Gautam Mukunda is an internationally recognized expert in leadership and innovation. He has been everything from an Ivy-League professor to a podcast host. Gautam received his PhD from MIT in political science and an AB in Government from Harvard, and since then has followed his many interests wherever they will take him. He has served on numerous councils in the worlds of politics, biotechnology, art, and economics, including the Council of Foreign Relations, The Chief of Naval Operation’s Executive Advisory Panel, the New England Regional Selection Committee for the White House Fellowship, the Museum Council of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on New Models of Leadership, among many others. He is on the board of directors and chair of the Mentorship Committee of The Upakar Foundation, a non-profit providing scholarships to underprivileged students of South Asian descent. He has been a research fellow at Harvard and the American Assembly, as well as a Principal Investigator on the National Science Foundation’s Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center grant. With far-reaching passions and areas of expertise, it should come as no surprise that Gautam has also been a Jeopardy Champion.
Gautam is the author of two books: Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter and the forthcoming Picking Presidents. He has published articles on everything from leadership to politics and beyond in Harvard Business Review, Slate, Fast Company, Politics and the Life Sciences, and many more. His work has been profiled in the New York Times, Atlantic, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and many more distinguished publications. He also advises a variety of companies and organizations on leadership and strategy. Gautam often jokes that his life’s ambition is to have the world’s most confusing resume and that he’s most of the way there.
Transcript:
Bryan Wish:
Gautam, Welcome to the One Away Show.
Gautam Mukunda:
Bryan, it’s a pleasure to be here with you.
Bryan Wish:
I appreciate you responding randomly to my reach out to say, you’d joined me for this, but we are here. What is the one away moment that you want to share with us today?
Gautam Mukunda:
So, I think anyone’s probably got a bunch of different ones, but the one that leaps to mind more than any other was the first time I met professor Clayton Christensen, he was a professor at Harvard Business School and he wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma. I’m sure almost any of your listeners will be familiar with his work. And so, when I met Clay, I was, I think a first year student in a political science PhD program at MIT. And so, I was 25. I left McKenzie after two years to go do a PhD. And, I have to say, probably makes anyone hears that question my decision making pretty profoundly. And so, I was there and Clay’s work obviously had this incredible impact in the business world, but I was studying national security matter, where I was studying in the military and national security decision making.
Gautam Mukunda:
And so, I was trying to understand if you could use his ideas to try and explain what happens with militaries in situations where a stronger, better equipped military can be defeated by seemingly weaker, less capable one. And this was 2004, it wasn’t that long after 9/11, we had troops in the Afghanistan in Iraq. So, obviously the contemporary relevance of that idea was pretty profound. And so, I started thinking about his ideas and how to apply them. And as I was working on them, started to modify and build on them a little bit. And it turned out we had a mutual friend, actually a friend of mine who was working for a company Clay founded. And he said, you should go meet Clay. And in those days it was professor Christensen, it took him like two years to get me to call him clay.
Gautam Mukunda:
And so, I said, okay, I should meet the most famous business school professor in the world. Yeah, that happens every day. And so, I go, and there are two things you got to know about Clay. So, the first one is, there’s no doubt in my mind as a first year graduate student, that I was the least important person he met that month. Right? He was on the board of Intel. The stratosphere in which he had earned his way into, by being this incredibly brilliant thinker. And the second thing you got to know is, he was 6’9.
Gautam Mukunda:
So, I am, I would say, not a small man, but I was more than a foot shorter than he was. I felt like a hobbit. And so, I walk into his office and look up and then keep looking up and realize just then my friend had neglected to inform me of this particular fact about him. And we start chatting and I somewhat nervously start taking him through not just the set of ideas of how I’d applied his theories, but how I started to push them a little bit and modify, build on them in a way to get them to apply to the militaries, which are incredibly different from businesses. And so, the third thing you got to know about Clay to understand this meeting is that most senior faculty who are introduced to a random grad student who tells them, “I’ve been playing with your life’s work and adapting it and changing it,” would not be big fans of this idea.
Gautam Mukunda:
Like, hat’s not a, that’s not a trivial thing to say to someone who has just spent the last year of his life building this idea, but had demonstrated that it was the most important idea in business thinking in a generation. But that’s not Clay Christensen, the third thing that made, made Clay special is he started to listen and he sat down and I started to talk through some of the ideas, especially about how you define what it meant to be a disruptive innovation and different concepts of his theories. And he said, “Let’s talk about that some more.” And then we started to engage and we ended up spending an hour going back and forth and pushing back and forth on his ideas and how to think about them and things like that.
Gautam Mukunda:
And by the end of the hour, I’d realized that this wasn’t just an incredibly accomplished human being. He was an incredibly wise human being. He was the sort of person who you want to go to, you want their advice. Even after an hour meeting him, this is the sort of person whose guidance any person should seek out in life. And so, I had been in the private sector and now I was in grad school, but I didn’t really ever plan on being a professor. I was doing a PhD because I really liked exploring ideas and assumed that after my PhDs, something would work itself out. And so I said, professor Christen, I would love your advice, if you have any thoughts as to what you think I should do next, after I finish my PhD, it’s a long way away. I’m only a first year, but whenever I do finish, if you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them.
