On May 6, the USC Marshall School of Business hosted a festschrift Ð a conference devoted to the scholarly work of leadership pioneer and USC professor Warren Bennis. Luminaries such as Tom Peters, Peter Drucker and Charles Handy, as well as top business leaders, educators and journalists, gathered for the signal event.-Bennis, 75, has been observing and writing about leadership for more than four decades. He is the author of 26 books, including the best-selling Leaders (co-authored with Burt Nanus) and On Becoming a Leader, both of which have been translated into 21 languages. His collection of essays, An Invented Life, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His published articles, numbering over 2,000, have appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, Saturday Review of Literature, Washington Post, Psychology Today and the Harvard Business Review. In 1996, Forbes magazine dubbed him the “dean of leadership gurus.” He came to USC as a University Professor in 1980, and is the founding chairman of the Marshall School’s prestigious Leadership Institute.-In honor of the festschrift, USC Trojan Family Magazine asked Los Angeles Times business writer and columnist Patricia Ward Biederman to reflect on her more than 30-year connection with Bennis. Biederman, who has worked with Bennis on several books and articles, first met the world-famous leadership scholar in 1967 at SUNY/Buffalo.

Photo by Steven A. Heller

It is an honor to have been asked to write this piece about Warren Bennis, whose enormous impact on the field of leadership and the management of change was acknowledged in May with a much deserved festschrift.
Like so many others, I feel I’ve known him for the better part of a lifetime. He and I began collaborating in the late 1960s when he asked me to work on one of his early books, The Leaning Ivory Tower (1973). I was a young writer at the time, a new mother and utterly unaware that new worlds were about to be revealed.
When we met, Warren was the new provost of social sciences at the State University of New York at Buffalo. If you weren’t there, it is hard to describe the excitement of that time and place. I know, I know, you are thinking, Buffalo, New York? But SUNY/Buffalo was not simply a provincial university in a place best known for chicken wings and bad weather. SUNY/Buffalo was reinventing itself at a time when the whole world was rethinking what a university was. Grand ideas about education and the roles and obligations of students and teachers were in the air. Edgar Z. Friedenberg, one of the legendary mavericks of the philosophy of education, was on campus, as were others who were throwing out time-honored notions of what college was and proposing radical new ones that would shape the ideas about education we take for granted today.
How revolutionary were these ideas? Well, let’s just say that when Warren first arrived on campus, the accepted notion was that a college education was something that happened between the ages of 18 and 22. If you missed that tiny window of opportunity and didn’t go to college then, you might never have another chance to do so. You were doomed to a life of TV, not of the mind. By the time Warren left UB, as we all called SUNY/Buffalo, the nation had come to accept the once-extraordinary notion that learning was something that happened for a lifetime.
That was only one of the changes that happened on his watch at UB, albeit one of the most important ones. Others included the blurring of the distinction between the kind of learning that takes place on campus and the kind that takes place everywhere else. These ideas are commonplace now, the rationale for everything from workplace learning programs to Elderhostel. But at the time, they constituted nothing less than a paradigm shift, an idea that changed the world. Warren was not the sole cause of this shift, of course, but he was among the eloquent, creative voices that caused it.
Buffalo was shamelessly ambitious in those days. It wanted to be the Berkeley of the East or, as Warren later put it, “an academic New Jerusalem.” Everyone who was part of that great experiment was dizzy with hope. Warren was one of the most visible symbols of the university’s aspirations.

