courage to stand up against the Shah. The first time he did it was twenty years earlier or thirty years earlier, so he had a record.

SCARPINO: And he was exiled.

JAVIDAN:     He was exiled. Yeah. That’s how he got exiled, because he was arrested. It was a very basic demonstration of religious people in the streets of Tehran the first time, and the government just clamped down, arrested him and all of his followers. The Shah wanted him executed, but others in his government decided that it’s better to have him exiled. So, his courage, and his religious views. Interestingly enough one of his complaints about the Shah was that the Shah gave voting rights to women. And many women, middle-class women, were supporting him during the revolution. So, that kind of sounds strange, but it tells you about the stress that existed in that society at the time.

SCARPINO: Giving the vote to women in Iranian culture must have been a divisive issue.

JAVIDAN:     The religious community in Iran was very much against it, but the Shah had this idea that Iran needs to be a European, Europeanist society. The country was schizophrenic. I’ll give you another example. Turkey of today is exactly where Iran was in the ‘70s. Half of the population sees itself… has the aspiration of being European, the other half has the aspiration of take us back to 1400 years ago. So, this is exactly what happened during the Shah. What really gave power to Khomeini and his followers was that the educated, the professionals who were the biggest beneficiaries of the Shah’s policies, actually turned on him in a big way.

SCARPINO: Why do you think that was?

JAVIDAN:     They were just dissatisfied.

SCARPINO: How would you rate Ayatollah Khomeini as a leader? I don’t mean good or bad, but just leadership.

JAVIDAN:     His leadership, his ability to inspire was incredible. To his followers, he wasn’t just a leader, he had such incredible – it’s like brainwashing, you know. There were people saying, ‘we saw his image on the moon,’ yeah.

SCARPINO: I actually remember hearing that in the news.

JAVIDAN:     That is the connection, you see, that is the incredible power that he had over his followers. It was not a transactional relationship; it was an incredibly transformational relationship. If Khomeini was half-smart, he could have turned this country into an incredible powerhouse. He was just an uneducated, stupid, brutal man. But in terms of his leadership capability, he had credibility because of his past and because of his courage. He had power because of his religious view. As a matter of fact, he was not a highly regarded religious individual. As a religious leader, he had no famous books on religion, nothing. But he was a guy who always used religion for political purposes, right from decades ago.

SCARPINO: And a charismatic leader?

JAVIDAN:     Extremely, extremely charismatic.

SCARPINO: Was it hard for you to leave Iran?

JAVIDAN:     No, not in ’76. I was just relieved to get out of all that stress.

SCARPINO: Have you ever been back?

JAVIDAN:     My last visit to Iran was 2004. Now, here’s what happened. I moved from University of Alberta to University of Calgary in Canada in 1991. And I used to teach an executive education program in Banff. Are you familiar with Banff, the national park, Canadian Rockies?

SCARPINO: I do.

JAVIDAN:     Beautiful place, unbelievable.

SCARPINO: And you taught there?

JAVIDAN:     Yeah, we had a three- or four-week program where people would come, and professors from different Canadian universities would teach. I would teach for one week on strategic management. It was such a joy to be there to do it. In 1991, I think, a deputy minister in the Iranian oil industry was a student in that program. And he had just… before the revolution, he had finished his PhD at Georgetown University, or George Washington, one of them. But he was a religious guy, he moved to Iran during the revolution, and then he became – he kept going up and he became a deputy minister later on. A year after that, he became Minister of Heavy Industry in Iran. He contacted me, and he said, you know, I need you to create a replica of that program in Iran. And I said, I’m afraid of coming back to Iran. He said, why? I said, well, because I don’t trust you guys. This is a crazy government. He said, I’ll guarantee everything. So, I created this, it was called a Strategic Management Program for senior government officials and CEOs of government-owned companies – there were so many of them in Iran. So, in late ’91, all the way to ’95, I would travel to Iran twice a year. Canadian professors would go with me and we would teach in that program. And then in 1995, I stopped because I was busy. The last time that I went there was in 2004 because the Petro Chemical Corporation of Iran, which belongs to the Ministry of Oil, asked me and University of Calgary at the time – this was in 2002 – to start an MBA program for them, for their managers. And I was director of that program. And the last time that I went there because of that was 2004, and I didn’t go back after that. Every time I went back, I saw the society being decimated, just self-destructing, going down, people becoming increasingly unhappy about their day-to-day lives and how this regime is mismanaging everything. So, in 2004, I said, you know what, I don’t want to go back anymore.

SCARPINO: When you went, you were going from Canada to Iran, not United States.

JAVIDAN:     I never went there from the U.S.

SCARPINO: Yeah, that would probably be a different story.

JAVIDAN:     Yeah.

SCARPINO: Actually one of your colleagues suggested I ask you this, so we’ll see how it works. Do you think of yourself as an expatriate Iranian or Persian?

JAVIDAN:     Iranian. You know, Persia is the old Persian Empire. I was born in the country of Iran, and the country was renamed in early 1900 from Persian to Iran. That’s where I was born and I grew up. After the revolution a lot of Iranians referred to themselves as Persians, because they don’t want to be associated with these bastards in the government, that’s all. So, the word Persian became popular after the revolution.

SCARPINO: Well, I think that’s where this question came from too. So, first stop when you left was Canada.

JAVIDAN:     After I finished my PhD degree at the University of Minnesota.

SCARPINO: Then you go to Canada.

JAVIDAN:     Yes.

SCARPINO: Why did you go to Canada?

JAVIDAN:     There were a couple of reasons. The most important reason was, remember the hostage crisis...

SCARPINO: Right, I do.

JAVIDAN:     Again, there was a lot of stress in the society for Iranians. I remember I was living in an apartment in Minneapolis. One day I ran into one of the tenants, who was an older lady. We used to always say hi and have conversations. And one day she asked me, where are you from? And I said, I’m from Iran. And she looked at me and said, but you’re a nice person. So, that was the attitude, understandably. I felt, you know, I want to get out. I didn’t want to go back to my own country, and at the time Canadian universities were really expanding and growing, and they wanted PhDs of American universities. So, they became… they really showed open arms to me. And I thought, hey, this is much easier, I’m going to go and live in Canada until things quiet down.

SCARPINO: You always intended to come back to the U.S.?

JAVIDAN:     Yes, but I lived in Canada for twenty years. Yeah.

SCARPINO: Did you become a Canadian citizen?

JAVIDAN:     Yes. Yeah. Very proudly. It was one of the highlights of my life. In 1988, I think, I became a Canadian citizen, and I never forget the immigration judge, the lady who I had to work with and go through this, her son was my student. So, as soon as she saw my name, she asked me, do you teach at the University of Minnesota?’ I said, yeah, she said, what do you teach? I said, strategic management. She said, do you know this person, this student? I said, yeah, the name rings a bell. She said, I’m his mom! After that, the quality of conversation changed.

SCARPINO: I want to talk about graduate school. You decided to attend graduate school, so you go to the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management, earned a Master’s in 1977, PhD in 1983. You already mentioned why you picked that university. You’re an engineer, right? So, I admit I don’t know much about engineering, although my son-in-law is an excellent engineer, and so is my son, but, why the School of Management? What was an engineer doing in the School of Management?

JAVIDAN:     I’ve been asked that question many times. When I was... in the ‘70s, as I was going through my undergraduate degree, there was a trend in American engineering programs of incorporating some element of humanities, HR courses, just basic organizational courses. I think the reason was that, at the time, these schools had figured they were producing engineers who were too narrow in focus, we’ve got to open them up as human beings and give them a little more of a context. So, this university that I was at, the Sharif University, very close to what’s going on in the U.S., so they started – in fact, in 1974, the Shah appointed - by the way, the Shah would appoint the presidents of universities, okay, because that’s a very important position in the eyes of any regime, any autocratic regime. You’re dealing with the young, the youth of the society, so not anybody can be president. And the person he chose for our university had a PhD in Islamic religion. He is still at Harvard University right now, he left during the revolution, and this guy became the president of Sharif University of Technology. So, that’s the extent that the Iranian regime decided we’ve got to bring in some elements of humanities. I took a course in Islamic religion as part of my engineering degree. I took two or three of those courses as electives, they were not required, they were all electives. And it kind of, not the religious one but the other ones, they opened my eyes to, oh my god we’re learning all these things about efficiency. I mean, industrial engineering was all about efficiency in those days, Taylor, you know, time management and all that stuff. And in none of those courses any of my professors would talk about human beings. It was all about the task. The human part, irrelevant. Later on, I learned that when Taylor was doing his own experiments...

SCARPINO: In the early 20^th century in the U.S., yeah.

JAVIDAN:     In the U.S., yes. He was very proud of saying, well, you know, these people who shovel coal, they have to take rest. What he meant by rest was, you do the shovel, now you walk over to get more. That period of walking is his definition of resting. That is the industrial engineering view of human beings. Taking these other courses took me in a different direction. Not other students, the other students were so busy with engineering stuff, but people are different. To me, the interface with the human became so much more important than the machine or the mathematics. And when this professor from Stanford told me about MBA degree and how it’s important to learn about how to manage people and these programs are designed for that purpose, all of that, suddenly it just clicked for me.

SCARPINO: When did you realize that you were different from most of your classmates?

JAVIDAN:     When I would get A’s in all of those classes. My fellow students who would get A’s also in the other side, but they would get lower grades in the human side because they were just having a hard time with it. I actually became a teaching assistant. The professor who was teaching one of those courses hired me and said, you know, I need you to speak, because the guy who was teaching it was not an engineer himself, he was having a hard time communicating with us. So, he said, I want to hire you and let’s see if you can help me do a better job explaining things to these kids. I don’t know if I had any effect, but that is the difference that I had from my other fellow students.

SCARPINO: As you went forward with your life and did scholarship on leadership and became a leader, how did that kind of experience shape your views on leadership?

JAVIDAN:     I did my PhD in Strategic Management at Carlson School, and my dissertation was focused on CEOs and the top management team, and how they make decisions. I was curious, how do they come up with a strategy for their organization? What thinking process, as individual, as a group, they go through? How systematic are they in their thinking? And why is it that some of their decisions are so good and some of them… same guy makes a bunch of good decisions and a bunch of disastrous decisions? What explains that? So that was my curiosity. I got to know these very senior executives and their philosophy, and their view of life, their view of their organization, and what criteria they were using in their minds to make their decisions. Most of them viewed the organization as a machine. They’re the driver, the organization is a machine that’s going to go in the direction they want. In other words, not a whole lot of attention to mobilizing, to inspiring. So, I learned many things during my dissertation and observing, and asking questions to these people. One was, that in these very senior positions, in those days – I think it’s different now – in those days the view is the organization just does what I tell them to do. So my job as a leader, as a CEO, is to come up with a vision, describe it, tell people ‘let’s do it.’ Not a lot of interface, not a lot of interaction. HR groups were simply order-takers in terms of how many hours do you work, what’s your pension, what’s your salary, duh-duh-duh-duh-duh. HR groups really had no significant role. It’s very different now. Even to talk of leadership, HR people wouldn’t want talk about that. Whereas now it’s all about leadership development and training and all of that stuff, leadership pipeline. So, to me, that raised some flags in my mind in terms of how you had thousands of employees in an organization, how does that work? How do they, how do you get them to move? And the answer in most cases was, hey, we give them a salary, bonus, challenge them, give them a good job, opportunity for development, that’s good enough. So that was one of the learnings for me, that they were all transactional leaders and the organization was kind of taken for granted. And in many cases, there weren’t a lot of job opportunities either, so, if I don’t like you as a CEO, hey, where do I go? All the other CEOS are like you, so it doesn’t matter if I stay where I am. At the same time, I started rereading the literature on leadership and I started understanding how these guys are behaving and what are the ways that they could do a better job as leaders, based on the literature. Another thing that I learned, by the way, which I’m sure we’ll talk about at some point, was that some of these guys were so successful in the U.S., but they were having a hell of a hard time outside of the U.S., just falling apart, both as individuals and as decisions. So, we want to be in such-and-such country, we invest, fall apart. And they couldn’t figure out why.