Gautam Mukunda:
And he looks down at me literally and says, “I think you should come teach at Harvard Business School.” And I went, “What?” He says, “No, I think, I think you should be a professor at Harvard Business School. I think we should talk about that.” And I said, “Okay,” I was a political scientist. I didn’t even know that business schools hired political scientists. And I just said, “Sure, let’s talk about that.” And he said, “Yeah, stay in touch,” and I left. And I turned to the turn to my friend who introduced this afterwards and I said, “Did that just happen?” And he said, “Yeah, you should probably take him up on that.” I said, “Yeah, yeah, I think I will.” And so, that started the process, by which six years later, I ended up on the Harvard Business School faculty.
Bryan Wish:
Wow.
Gautam Mukunda:
And so, my first published paper came out of that meeting. One of my best friends in the world, he actually spoke at my wedding is Clay’s oldest son now, just literally my entire life went on a completely different and completely unpredictable course because of that one encounter.
Bryan Wish:
Oh, chills. Amazing.
Gautam Mukunda:
I was very lucky and I would say, he was a person of towering stature, even greater intellect and more impressive than either of those was the greatness of his soul. He passed away, just by coincidence, I think two years ago today that he passed away. At least I know two years, two years ago today was when I heard. So, yeah, he was, as I said to my friend, his son, he was both the greatest and the best person I’ve ever had to honor of knowing. And he became my friend and mentor for the last 15 years of his life, after that meeting.
Bryan Wish:
Well, one, what a special way to honor him today. And two, the weird time, we didn’t know we were going to talk about 15 minutes ago and it might be a two year anniversary, [crosstalk 00:07:13] happens. Well, one, I appreciate you sharing just the journey and maybe … one, I think two things I was hearing, it was your openness and bravery, to go in and share and go back and forth on his work. But then also his ability to see you and say, “My ideas might be good, but why can’t they be challenged or why can’t someone else make them better?” And that curiosity was a part of what made him so great in that relationship with the dynamic you guys shared, made each other better. What was a special relationship it sounds like you guys built.
Gautam Mukunda:
It really was. He was unique. He kept a sign up in his office that said, “Anomalies wanted,” and what he meant was, and he was very rare in this, and there are a handful of other people I know who are like this and all, and uniformly, if you are like this, you are one of the most impressive people you will ever meet. What he wanted more, what he loved was when someone told him, “I think you’re wrong. And I think I found a mistake,” because that’s when he was starting to learn something and he loved learning things. And so, if you just sat there and said, “Well, you must be right about everything,” then, well, you already knew that. He’s not going to get anything from that. He didn’t need his ego stroked. What he wanted to do was get better. And that was what he’s like. And you don’t meet a lot of people like that. You really don’t meet a lot of people like that of his stature. And when you do, you know they’re unique. You know someone else who’s like that is Stan McChrystal.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah. [crosstalk 00:08:57] I’ve heard great, great things about him.
Gautam Mukunda:
He is like that too. He cultivates that, he wants someone to come in and tell him, “I think you’re wrong.”
Bryan Wish:
So, one of the first people I had on this podcast was two years ago, her name was Jesse Craig. And before running content, first run reviews, she worked on his book launch. And she talked about like coming into a arena that she’d never worked in, giving an opportunity and a platform to go do really good work. And it sounds like kind of the leadership and open mindedness. And also I want to build on something you just said, I’m almost through with the book called The Psychology of Money, have you read it?
Gautam Mukunda:
I don’t know that one.
Bryan Wish:
Really good, it’s written by my Morgan Housel, who was an investor. But he talked to this chapter in the book and it says, people are optimists, that’s great, being positive about situations, but good leaders and people listen when actually they’re pushed against the critic, because that’s where like the most learning can come from. And it sounds like Clay really valued that. And it’s cool that seems like you were able to do that for him. So, a question I want to ask you is to set the stage even more is, you read his book and then you’re inspired to go talk to him and you did it. I’m sure scary as heck, obviously led to something super meaningful, but two things. One, what led you to your interest in national security and the poly sci realm? And then what led you to the book where you had the synapse connection that said, wow, I need to go do this? Give us more backstory.
Gautam Mukunda:
So, the interest in national security, I wish I had a better answer for you than it always fascinated me. I always, I loved history, I loved military history, I always loved politics. I grew up outside Washington DC. And something about it just spoke to me. And I didn’t realize that this was something a person could study except I thought it was a hobby until I was in college and took a class on political science called Warren Politics and that was my fun class for the semester. And I just went, wait, there are people who do this all the time? And that was fascinating and enlightening. And suddenly I went, wait, I could do this all the time too, let me start studying that.
Gautam Mukunda:
And then I got to know more and more people in the military. And I just liked them. Something about the personality type of people who decided they wanted to serve their country just clicked with me. And so, some of my oldest and best friends in the world were the military officers, when I was in college, they would spend a year studying there as well. And somehow they would always end up adopting me. I always said, the two great things, they always bought the beer and they were always the most interesting people you would meet. And in fact, the idea that eventually became the core of my first and second books, was the product of a conversation with an army Colonel in a bar in Harvard Square. I still remember that, when he and I were chatting about stuff in the army and the way officers were selected, and that planted a seed in my head that became literally my first two books. Probably, goodness, that conversation would’ve been 2001, so 11 years is when the book came out.