I REMEMBER THE FIRST timeI saw him. Just out of graduate school, I had taken a job in the university’s public relations office. My editor was a lapsed newspaperman with a sophisticated notion of what a campus public relations office could do. He believed we could tell the truth about campus events and keep our jobs – which we did, though just barely. Warren was one of the highest profile hires by the campus’s charismatic new president, Martin Meyerson, who was scavenging other universities for geniuses who could be lured to Buffalo (one big draw was the chance to pick up a Frank Lloyd Wright house for the price of a condo in Los Angeles) and building a $650 million campus from scratch. Warren had been a student of Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson and other giants at MIT, where he had done groundbreaking work on groups and the structure and dynamics of organizations. He also had a burgeoning reputation as a futurist (a hot job title at the time), in part because of a much-talked-about 1964 piece in the Harvard Business Review titled “Is Democracy Inevitable?” That essay would be reprinted in HBR in 1990, just after the Berlin Wall fell, at which time we learned that Warren, with more prescience than even he knew he had, had originally titled it, with
characteristic confidence, “Democracy Is Inevitable.”
Warren had one of the most distinguished resumés of anyone on Meyerson’s wish list. He had taught at MIT and Harvard, had co-led a pioneering business school in Calcutta, and had already co-authored, though not yet published, The Temporary Society with sociologist Phil Slater (recently republished, that book may be even more relevant in today’s world of constant change than it was when it came out in 1968). Warren was also part of a remarkable group of individuals, based in Cambridge, Mass., who were thinking about social interaction, organizations and change in new and exciting ways.
The campus building where I worked looked like Tara and had a fairly distinguished history. It was where Sloan Wilson, then head of university relations, had written his best-selling novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, on company time. Warren’s offices were on the second floor, and he swept into the building one morning in the fall of 1967, unforgettably clad in a Tyrolean cape. Even if Warren hadn’t had movie-star good looks (this is a man who was born to wear a tuxedo), that cape would have been an eye-catcher. Buffalo is not a city where most people bother to make fashion statements. For months at a time, Buffalonians go around in their parkas looking like the Michelin Man. Warren’s was an unforgettable entrance.
Already possessed of an enviable Rolodex, he began recruiting and making the university a far more interesting place. A born catalyst, he began throwing huge parties as well as smaller, salon-like gatherings where ideas were swapped over wine. Friend Bruce Jackson, who holds an endowed chair in American culture at Buffalo, remembers one unforgettable night in 1968 when Warren screened Night and Fog, Alain Resnais’s haunting documentary about the Nazi death camps. The silence that followed got bigger and bigger until someone asked, “But did ordinary Germans know any of that? They couldn’t have known that.” One of the 12 or so guests, German historian Conrad von Moltke, spoke up: “We all knew. We all knew.” (Von Moltke’s father was one of the generals hanged with piano wire for trying to assassinate Hitler.) Jackson told me that whenever he runs into anyone who was there that night, they quickly come round to the screening at Warren’s when von Moltke said: “Everyone knew.” Jackson said, “That’s the sort of thing Warren could make happen.”

INEVITABLY, WARREN TURNED his experiences at Buffalo into a book. Fortunately for me, he knew my work from campus publications and the occasional review I did for the morning paper, and he asked me to assist him on a first-person account of that turbulent period in campus history. At Buffalo, we saw the campus occupied by 600 armed state troopers. We watched with horror as tear gas blanketed the once-tranquil Main Street campus. We attended countless fundraisers for 45 faculty members who managed to get themselves arrested for occupying a campus building to protest the paramilitary presence on campus.
Buffalo was lucky compared to Kent State, Wisconsin and other campuses that suffered tragic losses during those days when students and their campus supporters sometimes died in the name of free speech and an end to the Vietnam War. It was an unprecedented period in academic history. Faculty and administrators never knew when they got to their offices in the morning who would be occupying them. Although the level of intellectual ferment was high and uncharacteristically loud for academia, little academic work in the traditional sense got done. Indeed when a student filmmaker subsequently made a movie about that period at Buffalo, he called it Andy Hardly Goes to College.
The book that Warren published in 1973, The Leaning Ivory Tower, raised issues about leadership – including the ethical responsibility of leaders – that would be central to much of his later work. Among the book’s high points is a hilarious account of a country-club lunch at which he was assaulted by a melon ball emitted by a sputtering trustee of Northwestern University (at the time, Warren was a candidate for that university’s presidency). It may be the funniest scene in a book on academic politics since Kingsley Amis’s 1953 Lucky Jim.
Written with great verve, The Leaning Ivory Tower shows Warren at his wittiest (which is witty, indeed) and reveals much about his willingness to turn some awkward personal moment into a valuable lesson. The book, one of the few in the Bennis canon to fall out of print, is also classic Bennis in its concern with moral issues. These include the dilemma that most leaders must eventually grapple with: how and when to resign from an organization whose course you can no longer bear. The chapter on resigning ends in typical, rousing Bennis fashion: “If we find it impossible to continue on as administrators because we are at total and continual odds with institutional policy, then I think we must quit and go out shouting. The alternative is petit-Eichmannism, and it is too high a price.” Too bad “petit-Eichmannism” never found a place of honor in everyday speech.
Warren left Buffalo to become president of the University of Cincinnati in 1971. Becoming the president of a university was an inevitable next step for Warren, who had long been interested in blurring the boundary between the theory of leadership and its practice. Occasionally, Cincinnati would make headlines and I, still in Buffalo, would look for his name. He had been looking forward to heading a university and to being the kind of leader that Buffalo had so sorely lacked when its campus was under siege. But, as he has frequently said, the experience of actually leading a campus was a mixed one: “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world and I wouldn’t want to do it again,” he wrote recently.
However, Warren is like a good French chef: nothing is wasted. If he found academic leadership sometimes like trying to herd cats, it taught him lessons about the difference between leadership and management and other truths of organizational life that would find their way into his later work and into the curricula of every school of management in the world. His stint on the sultry Midwestern campus helped advance him toward the role he was born for – not as the leader of a single institution, but as a thought-leader.
He began to write the books that have become manage-ment classics, including the 1989 bestseller On Becoming A Leader. Like all his work, that book is informed by Warren’s vast learning. The brief preface begins with an allusion to Shakespeare’s Prospero and includes a wonderful line from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”: “Between the idea / And the reality / Falls the shadow.”
Virtually everyone who aspires to leadership reads that book and takes notes. In whatever field, most of what is written has the shelf life of a raspberry. As USC President Steven Sample recently reminded me, Warren’s work continues to be read long after it appears. “To have written anything that is widely read after 12 years is quite extraordinary,” Sample rightly noted.