SCARPINO: Is that because leadership is rooted in culture.

JAVIDAN:     Very much so.

SCARPINO: And if you’re an American, you don’t think about that.

JAVIDAN:     That’s right.

SCARPINO: I’ve spent a lot of time in Canada, I’ve worked in Ottawa and Toronto quite a bit. Canadians have to think about the United States and America. We rarely think about Canada, and if we do they’re just us and fur coats, you know.

JAVIDAN:     Yeah.

SCARPINO: Do you think that these individuals who are having trouble outside the U.S. were falling into that same trap; solidly rooted in U.S. culture without a clue of what’s going on in the rest of the world?

JAVIDAN:     Yeah. It’s funny that you mentioned Canada and the U.S. Pierre Trudeau, the current prime minister’s father, used to describe the U.S.-Canada relationship in the best way that I’ve heard.

SCARPINO: Yes.

JAVIDAN:     The elephant and the mouse on a mattress. The mouse, of course, is Canada. When the mouse moves, the elephant doesn’t care, doesn’t even notice. The elephant moves, the mouse is dead. That is the relationship between Canada and the U.S.

SCARPINO: He had that lovely line called ‘sleeping with an elephant.’

JAVIDAN:     Yeah, so that is in the psyche of Canadians, for a very good reason. What happens in the U.S. has huge impact on what happens in Canada. But in the U.S., a lot of executives were very successful, and that success actually became a liability. Hey, look at me, I’m a hero in the U.S. I go to Japan, I do exactly the same thing, oh my god, nothing is working, everything is falling apart. And that was in the ‘70s. These guys had a lot of money, company investing outside of the U.S. – the track record was not very good. They were all blaming the other side. Oh, it’s the Japanese fault, it's the Koreans’ fault. They don’t understand us. They don’t want to learn from us. That kind of ethnocentric mindset. That is actually what got me interested in studying the connection between culture and leadership. I’m sure at some point we’re going to talk about that. But going back to your question about leadership, during my years as an academic, because I was dealing with CEOs and senior executives, I was constantly exposed to a very narrow interpretation of leadership on the part of these executives, which was very task-oriented, everybody just follow what I’m telling you to do. And then I left the university. For four years I worked for the CEO of TransCanada Pipelines, and he was a finance guy. He was the CFO, extremely successful CFO in Canada. He loved making deals. He and I used to have long debates about what is the role of a CEO as a leader. And his response always was, ‘Mansour, I’m going to give people a challenge. If they deliver, I’m going to reward them, period. That’s the whole core of leadership.’ And I would disagree with him, and I would talk about the human side. Well, he always had a hard understanding that. I would tell him, ‘George, not everybody’s motivated by money.’ ‘Nah, how can that be? That’s not possible.’

SCARPINO: If you were motivated by money, you wouldn’t become a history professor. You mentioned that you started reading the literature on leadership; what are a few of the things that really impacted you.

JAVIDAN:     Warren Bennis was a really... his writings had a lot of impact on me. He was an academic who actually became a leader, not very successful interestingly enough, but he had a lot of learnings, he had a lot of messages out of it. Bob House, the late Bob House, who was always my mentor...

SCARPINO: At the Wharton School?

JAVIDAN:     At the Wharton School, yeah. He started the GLOBE Project that I joined. He was a world-renowned authority on leadership, and I would always... he and I, every time we were together, we would have some of the most wonderful conversations about what is leadership. And this guy had spent all of his career, and he was a super smart guy, and I learned so much from him. Bernie Bass on transformation and transaction. That language was very helpful to me of understanding.

SCARPINO: I’m going to be cognizant of time here, but August 1993 through 2014, you were past President and Chairman of the Board, and Co-principal Investigator, Co-author, Co-editor of the GLOBE Foundation. I mentioned that when I introduced you, but I’m going to come back to GLOBE, but I want to ask you one question… actually, I’m going to come back to GLOBE. So, July 1996 to June 2000 you were vice president-level Senior Advisor on Strategic Issues, Office of the CEO, TransCanada Pipelines, so you took a leave, I think, to go do that.

JAVIDAN:     Yes.

SCARPINO: You were responsible for helping the CEO develop a strategy for transforming the natural gas pipeline in Canada from a regulated to deregulated industry, okay.

JAVIDAN:     Yes.

SCARPINO:  So, take a leave from GLOBE, how did they find you? I mean, this is TransCanada Pipeline people and somehow they found you and asked you to consult. How did that work?

JAVIDAN:     You know, life is full of random events.

SCARPINO: I think more than entropy was involved here.

JAVIDAN:     Here’s what happened. As I mentioned to you, in 1990 or ’91 I moved from University of Alberta to University of Calgary. TransCanada Pipelines was headquartered at the time in Toronto. The then-CEO of TransCanada Pipelines decided we shouldn’t be in Toronto, we should be in Calgary. So they moved in 1992, I think, the whole headquarters operation of TransCanada Pipelines, which was the largest pipeline, it was the Number-four pipeline company in North America.

SCARPINO: Were they delivering gas to the U.S., was that the purpose?

JAVIDAN:     Yes, Canada and the U.S. In, I think, it was ’92 sometime, they asked me to run a couple of workshops for them on strategy because the Canadian government had sent signals that they wanted to deregulate the industry. There are very few industries in North America where you refer to your clients as stupid, dumb. You’re always in court with them, that’s what the regulated industry is. And the Canadian government, for whatever reason, had decided, hey, this is not working, we’ve got to do a better job; and maybe we should deregulate or introduce some levels of deregulation in this industry. So, they came to the University of Calgary and found me, because I was teaching strategy stuff, to do some workshops for them on strategy. Those workshops became very popular. Different parts of TransCanada contacted me, and I did a lot of work for them as a consultant. Of course, the word had reached the CEO, the new CEO, George Watson – he died a few years ago. And, so, he then contacted me and said, ‘I want you to run workshops for my team, for the CEO and the senior executive.’ And I did a number of those, and my relationship with him was very good, he trusted me. I remember in 1996 I was going on sabbatical, and I wanted to go to Wharton to spend a year with Bob House to continue our work on the GLOBE project. So, one day I was meeting George and I told him that I’m going on sabbatical starting July 1^st, I’m going to Wharton. And he looked at me and said, ‘Why don’t you come and work with us?’ I said, ‘what do you mean?’ He said, ‘Look, you keep complaining to me that we’re not doing everything you’re telling us to do. I want you to be here to understand why that is, and then you can help us.’ And he went through this issue of deregulation and how his company is really struggling. His top managers didn’t know what that meant. Their whole life, there were people in TransCanada Pipelines in senior positions thirty years, all they knew was regulators, taking your clients to court, dealing with regulators, that’s all. He said, ‘we’re really struggling with this, I need to transform this organization.’ And remember, he’s a finance guy, this is where the challenge started. So, I talked with Bob House and told him here’s a possibility, and Bob said, ‘You know, if I were in your shoes, I would accept it.’ I said, ‘well what happens to my work on GLOBE?’ He said, ‘Oh, you can continue work on GLOBE, but this thing is going to be your most important learning, professional development experience.’ He was right.

SCARPINO: That’s what I was going to ask you, what did you learn from doing that?

JAVIDAN:     Oh my god… I became a much, much more effective academic as a result of that. I know a lot of my academic colleagues disagree with that. They always ask me, ‘why did you waste four years of life going and working in the industry?’ They just don’t get it, they don’t understand. That period was the fasted learning pace I have ever gone through because things were happening so fast, it was incredible. So, that sense of reality that I needed myself, personally, as a human being, as a scholar, I got it. It wasn’t all positive. I don’t want to present a rosy picture. We went through some really tough issues, tough decisions, fights. We bought a company for $15 billion dollars, it was the largest acquisition in Canada at the time bringing these two cultures together in the middle of transforming…

SCARPINO: Which company did you buy?

JAVIDAN:     Nova.

SCARPINO: Nova.

JAVIDAN:     Nova was another pipeline, it was in Alberta only. It was a feeder in many ways to TransCanada Pipelines, and Nova was suffering. They weren’t making money. Even though they were regulated, they were still not making money. They just were not a disciplined company. So, TransCanada saw an opportunity to take them over, create much better efficiency in the systems cost-wise, and have more power in a deregulated environment. So, every day we would start the day, I was in the office sometime between 7 a.m. and 7:30 a.m., just one thing after another, one issue after another. And the politics of it was the ugliest, something that as an academic I really wasn’t exposed to. But these guys, I mean, they have such big egos, and they’re constantly wanting more and more. Money really makes a big difference to them. Interestingly enough, the higher you go, the bigger the difference, the more eager they become to make more money. I remember the day that I told George I want to go back to being an academic, he said, ‘What’s the problem, we’re not paying you enough?’ I said, ‘You’re paying me so much I don’t know what to do with it. It’s not about money.’ He’s said to me, ‘What’s wrong with you? What is it?’ I said, ‘I need my independence. I need my creativity. I need to sit down, do my own thing, and right now you own me, George, you own everything I do. I’m not used to that. Deep down I’m an academic.’ And he said, ‘Mansour, do you know the difference between a tenured professor, and a terrorist?’ I said, ‘George, what is it? He said, ‘You can negotiate with a terrorist.’ He’s right, with a tenured professor – I was still tenured at the University of Calgary – no matter what he did, he couldn’t negotiate with me because I told him, I don’t want to be here. I want to go. I was so grateful for the opportunity, and I think I did some good for the company, but it was time for me to go back.

SCARPINO: When you were in that position did you think of yourself as a leader?

JAVIDAN:     The best way I would describe myself was, a leader without authority. Influence without authority. Yeah, my job was influence. My job was to get things done. Some really tough projects. Some really tough ingrained individuals who were having a hard time adjusting; my job sometimes was to help them out, sometimes to make a decision, make a recommendation on, okay, it may be time to disengage. But I had no authority. It was just me, people sometimes used to call me (inaudible). But everybody knew that I’m here to do a job, and my job is not a singular focus. He would move me to different divisions of the company depending on what issues or challenges they were facing.

SCARPINO: But that’s the nature of being a consultant, isn’t it?

JAVIDAN:     Yeah.

SCARPINO:  You provide advice, you provide information, you suggest directions of travel, but they make the decision.

JAVIDAN:     The only difference was, I was inside the corporation. I was not an external consultant. The only reason why I was not given a title of VP was because as a VP, I had to be a fulltime employee and official of the company, legally. And because I was still attached to the university, I had tenure at the University of Calgary, I had to resign from University of Calgary in order to be given a VP title. I said, no, I don’t want to do that.

SCARPINO: Could you explain, for people who don’t know anything about pipelines or any of that stuff, what key recommendations you made to TransCanada Pipeline as it transitioned from a regulated industry to a deregulated industry, just what you look back on and consider to be the most significant bits of advice.