Bryan Wish:
Wow.
Gautam Mukunda:
And so, the interest, I don’t have a more coherent answer for where the interest comes from other than it just spoke to something pretty deep inside me, that I always found fascinating. And so, Bryan, you had a second question, what was that? Well, [crosstalk 00:12:58] the books, why his ideas? Yes.
Bryan Wish:
So, just to interpret too, it sounds like you were always just extremely curious around innovation or things of that nature in the army or national security, given the complexities and the global ramifications of doing it right or wrong, it seems like you really dove into that with a lot of driving, a lot of insight.
Gautam Mukunda:
So, the two things I’d say that have always fascinated me, I grew up thinking I was going to be a physicist and ended up not doing that, but I think what really intrigued me about it was science and technology side. So, the two things that have fascinated me pretty much the thread through almost everything in my professional life are innovation and leadership. Trying to understand those two things. And sometimes it’s trying to understand how they relate, quite often actually, but those two things were the big, driving passion for me. I would say that thinking about innovation is the one thing in the world where reading science fiction actually becomes a professionally relevant hobby. And I read a lot of science fiction.
Gautam Mukunda:
So, it took my fun time and made it productive, but more seriously, innovation is what makes the world work. So, when you look at economics research, there a wonderful book by David Warsh called Knowledge and the Wealth Of Nations, where one of the things he demonstrates is that economics has not until very recently grappled with the fact that almost all economic growth comes from something that economists barely studied at all, innovation. Just to give you a sense of this, the standard model for economic growth for a very long time was called the solo growth factor model. And it had different inputs that would go into it, and they were supposed to predict economic growth. So, land and labor and capital, and they all go in. And so, the thing that wasn’t input into the model was the economists would call the residual, the stuff of the model doesn’t predict, that’s the residual.
Gautam Mukunda:
And the assumption was always that the residual was innovation. The residual is more than 90% of economic growth. So, the model explained less than 10%. It was the residual that was the other 90. So, if you want to understand the world, really anything about the world, you have to start with innovation. It is the dominant, underlying force, I would argue, for all of human history. And if you don’t handle all that, you don’t have a handle on anything. But innovation is not an impersonal force. It is a product, we forget over and over again, of choices. Innovation didn’t have to go the way that we remember it historically, that was not ordained by nature.
Gautam Mukunda:
People chose that, people made those choices and they could have made different ones. But the Chinese invented gun powder hundreds of years before it was used, before it was militarily significant. There’s a wonderful book called Japan Gives Up The Gun about how the Japanese government and the Japanese social structure managed to keep firearms off Japan for centuries and maintained the social structure that would have been disrupted if if firearms had been widely distributed through Japanese society. Technology is a product not just of the underlying science, but of choices that people make. And that’s where leadership comes into it too. And probably a big part of why I’ve been fascinated by leadership. And of course, if you’re looking at the intersection of innovation and science, technology and leadership, you can’t do better than looking at militaries, which are literally the cutting edge of both things.
Gautam Mukunda:
I’ve spent a lot of time working with people of West Point, and I’ve spent a big chunk of my career teaching at Harvard Business School. And one of my former students is the head of the leadership department at West Point, he’s a PhD of HBS with me, and he always says that, those are America’s two preeminent leadership institutions, one military and one civilian. I would say that’s probably a little too flattering to Harvard Business School, but he’s not entirely wrong either. And so, they’re the two places that I’ve been lucky enough to have some extended contact with in various shapes and guises.
Gautam Mukunda:
And so, those two things are incredibly powerful forces in the world, and I think often determine much of what happens in the world. So, to circle back, Bryan, to your original question is, where did Clay’s stuff come from? Well, at the time, the military was itself was very interested in trying to apply Clay’s ideas to its strategic performance. Because obviously people in the military understood that they were a much more powerful, much more technically sophisticated force fighting against a much less powerful, much less technologically sophisticated enemy that somehow was doing very well. So, you would not think in a battle between the United States military and Taliban or Al-Qaeda that it would … that’s a very lopsided correlation of forces, but we were still struggling. And there was a feeling in the military that Clay’s theories might be able to explain.
Gautam Mukunda:
And if it could explain it, might be able to help us solve the problem. In fact, if you know, every four years, the military does a quadrennial defense review, that’s called the QDR, where they lay out what American military strategy is and what are the big challenges we’ll face and things like that. So, in the QDR that came out about that time, there actually was a two by two threat matrix that described four different types of threats the United States was likely to face. And one of those was disruptive. And so, I actually asked the person who wrote it, was that a reference to Clay’s theories? And he said explicitly, yes, it was. Now, if you work with the military a lot, and I would say that this is something I do out of patriotism and affection.
