Stanford GSB: Stanford Business May 2001

May 2001, Volume 69, Number 3

Genius & Folly

In Rod Kramer’s class, MBA students look at the follies of geniuses and wrestle with their preconceived notions of leadership.
by JANET ZICH

Illustration by Brian Cairns

AT THE END OF THE QUARTER, Business School professor Roderick Kramer asked his students to list five of the most interesting people who had ever lived. “Henry VIII,” said one. “Julius Caesar,” said another. “Leonardo da Vinci,” said a third. Kramer scanned the classroom. Finally one young woman ventured, “My grandfather.”
Her answer hit closer to home than the others. But not close enough for Kramer. “Did any of you list yourselves?” he asked. No one raised a hand. Now that they had spent 10 weeks studying other people, he said, “I want you to start thinking of yourselves as the most interesting person who ever lived.”

Last fall, employing as examples a lively collection of interesting people that included Margaret Thatcher, Jesse Ventura, Cher, Mary Kay Ash, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John F. Kennedy, and the 14th Dalai Lama, Kramer introduced Genius and Folly in Organizations, a free-form elective that explores the qualities that make leaders rise above the rest and the quirks that bring them down.

Prof. Roderick Kramer

Kramer, the William R. Kimball Professor of Organizational Behavior, had been asked to develop a course on leadership that would replace memorable leadership courses created and taught for many years by professor emeritus James March, who used great literature to probe the subject on a deeper level than do most “how to” books on business leadership. In his course syllabi, March warned students: “No recipes for success are presented.”

“I didn’t want to try to fill Jim March’s shoes,” Kramer says. “Nobody can. But I did want to have a course that would, like his, fall outside traditional boundaries. I didn’t want to teach a course just on leadership. I wanted to teach a course that focused on creative achievement and required leadership as part of the process.”

In creating Genius and Folly, Kramer drew on 15 years of his own academic research on creativity, decision making, and trust and paranoia in organizations, tempered by seven years of work with dying patients and their families, combined with a passion for video documentaries, a fascination with celebrity, and a lively curiosity that encompasses all of the above.

Genius and Folly examines both these qualities, often in the same people. “Martin Luther King is an obvious example of a creative leader. He was a person who tried to effect social change, which required mobilization of many people and working effectively on many different levels. How did he do that? What are the nuts and bolts of that sort of achievement? He was a great leader, yet when you look at his private life, you see he wasn’t perfect.

"So, the course is partly about leadership and it's also about self governance and managing your emotions and many other things," Kramer says. "It's about leadership, but about a lot more too."

Students tend to think genius is only about academic intelligence, but it is also a matter of intestinal fortitude and having the stomach to push one’s self and others in pursuit of a difficult goal.

Says Genius and Folly student Tim Chang: “The real underlying theme of the course was passion: He was telling us to follow our passion, and many of us have not found our personal passion. He told us at the beginning of the quarter, ‘My goal is to disturb people.’ If you used the course to look into your own life, it was a very disturbing class.” For example, Chang adds, “It’s the first time anyone ever asked me to write my obituary. That was disturbing.”

Kramer taught an elective called Genius and Folly twice before, but the latest, freewheeling version is quite different. A work in progress that is sure to change and grow every time he teaches it, the course is designed to instruct the creative process by emphasizing the importance of breaking habits and thinking outside traditional categories. Often, Kramer himself continued creating as he walked from his office through the classroom door to the front of the class. “I had very little idea going in where things were going to go,” he admits. “Even up to the last minute I didn’t know how it was going to work sometimes.”

In fact, Kramer cleared his calendar between his morning class, Power and Politics in Organizations, and the two afternoon sessions of Genius and Folly, the better to leave time for fine-tuning. (Ever the film buff, Kramer explains that Power and Politics is about Star Wars’ Darth Vadar, Genius and Folly about Luke Skywalker.) Lunchtimes, Kramer returned to his light-filled office on the third floor of the Knight Building, closed the door, and worked out the final touches on that afternoon’s lesson plan. “I feel so comfortable going into Power and Politics: I’ve taught it for nine years. There’s a sense of predictability about class materials. With Genius and Folly I’m not even sure sometimes whether it’s good or not.”