JAVIDAN:     Yeah, we embarked on a number of things based on my recommendations. Number one, the CEO himself and his top management team, I told them, hey, you guys, you all have these ideas, but you have to create a vocabulary about where do we want to go? Why do we want to get there? How do you get there? What’s in it for them? We spent, with the CEO and his team, a lot of time; I spent a lot of time with those people coming up with answers for these questions, because I told them, look, if you want transformation, you’ve got to have answers to these four questions. If you don’t have answers to these questions, don’t even bother because you’re going to just confuse the hell out of your workforce. So, we spent hours and hours debating and discussing. What they learned was, each one of us have some ideas on our own, but when you’re forcing us to come up with a collective answer to these questions, that’s hard. But we did it. We came up with their collective answers. As soon as we did that, then, they started – I facilitated workshops for each executive VP and their division about all of that. So the executive had to explain things to his team, and then we would engage his team in two-day, sometimes three-day retreats on, okay, so what does that mean for our division, for our function, what we do? How do we mobilize our own workforce in our division? And what Division A came up could be quite different from what Division B came up with, but it had to be embedded in their ways of doing things. I thought that that was a big success in terms of communicating, explaining things, answering questions. I did a big employee engagement survey just to hear people out – what are their concerns, what are their reactions to these? That was the first time that the company had ever done an employee engagement survey of that scale. The other thing that I did that I’m really personally very proud of, to be honest with you… so we did all of this, but at the end of the day it was about how do we inspire employees that are mostly engineers, by the way? So my engineering background was very helpful, I had credibility.

SCARPINO: You understood the discipline to speak engineer.

JAVIDAN:     I understood them very well. I used their language, they used my language. They didn’t see me as an HR consultant, you know, that made a big difference. But I started the project because I wanted people to taste success in doing something new. So, we embarked on a project called ‘Clean Sheet.’ Each division identified a group of up to ten people, so in total we had over fifty people. These were the kind of high-talent, high-quality, middle-level managers/professionals. My challenge to these people was – we put them in groups of five or six – my challenge was come up with a creative idea in your division. How can you be entrepreneurial? Do something entrepreneur. I don’t care what it is as long as you can generate revenue outside of the existing clients. Oh my god, that was an incredible project. And we added a lot of pizazz to it, we made it an exciting game. To begin with, I told each group, pick an animal name for your group. I don’t care what, you pick it. I remember one of the funny ones was… what’s that Egyptian… it’s an ugly, black, did you see the movie, “Mummy?”

SCARPINO: I did, yes.

JAVIDAN:     Those little black things that move, that ate people. They have a name, ‘Stapler,’ something like that, they picked that name, one of the groups picked that. I asked, ‘why did you choose that?’ ‘Because these things don’t die. They’re permanent. They don’t die. It’s very hard to kill them.’ Okay, that’s fine. Each group came up with all kinds of - cheetahs, and all kinds of names. So, we turned it into a game, and these groups were not really competing with each other, but at the end they were presenting their ideas in Banff, three days, to the CEO and the senior executives of the company. The additional revenue generated over the next two years was $50 million dollars.

SCARPINO: Geez.

JAVIDAN:     Yeah, it was a big deal. I mean, I was amazed at the ideas they came up with. But the point of that whole exercise, I mean, money was of course important, but it wasn’t just the money. It was to show people, to give them confidence: You guys are smart enough, don’t be afraid of deregulation. If you are given the opportunity, you can make it work. And it just turned things around inside. It became, you know, part of the folklore of the company.

SCARPINO: Your job was, in a sense, to change the company culture.

JAVIDAN:     That was the plan. That was my job. That’s why he hired me.

SCARPINO: I’m going to ask you one more question and then we’ll finish up tomorrow. This is sort of where we’re going to segue way to. So, obviously we’re at the International Leadership Association, and I’m interviewing you because you have won a Lifetime Achievement Award from this organization. I want to just start with a basic question and then we’ll follow-up tomorrow. And that is, how do you define or explain leadership?

JAVIDAN:     You know, I have a very simplistic view of leadership.

SCARPINO: I doubt that.

JAVIDAN:     Let me start with that. I’m going to start with one sentence, and then I’ll be done. At the end of the day, what is it that leaders do? Leaders mess with people’s hearts and minds. That’s it. And I use the word ‘mess’, but I don’t mean it in a negative sense. Leadership is, the essence of leadership is influencing other people towards something. Now, what is that something? Personally, I’m an educator, so, to me, the ultimate something is influencing other people to be the best they can be. But that’s my bias, that’s my personal bias. This is what I always get engaged in conversations with CEOs, that, okay, they want to make more money, expand culture, transformation, but to me at the end of the day it’s about those human beings. And, being an educator, obviously I define the essence of leadership as helping people become better. Not just as professionals, not just at the task, but as human beings. And I’ve got to tell you, this is what I’m proud of as an educator myself, my students, I treat them exactly like that. They may get it or not, doesn’t matter. But that is my view of my job as an educational leader. But in an organizational setting, leadership means the word ‘influence.’ You’re really getting someone, some group, some organization to accomplish something. Now, you can be Khomeini and the accomplishment could be the destruction of a country, you could be Hitler and the destruction of the whole world, or you could be Gandhi, who were all kinds of leaders. So, it’s just about an influence relationship. But an influence relationship between an individual and a series of targets. These targets could be individuals, such as your individual employees, or they could be a client, your client, or your supplier, or any stakeholder. You are a successful leader if you build a sustainable relationship.

SCARPINO: Can you teach somebody to be an influencer?

JAVIDAN:     Yes, I firmly believe that. It doesn’t mean that - you can teach 10 people; it doesn’t mean that all 10 are going to be great leaders. Same way that you can teach painting to 10 people. My sister is a painter, I suck at it, really, really suck at it. So, yes, there are individual characteristics that can enhance the process, the influence, the relationship, the learning, but yes you can do it.

SCARPINO: I’m going to turn the recorders off in a second, but before I do I want to thank you very much for giving me your time this morning, and I’ll look forward to talking to you tomorrow, and we’ll be talking leadership, about leadership in some considerable depth.

JAVIDAN:     Thank you.

SCARPINO:      Today is Friday, December 13, 2023.  My name is Philip SCARPINO, Professor of History at Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI); and Director of Oral History for the Tobias Leadership Center also at IUPUI. Today I have the privilege to be interviewing Dr. Mansour Javidan at the annual meeting of the International Leadership Association, which is taking place in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre. This interview is a joint venture undertaken by the Tobias Center and the International Leadership Association. This is the second recording session with Dr. Javidan, and the biographical information associated with him is at the beginning of the first recording session. I am asking your permission one more time to record this interview, to transcribe the interview, to deposit the recording and transcription in the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives, where they may be used by patrons, including posting all or part of the recording and the transcription to the website of the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives; and also to deposit the recording and the transcription with the International Leadership Association and the Tobias Center, where they’ll be used by patrons with the understanding that all or part may be posted to those organizations’ websites.

Can I have permission to do those things?

JAVIDAN:                     Yes, you can.

SCARPINO:      When you walked in and we greeted each other, you mentioned that you just received a significant recognition and honor, so, could you state for the record what that is?

JAVIDAN:         Yes, and I’m very happy to explain it. Every year, Stanford University goes through a very rigorous process of evaluating scholars and research scientists - that’s the word they use – scientists in pretty much all disciplines all over the world, and they basically look at the impact that these scientists have had in that particular year on their disciplines. So it’s purely about the impact of their research on other scientists and other research that’s done in the field. And in the field of Business and Management, that’s the category they have for my work, they evaluated 52,300 scholars, and I was ranked as among the top 2%. The actual ranking, I think, is 830, number 830 among 53,000-some.

SCARPINO:      Congratulations, I mean, that is quite an honor and recognition for a lot of hard work that generated that scholarship that had that impact.

JAVIDAN:         Yes, hard work and it’s also – a CEO that I used to work for would always tell me, ‘Mansour, it’s so much better to be lucky than smart.”

SCARPINO:      I don’t know, maybe if you’re talking about the gas pipeline company, maybe that’s right, but...

JAVIDAN:         So, I’m sure, having a good fortune of working with a lot of very good colleagues, in my career, I’m very proud of the ability to work with hundreds of researchers...

(BACKGROUND NOISE)

SCARPINO:      I’m going to close this door... Thank you, thank you very much. Yesterday when we stopped, we were talking about leadership, and leadership as a culture of construction and so on and so forth. But, one thing occurred to me and I’d like to get you to comment on. I’m going to name some nasty notorious dictators. I know you know who these people are, but I just want this on the record. Adolf Hitler was a dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945; Pol Pot, Cambodian dictator at the time of the genocide in the mid to late 1970s; Augusto Pinochet, military dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990; Idi Amin, president of Uganda from 1971 to ’79; and we could add more but you get the idea. The question is, do you think it's possible for bad people, or people with bad intent, to be leaders?

JAVIDAN:         Absolutely. If you define leadership as a process of influencing an individual, a group, an organization, a country... mobilizing towards a goal, every one of these guys did a very good job at it. The endpoint was brutal, was really dysfunctional on any level using any metric. And it ended up costing all of those societies a huge amount of disaster, but they were able to mobilize. Now, the thing about the people you mentioned is that their methodology of mobilization wasn’t just through inspiration, which Hitler, by the way, was very good at…

SCARPINO:      Yes, he was.

JAVIDAN:         …Stalin was very good at, but they were also very brutal as leaders. In other words, the package of carrot-and-stick as leaders: I’m going to inspire you, if you don’t get on with the message, the hammer is coming down. People get jailed and were killed, so that side of leadership, forcing their approach to leadership. Now, Putin in Russia today is exactly a very effective in the sense that he communicates an inspiring message. It’s a deceiving message, but it doesn’t matter. It is a message that resonates with masses of the Russian society, and then if you happen to disagree with him, well, guess what happens to you? If you’re lucky, you end up in jail; if you’re not very lucky, you get killed.

SCARPINO:      Your airplane crashes.

JAVIDAN:         Yeah, suddenly you disappear. I don’t know if you heard about three Russian oligarchs. The first few months that Russia invaded Ukraine, three very rich Russian oligarchs happened to be in New Delhi, in India. Every day one of them fell off the balcony to their death. And what was so funny about this is the New Delhi police said, ‘Oh, this is just a coincidence, it was an incident, an accident.’ I mean, really? Now, it was never made public what was their fault, what did they say. Obviously, they were not supporting Putin; or they had said something that communicated that message and... ping! They go down. So, that side of their approach to leadership is not what we in our field define as leadership because it’s brutal force. That’s a different issue. Some CEOs try that, forcing people, not that kind of brutal force, but true punishment and putting... I know of a CEO that had created this image of Hall of Shame. So, any vice president that he didn’t like, one way or the other, he would make sure everybody knows, that guy is on Hall of Shame. And I used to ask him, ‘What is the value of that? I mean, if you don’t like the guy, the guy isn’t doing the job, why don’t you fire him? That’s your privilege, you can fire him.’ ‘Well, you know, the board gets upset if I fire too many people, so I put them on the Hall of Shame and I make sure everybody knows so they, themselves, go away. That was his strategy, because he didn’t want to be seen - of course, everybody knew, but in his mind he didn’t want to be seen as, oh, I’m firing people. Well, he was firing people in a very, very nasty way.