After Warren went to Cincinnati, we lost track of each other for a couple of decades. It was only after I moved to Los Angeles in 1984 to become a reporter at the Los Angeles Times that I learned he was at USC. Oh, and in the interval, he had become one of the giants in his field.
Happily, we began collaborating again. I worked with him on a series of articles and books, including An Invented Life: Reflections on Leadership and Change, published in 1993. That book, as many know, is a collection of Warren’s thoughtful pieces on such varied topics as the Wallenda Factor (that allows leaders to walk their particular tight-ropes) and the importance of “followership.” It also includes a terrific autobiographical piece called “An Invented Life: Shoe Polish, Milli Vanilli and Sapiential Circles.” In 36 pages, Warren masterfully presents a version of his life “to illuminate the work I’ve done that readers are most likely to know.” It is a story about self-invention and re-invention, themes applicable to everyone’s personal and professional life. In it, you learn about a boy from Westwood, New Jersey, who hated carrying an accordion on the bus, and how he came to be someone whose counsel is sought by leaders around the world, including the man who may be the next president of the United States, Al Gore.
In that important essay, many of the major themes that mark Warren’s work are placed in the context of his life, including his early interest in leadership, piqued by older twin brothers – one of whom was a born leader, the other a natural follower. The memoir is classic Bennis: funny, insightful, learned, moving and above all creative. One of his great strengths as a writer is his near-phobic avoidance of jargon. Whenever you read Warren’s work, you are reminded that there is a poet inside, as well as a powerful thinker and perhaps a little standup comic as well.
He has a genius for turning personal experience, however bleak, into material that resonates with others. Autobiographical writing is remarkably tricky, as anyone who tries it soon discovers. It’s all too easy to invest enormous energy into writing about yourself, only to create a persona that your readers hate (the recent craze for memoir has produced many examples, a surprising number by people who used to work at The New Yorker). But I was struck anew with admiration for Warren when I read the first draft of his “Invented Life” essay. Warren understands the power of stories and knows how to tell unforgettable ones without trying his reader’s patience. There is a heartbreaking portrait of Captain Bessenger, a natural leader who saved Warren’s life when he was a 19-year-old infantry officer during World War II. And there are tributes to some of his mentors, including Douglas McGregor, who pioneered the field of organizational studies and whose death at the age of 58 still saddens Warren.
His encyclopedic learning is there, always, including a discussion of Oxford philosopher-historian Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between intellectual hedgehogs, who know one big thing, and foxes, who know many things and can’t wait to learn new ones. But what makes the essay irresistible are the revealing little stories. You see the man who would go on to write bestsellers about leadership as an eighth-grader dazzling his teacher and classmates with his skill at polishing shoes, creating a personal triumph with nothing but wit and a can of oxblood-colored shoe polish. And you a get glimpse of Warren’s emotional and social education in a delicately rendered little tribute to the person who taught him how to eat an artichoke.

