A big challenge for leaders and
managers is to balance the tension
between being directive and
specific and allowing for space for
discussion, debate and difference.
Today on the podcast,
we'll discuss this and
the ever changing expectations of
leaders in communication.
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I'm Matt Abrahams and I teach
Strategic Communication at Stanford
Graduate School of Business.
Welcome to Think Fast Talk Smart,
The Podcast.
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I'm excited to chat
with John Levin, who is
the Philip H Knight Professor and
Dean of Stanford Graduate School
of Business.
Before becoming dean in 2016,
John spent 16 years in the Economic
Department at Stanford.
In 2021, he was appointed to
President Joe Biden's Council of
Advisors on Science and Technology.
Well, hi, John,
welcome to the podcast.
I am super excited
to have you here.
>> Thanks, Matt great to be here.
>> Cool, let us get started.
As your career has unfolded,
you have had more and
more opportunities to share your
thoughts with larger and
larger audiences.
I am curious to learn more
about this and
how your thinking on communication
has evolved over time.
>> My thinking about communication
has evolved over my career.
I served as a Professor, teaching
and when you're giving research
talks, it's just everything is
about presenting ideas and
information clearly.
And maybe even impressing
people a little bit and
getting them to change the way
they think about a problem.
In a leadership role, so
much more of communication is about
connecting with people,
establishing shared humanity.
Motivating them, inspiring
them sometimes challenging them.
So, I've gone through my career
that has really reinforced to me
that the different purposes that
communication serves to inform
people, to connect with people,
to motivate and inspire them.
>> I too have seen over my
time how it's changed and
the expectation has changed.
And I think a lot of people who
listen in I have found themselves
as their career has developed,
they've had to adjust the way they
perceive communication much like
you have.
And for many people that can be
very challenging so it's good to
hear that you recognize that.
Any particular moments or thoughts
that you've had that really helped
you make that shift from talking
about your own research and
your own department to now being on
a larger stage?
I wish there was just a single
moment when the light bulb went on
and I magically got better figured
out different ways to communicate.
For me, it didn't happen that way.
It was more of a gradual process of
learning and improving.
And like anything communication is
a craft and
the craft that you teach, and
you have to work at it.
>> Thank you for that candor and
thank you for reinforcing the fact
that communication is something you
have to work on and practice.
Very, very true.
>> In your six years as Dean of
the Stanford Graduate School of
Business, you've had to address
many significant issues happening
on campus and beyond.
What are your thoughts on the role
of leaders in communication in
times of ambiguity and challenge,
and do you have any best practices
you've learned that you rely on?
>> One of the most important things
is to be able to provide clarity in
a timely way.
Often the way I tend to think about
that is what do people need to know
and how it allows them to feel when
they read a message for me.
There's a very complex set of
issues that has arisen on campuses
and an academic leadership that has
to do with how do you
communicate about issues that
are going on in the world?
And the landscape for
that particular question has
changed hugely over the last,
say five or ten years.
Where historically, academic
leaders were hesitant, often did
not rarely communicated about
the events of the day and so forth.
And today, there's a much higher
expectation and
a much greater demand to know where
did the institutions stand?
What does the President he or
she think, what a Deans think about
different issues?
I find that to be one of the most
complicated and
challenging set of questions in
leadership communication,
figuring out what to talk about and
how to talk about it.
Wanting to be able to make clear
statements about what I think.
Or institutional values to reassure
groups of people who really want to
hear something about that but
at the same time leaving space for
people to form their own opinions.
To discuss ideas to debate what's
going on because that diversity of
ideas or viewpoints of perspectives
is just so
absolutely central to our mission.
>> I think in that you've clearly
defined a tension that all business
leaders need to manage which is.
How do you step forward and
put forth your position but
also leave space for
people to discuss, to debate,
to discover.
And that's a hard tension.
And it sounds like part of how you
navigate through that is by
thinking through what do you want
people to know?
And how do you want them to feel
about those issues and that is
something we've talked about before
on this podcast and I think
critical in all communication.
It's not just the information you
need to put out there, it's how
do people need to feel or do you
want people to feel about it.
So thank you.
In the early days of the pandemic,
you started sending out a weekly
email blast that you sent to
everybody in our community here at
the GSB.
And it relayed information.
It offered support and
assurance and I personally found
these messages comforting,
informative and encouraging and
a time when encouragement
was definitely needed.
I'm curious about the specific
thought process that went into
those emails.