SCARPINO:      We talked yesterday about the fact that you have consulted and advised in countries all over the world, and you’ve been back to Iran a number of times. When you do that, do you ever think about ‘What happens to the people in the society after I leave?’ By teaching them certain things and advising them in certain ways, do you ever find yourself thinking that it might put these people at risk?

JAVIDAN:         I have reflected on that many times, not the possibility of putting them at risk, that doesn’t exist in my mind. But the probability of ending up leaving them very frustrated because I give them a set of tools, and if those tools – they cannot implement them, they cannot apply them in their environment, they can get frustrated. And I think that’s a real possibility. Now, that’s why, when I’m outside of Canada and U.S., and I’m dealing with leaders, I always start out discussion on leadership about the culture of the country. Because to me, leadership has to be contextualized. Just telling them, here’s the five best practices in the U.S., go try them in Argentina, that doesn’t make any sense. The only way that I can teach leadership is by first learning about their culture, and then having a conversation with them about their culture. And then talking about, okay, so what would work as a leader in that environment. So, the tools that I provide I do my best... doesn’t mean it’s perfect, but I do my best to make sure that the tools are feasible given their realities.

SCARPINO:      We talked a little bit about GLOBE yesterday, and I said I was going to save most of that discussion for today, so, here we go. I understand that Robert House, who was at the Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania, was the principal investigator and founder of the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness, this research program which becomes GLOBE. How long did he have to work to get those letters to come out in a catchy acronym? Early 1990s, in order to sustain his project then, he also founded a non-profit foundation, added board of directors, and so on.

So, before I ask you about GLOBE, I did tell you yesterday that I talked to David Waldman. He told me that both of you had been mentored by Robert House. 

JAVIDAN:         Yes.

SCARPINO:      Is that accurate in your mind?

JAVIDAN:         Yes.

SCARPINO:      You know, House had a towering reputation in leadership. He developed the path-goal theory of leadership, which asserts that the role of a manager or leader is to set goals for employees and help them establish a path to achieve success. He later publishes the charismatic theory of leadership. The man was a giant in his field.  He died in 2011. How did you get to know him? I mean, do you just call a guy like that up and say, hi?

JAVIDAN:             You know, when we started our conversation today, I used the word ‘luck’ and ‘fortune’ a number of times, and I really meant that. This is a perfect example of it. This is what happened. When I was at University of Alberta in Edmonton, Bob House was a chaired professor at the University of Toronto. Every couple of years business schools need to be evaluated by a committee, by AACSB which is the accreditation association of business schools. And Bob House was sent to the University of Alberta to evaluate what we were doing. During his stay at the University of Alberta, he and I ended up having some really interesting conversations that had nothing to do with University of Alberta; it had a lot to do about leadership. And then, in 1990, he and I were both visiting professors at the University of Victoria here in British Columbia. He was teaching a PhD course in leadership. I was doing a lot of executive education workshops for the college. Our teaching work would end by noon. Every day, he and I would go and have lunch together, we both loved red wine, and we both loved cigars. So, we’d have a great lunch, and Bob, bless his soul, loved food and drinking. We would have at least a bottle of red wine, a couple of cigars, and we would constantly talk about leadership. At that time, he had started wondering about the relevance of everything he had done, and all the other researchers on leadership had done, outside of the U.S. because all the work was either in North America or Western Europe. He had started reflecting on that, and I came at it from a very strong cross-cultural point of view. I was just pushing him hard and hard. ‘How do you know being a charismatic leader works in Vietnam?’ He would say, ‘I have no idea.’ And I would say, ‘Well, aren’t you worried that your books are being used in Vietnam?’ And he would say, ‘Yeah, but I have no control over it.’ And then, when we were there, he drafted a proposal for funding for a grant. To start the project, we thought, maybe we’ll study 20 countries. And of course, when we were discussing - we weren’t really debating it, we were discussing it, and we both agreed that, well, if it doesn’t work in Vietnam, why? Well, it has to do with the culture of the country. So, we started talking about, well, we need to understand… we need to have that way of measuring the cultures of countries because we need to compare it. And then we need to use Bob House’s traditional questionnaire on leadership across all these countries. And, of course, the questionnaire had to be translated in the local languages. So, that is how the wine, the cigar, the food, and the beautiful Victoria was the venue for this big project. Now, I know that before coming to Victoria and after Victoria, he continued to have conversations about this issue of national culture and leadership. The project that we had in mind with 20 countries ended up being 60 countries. And the reason for that was, his reputation. So, anytime we contacted people in other countries and said, ‘You know, we have a team, Bob is the principal investigator, and we’re wondering if you would be interested in joining us?’ nobody said no. Not only that, they talked to their friends in other countries, so people started contacting us from other countries and said, ‘Oh, we’ve heard about Bob House’s project.’ Okay, so we ended up with 60 countries.

SCARPINO:      You said, ‘the team,’ so it was yourself…

JAVIDAN:         Yes.

SCARPINO:      Robert House…

JAVIDAN:         Yes.

SCARPINO:      Who else was involved?

JAVIDAN:             Peter Dorfman, he’s retired now, he was at New Mexico State University. Really, that was the core. Then we had a few professors; one from Sweden, one from South Africa, who at times we would contact for consultation and conversation. Oh, and Paul Hanges, by the way, at University of Maryland.

SCARPINO:      You were obviously in the same place as Robert House, but the other two, how did they become members of the team?

JAVIDAN:             Peter Dorfman, himself, is an authority on leadership. He and Bob House had conversations, not to the same extent, but Peter had written some articles about leadership in Mexico, one country. So, that conversation took place - briefly before Bob came to Victoria and after, during the conversations in Victoria, these names, Bob mentioned these names. Paul Hanges is an incredible statistician. Not only is he a leadership scholar, this guy is super smart and just unbelievably knowledgeable in quantitative methodologies, and we really needed someone like that. Bob and Paul knew each other, and so Bob contacted him, and Paul agreed to be part of the project.

SCARPINO:        Robert House as a mentor, how do you think of him now? He’s been dead for a while, and you are mentoring other people yourself now. So, when you look back, what do you think about his role as a mentor?

JAVIDAN:             I owe, really, this award, the 2% thing, to him. He was truly the most intelligent person in my life. And he and I just used to have a lot of personal conversations, you know. We became very good friends. And he used to tell me, ‘Mansour, I love telling you jokes because you laugh at them regardless of whether they’re funny or not.’ We had a personal side to our relationship. He really was like a father figure to me. Now, the thing about Bob was, as a human being, he was completely immersed in his research. He didn’t even like teaching much, you know. He certainly did not like executives, I remember, and that actually got us into trouble a couple of times. I remember we were invited by the Baruch College in New York, he and I, to make a presentation to their executive audience, about a hundred of them. They were vice presidents in the local New York area. And then in the afternoon and the next day, we would have a lot of presentations and discussions with their professors. I will never forget this. We both arrived the day before, of course, but Bob wasn’t 100%. He had a lot of health issues, and he just wasn’t feeling a hundred percent. He and I had dinner the night before, he wasn’t his normal… so, in the morning after breakfast, we’re sitting out there on the panel, the two of us in this big room with all the executives. The host introduced both of us and said, ‘Bob House is going to start the conversation,’ and Bob stood up and said… what he said, to this day, boggles my mind, he said, ‘Well, you know, executives are mostly dumb.’ This is what he’s saying to these people. And I looked at my host, the guy was so embarrassed. But Bob visibly was not feeling good. So, about five minutes into the talk, he actually sat down and said, ‘Mansour, why don’t you take over, I want to go to my room.’ And he did, he walked away, and the host was so pleased and relieved that Bob left. He just had no patience, no interest, in administrators, in executives, in government officials. I never understood that level of just looking down. He had this thing about him, that he was so narrow – as a human being he was so narrowly focused on his research. Even though his work was all about research, he looked down on the people who were using his work. I used to have long debates with him, I could never understand it. What I learned from him both was on the positive side and on the negative side. I learned from him that leadership can be taught. People’s leadership skills can be developed. But in order to do that, if you’re the coach, or if you’re the teacher, you’d better know what you are doing. And that’s his rigor in his work, that just was, I really was brainwashed in that sense of, anything you do has to have rigor. Without it, you’re actually doing damage, you may not even realize it. That was a big impact on me. He really paved the way for me to be the kind of scholar that I am. The thing I learned from him on the negative side was the connection with the business community, with executives, organizations. To me, my audience is not just other researchers. Whatever I do, it has to connect. It has to provide a pathway for the people out there. And this is really a very strong passion of mine. I’m very pleased that I’ve been able to bridge these two. As you know very well, I left the university for four years because I wanted to be in that world. I wanted to understand on a day-to-day basis their realities. Bob would always ask me, ‘What the hell are you wasting your time for? Why are you there?’

SCARPINO:      Well, you gave yourself a paid practicum, right?

JAVIDAN:             Yeah, exactly, yes. In fact, you just reminded me of something. I told you yesterday that I sat down with the CEO of the company and said, ‘I’m going on sabbatical to Wharton,’ and he said, ‘Why don’t you come and join us?’ So, after I talked with Bob, I had another meeting with the CEO, and I told him, ‘George, I think I’m interested, so let’s discuss how I can join you.’ And his response was, ‘So, Mansour, how much are you paying us to join us?’ And I looked at him and said, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, you’re going to learn a lot.’ And then he said, ‘I’m joking, I’ll pay you whatever you want’ etc., but that was exactly the point he made. And he was absolutely right. And you’re right. I learned so much, I learned so much about things that were important to me. They were not important to many other researchers, including Bob House, but to me, what is the value of…? I mean, okay, Stanford University, other researchers, my impact on other researchers, fantastic, all right, but I got to know that the people out there are using, are benefitting. There is another ranking, I was ranked in the top 100 researchers, top 100 authors in the field of organizational behavior. That connects to the other side. And that’s why I’m at Thunderbird, by the way, because Thunderbird has a very strong emphasis on executive education and working with corporations, organizations, etc.

SCARPINO:      It connects the theory to the practice…

JAVIDAN:         Absolutely.

SCARPINO:      When House was pushing to develop GLOBE, what purpose did he see it as serving? What did he tell you he thought he was doing?

JAVIDAN:             He had one question: What is the connection? Let me rephrase. Deep down he only had one question, and this is the question: Does my charismatic leadership framework work in other countries? That was it. He just wanted to test whether or not, and to what extent, charismatic leadership is universally applicable. And if it's not, why and how? And that’s where the culture came in. So, that was his interest, purely.

SCARPINO:        Given that he was the driving force behind the founding, do you think that he was successful in his initial intended purpose?

JAVIDAN:             Absolutely. I’ve had several of the most distinguished leadership scholars tell me, ‘This is a project that I wish I could have done, I wish I could have been a part of.’ I mean, when people of that stature make a comment like that, you know you’re doing something…

SCARPINO:        I realize I’m asking you to do something that’s a little self-serving with this next question, but you’ve been associated with GLOBE for a really long time now; how do you assess its impact?

