Interview with Dr. Ruth Simmons, President of Brown University, on Leadership

Dr. Ruth Simmons, the President of my alma mater, Brown University, will be stepping down at the end of this year. She will have served Brown brilliantly over a period of 11 years.

The New York Times has a great interview with Dr. Simmons, as part of its Corner Office series.

What especially impressed me in the interview, was how she had to overcome some tough times (it was suggested to her to leave the PhD program at Harvard, for example), and how she learned from those experiences. She very much values team-work, ambition in her employees and members of her leadership team and people who are genuinely interesting (physicists who like poetry, for example).

One of my favorite excerpts from the interview with Dr. Ruth Simmons is below:

I keep going back to this fundamental idea of being able to respect other people, especially if you’re in a senior position. You can get a lot more done if people have a sense that you respect them, and that you listen to them. You would be surprised at the number of interviews I’ve done where the person never stops talking. If I’m interviewing someone and if they never stop talking, I will never hire them, no matter how qualified they are. If you cannot listen, you can’t be the site of welcoming, nurturing, facilitating new ideas, innovation, creativity, because it really is ultimately only about you. So I look for people who listen well and can respect the ideas of others.

It is truly amazing what this youngest of twelve children from Texas has been able to accomplish.

Her shoes will be really tough to fill.

I wish the next President of Brown a lot of luck.

An Ivy League University President Who Loved Math

Today's New York Times, in one of my favorite columns, The Corner Office, has a wonderful interview with Dr. Amy Gutmann, the President of the University of Pennsylvania. I had the pleasure of hearing her speak while I was a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard in 2005-2006.

In the interview, conducted by Adam Bryant, she is asked many questions about her leadership style but what impressed me most about her (besides her energy, intelligence, and elegance that always shine through) :

1. her gratitude to her parents and especially for her father's courage and farsightedness -- he left Nazi Germany for India, and for her mother's survival of the depression, experiences which taught Dr. Gutmann to focus on the long term and not just to react to the next small challenge;

2. how she loved math and emphasized that she was captain of the math team and enjoyed solving puzzles. She thanks her 8th grade math teacher for motivating all kids and quotes Emerson: "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." In addition to enthusiasm, she emphasized the relevance of "hard, smart work," and

3. the importance of communications as a leader, which I completely agree with. She emails, calls people, walks around campus, and drops by her employees' (31,000 worth) offices. She listens and wants to know what motivates people. Employees who are noticed and paid attention to will respond in kind and will produce for the organization.

Dr. Gutmann graduated as the valedictorian of her public high school class in NY and was the first from her school to go to Radcliffe (which has since become part of Harvard). She received her PhD in political science from Harvard, after receiving a Master's from the London School of Economics. Before coming to Penn she was a professor and then Provost at Princeton (who now also has a female President as do Harvard and brown -- all simply terrific leaders). Dr. Gutmann's daughter, Abigail Gutmann Doyle, is now an Assistant Professor of Chemistry, having received her PhD from Harvard, too. By the way, she also was the valedictorian of her high school class.

Read the interview with President Gutmann here and learn from this great leader.