As well as your thoughts about how
leaders can find a balance between
being warm and personal, which I
thought you did a great job with
and being strong and definitive.
>> Thanks for saying that when
the pandemic started
in the winter and spring of 2020.
There was just so much going on
because we were canceling programs,
international travel,
we went online over a weekend.
People were working from home,
they were had to be on lockdown.
It was just an incredibly unusual
and dynamic situation and so
I started writing to the community.
Basically just to summarize
the information that people needed.
What was cancelled,
how we're moving online,
who needed to be on campus?
And I was basically just reading
bullet point memos to make sure
everyone had sort of common facts,
information and knew what to do.
And then within a few weeks,
I started reading more reflective
emails.
And so what I was thinking
about what I was reading
was talking to the experience of
having a Passover Seder on Zoom.
No other types of
strange experiences that everyone
was sharing and everyone was so
isolated and
lacking in community and
I wanted to try to maintain that.
And so I did keep that up through
the main part of the pandemic and I
got a lot of positive responses and
appreciation partly just for
putting that effort in to try
to maintain community.
I really found it endearing and it
did build a sense of community when
you were sharing the stories about
how it was affecting your life.
How it's affecting your family, you
would highlight what you noticed
other people doing and it really
served to bring people together.
And I think a lesson for
everybody listening is that even in
times of stress, being personal and
sharing your own experience can
really help bond people together.
And I appreciated that.
As you think about the future of
business and business education,
I'm wondering what you think about
the role communication is playing
now and will play in the future.
>> There is just no doubt
whatsoever that
communication is going to continue
to play such an important role.
For business leaders that's true
whether they're
communicating individually,
to their leadership team or to
different people in their company.
Or to employees or to customers or
to shareholders or
testifying in Congress or
to the public.
It really is just so
important for people who are in
leadership roles to be
able to communicate with clarity.
Our students are really fortunate
to have folks like you that help
prepare them for
that world such an essential skill.
Thank you and I agree with you
that the role of communication,
the pandemic taught us how
critical communication is and
when we're cut off in some ways
from our communication it can be
very challenging >> Let me ask you
about a question that is relevant
to someone who is an Economist and
the Dean of a business school.
Capitalism is under fire
these days.
We're facing problems of economic
inequality, climate change,
loss of jobs to technology, privacy
concerns, and many other things.
How is the GSB teaching students
to think about capitalism?
And what is the role of the school
in leading a broader conversation
on the subject?
>> Hey, I'd love that question
because I think you're just spot on
with where the world is today.
But first, I like to start and
thinking about that is just to
think about the extraordinary
triumph that we've had in this
country and in many other places
around the world over the last
century, century and a half.
In the United States over the last
150 years standards of living
almost doubled every generation
and that rise from subsistence to
prosperity.
There's no precedent in human
history and it's been even more
dramatic in countries like China,
for example that adopted many
elements of capitalism.
And so it's just incredibly
important to keep in mind that
markets that private enterprise
coupled with stable political legal
institutions, can be the single
greatest engine for
societal progress.
It particularly important that
matter to business school because
that's the engine we were trying to
build and support.
At the same time you're
absolutely right.
You think of challenges like
climate change, inequality,
the misuses of technology.
These are serious issues that we
have to grapple with in this
century.
And we're living at a time when our
political system which in some
sense is the right place to deal
with those types of challenges.
Just seems entirely unable to come
to terms with them and address them
in any sort of reasonable way.
And so people naturally then look
elsewhere for solutions and for
leadership.
And so there's they look to
business, they look to investors.
They look to the private sector to
tackle these market failures,
externalities, these problems to
be responsive to a broader set
of stakeholders.
And that just raises all kinds of
hard questions like it's hard
enough to run a business to
maximize long-term value for
your shareholders.
And then someone asks you to solve
global climate change, right?
So when I think about what we
want in educating students
today to be business leaders,
we want them to dive into those
questions to wrestle with them.
There's all kinds of tensions and
trade-offs.
We want them to really think hard
and understand those complexities.
And of course, we also believe
in a particular place like Stanford
we're an epicenter of innovation.
We want our students to be
the source of the solutions.
We want them to solve problems like
climate change to bring new
technologies, ideas to market with
great business models that deliver
them with scale, with speed.
We hope students when they come
here are going to be inspired to
take on big challenges.
And then to do it in ways that will
restore people's faith in business
and the ways that contributes
to society.
I certainly see as our students
leave here, that energy,
that excitement to do just that.
It's one of the greatest pleasures
I have teaching here.