JAVIDAN:             All right, so, I’m going to give you some examples. We published three books, the most important is what we call the blue book, it was over 1,000 pages. That book has over 14,000 citations. Now, in academic circles, if you get 500 citations, you’re very excited. That single book has over 14,000. My articles that I’ve written based on GLOBE data, minimum 2,000 citations. And some of them are for practitioners, by the way. So, teachers, professors use it for their teaching purposes and then they make reference to it in their writings. So, looking at it through the eyes of the academic audience, clearly, because the metrics are objective, easy to understand. And by the way, the current version of GLOBE is going to overshadow what we have done up to now. The latest version that we just completed data collection in 2022, in 144 countries, it’s just multiple times bigger than the previous phases of GLOBE. Now, any textbook on leadership there’s a section on GLOBE, that’s the impact on (INAUDIBLE). But I’m going to tell you a really interesting experience. The Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology – SI0P – Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology. These are org scientists, mostly organizational psychologists and business professors. So, they invited me – this was, I think, 2006, our book had come out in 2004, the blue book. So, in 2006 they invited me to make a presentation about ‘What Is GLOBE?’ to their audience. And, for lunch, they put us at round tables of about ten people, and they said, ‘We’re going to give you an assignment: The assignment is, discuss whatever you’re discussing, whatever is important to you around the table.’ ‘And at some point,’ the host said, ‘I’m going to ask each table to tell us, what was important?’ So, we had our lunch, we had our discussion, and we had probably something like 30 round tables. Two of the tables, the guy who stood up and said, ‘Our priority for this year is to figure out a way of bridging GLOBE to our audiences.’ That was just, wow! As I was so impressed with that, I was also wondering, well, these guys are going to make a lot of money off of our work.

SCARPINO:        Then there’s that.

JAVIDAN:         But that was the reality.

SCARPINO:      When you referred to that study, you were talking about Culture, Leadership, and Organizations:  The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies that came out in 2004?

JAVIDAN:             That’s right.

SCARPINO:     Okay, I’m going to ask you more about that in a minute. But again, GLOBE, Understanding cultures and implicit leadership theories across the globe: an introduction to project GLOBE, which was authored by Robert House, yourself, Paul Hanges and Peter Dorfman, appeared in the Journal of World Business, Volume 37, spring of 2002. Just for the benefit of anybody using this, at that time Robert House was at the Wharton School; you were at the University of Calgary; Hanges was at the University of Maryland, College Park; and Dorfman, University of New Mexico. People can follow up on that if they want to. I asked you how got connected with this group, so I’m going to skip that, but was this the first example of GLOBE sharing what it was about with professional colleagues? This 2002 piece?

JAVIDAN:         Yes, the 2002 special issue of Journal of World Business, which to this day is among their top 10 most popular, most cited issue of the Journal.

SCARPINO:      I admit that I am not an expert on refereed journals in your field, but I know something about refereed journals in my field and related fields, and to talk to one of these journals to do a special issue around some idea you have usually takes some effort. How did you all persuade this journal to dedicate an issue to what you wanted to deal with?

JAVIDAN:             You know, as we speak, Canada has a lot to do with this project. You heard me say about Victoria, and the meetings I had with the two chief editors of the Journal of Business took place in downtown Toronto. And, we were at the Academy of Management Conference, I forget the year, probably 2001 or 2000. Both of them are very distinguished scholars in the field of leadership, but very American; all of their work is about the U.S., leadership in the U.S. They asked me to join them for lunch. Both of them knew me from my previous work, and of course I knew them from their work.

SCARPINO:      And these are the editors.

JAVIDAN:         Yes.

SCARPINO:      And their names were?

JAVIDAN:             John Slocum at Southern Methodist University in Texas; and another guy who I love, his name will come to me - at University of Nebraska. They wanted to know, ‘What is this thing you are working on, what is the project?’ And I shared with them, this is what we’ve done, the data, the objectives, how we have collected data. By the way, besides managing the project, I also was the researcher who collected data on leadership in Iran, with a friend of mine, the two of us collected data. We had a very good conversation about it. They said, ‘Wow, this is very different from everything that we know about leadership. Why don’t you put a proposal?’ And, of course, they knew Bob House, and they said, ‘Talk to Bob, why don’t you guys submit a proposal to us?’ I said, ‘okay.’ I had a talk with Bob, he said, ‘I have no interested, I’m just too busy with other things.’ He said to me, ‘Mansour, you do this, I don’t care.’ So, I put the proposal together. And, there was a number of back-and-forths between me and these two people. That’s how it worked. At the end they said, ‘Okay, here are the rules.’ They gave me the rules on how they expect me to be the editor of the special issue. And I had told them the specific topics that I believed would be of interest to scholars for that special issue, and they agreed to it.

SCARPINO:      So, you recruited the authors, edit their products, so on and so forth.

JAVIDAN:         Yes.

SCARPINO:        This may sound like a silly question, but why is called ‘The Blue Book?’ And if it’s because it’s blue, I walked into that.

JAVIDAN:             That’s it. The other one is brown, and the third one has a mix of colors. But ‘The Blue Book’ is thick. I think all the PhD students in international management are now required to read at least portions of it. It was written for academics, it wasn’t written for practitioners. It has a lot of methodological things and how we collected the data and the quality of the data and that kind of stuff.

SCARPINO:        But if it’s still being assigned, it stood the test of time.

JAVIDAN:         Oh, absolutely.

SCARPINO:        You basically were looking at culture and leader behavior in the 62 societies. You didn’t start out with 62 societies in mind. People really wanted to get in on this.

JAVIDAN:         Our ambition was 20, because collecting data in multiple countries is not easy.

SCARPINO:      How did you do that?

JAVIDAN:             Well, you know, I don’t know how we could have done it without the internet. I mean, the internet, as you can imagine, and those were the early days of the internet, but without it I don’t know how we could have communicated. But, at the same time, after people - it was all paper and pencil. After everything was translated, the questionnaire was translated in the local language to our satisfaction, then we would email a copy of the questionnaire in Word to the professor, the researcher in the country. That professor would have it printed, so they had to collect data from 300 managers, print 300 copies. Handed out to people, people would respond, put them in a bundle, have it shipped to us.

SCARPINO:      You got the questionnaires, the data gathering, they go to 62 eventual societies, lots of different languages. They had to be translated into, this was not all done in English… or French…

JAVIDAN:         No, no, no, every country it was translated into their language.

SCARPINO:        How did you get it from whatever language it happened to be, you know, Spanish, Arabic or whatever it was, to a common form in English? And then how were you confident that you ended up with what the individuals who filled out the forms wanted to say?

JAVIDAN:             We did a much more sophisticated job between 2019 and 2020, but we learned from that experience. The way we did it was, all the questions were numbered. So, in the translation - and let me explain the process we went through for translation. So, let’s say you are the researcher in Japan, we would send you a copy of the English instrument and we would ask you to translate it into Japanese. So, you would translate it into Japanese. Then we would ask you to find another Japanese person to translate it back into English. So, that person would do it. Then you would send us back your back-translated English version. So now I have your English version and my English version. I go word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence. If there was any dissimilarity, or if there were words that were used which in our mind did not communicate the message in our questionnaire, we would go back to the Japanese and have a conversation with them. ‘Why did you use this word? What does this mean? This is our intention.’ A little bit of back and forth, and we would fix it. Once we fixed it, we now have an original English version; a finalized, back-translated English version which we sent to the Japanese guy, and the Japanese guy now was asked, ‘Go back to your Japanese translation and make sure that the back-translated English is now fully represented.’ But the question numbers were critical. If there was the tiniest error in numbering the questions, it would have been a disaster. So, that is how we controlled it at that time. This time, we used a much more complicated and much more rigorous process.

SCARPINO:      At that early stage, when you were collecting this data and it starts coming in, were you then quantifying this data?

JAVIDAN:         Everything was quantified. All the responses were quantifiable.

SCARPINO:        The responses then came back in a clear enough fashion that somebody didn’t have to make an ambiguous call that, ‘this means this’ or…

JAVIDAN:             That’s right. That’s why question numbers were critical. The person who was looking at the Japanese questionnaire and entering it into an Excel file or an SBSS file had no idea what they were looking at, but they were only paying attention to question numbers. Question number four, this person’s response is three, so, enter three. That’s how it was done. But the work we did prior to that was to make sure there was no error on the question number.

SCARPINO:      Now looking back, after a certain amount of scholarly water has flowed under the bridge, how do you think you did?

JAVIDAN:             Well, the fact that this time around we completely changed the process reflects the fact that we believed we could do a better job. And remember, that was mid-‘90s. Now, we’re dealing 2019, so technology has changed. Just to give you an example, we used Excel files this time. We didn’t have that capacity. We didn’t even think that way back in mid-1990s. And the way we did it this time was we had the English version, sent it to one Japanese researcher. And we asked that Japanese researcher to translate it into Japanese. Then that Japanese researcher was asked to send it to two independent Japanese researchers and ask them to back-translate it into English. And then we asked those two to send their versions to number-four Japanese person, who would have to reconcile if there are differences, because that number-four had the copy of the original English version. So, then, that number-four sent us back their final back-translated English to two people on our side, in most cases myself and one other colleague in an Excel file. You see, I emphasize Excel file because it gave us a lot of flexibility. Item by item, number by number. Same column, all these words. And if there were any discrepancy, we would highlight it and put a note in the next column, and would say to the number-one person, ‘Here are our concerns. Either fix them, or get back to us to explain.’ And that process took 12 months. Four people in every country, two people on our side, for each questionnaire. And let me end by saying, we ended up with 138 versions of 60 languages because the people in Argentina said, ‘Yeah, we speak Spanish, but not the Spanish in Spain. We’ve got to translate it to Argentinian language. So, 16 versions of Spanish, 13 versions of Arabic, that is the level of detail and rigor that we went through this time. We didn’t do it – we couldn’t even think away, you know, the technology didn’t exist. And, by the way, the process I just shared with you, no other researcher has done it. This is now the gold standard of translation/back-translation across cultures.

SCARPINO:      How did you pay for all that?

JAVIDAN:             Aha… we were able to raise a little over $1 million dollars Canadian from the government of Canada. Yeah, they have a granting agency for research. They loved this idea. And we raised over a million from the government. And then, there is a foundation here in Vancouver that heard about what we’re doing. They’re giving a lot of money to refugees to less-developed countries. My friend who at the time was the dean of the business school here at Simon Fraser University, he and I met with these people – I’m actually having lunch with them later today – and they gave us $500,000 dollars because they said, ‘We’ve never seen anything like this, and once you complete your research, we want you to use the money to disseminate your learnings. We want you to make sure you’re bridging this information to people everywhere. So, they gave us the money. This year, they’re giving us… they just signed a deal with the business school at Simon Fraser University for $50,000 dollars a year for three years. Today, I’m going to ask for another half-million.

SCARPINO:      And this is for dissemination.

JAVIDAN:             Their only interest… they’re not into research.

SCARPINO:        That’s amazing.

JAVIDAN:             Yeah, they just want people to learn how to live together, work together, regardless where they’re from. That’s their mission in life.

SCARPINO:        We talked about the societies and how they were chosen, and some of them were really chosen because they begged to get in. That sounds a little harsh, but… you’ve got the primary person in each one of the countries that you’re working in or each one of the societies, how did you find these people?

JAVIDAN:             Let me see, personal connections have proven to be credible. Myself and my colleague who was dean at this business school, Bob House, of course, in the earlier years, we really have a huge network of professors all over the world. So, we started contacting. And then there were countries for which we didn’t know anyone. For example, we didn’t know anyone in Cambodia. So what I did was, I sent an email to all my contacts in the neighboring countries and told them, ‘Hey guys, we really need to find somebody in Cambodia; do you know anyone, can you make a recommendation, put us in touch with someone? In most cases they did, and that’s how we built the network.