Gautam Mukunda:
I think it’s important that we have a strong military and I also do because I just like these guys and women. We just, we get along for whatever reason. And so, I want to help. You know that somewhat unfortunately, the United States Military has a tendency to swallow every management fad whole that comes across its desk, not always with analyzing it very well. And so, my initial concern was that this was a fad that they had swallowed whole and I needed to figure out what was the problem here. But as I got into it, I discovered that Clay’s theories, unlike a lot of stuff that makes its way through the management world, was incredibly well thought out and incredibly well founded, was grounded in really deep research, was thought through. It was at the standard of really good work, not the standard of the 10,000 hour rule that you might get in a book from an airport bookstore.
Gautam Mukunda:
And so, that meant that it might actually have something pretty important to say about the problems the military was facing. But militaries and businesses are different. My shorthand for this is always that, if your military is turning a profit, you have a problem, not a signature strength. Your military is not supposed to be a profitable institution. That is a concern. And so, you can’t just take the theory and apply it blindly. You really have to get down to the nuts and bolts and understand how it works. And only by doing that, can you do the hard work of porting over and trying to get, okay, does this really speak to the challenges the military faces?
Gautam Mukunda:
And I’ll tell you as an example, in that QDR, in that two by two matrix, one of the four boxes was labeled disrupted. They had labeled the wrong box. The things they were describing as disruptive were not disruptive in the sense that Clayton Christensen would use that word. And that’s the big problem, because if you think that a threat is a Christensen type disruption, and it isn’t, your response to it will be exactly wrong. It is profoundly different types of responses to one type of threat and another as his theory dictates. And if you misidentify it, you will fail.
Bryan Wish:
Wow. Okay. One, as you said, profound, the word profound in my head was running. And it makes so much sense about just the analyzing of the situation. And I appreciate you tying the interest together in the work and how it led to one another. But then also the important note, I loved what you said, it’s, what’s the application of the theory? And if it’s done wrong, it might have catastrophic consequences versus getting to the nuts and bolts and really analyzing it. And it’s cool that you’ve been able to play this maybe intermediary … give this view to help maybe drive important decisions. I don’t want to project, but it sounds like you’ve really been at the forefront of some of these incredible opportunities with the military, using your business background.
Bryan Wish:
Something that came to mind, and then I want to eventually skip forward from that conversation, but one thing I want ask and I don’t want to assume, but do you think that it seems like you really take work and you chew it up and you just learn at a granular level. And someone like Clay, a lot of great theories in the book, big concepts, do you think part of the reason that you and him were maybe able to hit it off so well off that first meeting is because you were able to take a body of work and maybe challenge it to the application on the ground floor of how this applied? What do you think it was about that meeting with him that really can create the connective tissue for future relationship?
Gautam Mukunda:
So, I would hate to speak for him, but my guess is there were two things. So, one is what I really like to do, and I think this is a product of both having grown up, wanting to be a physicist and then training in political science theory, which really drives you towards abstraction is, what I like to do is take a theory, take a set of ideas and make them as abstract as possible, by which I mean, make them as general as possible. Clay had a bunch of theories about businesses and he said, would businesses have customer segments and what happens and a disruption essentially is when your competitor comes in and goes after a low end customer segment and wins that customer segment and the incumbent, the rich, successful, technologically advanced company doesn’t even bother to fight back.
Gautam Mukunda:
Because they say, “We don’t care about that customer segment. That customer segment is not valuable to us. We’re actually better off not selling stuff to them than selling stuff to them.” And so, in his theory, the way disruptors win is they went from the bar [inaudible 00:24:02]. They take these customer segments and go upwards and upwards and upwards, and eventually they take over the whole market. And so, it turns out that pattern recurs in industry after industry, time and time again. And so, something that he identified originally in the disc drive industry, turns out to happen all over the place. It happens in construction equipment and in steel and in cars and just you name it, it’s everywhere. And so, taking a theory from disc drives to many different types of industries is making the theory more abstract and making it more generalizable.
Gautam Mukunda:
Because you’re stripping out from disc drive speed and disc drive density to something a little bit broader about customer segments, things like that. So, what I was saying is, okay, militaries don’t have customer segments, so you can’t think about [inaudible 00:24:53]. So, you’re not all the way there yet. What I needed to do was understand what is the theory actually? What is a customer segment at a more abstract level, on a more general level? And to me, what that answer was, that’s a priority. If businesses have customer segments, organizations have priorities. They have a hierarchy of things that they care about. And so there’s the thing they care about most, and then second most, and third most on the things they don’t care about at all.
Gautam Mukunda:
And so, if in a business you were saying they were going up to the low value customer segments, from a more abstract model, from an organizational model, what was happening, what you were saying is, the competitors were going after low priority tasks. That’s what was going on. And so, for me, I think the first thing that Clay saw was someone who was taking what he had already done, taking his theory, his brilliant insight and making it more general so that it went from one industry to many industries. That was what he had already done, and was just taking the next step, which, he was a business school professor. He was a genius, if he had reason to do that, he would’ve done it.