His 130-some students also entertained a few doubts. Attendance was unusually high for late Friday afternoon classes, and students rarely followed Kramer’s encouragement to emulate “genius” Henry Kissinger at Harvard and skip class if they believed they had more pressing business, but the lack of apparent structure in the syllabus bothered them. This came as no surprise to Kramer.

“The course is deliberately designed to break students out of a certain mind-set,” Kramer explains. “The learning process here at Stanford often is tightly scripted so that week by week you know exactly where you’re going. There’s a reason for that. When I taught Negotiation, and in courses like Accounting and Finance, where there is a very logical development of materials, it makes perfect sense to have a very tight structure. But for this class it is helpful to not know where we’re going.”

Chang was one student who found it helpful. “One of the big takeaways for me is that I learned sometimes not planning things is the way to go,” he says. “There is no one path to genius. There is no one path to folly.”

For the most part, though, students don’t like surprises. Kramer was responsive. “They definitely want to know where a course is going in terms of how much time is demanded of them, and so I do provide that much structure,” he says. “But I’m going to resist giving too much. I like to have them walk in the room and not have a lot of preconceptions about what they’re going to see or think that day, or who’s the next person they’re going to look at.”

Some of the people they looked at were nothing if not surprising. “Arnold Schwarzenegger may not be a traditional figure in business school courses, but he’s a master at organizing his attention, his time, his energy, and his resources to achieve something,” Kramer says of one of his early subjects. “Schwarzenegger wanted to be the world’s greatest bodybuilder. He also wanted to be a great star. When he started, neither one of those accomplishments seemed within his reach. We examined how he systematically set about doing these things.”

Like his examples, Kramer’s language is deliberately provocative. “Many of the words we have in our language are fairly limiting, and it’s important that people think outside those categories and think more broadly about human possibilities. Even ‘genius’ and ‘folly’ are limiting,” Kramer says. “Students have a notion of what a genius is—and it’s Albert Einstein; it’s not them. Also, they tend to think genius is only about academic intelligence, but this kind of intelligence plays only a tiny role in achievement. I like to joke that the brain is not the only major bodily system involved in genius. It is also a matter of intestinal fortitude and having the stomach to push one’s self and others hard in pursuit of a difficult goal. That’s why we talk in the course about genius with a small ‘g,’ as a very complex kind of process—one that it’s not clear many people could actually emulate.”

The traits these “geniuses” exhibit are not all positive, and students aren’t comfortable with that either. “Many of the more conventional books on leadership show leaders as mythic and heroic figures,” Kramer says. “Students want their leaders to be perfect and without any personal blemishes. What they fail to realize is that sometimes the very qualities that make someone imperfect also help explain their tremendous drive to succeed and energy to focus on one narrow realm of achievement.”

“The conjunction of genius and folly is one of the distinct themes of the course,” Kramer says. “Steve Jobs is a great example. He is a creative genius and yet he has an amazing ability to alienate some people and drive them away from his organization.” Former Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight is another. Students noted that the lessons Knight taught—discipline, hard work, character, respect—were the ones he failed, leading finally to his forced departure from the university.

Kramer is especially fascinated by the paradoxical behavior of many American presidents. He has written several papers on the peculiarly self-defeating actions of Lyndon Baines Johnson and the exaggerated perceptions of conspiracy that inspired them. “Here you have a man who almost universally is regarded as one of the most capable bargainers in American political history, and yet when it came to Vietnam, his skillful handling of internal politics and perceptions gave way to self-defeating behavior. And Bill Clinton. How can a person like Clinton be so shrewd and savvy and effective in one domain and then be so self-defeating? Clinton will be a great subject for this course eventually. Right now he’s too close. He is on the road to where people will be curious about him, much the way they’re curious about Kennedy now.”

