"Personal Power
and Leadership Miracles"

Harriet Rubin, even before publishing her engaging book The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women, had already had a major impact on business thinking in this decade, from her work as founder and editor of the Doubleday Currency book imprint. It was her insight that business thinking had become too ingrown, and badly needed an influx of thought from the non-business realm. Her ambition was to create with the Currency imprint a "colossal megaphone" with which to amplify these new ideas. Her talk, featuring material she uncovered for her next book. Her upcoming book, titled The Bad Boys of Big Business, was an outgrowth of this insight.

For Harriet Rubin, what passes for conventional wisdom is not enough. In her August 4 session she took pains to distance her findings on leadership from the contemporary view of leadership first expounded by Warren Bennis: "The leader articulates a vision, and good things happen." For Rubin, there must be something more.

She knows there is more to leading, something subtler and more human, than being a visionary on a horse.

Sometimes it's being a little crazy. Why does Max Dupree of Herman Milller care about pink ice in company urinals? Why does Phil Knight office in a cramped little room? Why does Gianni Antonelli of Fiat stare out to sea while contemplating the day's agenda? Why does Howard Schultz of Starbucks meditate on the black paint in a Mark Rothko painting? What makes Andy Grove so paranoid?

The great leaders, she said, have looked beyond the day to day needs of their organizations. They have contemplated the end of it all -- the moment the gravedigger shovels dirt on your face -- and come away with an even more powerful vision, one that embodies elements of life, death, recklessness and liberty.

This state, which is attained only beyond the mechanics of Bennis-style leadership, may then be funneled back into the organization, enriching the quality of leadership.

Or not. Some leaders -- even those as seemingly wedded to their organizations as NewsCorp's Rupert Murdoch -- may rejoice on the day when they can walk away from it all and be truly free.

For inspiration, she looked to our country's founding fathers, who, discovered, were quite loony about liberty. Ben Franklin was so fearless he took on the nature itself, barbecuing live turkeys with live lightning. One time he actually tried to steer a tornado with a buggywhip.

Did he do this for knowledge? For new knowledge yes. To people like Franklin, existing knowledge is as often an impediment as a resource.

George Washington, with scant military training and an army of ragtag kids, discovered that you could lose almost all the battles in a war and still win the war. But you have to roll the dice and engage the enemy.

When you play with freedom, Rubin said, you cannot play it safe.

True leadership is not predictable, she said. She recounted a trip to Mistubishi headquarters. The top floor, which she thought would contain its top leaders, was empty. Everyone was gone, "out looking for new ideas."

Or Ted Turner. Told by the networks there was no use for a 24-hour news channel, Turner created a news item that only a 24-hour news channel could properly cover -- his own disappearance and likely drowning in a storm in the America's Cup race. Turner outraced a Force 10 storm to save his ship, his crew, and his future.

Just as a revolutionary product like the Apple II is like to be born in a garage, so is a great leader. George III of the Hanover family was done in by a Virginia surveyor. The pharaohs of Egypt were bested by a baby laid in the bulrushes. The Roman empire was transformed by another baby born in an animal's stall.

Another great truth of our changing times is that organizations, putatively the reason we gather together at The Masters Forum, are no longer the be-all, end-all they were two generations ago. Alfred Sloan created the idea of the modern corporation with the idea that it could allow groups of people to be bigger than any single person.

But that is no longer true of corporations. At their best they manage to be a filter for expressing ourselves. At their worst they are the enemy of this expression. She cited the case of Peter Barton, who left Liberty Media at the top of his game, saying, "I've built a great company, I've climbed Mount Everest, and I've sailed in really bad weather. Now I want to something dangerous."

In her conversations with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, Rubin uncovered nine rules for living a reckless but satisfying life:

There's no point in being conservative, Coppolla told her. You have to go for the gusto, whether it's founding a resort in Belize, storytelling, films, making wine.  

Orson Wells tried to make a movie of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and was defeated. Coppola bet everything on the Apocalypse Now project, even mortgaging his house. He had to succeed -- or be homeless.

Stop pretending your work isn’t personal. Coppola happily concedes that he is Vito Corleone, fighting with horse heads against the film industry, and he is Kurtz, the jungle Satan. An artist is always on -- if you wish to go beyond leadership, you don't distinguish between work and play.

Be innocent. Be naïve. Say yes to every possibility. Live life as one big guess!

Coppola sees his Godfather trilogy as a failure because their financial success tied him to the studios, instead of liberating him to do cheap indie work.

His company FC Brands is dedicated to the idea that industry must come to be seen as art. You do not make art by pandering to what is wanted now, but by seeing, with a visionary's eyes, what will be needed tomorrow. 

 If you must sell out, sell out to yourself -- to what is inside you and cries out to be done.

Henry Ford, the saying goes, built cities, not cars. It could be said he built an entire society around his product. "If I had Bill Gates' money," Coppola told Rubin, "I would borrow $500 billion from the bank and build a city of the future." 

