Warren Bennis - Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership

Table of Contents

Copyright 2010 by Warren Bennis. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bennis, Warren G.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-470-43238-9 (hardback)

1. Bennis, Warren G. 2. ExecutivesUnited StatesBiography. 3. Leadership. 4. Management. I. Biederman, Patricia Ward. II. Title.

HC102.5.B46A3 2010

658.0092dc22

[B]

2010019246

For Grace, and for Kate, John, and Will and their children, my loving links to the future

PRELUDE

IN THE STRICTEST SENSE, I began writing this memoir in my 85th year. But its roots reach back to my college days at Antioch in the late 1940s. In my sophomore year, I wrote an autobiographical story about an unnerving encounter in Germany after the war. Published in the schools literary magazine, the piece had the campus buzzing. I was stunnedand transformedby the discovery that I could write my way into the consciousness of others. Most surprising was that this was true even when the subject was so personal. At that moment I understood that something magical happens when you tell a good story. Listeners, or readers, somehow experience that story as their own.

That first unexpected success at Antioch made me both a storyteller and a collector of stories. From then on, I scrutinized everything I heard, read, and experienced for resonant tales. Once you know that deftly shaped stories compel an audience as nothing else does, you cant stop telling them, if only to see the look of delight on the faces of those hearing them. I have been seeking that bond between storyteller and audience ever since, as a teacher, writer, and speaker. I think the power of narrative struck me with such force because I discovered it relatively late in life. Unlike most American children, who hear stories before they can pull themselves up in their cribs or manage strained peas, I dont remember anyone ever sitting on my bed when I was little, telling me a story. I dont mean to claim that I was traumatized by Rumpelstiltskin deprivation. But the fact is that my parents did not read to me on a regular basis, nor did my older brothers. As a result, my love of stories developed later, as I was bewitched in turn by radio, comic books, movies, and pulp fiction. The stories told in these rather new media mesmerized me. Even better, they allowed me to escape for a time from the uneventful existence of a working-class boy born in the Bronx in 1925a child inauspiciously named Warren Gamaliel after the late President Harding.

As that undergraduate publication first showed me, stories are a powerful tool for engaging others. All of us present ourselves to the world through the stories we invent about ourselves, consciously or not. In fact, I had proof of that well before college. In 1938 I was an eighth-grader at a public school in Westwood, New Jersey, where I often felt like the only Jewish child in a town whose angry German Bund gave me nightmares. There, it was my great good fortune to have a wonderful teacher, a Miss Shirer. She was one of those extraordinary people who reflexively assuage the anxieties of their young charges as they educate them. She was also a local celebrity. Her brother was CBS Radios man in Berlin, William Shirer, who risked his life describing in nightly newscasts Hitlers attempt at world domination.

One day Miss Shirer gave us an unsettling assignment. She asked us to tell our classmates about our favorite hobby. What was I going to do? I had no hobbies, let alone a favorite one. Unlike most of my male peers, I wasnt good at sports or even building model airplanes. In my panic, I had an inspiration. My classmates reported on their love and mastery of chess, philately, and other popular enthusiasms of young adolescents of my generation. When it was my turn to present, I reached into the shoe box I had brought to class and pulled out the accoutrements of the only activity I felt I had truly masteredshining my familys shoes. As my classmates looked oneither stupefied or awed, it wasnt clear whichI revealed the rituals and best practices of my unusual art. In memory, I was brilliant on such fine points as when oxblood polish is preferable to maroon and when a cloth produces a better sheen than a brush. I first wrote about this singular performance in the book An Invented Life, and rightfully so. The Warren Bennis who emerged in that New Jersey classroom was essentially a work of my imagination. Out of such unusual elements as neats-foot oil, I had devised a story that I could star in. Ive been doing much the same thing ever since.

When I was first approached about writing a memoir, I had serious reservations. In an odd way, I felt I wasnt ready yet, that I was too far from the end of my story to write it effectively. Once I got over that, I became utterly engaged in the project. Wherever I went, I carried a notebook for capturing memories that popped to mind at the oddest moments and jotting down notes about scenes or topics I wanted to include. I began going to the Viceroy Hotel in Santa Monica at least once a week, often two or three times, to tell stories to my long-time collaborator Patricia Ward Biederman. While the vigilant staff kept us in cappuccinos, we began to document my life, starting with my experiences as a 19-year-old infantry officer in the Battle of the Bulge.

Someone asked me recently why this book doesnt begin with a detailed account of my childhood. Frankly, my childhood, like most, wasnt all that riveting, and readers have better things to do with their time than paying it too much attention. Yes, I was once a mortified adolescent schlepping his accordion on the bus from his weekly lesson in Hackensack back home to Westwood. But Ive already written about that unhappy time, and it lacks the scope and drama of what came later. Moreover, as Ive grown older, Ive lost patience with glacier-size memoirs and biographies that start with the histories of both sets of grandparents and proceed in mind-numbing detail from preschool to the present. A few giants warrant such cradle-to-the-grave treatmentvery few. I think the rest of us tell our stories most compellingly when we limit ourselves to the high pointsnot telling all, but telling a well-chosen some. Alfred Hitchcock said that drama is life with all the boring parts cut out. I think thats what a good memoir is as well. So in this book I chose to recount those experiences that were formative, meaningful, funny, and moving, but to eliminate the boring parts. Instead of duly reporting what I was doing year after year, I tried to capture the excitement of more than eight tumultuous decades as one fortunate man experienced them. In the end, no memoir, however encyclopedic, truly captures a persons life. As novelist John Barth (a colleague at the University at Buffalo) so brilliantly observed, Your story is your story, not your life. I would rather readers finish this book wanting to know more about me than feeling that they know too much.