It's incredibly inspiring.
>> Absolutely.
It just renews your faith.
>> Exactly.
>> In humanity and people every day
and every year when we get a new
generation of students.
>> I so agree because the
challenges are formidable and yet
the students leave ready to tackle
them and it's very rewarding.
Stanford GSB is one of the most
competitive management education
programs in the world.
What do you see as
the opportunities for
the GSB to reach and educate even
a broader set of leaders than those
fortunate enough to come here?
>> So your question,
it sort of alludes to attention
in our core model of education
in a place like Stanford.
Which is we take a very small and
highly selected set of students and
we pair them up
with an even smaller and
highly selected set of faculty.
That's a magical,
immersive educational environment,
very intense campus experience.
And we hope that the outcome of
that is that students go on
graduates go on to have an outsized
impact in the world.
At the same time, we need a much
larger, stronger cohort of global
business leaders to help continue
to move toward prosperity and
to have growth and solve the big
challenges of the world.
And particularly with the interest
that people have and
continuing to learn throughout
their lifetime in the capabilities
that we've developed, others
have developed with technology.
I have a very strong feeling that
places like Stanford have
a tremendous opportunity in
some ways a responsibility to try
to reach and engage with and
educate a broader set of people
around the world.
And to do that in ways
that are transformative and
meaningful and impactful.
We do that today through short on
campus programs that run for
executives or further leaders,
in our online programs.
Our lead program nearly doubled
during the pandemic, in programs we
run globally like Stanford Seed
which we run for entrepreneurs in
Africa and South Asia.
And we continue to look for
new opportunities to do that and
it's one of the things that I find
most exciting about the future.
>> I have certainly seen your
commitment and your leadership
team's commitment to expanding how
this place, the business school but
also Stanford reaches people.
And I truly appreciate the support
you have of what we do
here because we're trying to reach
people as well.
I think a podcast like this is such
a great example of the ways that
a place like Stanford can share
ideas with the world and
reach a broader audience.
And give people a sense of what's
going on, what are people thinking?
What happens here?
>> So before we end, I'd like to
ask you the same three questions I
ask everybody who joins me.
Are you up for that?
>> Let's do it.
>> All right.
Question number one, if you were to
capture the best communication
advice you've ever received as
a five to seven word presentation
slide title, what would it be?
>> I have a story about this which
is maybe 20 years ago.
My brother and I were asked to
speak at an event that was in honor
of my father, and we were supposed
to be the dinner speakers.
And so we wrote to the people
organising this event and
we said well, what should we say,
what's going on?
What do you think and so forth.
And they wrote back this incredibly
long email with well,
maybe you could touch on this and
that and this and that and
you could do it this way.
And by the way, maybe tell joke and
sort of say something about your
mom and all this stuff.
And I looked at this email and
I was like wow this is going to be
a tough assignment and my brother
immediately just hits Reply All and
he says, got it.
Standard talk, funny, touching and
short.
>> I love it, funny, touching and
short.
I think that's great advice for
many of our communication
situations.
I'm curious, how did the talk go?
>> We were short.
>> [LAUGH] I'll leave it at that.
>> I'm curious John,
who is a communicator that you
admire and why?
>> So one person is Barack Obama,
no matter your political
affiliation, you have to admire
President Obama as a communicator.
He came and spoke on campus,
he gave a incredibly detailed,
pretty technocratic talk about
social media and misinformation.
It was easily an hour,
maybe even an hour and a half, and
it was mesmerizing,
he's a wonderful speaker.
>> Let me ask you my third and
final question, what are the first
three ingredients that go into
a successful communication recipe?
>> Clarity, connection,
inspiration, very, very important.
>> All three and you do all three
of those very well and serve as
a good role model for all of us.
And I think all business leaders
and people developing their careers
can think about how they can
leverage those three together to
help them successfully navigate
the communication challenges that
they have.
John, thank you so much for
being here.
I appreciate your time,
your insights, your candor.
And truly appreciate what you do
for us, and for
all of our students, thank you.
>> Matt, thank you so much for
having me on and we're so
fortunate to have you teaching at
the GSB and doing this podcast.
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>> Thanks for joining us for
another episode of Think Fast Talk
Smart, The Podcast from Stanford
Graduate School of Business.
This episode was produced by
Jenny Luna,
Michael Riley and me Matt Abrahams.
For more information and episodes,
visit gsb.stanford.edu or
subscribe to our show wherever
you get your podcasts.
Finally, find us on social media at
Stanford GSB.
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