Gautam Mukunda:
But that was not as a business school professor something, I think he, he was going to be thinking about it that moment in time. And he saw someone who was like, well, yeah, but you can take your ideas. And if you strip them down a little, you strip them down. Even further, you find out that they are even more powerful than we knew already. Right. So that’s, I mean, that’s, that’s interesting. The second thing I think is I say is that this is something I would tell my students when they were, when, when, when they were in their PhD. And so what I like to do is these things are many different fields, right? So I was a, I was a political scientist who spent seven years in an organizational behavior department at a business school. And as far as I know, I was the only political scientist in the country who was in the organizational behavior department.
Gautam Mukunda:
And that had its difficulties, but was also really interesting because, okay, there’s a concept in … and this is an example of what I’m describing. There’s a concept in paleontology, where if you see the fossils of two or organisms, two types of animals and they have organs that are very similar. So, say fish. Sharks have fins and dolphins have fins. And the fins for sharks and the fins for dolphins look exactly at the same. So, what’s going on here? There are two things that can happen. One is, those fins can be a product of common descent. So, the reason they have the same structure is because they’re related to one another. And so, every type of shark has fins that look very similar because all sharks are related to one another.
Gautam Mukunda:
That makes sense. But sharks and dolphins are not related to one another. Dolphins are mammals and sharks are not. In fact, dolphins are the descendant of land animals. Whereas sharks have had fins, going back, sharks never left the oceans. Dolphins are the descendant animals that were in the oceans, went on the land, evolved legs and then went back into the water and revolved fins. So, that’s cool, that’s just a cool thing to know about the world. That whales and dolphins, the reason they breathe air is because they’re the descendants of land animals. But they still have fins that look like sharks’ fins. And so, the reason for that, they say, this is the second idea, is that when you have organs from two animals that are not from a common line of descent, but that nonetheless have the same structure, it is in response to similar circumstances.
Gautam Mukunda:
So, sharks and dolphins both have fins because fins are the right answer to get around in the water. It’s not common descent, it is because the particular dynamics of being in the ocean or in a lake mean you should evolve fins. So, what that means is, if you see two structures that are the same, and they’re not from a common descent, you know that they exist in similar environments. So, you can learn a lot about the environment for the animal from its structure, by looking at it that way.
Bryan Wish:
Wow.
Gautam Mukunda:
So, what does that mean for me? I’m looking at Clay’s theories and I’m seeing, they apply in a business world, and I think they also apply in a military world. And I tested that and I showed a way that they do apply in the military world. So, what that tells me is that the dynamics that drive his theory must be only the things that the military and business have in common.
Bryan Wish:
Wow.
Gautam Mukunda:
Because if it’s something that’s in one or the other, it can’t be part of the theory because you’re still getting the same outcome. And so, I study lots of things because I’m interested in everything. I was on Jeopardy, I’m just interested in everything. There’s almost no topic on Earth that you couldn’t get me to be like, oh, I’d read a book on that. Sure. But if you’re like that, it can either a problem or an advantage. And the way you turn it into advantages, you got to be able to bridge lots of different areas and put them together. And so, if you’re an academic, if you’re a social scientist, the way I am, what you are is, you’re a theory building with machine. A mathematician was once to finds a machine for turning coffee into theorems. And so, if you’re a social scientist, what you do is you try and create theories. And that sounds very academic, but actually as Nitin Nohria, the deal of the Harvard business school when I was there would always say correctly, there’s nothing more practical than a good theory.
Gautam Mukunda:
Because good theories are how you understand the world, and they’re what gives you leverage to try and shape the world in your direction. If you are the United States Military, and somebody gives you a theory that explains why you are struggling to deal with this kind of asymmetric threat and how you should change to do it, that theory might sound very academic, but it’s also very practical.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah. For sure.
Gautam Mukunda:
And so, that’s what I was trying to do is, you could learn about the theory by seeing how it applied in lots of different areas.
Bryan Wish:
Totally. What a beautiful explanation, that you’ve tied together so many things. And I wrote down something and you actually hinted on it, which was, I’m sure you’ve Range by David Epstein?
Gautam Mukunda:
Yeah. He was on my podcast, he’s fantastic.
Bryan Wish:
I didn’t see that, but not shocked after everything you said. But then I also wrote down simplifier. And then, to synthesize, if I’m doing it correctly, is you’re a wide range of experiences and learnings and insights across many topics allows you to maybe look at something and take out the heart of it and simplify it in a way that creates application into other areas. And so, actually, like you said, it might be an advantage or a disadvantage, you’re taking these wide range of interests in your dynamic nature to simplify complex things into ways that are applicable for everyday people to use them and what a gift.
Gautam Mukunda:
I hope so. That’s certainly my ambition, is what I try to do. So, both my books, for example, the one I wrote a few years ago and the one that’s coming out in [crosstalk 00:32:19]-
Bryan Wish:
While we’re at it, just share the books, because I’m going to get to them, but just feel free to name drop them.
Gautam Mukunda:
Oh, sure. No. So, my first book came out in 2012. It was called Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter. I was trying to understand when is it that an ind individual leader has a impact on an organization for better or for worse. So, where do the best and worst leaders come from, the first book. And my second book was trying to apply those theories specifically to presence of the United States and try and give people a set of tools, basically, that would say, allow us to analyze a presidential candidate and say, regardless of party, whether or not I agree with this person or am I Republican or Democrat, it doesn’t matter, just can I say with some confidence, this person could do the job. I feel comfortable with the idea of this person in the White House, even if they’re not my candidate.