IN 1996 WARREN graciously offered me the opportunity to collaborate with him on Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration. He had first had the idea for a study of great collaborations back in his days in Cambridge. When he mentioned it to anthropologist Margaret Mead, she said it was a great idea and suggested he call the book “Sapiential Circles.” Warren has a gift for collaborating and understands that a successful collaboration is worth the discomfort of sharing power. Even though we had now known each for decades, working on this project was a revelation. One of the principles of the book is expressed in the line: “None of us is as smart as all of us” (a quote, by the way, whose source we have never been able to determine). When you sit down to do intellectual work with Warren, you know you’re going to think more creatively as a result. You have to stretch. Because he sometimes seems to know everybody and to have read everything; to have understood it, remembered it and alchemized it into something new and valuable.
Warren is an idea junkie. Ideas obviously thrill him. There is no doubt that in the Isaiah Berlin taxonomy, Warren is a fox – one whose view of the world is always evolving as he pounces on new ideas and incorporates them into his always-evolving world view. As you grow older, you become exquisitely aware that time is too precious to spend with people who don’t stimulate and teach you. A single example of something important Warren taught me in the course of writing our book: He told me about the groundbreaking 1951 experiment by social psychologist Solomon Asch on the effect of social pressure on perception. In the experiment, student participants were asked to say which of three lines of different lengths, displayed on a card, was the same length as another line, also on display. The experiment was set up so that one student would hear all the others choose incorrectly (all but the target student were in on the experiment). One third of the time, the target student went along with his peers des-pite the evidence before his eyes. The Asch experiment had an enormous influence on much of the important research on groups, social pressure and evil, for want of a better word, that followed.
One of Warren’s enormous strengths as a thinker is his understanding of human be-havior, grounded in science and enhanced by art and intuition. He has always been a student, of human behavior, whether observing his brothers, as a graduate student or as he has interacted with his vast network of colleagues and collaborators, including the students he so values at USC.
One continuing collaboration that he clearly treasures is co-teaching a course on leadership with President Sample. When I asked what he had learned from Warren, Sample (who, coincidentally, was president of SUNY/Buffalo a dozen years after Bennis left) cited many things, including a great deal about leadership and teaching. Then we talked briefly about Warren’s remarkable “emotional intelligence,” a term that could have been invented for him. Warren had once observed to Sample that he himself possessed “good personal radar,” while the USC president had a “good gyroscope. You can set a direction and stay with it pretty well.” It was the kind of sharp insight that Warren can make because he studies other people and, rarer still, he listens to them closely and perceptively. Someone clumsier than Warren, as most of us are, might have turned that observation into something slightly offensive. Instead, Sample said, it made him decide to be a bit “more serendipitous” and spontaneous – a little more radar, a little less gyroscope. You learn things about yourself, as well as organizations, when you work with Warren Bennis.

IN ORGANIZING GENIUS, we talk about fun as an indicator of the worthiness of a project. “Great groups” are places filled with laughter and even foolishness, as well as obsessive problem solving. When we were writing, Warren and I had fun. Writing – especially writing on deadline – is hard, nerve-racking work, and we certainly didn’t have fun every minute. But we knew that fun could break out at any time. Warren has a vast repertoire of jokes. Virtually every time we get together, he hits me with one, occasionally one with a Yiddish punch line. These are not always good jokes. But there is something intrinsically generous about starting an interaction with a joke. The joke-teller is always vulnerable, wondering whether the laugh will come, making it an act of courage as well.
Another joy of working with Warren is his civility, too rare a quality and one that I suspect has helped him to succeed almost as much as his fine mind. No matter how under-the-gun we were, no matter how tight the deadline, he was invariably polite, even courtly. Like humor, that too counts for a lot. Nothing sabotages a creative collaboration quicker than a failure to treat your colleagues decently – something young Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs failed to do, but that time seems to have taught the older Jobs.
Warren is unfailingly generous with his collaborators. First off, they get to attend a Management School of One, taught by a master. Moreover, he allows them to reap the benefits of his name and reputation. As Fast Company and other hip management publications are always declaring, nothing is more valuable these days than “Brand You.” Warren’s brand is one of enormous clout, including the ability to get handsome advances and sell books, both here and abroad. It is the Lexus of such brands, universally admired for its quality. The person who collaborates with Warren greatly enhances his or her chances of making the Business Week bestseller list or being called a “leadership guru.” And sharing a book cover with Warren means never going into a reputable bookstore without a good shot at finding your book on the stretch of shelf devoted to the collected and still increasing works of Warren Bennis.

ONE OF THE THINGS I now do is look to people who are older than I am for lessons in continuing to live well. Warren has been a superb model. The last time we met for breakfast at the Rose Café – within walking distance of the Santa Monica home he shares with his beloved wife, Grace – he was full of ideas and excitement about his new book-in-progress. First, of course, he told a joke. Then we batted ideas back and forth while he ate his bowl of fruit and I, my bagel.
For all the honors, for all the success, Warren is still hungry. He thinks on his feet as well as anyone I know, which is one reason my reporter colleagues constantly turn to him for comment, knowing he’s always good for a quote that is both vivid and thoughtful (“good copy,” we say in high praise of such rare people). At this point in his life, he has become an intellectual entrepreneur – an example of the very engine of the new economy he has described so vividly, the person of ideas. He talked about his new book with the passion of a graduate student who had drunk just one cup of coffee too many. The ideas spilled out. He obviously couldn’t wait to get back to his office and to work. It was heart-warming to look across the table and see the essential Warren Bennis unchanged.
At Warren’s festschrift, Charles Handy recalled the old Chinese proverb that says happiness depends on “something to work on, something to hope for and someone to love.” He described his friend, at 75, as “a happy man in the prime of life.” Talking to him at the Rose, I thought of Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” in which the great hero looks forward, not back, and declares that “some work of noble note, may yet be done.” If Warren’s enthusiasm is any indicator, his next book will be his best yet. I left the Rose smiling, and inspired.