Order The Princessa from Amazon.com by clicking on the title.

Avram Miller is not your typical Intel engineer. In the ten years he's been with the company, he has served a kind of knight-errant of new ideas, going where no semiconductor company had gone before. Today he's best-known as "Intel's ambassador to Hollywood," having sparked a connection between technology and entertainment bigwigs like Steven Spielberg. His story is about the power of belief -- and how he showed the world, and his own company, what might be possible.

Everything we know about management, says Avram Miller, is -- irrelevant.

There's a reason for this, and his company, Intel, is partly to blame for it. Company patriarch Gordon Moore predicted, nearly 50 years ago, that transistorization would double about every 18 months. He did not add that this speed-up of information flow would drive change in the larger society as well. Moore's Law became the metronome for a changing world.

But it did. And as a result, the circumstances facing us today are so new, and so unprecedented, and they are occurring with such rapidity, that "old school" nostrums about business are doomed to failure.

We are doing business in a speeding blender today, and people who complain about the discomfort are missing the point. The challenge isn't to slow the world down to a comfortable pace -- that ain't possible -- but to learn how to be comfortable being uncomfortable.

The history of Intel is a tale of how to do that.

Fifteen years ago, Intel was a second-rate semiconductor company whose sole claim to fame was inventing the memory chip. It was a poor manufacturer, and its business plan was basically to sell generic chips much as a coal mine sells coal, by the carload. It was as unimaginable to have a computer in one's home as to install a nuclear reactor there.

It backed into the business it is in today, creating against a chorus of naysayers a special calculator chip that could run functions on demand -- a microprocessor.

The microprocessor had a life of its own. It kept evolving, until Intel made an important decision, one that took faith: getting out of memory business the company had created, laying off 30% of the company, and refocusing on this curious new business.

In time IBM chose Intel as the maker of its PC microprocessors, and Intel was on its way. But first it had to change everything.

It meant Intel had to stop being a supplier to other businesses and become a business on its own right. Indeed, it would become the engine of an entirely new industry.

It meant Intel had to decommoditize itself, and create a brand that was as recognizable as Tide or Buick.

It had to redefine its customers, who were not IBM and Compaq and the other clonemakers. They were end users, you and me.

For his part, Miller was unable to, in his words, "find limits to technology," and this sense of limitlessness was what drew him on, where few dared follow. Intel was smart enough to let him find his own way. Digital, his previous employer, was less bold.

"I tried to get Digital to change," he said. Then, as he was being wooed by Intel, he noticed this sentence in its strategic plan: "Change is our ally. We intend to foster change."

Miller may have presided over the most breathtaking regime of change at any company ever.  It saw the "end of the runway" -- the end of the period in which the company grew according to plan, copying and miniaturizing what bigger computers did, and the beginning of the period in which it took on challenges that were unplannable and without precedent. "We were," he said, " in the business of miracles. Our task was not reduction any longer, but innovation."

Intel came up with the idea of networking of computers. It was among the first to see that the computer is a communications device, not a computing device. "That may seem straightforward now, but it was really weird at the time." It was as if the car industry had to convince customers of the necessity of roads. If it had not undertaken this proselytizing, computers would be mere personal productivity tools today.

Then Miller got the idea that people would want computers in their homes. The reaction was the same: Miller was nuts. It was a measure of his special role at Intel that Andy Grove told Miller to look into it, but no one else was to spend one second on it.

In 1989 he saw the home PC as a new medium, like TV, communications, commerce, info, education. But he had to understand how the new medium would connect. In those days all we had were America Online and Compuserve and a few services, very primitive.

Then he discovered cable television and coaxial cable, discovered its power, and began the debate over convergence that continues to this day. After seven years, it's the most important thing to ever happen to the cable industry, and explains why the big telecommunications companies are slathering to buy even tiny cable TV firms.

Next stop: Hollywood. Miller traveled to the media headquarters to convince people like Steven Spielberg of the power and relevance of the new technology. He set up a media lab (a "technological sandbox") right in Hollywood to convince the unconvinced. His stylish Italian suits and long hair finally had a place to seem appropriate.

 Intel then became a venture capital firm, investing in new ideas that would bring the future, and Intel's importance as the driver of the industry, into clearer focus. The company has invested in hundreds of startups, with the idea of priming the market of tomorrow with cash today.

 It was a great challenge, because big companies -- which Intel now was -- have never been good at identifying talent and passion in smaller companies. Intel learned to treat these small but brilliant teams with respect.

Finally, the company went global, focusing on markets destined for rapid growth, such as India and China. The U.S., while being the company's largest market today, is only 3% of the larger market. This meant abandoning their own local biases, and working with groups abroad to build new opportunities. New alliances, new languages, new visions -- all to peddle chips based, basically, on sand.

Throughout, Intel had no business plan -- just hunches, visions, and the energy of people like Avram Miller. "We learned to change, to accept differentness and even craziness. We learned we are doing business in the whole world. We learned how to have the courage to drive the market."