Gautam Mukunda:
That’s what the second book was about. And both books are peer review, so they go through that whole academic process of review, blind review and credits and things like that. But my goal in writing them was to say that, okay, they were researched at a standard that could stand up to the highest level of peer review, just like an academic journal or an academic press, which is what they were, but anyone could read them, not just read them, could enjoy reading them. That they had to be both. That was what I wanted. That was the task I set myself for both books. Because I was not interested in writing something that would only be read by 10 people. That did not seem worth anybody’s time to me. And so, that was what I was trying to do with both of those is take the ideas and make them something that anyone could understand, even if they didn’t read political science or organizational behavior literature.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah. Got it. And so, essentially, you applied that as a wide range of interests and simplification to things and brought that into your books to them be enjoyed by the everyday reader on two topics with similar but different areas of reading. Beautiful. Definitely want to get more into the books and how you’ve developed that. So, I think this conversation’s just been fascinating all around because understanding your preceding interest and then how you showed up and then maybe challenged or showed Clay about how his work could be applied. And then, he said to you at the end, “Hey, six years, five years from now, when you’re done, you should consider being an HBS faculty.” Take us to graduation and what happened after. You said, okay, maybe I should be a faculty and I should go on this journey. Where were you in life then and how did everything unfold for you after that graduation moment once the seed was planted in your head?
Gautam Mukunda:
So, in academia, you apply for jobs before you graduate. So, a few years later, probably you could say five years later, I applied for a position in his department at the business school. And I interviewed for it and the interview went very well. And he and I both thought it was definitely going to happen. And then this was right after the financial crisis. And it turned out that even Harvard was affected by the financial crisis and it didn’t happen. I was like, this is quite upsetting. Like, we’ve been planning on this for a long time. And so, I did a postdoc at MIT for a year. So, I just stayed at MIT for another year as, except I graduated and I did it as a postdoc.
Gautam Mukunda:
And, I took that time to turn my dissertation into a book. And so, I then applied to lots of other schools and I stayed in touch with Clay and we both really hoped this would work and we thought it would, but it didn’t. But I said, why not? So I applied. Clay’s department, was the technology and operations management department. And so, they focused on innovation. And about half the work I had done was on innovation. But the other half of the work I did was on leadership. And there was a different department at the business school called the organizational behavior department that focused a lot on leadership. And so, I was like, you know what, let me apply there. Why not?
Gautam Mukunda:
Let’s see how that goes. And so, I did. And so, I didn’t hear anything from them for months and months, so I’d completely forgotten all about it. And then just when I had decided, well, I guess I was going to be a professor after all, which was okay, because I never really planned on being one and I was actually about to call McKinsey [inaudible 00:36:32] and go back. Say, ” Hey, can I go back?” I get a phone call from that second department, the organizational behavior department and pick up the phone and this wonderful professor named Robin Ely says, I’m Robin William I’m from the Harvard Business School’s department. Would you like to interview for a job in our department? And instead of her answering, I started laughing and I think she was a little offended.
Gautam Mukunda:
She said, “Why are you laughing?” And I finally stopped laughing. I said, “So, does anyone ever say no? And then she started laughing too. She said, “Okay. Yeah, probably no one ever says no when I ask that question.” So, then I interviewed with that department and so I did my job talk and Clay, that’s how you interview it in a university, you do what’s called a job talk, where you present on your research. And Clay shows up at my job talkings, in the back of the room and everybody sees him and recognizes him and, “What’s Clay doing? Clay never comes to our doc to our talks, why is he here?” And then it became clear. And a few weeks after that, they called me to say, “Hey, actually would like you to join the faculty after all.” So, a very circuitous route, but it worked out for the best.
Bryan Wish:
Wow. Yeah, it’s funny how life happens when you’re going on a course and you get thrown off and things come back probably better than you would’ve expected before, but it took up some sidetrack to get there. Did you know Clay was going to up? Or was that a surprise to you?
Gautam Mukunda:
I had told him I was going to be speaking, but I did not expect him to come, because I knew how busy he was and I was just, “Clay, just so you know, I’m going to be on campus,” it would never even have occurred to me to ask him to come. The demands on his time were for too great, but he made the time.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah. But it shows clearly how much she cared and how much he wanted to be there for you. How special. And you got to give yourself some test to your own hard work and journey as well.
Gautam Mukunda:
I hope so. I still miss him a great deal. He was a great man.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah, no, it sounds like what a tremendous influence. What I’m curious about is, asa professor, as someone who teaches and as a faculty, tell us a little bit more about what you’re sharing knowledge on, but what do you find the most rewarding part of your job and are you looking for other Gautams, so to speak, in trying to be that model of Clay that he was for you? I mean, I’m just curious how you show up in and day out, on this journey.