GENIUS AND FOLLY BEGINS by focusing on the individual, and Schwarzenegger is only one of the people used to illustrate how certain unlikely individuals have been able to achieve creative or challenging things. Certainly equal in determination, although opposite in image to the bodybuilding actor, is Mary Kay Ash of the eponymous Mary Kay Cosmetics.

“Here’s a woman who had some very strong feelings about women and equality and earning potential and not having to give up family life, and we examine how she made that all work. She created an organization for herself that made it possible to achieve all these things that were really important to her,” Kramer says.

“Jesse Ventura was another interesting example,” he adds. The former professional wrestler and current governor of Minnesota “has led this very rich, textured kind of life. People say he keeps reinventing himself, but I also think he keeps finding new challenges that enlarge what his life is about.”

Kramer points out that these high-achieving individuals follow similar patterns. “The intelligence they have is deliberate,” he says. “In other words, they have a set of ways of thinking about themselves and the challenges they’re facing that are almost rule-like, and they often go about systematically implementing those rules. That’s why celebrities are so interesting. Many of the people we study in this course—like Jesse Ventura, Cher, and Madonna—are not well-educated people in an obvious way. But they have a real intelligence when it comes to understanding how to analyze situations, who they have to contact, and how to promote themselves.”

Genius and Folly then moves from individual achievement to the group level, where students study how great leaders work with small groups, and then on to the collective level, where they can see for themselves how leaders deal with much larger audiences, like social movements or huge organizations.

One of the instruments of successful leadership is rhetoric (“A great speech is the poetry of leadership,” Kramer notes), and consequently, videos play an important role in the Genius and Folly classroom. “Although you can read about creative or brilliant behavior, it helps enormously if you see a great leader like Martin Luther King actually talking to an audience—or Steve Jobs interacting with a group or Bill Gates managing conflict,” Kramer says.

In one session, Kramer played selections from King’s sermons as well as his entire “I have a dream ...” speech. Students had been given a copy of King’s famous 1963 oration and told to read it aloud to someone before class. While Kramer admitted to having delivered it before a mirror with a glass of Chardonnay in hand due to lack of an audience, one student found the perfect audience in his wife. His wife’s mother, it turned out, had been present at the actual speech and had talked of it repeatedly as her daughter was growing up. Both the student and his wife were moved to tears when he read it aloud, he told the class.

In the same session, John F. Kennedy was shown introducing the moon program to a Texas audience as his Texan vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, looked on sourly (the space program had been LBJ’s idea). Ronald Reagan was also featured at his after-dinner, political speaker best. Kramer showed snippets of Reagan telling the same joke in a half-dozen different venues. Each time the former president seemed as delighted as he was the first time he told it. The only things that changed as he spoke were the backgrounds and his jacket and tie.

King’s cadence, JFK’s evocative language, and Reagan’s humor, often self-deprecating, all demonstrated the power of rhetoric.

But context and audience are important, too, and nowhere was that more evident than in the 1991 Senate committee hearing to approve the appointment of an African American appeals court judge to the Supreme Court. The appointee, Clarence Thomas, was confronted by a witness, law professor Anita Hill, who had charged that Thomas had sexually harassed her some years before.

In videos of their testimony, Thomas’s voice was deep-pitched, his delivery slow, positive, and unequivocal. Hill, on the other hand, seemed hesitant, her voice high and her demeanor tentative. She was said to be a reluctant witness and appeared so. But what was clear was that Thomas understood his audience of white male senators and played to it. Thomas’s angry use of the “race card,” charging that he was a victim of Hill and was being “lynched,” was startling—the more so because Hill also is African American. But it worked.

“Thomas really was the more effective impression manager in that situation. He was able to marshal his language and manage his behavior. And even though I think a lot of people sympathized with her, she was not able to perform as skillfully,” Kramer observes. Yet, nine years after the event, when Kramer played the video before the class, many of the students who were watching the testimony for the first time believed Hill. “In the class we stress the importance of looking beneath surface appearances and trying to understand why some people leave lasting and more effective impressions than others,” Kramer says.