SCARPINO:      Again, in the case of the study, Culture, Leadership and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies, Robert House, et al, the mechanism for learning about the relationship between culture and leadership behavior was these questionnaires that you developed.

JAVIDAN:             Yes.

SCARPINO:        The material was then quantified…

JAVIDAN:         Yes.

SCARPINO:      Came in in written form, or were they just circling numbers or something?

JAVIDAN:         All numbers, no open-ended questions, and all on paper which we then had manually inserted in SBSS or Excel Files.

SCARPINO:      I guess I should know this, do people use SBSS anymore?

JAVIDAN:             Oh yeah, I’m still a big user. You know SBSS was acquired by IBM.

SCARPINO:        I didn’t know that.

JAVIDAN:         Yeah.

SCARPINO:      I mean, in a former life I did quantification and then I used it, but not in years and years and years.

JAVIDAN:             And it has become quite powerful. IBM has made a good investment, they’re making a ton of money.

SCARPINO:        That’s amazing. You’re looking at these 62 societies, obviously it came out in 2004 but there was a lot of work that went in before that. As you were doing this, as you’re thinking about the product you were going to produce and how it was going to be organized and so on, what were you hoping to add to the literature on leadership that wasn’t already there? What was your contribution to knowledge?

JAVIDAN:         Yes… I need to tell you a little bit of my own personal background. I was born in Iran, right? My father was Iranian. My mother was Russian. In my family right now, there are five different languages that are spoken. We have an Italian side, a French side, a Turkish side, a Russian side, and Iranian side.

SCARPINO:        It’s like the U.N. around the dinner table.

JAVIDAN:             Exactly… it’s quite possible that two members of my family can be sitting at a table without being able to communicate. I was in Moscow, I couldn’t communicate with the Russian side of my family, which is my mother’s side, because they couldn’t speak my language, I couldn’t speak their language. By the way, that’s not always bad because multiple religions are practiced in my family. The point I’m trying to make is, in contrast to Bob House and the other professors, I grew up as a person in the middle of diversity. I grew up seeing the way things are done in my own family in such different ways. When I was a teenager in Tehran – I’m going to tell you something that may sound weird to you – I was wondering why is it that the Italian side of my family has coffee for breakfast, my own family has tea for breakfast, why is that? As basic as that, I was always curious. What is going on? Things are different. And then, as I mentioned to you yesterday, when I was doing my work with CEOs in the U.S., I noticed that anytime they go outside of the U.S., it’s random. Sometimes they’re successful. Sometimes they’re not. Based on my own background, that curiosity was further nurtured about what is special about this diversity that, when people are faced with it, they struggle. And some don’t, they’re very successful. What is it that creates this additional dynamic when you cross borders? So, my whole approach, and my whole contribution in this project has been to create a language, create a vocabulary, and create a methodology to understand what are those dynamics that you face when you deal with people who are different from you. And in doing that, my scholarly contribution goes beyond, oh, here are the papers and books. My scholarly contribution is focused on the parameters under which each theory works. The limits of Bob House’s charismatic leadership, to what extent does it work, in what countries, and why? And why not? So, that’s what prompted me at a very personal level to be part of this project. It was so natural to me to get engaged even though my PhD dissertation was in strategic management, was all about how CEOs make their strategy decisions, had nothing to do with anything cross-border etc. But because of that thing in the back of my mind, I kept gravitating towards, well why is it some global strategies fall apart? Why is it some executives fall apart? And that’s how that project keeps continuing, by the way.

SCARPINO:      Ten years after the publication of Culture, Leadership and Organizations, GLOBE publishes another volume. Looked at a similar topic but focused on CEOs, which you addressed: Strategic Leadership Across Cultures, the GLOBE study of CEO Leadership, Behavior and Effectiveness (2014), co-authors Robert House, who I think was deceased by this time, died in 2011. Peter Dorfman, New Mexico State; Paul Hanges, University of Maryland; yourself, Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University; and Mary F. Sully de Luque, she is the one name that has not yet come up, so can you give a few sentences describing her expertise?

JAVIDAN:         Yes. She did her PhD in leadership at the University of Nebraska. She did a post-doc with Bob House on leadership. She joined us as a post-doc support person for Bob House. And then later on in early 2000 when we were starting on this project, which was reported in that book, she played a bigger role in helping us collect data in this country, kind of managed that project in Bob’s office.

SCARPINO:      But she’s listed as an author.

JAVIDAN:         Yes.

SCARPINO:      Now, I do notice that the authors are listed in alphabetical order except for Bob House, who is first.

JAVIDAN:         Yes.

SCARPINO:      So, I assume that’s an acknowledgement of the powerful role he had, and impact he had on all of you.

JAVIDAN:        Absolutely.

SCARPINO:     Is GLOBE based on culturally-endorsed implicit leadership theory?

JAVIDAN:         Very much so.

SCARPINO:      Can you explain, for anybody who uses this, what culturally-endorsed implicit leadership theory is and how it applies to GLOBE?

JAVIDAN:         Sure. There’s a scholar, there’s a researcher at the University of Maryland, his name is Bob Lord. A few years back he introduced the concept of implicit leadership theory. What he meant by that is, any individual because of their personality, because of their experience, has an implicit notion of what is leadership? What does it mean to be a leader? And then, when they are asked to evaluate somebody, they’re using their implicit leadership theory to evaluate. So, your implicit leadership theory may be different from mine. We may look at the same person but end up with different assessments, evaluations because our theories are different. Lord is a psychologist, so his level of analysis was at the individual. In GLOBE, we argue that this makes perfect sense – everybody does have implicit leadership theory... but, it’s not just all about psychology, and it’s not just about one person’s experience; the culture of the country. So, if you take a thousand people in Iran, and a thousand people in the U.S., the thousand Iranians will have commonalities among their theory or their set of criteria for leadership; and the Americans will have commonalities, and that commonality is driven by their experiences in the society. So, the national culture of the country helps shape people’s implicit leadership theories. That was the theoretical framework that we used. And Bob Lord, just recently in 2020, wrote an article praising GLOBE in very colorful – I was a little surprised how positive he was in praising our work, taking his work to a much bigger, broader level of the society. What we mean, in a very simplistic way, what we mean by culturally endorsed leadership theory is really what a society expects their leaders to do. What are the criteria that people in a country use to evaluate whether or not someone is a good leader or a bad leader.

SCARPINO:      I can’t resist asking you this. I’m sure everybody in the United States and Canada knows how much trouble the U.S. House of Representatives is having electing a speaker. As you look at that situation, do you see the problems of failure of leadership?

JAVIDAN:         Absolutely. In my view, it’s not about now. For years, decades maybe, a couple of decades, there is a big part of the American society that believes their political leaders over-promised and under-delivered, and it’s a cumulative phenomenon. So, the level of stress and the level of frustration over years keeps going up. So, today, as a result of this cumulative experience, in our country and the U.S. we are looking at a situation where there is a portion of the voter public who is saying, let’s just revolt... because, for years we tried using internal mechanisms – voting for this one versus the other one – and it didn’t work. They still do not give us what they promised, so let’s have a revolution. I mean, it is a revolution to these people. It’s exactly the same thing that happened in Iran, having a revolution, or in other countries: Let’s kick out these bastards, let’s try to destroy the government so that we an rebuild it. And there are politicians who are elected because of that, they’re promising that. So, they cannot change, that’s how they get the votes. And the more vocal they are and the more anti-government they are, the more votes they get because they’re tapping into that level of readiness to revolt.

SCARPINO:      Is that leadership or demagoguery?

JAVIDAN:         Well, to me, it’s a failure of leadership over years. Over the years, both parties, because they have been in a monopoly position, they have promised what they thought would get them votes. And then they forgot about it, or, the realities of the incentive systems of politicians. So, clearly a failure of leadership, which has resulted in the level of stress and frustration in the society to the extent that, in my mind, has been unprecedented in modern American history. And, now, there is a crop of politicians who are tapping into that. Donald Trump is the master of that, and there are others who are saying, hey, this government... the longer this government is closed down, the better it is for the society. That is their philosophy, they really believe that.

SCARPINO:      Doing a little bit of background on GLOBE, approaches culture in terms of what I would see as nine quantitative variables or dimensions, so, to get them in the record: Assertiveness; Future Orientation; Gender Egalitarianism; Humane Orientation; Institutional Collectivism; In-Group Collectivism; Performance Orientation; Power Distance; and Uncertainty Avoidance. What is Uncertainty Avoidance?

JAVIDAN:         This is actually one of the most important dimensions of culture. This is the extent to which people’s lives are organized, predictable, structured. This is the extent to which people in a society can predict the next week based on the last week. In a society like Germany, which is the epitome, the highest level of Uncertainty Avoidance, rules and structures, everything is organized. The Pope received a traffic ticket when he was visiting Berlin because he wasn’t wearing his seatbelt, that is universality of rules. So, in societies that are very high on Uncertainty Avoidance, I wish we could come up with a nicer phrase, to be honest with you, but that’s the language that the literature uses. When the child grows up in a society like that, he or she learns that rules are there to protect you, but, in return, you have to protect the rules. You have to abide by them, you have to respect them, you have to trust them. Now, you contrast that with a country like Russia, which is one of the lowest on Uncertainty Avoidance; can I predict what’s going to happen tomorrow? Who knows what Putin’s going to do. Suddenly, he decides to invade another country. Rules keep changing. And, by the way, the powerful people, they break rules and they get away with it, nobody seems to bother with that. And a lot of these rules are stupid anyway.

SCARPINO:      Although some of them get thrown out windows and...

JAVIDAN:         Not because they did not follow the rules, it was because they did not follow the king, or the emperor, or the czar.

SCARPINO:      How did you go about gathering information on these nine variables?

JAVIDAN:         Okay, that’s a very good question. As a typical researcher, we started reviewing the literature. We wanted to know what other researchers have done, have said. Of course, the dominant scholar in the field is Hofstede, the late Dutch scholar.

SCARPINO:      Hofstede?

JAVIDAN:         Yeah, he was the first one who quantified culture. As you know, national culture is such a complex thing. He came up with some of these dimensions, not all of ours but some of them, like Power Distance, like Uncertainty Avoidance. In a book that he published in 1980, which really became the bible of cross-cultural studies, he introduced these concepts. And there are other researchers after that did research, wrote theoretical ideas about it. So, a big part of our culture dimensions is based on the literature, but not all. For example, until our work, all the researchers used one culture dimension called collectivism versus Individualism. Is the society very individualistic, or is the society very collectivist? Singapore, Sweden is very collectivist. Greece, U.S., is on the more individualistic side. This is what the literature was up to that point. We came in and said, ‘There’s nuances here.’ There is collectivism at the society level. There is collectivism at the group and family level. So, Greece, is highly family-oriented, highly group-oriented, but very individualistic at the society level because they don’t trust their government. They don’t trust their politicians, etc. So, we were the only ones who started disentangling collectivism at the society level versus collectivism at the small group and family level. So, this is how we came up with these dimensions.

SCARPINO:      And then the mechanism for collecting information was the questionnaires that we talked about before.

JAVIDAN:        Yes.

SCARPINO:     Okay. Global Mindset Index, what is that? Can you explain that?

JAVIDAN:         Yes. I went back from TransCanada Pipeline to University of Calgary in 2000. In 2002, I started doing a lot for INSEAD, which is a business school out of France.