Gautam Mukunda:
I would hope to be, you can only aspire to be someone like him, I don’t know if anyone gets to live up to his example. But for me, what I always say is that, teaching is the best thing in the world.It is the thing that when you’re an academic, most academics go into academia because they like research and I like research too., I love writing. And I never want to stop writing books or thinking about trying to solve problems that way. But the teaching is fulfilling in a way that nothing else is. So, I would say that what I kept more than anything else was the note … and when you become a good teacher, you start to get a few of these, every year, the, “You changed my life notes.” Yeah. That my career path changed because of this or I would teach on leadership and teaching on leadership it’s indistinguishable from teaching about ethics. You got to do both.
Gautam Mukunda:
And so, I changed my career path, or I applied this in my family, there was something in my family life that we talked about because of that. And so, to this day, I still get … once a week or so I’ll say, I’ll get a phone call from a former student saying, “Hey, I just want to talk about X. Do you have time?” And those are the calls for which I will always make time. No matter what’s going on in my life, if you were a former student and you want to talk, I will find a way to make that happen. And I always tell them that if you don’t hear back from me in 48 hours, you need to message me again. [crosstalk 00:40:56] I’m not ignoring you. It just means something happened. I need you to make sure I’m number one in your inbox. So, if any of my students are listening to this, if you don’t hear from me two days, call me, message me again.
Bryan Wish:
Sure, and that-
Gautam Mukunda:
Go ahead.
Bryan Wish:
Oh, go ahead. Sorry.
Gautam Mukunda:
No, I was just saying, is that when you’re a teacher, being a teacher is a privilege, because your students are trusting you to influence them in some way, shape or form. And for my first few years in the faculty, almost all my students were older than I was. So, it felt a little weird. And the PhD student I worked most closely with was not just older than I am, I’d say he and Clay are the two human beings I most admire of anyone I’ve ever met. And so, I was like looking my quote, unquote student as someone who I wanted to learn from, instead of the other way around.
Gautam Mukunda:
But that experience is something that it’s twofold, one is you get a chance to look at people. And I’ve been very lucky to have this sort of students who I know are going to go off and do amazing things. So, you can shape their course a little bit, that’s leaving a legacy and something that’s pretty powerful. And the second is thing is, you learn on about yourself. Teaching is a reflection, teaching is always a reflection of who you are. And so, what I focus on with them often tells me what I care about at that moment in my life as well.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah. Dive deeper on that. What do you think [crosstalk 00:42:30] … Go ahead.
Gautam Mukunda:
So, for example, as I said, that lead and ethics thing, that’s a big thing there. So, I am a political scientist by training, I teach leadership by vocation. And for me core class almost always become … not almost always, often becomes a discussion about what is the right thing to do. Not meaning what’s going to make your career succeed, but what is the thing that you would be proud of? What is the thing that actually is the right thing to do that is morally and ethically the right thing to do? So, if you were in somebody else’s class, and this is not a criticism of them, my colleges have other things that we care about, they are probably not going to get the same focus of, how do we think about the ethics and the responsibility?
Gautam Mukunda:
I say that, as a political scientist, what political science is more than anything else is, it is the study of power. So, you don’t go into political science unless what you’re in the business of is thinking about power and what it means, and hopefully how to use it responsibly, and how it changes you. So, if you are going to become a leader, you’re going to be a person who has power. And so you better think about what that power means. And what it means for you and how you want to use it. Because if you only start thinking about that after you’ve gotten, it will be too late.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah. For sure. Because, one, I loved your answer. I read a book called Power For All, [crosstalk 00:44:07]-
Gautam Mukunda:
Julie Battilana, she’s a dear, dear, dear friend. She is wonderful. [crosstalk 00:44:11] You should have her on the show, actually. Yeah.
Bryan Wish:
Well, her co-author came on last week. [crosstalk 00:44:16]
Gautam Mukunda:
Tiziana, yeah, sure.
Bryan Wish:
Anyways, we’ve become super close the last three months for a lot of personal things. But anyways, I think you’re right, when you’re in a leader, you’re in a position of power and influence and you get to shape the minds. And you’re shaping the minds of some of the brightest, young individuals globally. So, the impact of your work today could change the course of their lives for decades to come. And it comes with great responsibility, I think, as you said. One more question and I want to ask you the last thing around your future and some books stuff. When you compare your yourself as a student, when you were going through MIT and working with Clay and applying, when you think about yourself as a student versus the students that you are teaching today, what would you say the biggest differences or similarity in what you’re noticing, being a part of the country that is attracting some of the brightest young minds.
Gautam Mukunda:
So, the similarity is easier, it’s this … you don’t do a PhD … if you’re talking about PhD students, unless you’re passionately concerned about ideas, like you care about ideas, you care about trying to understand the truth about the world, using the tools of science. That is what attracted me to doing a PhD. And nobody does a PhD for the money. One of my students once asked me, why did you do a PhD? I said, “Well, I hated money. And I never wanted to see it again.” You do PhD because it matters to you, that kind of thing. So, that’s similar. And when I look at the MBA students … I don’t teach MBAs at the moment, but I did for seven years.