Midway through the quarter, Kramer sprang a surprise course evaluation on the class. One criticism was that the course offered too few exercises. Kramer agreed to add one or two. “This is an example of what you can do with an unscripted course,” Kramer says. “It would have been hard to fit in an exercise if Genius and Folly had been scripted, and the students would have been frustrated trying to squeeze it in.”

A few weeks later he came up with an exercise that was typically Kramer. The students had prepared for class by reading Kramer’s research study “Trust and Distrust in Organizations.”

“The author tends to speak in turgid prose, so the going is a bit tough,” he warned them. “However, I think the ideas in the article are worth pondering.”

But Kramer wasn’t planning to ponder the assignment aloud in class. Instead, the students were told they would do an exercise in which they would use their creativity to survive an imaginary wildfire. They were given a list of items ranging from a map to a rubber hose and asked to rank them in order of importance to their survival. The individuals with the best answers would be announced the following week.

Kramer divided the room into pairs and handed out instruction packets to each of the team members. Although the partners were to discuss strategy before they wrote their reports, they would read the instructions and write the reports by themselves. What Kramer didn’t tell them was that their teammates were not playing by the same rules. One quarter of the students had been instructed to deceive their partners while one quarter was told to be truthful. These two groups were paired with students who were either warned their partner might be lying or told nothing at all. Relatively few caught on.

“What was nice about the exercise,” Kramer says, “is that in a traditional course on creativity you would have had an exercise on creativity and it would be only about creativity. Well, in the real world when people work in creative groups, they’re also working with people who are potential competitors—people who may not want them to succeed. We had actually talked about this issue earlier in the course. We had given examples of groups that were undermined by other groups, who had the sense that they were working together but one side decided they wanted to get all the marbles.

“The students thought that earlier discussion was interesting academically. But they forgot about it, and so when we came to the exercise, which was in the part of the course on creativity, they thought the exercise was just about sharing information and being creative together. Then they found out their partner didn’t share completely. It happens in life. We often operate out of mistaken assumptions about whom we can trust and under what circumstances. And those mistakes can get us into trouble. And based upon some of the feedback I got, they really liked it. One student told me: ‘It never ever occurred to me that I had to think about trust in this situation. I just took it for granted they were telling me the truth.’”

Chang was one who didn’t get it. “The exercise was a wake-up call,” he says. “Even though I was in Power and Politics too, I didn’t catch on till the end.”

Chang and his classmates were being exposed early on to a lesson it sometimes takes years to learn. Over the past 10 years, Kramer reckons he has taught about 1,500 executives through the Business School’s executive education programs and through his own consulting with companies. More than 80 percent had experienced at least one event during their careers that changed the way they thought about trust, he says.

If there was one experience in Kramer’s career that influenced his thoughts on creativity and leadership, it was his early work with terminal cancer patients. “It colors Genius and Folly in an interesting way,” he says. “The one thing that impressed me in the research on dying patients and people who experience catastrophic illnesses is how it sharpens their priorities. Often they find new meaning in life and mobilize their resources much more intelligently and sharply than people who aren’t thinking about these things. The question then becomes: How can you start to do that without having to have the catastrophic illness?”

One way he found was to require his students to write their own obituaries. Kramer gave them the quarter to think about what they would like others to read about them post-mortem.

“He was asking, ‘What is the story line of your life?’” says Chang.

IT TURNED OUT THAT SUCCESS in business plays a relatively small role in how students think about their lives. For many, Kramer says, “Business plays only a functional role as a stepping stone to other things they care about more, things that will have to be delayed while they earn money.” Among the more valued accomplishments were children and grandchildren, long and happy marriages, creative works (“You’d be amazed at how many bestsellers are coming out of this class!” he says), wealth distributed to charities, and lives of commitment and public service.

To the professor, it all makes sense. “The first half of life is spent chasing success,” he says, “and the second half, chasing significance.” Kramer is working to see that his students get an early start on the second.