SCARPINO:      Manfred Kets de Vries was there for a few years.

JAVIDAN:         Yeah, Manfred... Manfred and I used to have a lot of interesting conversations.

SCARPINO:      Interesting man.

JAVIDAN:         Very interesting man. I used to actually visit him in his apartment in Paris with his wife... really fun people, a little quirky, but fun people. And then, so, in 2002 I was spending a lot of time doing executive education workshops for INSEAD in Singapore and in Fontainebleau in France. In 2003, they made me an offer, just come and join us. So, I moved to Singapore, I accepted, but I told them on a temporary basis because I wasn’t sure I could live outside of North America; not me, my wife, she wasn’t too excited about it. So, I told them, ‘Hey, I’m coming, I’ll join you in Singapore, I’ll work for you wherever you want, but I’m not making a final commitment.’ They said, ‘Aw, that’s fine, come and join us.’ So, I did, I moved to Singapore. My wife stayed in Calgary and then joined me, and then went back. She just wasn’t very comfortable in Asia. What I was doing was just traveling all over the world; Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, China, for working for INSEAD, and back to Paris. And my wife wasn’t happy about that, either. I was on the plane, really, a lot of the time. So, then, I got a call from a headhunter - at that time I happened to be in Calgary, I remember – and the headhunter said, ‘I’m calling to let you know that you’ve been short-listed for a position at Thunderbird.’ And I said, ‘What are you talking about?’

SCARPINO:      I didn’t apply...

JAVIDAN:         I didn’t apply for anything. What is the position? And he explained that, ‘Yeah, one of the members of the committee told us about you, told the committee about you, we gathered information about you without contacting you. We shared with them, and they’ve short-listed three people to interview, you’re one of them.’ And I said, ‘You know, I’ve just recently accepted the position at INSEAD, I’m not sure, I don’t want to be unfair to you guys.’ And he said, ‘Well, let me talk to the dean at Thunderbird and communicate to them what you just told me.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ So, a couple of hours later, the dean called me at Thunderbird, and I didn’t know him. He’s not in my field, I wasn’t in his field. David Bowen is his name, we’re still very good friends. And he said, ‘Well, what’s the problem? Why wouldn’t you come and spend two days with us?’ I said, ‘But I want you to know my position, this is my situation right now.’ He said, ‘Okay, that’s fine, we just want to know what you’re doing and we want you to know what we’re doing.’ And of course, Thunderbird has always been ranked number one in international management, I knew that. So, in March 2004, I agreed to go there for two days and did my interview, met with people, and they told me they had already met with the first person on the short list, and the day after I leave, person number three is going to show up, and I happened to know who that person was, and they said, ‘We’ll let you know probably in a week,’ because the committee has to get together, and I said, ‘Okay, that’s fine.’ And, again, I reminded them, ‘Don’t be upset if I decide not to come.’ They said, ‘Oh, that’s fine.’ So, I had my meetings, went back to Calgary. In the afternoon of the next day, the dean called and said, ‘I want to send you my offer.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute, you have your number three over there.’ He said, ‘Yeah, we’ve already decided. There’s no point in waiting. We’re going to make you an offer, and we’re going to let you think about it.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ So, as soon as the offer was received, I shared it with my wife, who said, ‘It’s time to go. Don’t even debate it. You’re going to be happy there, that’s your place...’

SCARPINO:      Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Just go.

JAVIDAN:         ‘I want to go. So, let’s go!’  This is how I ended up at Thunderbird. Now, there was a reason why I’m giving you this feedback. The number one reason why they approached me and the position was, Garvin Distinguished Professor and Director of the brand new Center for Cultures and Languages. They said, ‘We’re going to give you $5 million dollars. You’re going to build the brand new research center, Cultures and Languages. Sam Garvin is one of the owners of the Phoenix Suns, he’s a very rich guy, and a very dear guy. He gave $60 million dollars to Thunderbird, $5 million of which was allocated to this center which they wanted me to build. I said, ‘Okay, that sounds good.’

SCARPINO:      So, you could spend that, that wasn’t an endowment.

JAVIDAN:         It was cash, it was not endowment.

SCARPINO:      Right, yeah, yeah, this is money you can spend.

JAVIDAN:         It was operating money, yeah. Thunderbird, one of the unique features of Thunderbird, is it’s so practically oriented. It is so focused on bridging knowledge and research to real work in classroom, in executive education, anything. My wife and I first arrived in Phoenix mid-July of 2004 to do some house-hunting, look around, it was 112 degrees.

SCARPINO:      I’ve been to Phoenix.

JAVIDAN:         Actually, you know what I mean.

SCARPINO:                  I lived in West Texas, I do know.

JAVIDAN:         The heat is amazing. Then, we officially started August 1^st. So, August 1^st of 2004, I started as a full professor at Thunderbird and a chaired professor. And, then, within the first six months I started wondering – okay, GLOBE shows us that there’s a lot of diversity all over the world in terms of culture, in terms of leadership, so why is it that some managers work so successfully with people from different parts of the world, and some managers fall apart? What are the individual differences that would facilitate or impede your success in a global role as a manager? That was the question that came to my mind. So, global mindset is the package, is the answer to that question. Global mindset is a collection of individual characteristics. If you have a high level of those characteristics, it makes it easer for you to work in global roles. If you have a low-level of those characteristics, it makes it harder for you.

SCARPINO:      It’s an assessment mechanism to see if somebody is going to be a good fit.

JAVIDAN:         What I did was, I sent an email to my colleagues at Thunderbird, this is my research question. Anybody interested? In the next fifteen minutes I got eight professors who wanted to be part of this. Okay. So, we divvied up the work, everybody did literature review because they were from different fields. Then, we interviewed probably 15 of our own professors at Thunderbird, professor of Global Strategy, Global Finance, Global Economy, and just asked them, ‘Well, in your mind, what does a manager to need to be, or to do, or to know, in order to be successful?’ So, we collected all of that information, added to the literature. Then we interviewed 217 global executives in 23 cities; in Asia, in North America, and in Europe. Same idea, trying to understand - these are very senior people - trying to understand, what does it take? So, Mary Teagarden, my colleague at Thunderbird, and I, distilled the learnings. Then we invited thirty of the most distinguished professors that had something to do with international management to Thunderbird. Paid all their expenses for three days. When I welcomed them, I said, ‘As you all know, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, you’re going to work hard for this.’ And they did. It was fantastic. So we shared with them what we had heard. It was fantastic just watching all kinds of people coming at it from different angles. So, we ended that workshop with me summarizing what we had learned on a huge whiteboard. And, again, we had conversations. The most interesting part of it was, on day one, one of my friends who is a very distinguished scholar, stood up and said, ‘I don’t believe in any of this. I’ve got to tell everybody, I’m here because Mansour invited me, but I don’t think this has any merit.’ When we ended, he stood up again, and he said, ‘I want everybody to know, I was wrong.’

SCARPINO:      Good for him.

JAVIDAN:         There is a lot of value here. It was not prompted by...

SCARPINO:      It’s hard to admit you made a mistake in public.

JAVIDAN:         Yeah, but this guy is a very good guy. So, he said, ‘Yeah, I wanted you to know I was wrong. There’s a lot of really interesting stuff here. This is very valuable work.’ Based on that framework, Mary Teagarden and I started creating questions using our own MBA students to create questions. We ended up with 700-some items. Then I hired a consulting firm whose expertise is in instrument design. Gave them all the questions, and they went through their work. We did two pilot tests with probably in total 5,000 managers. And we ended up with an instrument, which is called Global Mindset Inventory. And that instrument has now been completed by over 70,000 people all over the world.

SCARPINO:      It basically helps to predict whether somebody can be successful in that...

JAVIDAN:         And how we can help them, how we can help develop. For example, it has three dimensions, we call capital: intellectual capital, psychological capital and social capital. So, if your profile is reasonably high on these three capitals, you have a higher probability of success. If you have a low profile on intellectual capital, we can provide workshops, we can help you develop action plans, etc. on how you can improve. So, it’s not just an assessment, but also developmental.

SCARPINO:      I read what I thought was an interesting piece co-authored by yourself and David Waldman, titled, “The False Dichotomy Between Globalism and Nationalism.” Harvard Business Review, June 18, 2020. Now, I’m going to admit in public that I don’t read the Harvard Business Review on a regular basis, but I know what it is and I read it from time to time. I really like this piece so I’m going to just quote a couple of things, get it in here, and then get you to comment. So, you and your co-author said:

“For years, government officials, business school professors, and executives have espoused the benefits of globalization, supporting their arguments with sound evidence.”

“In recent years, however, nationalist sentiments seem to be on the rise. During the current pandemic and economic downturn, political leaders might find it more expedient to search for solutions for their own citizenries, instead of combining efforts to find a global one.”

“At first glance, it might seem that one has to pick either globalism or nationalism because they appear to be diametrically opposed. We believe that this ‘either/or’ approach leads to highly undesirable outcomes.”

“A paradox mindset – one that merges both globalist and nationalist views...” and then you go on to talk about that, and that’s what I want to ask you about. So, what did you see as the purpose of a paradox mindset?

JAVIDAN:         Well, let me start by saying that that article is really a practitioner version of complexity theory. We didn’t use those words, but it was really an application of paradox and complexity theory; which argue that it is always easy for human beings to go either/or, but the world is more complicated than that. And the paradoxical situation is where you can bring two seemingly conflicting contradictory concepts together at the same time. Now, why we decided to write this article was, Trump was in power, and his government under his leadership was using a lot of language of nationalism, nationalism. And politicians were using that language, which always resonates with the population, it’s proven throughout history. Unfortunately, what we felt was, even though it is so desirable politically, it can have very serious dysfunctional consequences, not just for the country, but globally too. At the same time, we understood, because of me mostly, David is an incredibly sharp theoretician. He is the number two most impactful professor at all of Arizona State University. That’s how powerful this guy is. And I’ve had the privilege of working with him a number of years. So, he was the theoretician on the complexity theory. I understood how executives think, and American executives in corporations for years had no interest in national issues. They’re just making money, and globalization provided more opportunity, more expansion, more profit. So, the world of business was moving so fast towards ignoring borders, ignoring political realities, making decisions such as, let’s move all of our production in the auto industry to Mexico and shut down our operations in Ohio, in Michigan. I actually visited some, they were shut down. But in the eyes of the decision-makers who were making those decisions, the idea that, ‘Hey, we’re dealing with people’s livelihood here’ didn’t even come into consideration because their assumption was that’s a problem for the government, that’s not a problem for us. Our challenge as a corporation is to produce the best product, provide the greatest shareholder value, provide jobs in a global environment – and take maximum advantage of talent no matter where it is. So, Mexico, for a number of years, had the highest rate of growth in auto industry manufacturing. While the U.S. was going down, Mexico was going up. And the executives in the auto industry didn’t see anything wrong with that because, in their mind, that’s their incentive system. On the one hand, you have these business executives who are thinking only globally, because that’s where the money is, and you have politicians on the other side that are now figuring out, oh, there’s a community in our society that is the loser. And if I can connect to them, I’m going to get votes. So, now you have these globalists and these nationalists, and they can’t even speak together. So, our point in that article was, this will get you nowhere. Yeah, the politicians are going to get the votes, the executives are going to get their bonus, but the society and that voter is going to fail and is going to be damaged because there’s no solution to be taken from that perspective, there’s no solution.