Gautam Mukunda:
What you see is, there’s what I hope that I had at that age, the drive, the ambition. To not just do things that are big, but to do things that matter. And I’m always touched by how much my students, despite all the stereotypes, unfair ones, I think mostly, of Harvard MBAs, how much they really, really … they wanted to do big things, but they wanted to do big, good things that mattered to them, that they were in that place. That meant a lot to me. The difference, I think, is, if you most of my students, not all, but most of my students are Americans, and the 10 years in age that separates us now have not, on the whole, been good years in the United States.
Gautam Mukunda:
Lots of bad things have happened, from 9/11, the wars Iraq and Afghanistan, to the Trump years, to the COVID. Like, a chain of catastrophes and horrors. And they look at the future and in the world of climate change, with climate change and I’ll say, one of my podcast episodes was on climate change, say that if you are a leader, you need to be thinking about climate, climate change. Because you are deeply immersed in that field. Your estimate of its impact is low by multiple orders of magnitude. I want to emphasize that statement. Unless you are deeply immersed in what climate change means for the world, and probably even if you are, however important you think climate change will be over the next 10 or 15 or 20 years, you are off by orders of magnitude. You probably don’t even have 1% of the real impact. That’s how enormous the scale of what the challenge [inaudible 00:47:49]. So, but my students quite often do understand that.
Bryan Wish:
Wow.
Gautam Mukunda:
And what sort of worries me and where I feel concerned is, I had a sense and an optimistic sense, not seeing all of these various things coming down the pipe, that when I was 25 or even when I was 30, or probably even 32, 30, 3, 34, that the world was on a good trajectory. That whatever happened to me person personally, I had this sense that things were going to get better on the whole. And a rising tide lifts all boats, right? Even if things going went badly for me, they weren’t going to go that badly because things on the whole were good and getting better.
Gautam Mukunda:
And I think too many of my students fear, not wrongly, that the world is not getting better. That things are getting worse. That the range of possibilities of what people aspire to be is narrowed. And those fears, they’re not ill-founded. The global financial crisis happened in 2008. And it was the greatest economic downturn since the great depression. And in the United States, the people who did it were rewarded and the people and everyone else suffered. But that should appall you. You should feel questioning the future when you see something like that happen. And that’s just one example among many. And so the only thing where I hope to leave them, when I say this is the difference is, if I was naively optimistic, where I think as they are too, they are in a sense, naively pessimistic. It’s true that all these things have happened and that’s bad. But if that becomes an excuse for cynicism, I would say, cynicism is lazy. Cynicism is the believing the worst of the world and in other people. And it is a default. It’s a way to seem sophisticated without actually being sophisticated.
Gautam Mukunda:
And so, and at the end of the day, what it is, it is not empowering. It is disempowering. It is saying that because everything, everyone is bad and the world will always turn at the worst. It is a way of saying, therefore, I do not need to do anything. So, if we want to circle back to where we started at the beginning, I teach leadership. If I don’t think leaders have an ability to change the world, I have wasted most of my life. So, I do think that. So, it is true that, I would say, that things have not gone as well as I would’ve hoped 10 or 15 years ago. But it does not not mean that our fate is set in stone. If you teach leaders, then you have to believe that they have the chance to change trajectory. And so, that is not a message of fear, that’s not a message of despair. That’s a message of hope. If you do not like what the world looks like today, we’ll get out there and change it. You have that power.
Bryan Wish:
Wow. I think it’s so interesting that you compared you being cautiously optimistic that you look at the last couple of decades, and you say, oh, these aren’t the best. And so, students today are more pessimistic, hopefully rightfully so, that maybe they make them want to solve bigger world problems. Cynicism, like you said, though, is clearly another piece that isn’t sophisticated. So, Gautam, this has been amazing, unfortunately it’s top of the hour. I feel like we could go another two hours. I wish we could have talked more about your books. Where can people find your books where can they find your podcast? Tell us where to connect with you and we’ll make sure we do this episode justice.
Gautam Mukunda:
Well, thank you. So, I am @GMukunda, G-M-U-K-U-N-D-A, on Twitter. My first book indispensable When Leaders Really Matter is on Amazon. You can find it. My second book, Picking Presidents: How To Make The Most Important Decision In The World, will be coming out in October from the University of California, press. You can’t fight on Amazon yet, but you will be able to soon. And my podcast is World Reimagined with Gautam Mukunda, it’s Nasdaq’s [inaudible 00:52:09] . It is hosted by and created by Nasdaq. And I do the guests and interview all of them. And you can find that pretty much in any podcasting service in the world, at Spotify or Stitcher, you name it. We are there. You’ll even see us in time in Nasdaq’s 40 foot tall billboard on Times Square occasionally. They’ll even have us up there.
Bryan Wish:
Amazing. Wow.
Gautam Mukunda:
Som please check us out. If you like this, you will enjoy the podcast.
Bryan Wish:
Well, this was, it’s only Monday, but by far th best hour of spend today, hopefully for the next week. So, thank you for your insights and knowledge. What a great conversation, excited to get your voice out there and your work. Thanks for all you do.
Gautam Mukunda:
Well, thank you, Bryan. Really appreciate this.