SCARPINO:      All of those boarded-up neighborhoods in Detroit are not going to change.

JAVIDAN:         Yeah, exactly, yeah.

SCARPINO:      My son used to live there and he took me on a tour of all of those boarded-up...

JAVIDAN:         And I’ve been in that area. Yeah, so our approach was, it’s time for executives to understand and to take into consideration the nationalistic issues because their decisions have real-life impact on real people. To them, it’s just numbers. But to the guy who loses their job, it’s not a number, it’s their livelihood. And it’s not just the government’s problem. The point that I made to one executive was, when you say it’s government’s problem, what do you expect the government to do? He said, ‘Well, you know, they have to provide training,’ etc. I said, ‘What if the government decides to nationalize you? That’s always a possibility.’ ‘No, that’s not possible!’ And I said, ‘What do you mean, when you say it’s the government’s problem, you’re giving the solution to government. You’re ceasing your role. So what do you expect?’

SCARPINO:      When you talk to executives in global companies, do you tell them that the intended and unintended consequences of their actions matter, and that’s a part of leadership?

JAVIDAN:         The language I use is partly that, that it’s about your leadership to understand that your stakeholders go beyond your (INAUDIBLE) stakeholders. The person that loses his job in your town is also a stakeholder. So, I use that language, but very carefully, because executives that I know of have been trained not to consider anything other than business criteria. So, based on that understanding, I use a language that they understand. This point about nationalization, this point about, hey, governments start doing messy things and then you’re going to start complaining. So, I try to get them to understand that it is in their own interest, may not look it in the short term, but it’s definitely true in the longer term by taking steps, at a minimum, to expand the scope of their decision-making criteria to include these social issues that they usually shy away from.

SCARPINO:      I was going to ask you about the U.S. and the world and leadership, but we certainly have already touched on some of that stuff. But one question, I mean, you did indicate, and we talked about the fact that in the U.S. we probably are facing a crisis of leadership. Do you think that scholars of leadership have a role to play trying to deal with this crisis of leadership?

JAVIDAN:         Well, as you know very well, the concept of leadership is studied and taught in so many colleges with different disciplines. Leadership in the political arena is something that I don’t touch at all. Business schools have nothing to do with it, but public administration schools have a lot of expertise in it and have studied it. What is kind of surprising to me is how quiet the academia is in regard to the failures that we are experiencing in our political system. It’s just surprising. I mean, when Enron or some crooked company does crazy things and steals people’s money, etc., there is some kind of hoopla. Even among academics, they talk about it. When a bunch of politicians create all kinds of disaster, I don’t see experts in the field coming out and pushing. I don’t know how to explain the silence of the world of academia regarding leadership in the political arena. I just don’t see it.

SCARPINO:      I mean, it seems to me that if you look at a range of academic fields, and leadership is one, there really needs an applied dimension.

JAVIDAN:         Absolutely, yeah.

SCARPINO:      I’m going to ask you some wrap-up questions. We’ll be done in the amount of time that I promised. I have standard questions that I use, but some of these were actually suggested by your colleagues, so... ‘Let us know what he says.’ So, professionally, who do you look up to, who inspires you?

JAVIDAN:         Professionally, hmmm. As a scholar, I feel pride in having a very high level of curiosity. So, there are people, both in academia and in other arenas, that I see as my role models: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, researchers who introduce new ideas. So, it’s not one person, it’s anyone who manifests a great deal of curiosity. That just excites the hell out of me. When I meet people like that, I can spend hours and hours either talking with them or reading about them. It’s that word ‘curiosity’ is like blood in my veins. What sometimes frustrates my own colleagues in the GLOBE Project is that I start on a research project, not because I have expertise in it, but because I don’t know anything about it. That’s very unusual.

SCARPINO:      That’s a good reason to conduct research.

JAVIDAN:         It’s fascinating. That means I have to learn so much. I’ll give you an example. Everything is digital now, okay? In 2026, the expected amount of investment in digital transformation, or digital technology, in the world is $3.6 trillion dollars. Think about that, $3.6 trillion dollars in one year. Last year, a year ago, I said to my dean, ‘I don’t know anything about digital transformation, that’s not my expertise. But I have this Global Mindset Inventory, I need to morph it into Global Digital Mindset Inventory because global and digital obviously go hand in hand. I don’t know anything about it. So, give me one year, I’ll have it.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Really?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ As we speak, we are pilot-testing Mindset Inventory on the digital side. So, I started from scratch. I didn’t now anything. I started reading stuff, I talked to people in the field, I just spent a lot of time on websites. I’ve learned a lot. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I’ve learned enough to be able to create the Digital Mindset Inventory.

SCARPINO:      One of the people I talked to about you said, ‘Ask him, what makes you tick? Why do you do the work you do?’

JAVIDAN:         What makes me tick? Asking questions. What makes me live is asking questions constantly. Why? How? What is that? Sometimes I get my wife frustrated. Sometimes I feel like a kid, I have to ask. I need to ask. And if somebody doesn’t have the answer for me, I’ll go find it myself.

SCARPINO:      Isn’t that something that’s sort of, as we go from childhood into adulthood, in some way that gets rung out of us. I mean, little kids always want to know why, why, why? And then at some point it stops.

JAVIDAN:         I’ll give you an example. So, are you familiar with YPO, Young Presidents’ Organization?

SCARPINO:      I know it exists, but that’s about it.

JAVIDAN:         It’s a very distinguished elitist organization, and it’s a global organization. These are young, up to age 40 I think, CEOs. So, Thunderbird has signed a deal with them to run a workshop for them in Dubai. My part of it is Global Mindset. We have a global strategy, we have a global marketing, etc. Because the participants are saying we want our companies to go global, and we want to know how to do it. So, we’ve been meeting, the professors and the program manager, once a week and then once every two weeks putting everything together. In February, we’re going to offer it. I’m going to be in Dubai, all of us are going to be in Dubai to offer the program. And we’re creating a learning journey for these participants. As they go through the different courses, we want them to record what they’ve learned, okay. And all the professors are saying this is really important. At our last meeting, I said, ‘We’ve got to ask them – we’ve got to get them to do something else.’ They said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘We’re going to tell them what new questions come to your mind having gone through the section on Global Mindset?’ They looked at me and said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Look, our job is not just to give answers, our job is to provoke, our job is to prompt, our job is to energize them to ask questions they have never thought about. They looked at me and said, ‘Maybe.’

SCARPINO:      It’s not a download, it’s an engagement.

JAVIDAN:         Yeah. I mean, it’s in my blood. Here, we’re talking about CEOs. My colleagues are saying give them answers. I’m saying, okay, but that’s only part of the picture. These are very smart people. What questions, what new questions are they coming up with that even you and I haven’t thought about because we don’t know their business? So, we’ll see. The last conversation we had, we decided the next meeting we have, which is next week, we’re going to make a decision. Should we include this portion in this program?

SCARPINO:      Why Dubai? Why are you doing this in Dubai?

JAVIDAN:         They asked. YPO said our participants want to be in Dubai, so, you guys run it in Dubai. So, okay.

SCARPINO:      As you look back on several decades of work and accomplishment, how do you feel about your accomplishments? What do you think you have accomplished?

JAVIDAN:         I feel very good. I feel satisfied. I feel I have contributed. I am confident in that. At the same time, I feel there are so many other questions and so many other contributions. As long as my brain works and I don’t like fishing or golf – that’s my answer to my wife – ‘When are you going to retire?’ I say, “What am I going to do? I don’t like fishing, I don’t golf.’ As long as my brain works, I am going to continue. In other words, I’m not at the point where I say, ‘Well I’ve done what I could.’ I’ve done some, and I can do more.

SCARPINO:      You think of yourself as a work in progress.

JAVIDAN:         Absolutely. I don’t think there’s ever an endpoint to me. I just cannot see it. Well, when I die. That’s the day that there’s an endpoint. Otherwise, then I don’t know what it is, I have this curiosity in me, and it just doesn’t go away. You give me a topic, I’ll give you curiosity about that topic. I’ll take an approach to it that may surprise people.

SCARPINO:      Again, as you look back on several decades of experience, is there anything that you regret or wish you could do over? We don’t get do-overs, but we can wish.

JAVIDAN:         I have no regrets. This is one of things I’ve tried to teach my daughter, you never regret about the past. You learn from it, but you don’t regret it. Because what’s the point of regretting about something that you have no control over, but you can learn. So, I have no regrets. I would always be an educator. I mean, this is in me. So, I’ve been so fortunate doing and spending time what I enjoy. If there is one thing that I wish I could have done more is publish more. And I mean that, because I should have, I could have, but I had other things to do too. So, at the time, I decided I have other priorities. I would have been more satisfied at my level of scholarly contribution, despite all of that stuff, if I had published more. That’s it.

SCARPINO:      Can you think of any other profession that would allow a person to pursue their curiosity the way being an academic does?

JAVIDAN:         I do not know of one. I think those of us who are in academia are the luckiest people, whether they would realize it or not. Professors like to complain about everything, but the reality is - and having worked in the industry for 40 years - I know what I’m talking about because I have a reference point. I have a comparison point. I remember, I mentioned yesterday we start our days at 7:00, 7:30 every morning, till 6:00, 6:30 in the evening. One day I arrived on the driveway of my house at 5:30. As I was just getting into the garage, the CEO called me. ‘Where are you?’ I said, ‘I’m just entering my garage.’ He said, ‘Oh, so, since when have you started working parttime for us?’ I mean, think about that. This is what you do when you work for these organizations, especially corporations. I have no experience really in the government sector, but as an academic, can you imagine a dean saying something like that? I mean, it’s impossible, but that’s what I mean, that freedom. Now, to some people, more money of course. But, as you know very well, we don’t go into academia to make money, although business professors do very well compared to other academics. But that’s not what’s driving our behavior. Yeah, some people love being in the private sector making a ton of money and all. That’s fine, that’s their priority. But for me, it’s the luckiest position I’ve ever been in.

SCARPINO:      Couple more questions, three. Legacy, I don’t wish (INAUDIBLE) on anyone, but we all have an expiration date. At some point in the future, what do you want your grandchildren to know about your accomplishments?

JAVIDAN:         How I have helped other people become better; my students, thousands of them, other researchers, that’s it.

SCARPINO:      Is there anything that I should have asked you that I didn’t?

JAVIDAN:         You’ve pretty much covered everything. Some of the things I hadn’t even thought about. No, I don’t think so. No, we’ve covered the bases.

SCARPINO:      Is there anything that you would like to say that I haven’t given you a chance to say?

JAVIDAN:         No.

SCARPINO:      That was easy.

JAVIDAN:         That was easy, yeah. Well, you have covered them. You obviously know your business. You’ve covered all the bases that I could think of.

SCARPINO:      Your colleagues were very helpful, and, so... All right, we’re going to end a couple of minutes early. I think we’re at a point where it’s fair to stop. Before I turn these things off, I want to thank you sincerely for taking four hours to sit with me - I know it’s a busy conference and a busy life – and talk to me about your career and your perspectives on leadership. So, thank you on behalf of myself, the Tobias Leadership Center, and the International Leadership Association. Very much appreciate it.

JAVIDAN:         It has been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

SCARPINO:      You’re very welcome. And let me turn these things off so we don’t have live mics anymore.

JAVIDAN:                     You know, this conversation has prompted me to kind of reflect...