Princessa: Machiavelli for Women by Harriet Rubin
Last week, the Humanities and Sciences department played host to Harriet Rubin, Art Center’s first Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow.
Rubin founded Currency, an imprint of Doubleday. She has written for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, was a senior writer and columnist for Fast Company (a “Currency Magazine” prototype became Fast Company), and is the author of Soloing: Realizing Your Life’s Ambition, Princessa: Machiavelli for Women and Dante in Love: The World’s Greatest Poem and How it Made History.
Rubin spent a week at the College spurring discussions both in and out of classrooms; and on Wednesday she presented an Art Center Dialogues lecture titled “The Secret Life of Leaders,” which included a thought-provoking discussion on the nature of leadership and the powerful role that poet-priests play as societal influencers.
Below are highlights from her lecture:
On the word “leadership”:
“Leadership” is a word we use a lot, but it is sounding increasingly archaic, like “zoo” or “Triceratops” or “mini-skirts.” The media, Washington, business schools, colleges all talk reverently about leadership, but why? This Monday I heard two wonderful presentations by students in Gerardo Herrera’s class on marketing Coffee-mate to millenials. And it occurred to me that leadership may be just like Coffee-mate. Maybe that’s what we should do with leadership. We need to rebrand it.
On the actual power of “leadership”:
We’re living in a bottom-up world. Social media undermines centralized power. Flash mobs, Kickstarter, sleeper cells, tribal consciousness, shadow governments. The most-watched TV anchor Brian Williams, the leader in TV news, is revealed as no leader at all. I keep wondering if secretly nobody wants to be a leader. Maybe Brian Williams created the circumstances of his own firing. Maybe he really wanted to get out of his soulless role, and the only way he thought he could do it was by kicking it all apart.
On following your mentors:
David Leach, the emeritus director of the ACGME (Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education), the accrediting board for physicians in this country, gave me this wonderful piece of advice: “Don’t follow your mentors, follow your mentor’s mentors.” So when you ask a question like, “Why is Obama the way he is?”, you could think about Obama, but then you could also triangulate and think, well, what about his spiritual father, Dr. King? And what about Dr. King’s spiritual father, Moses? If you keep going back down the line, you get to a pretty interesting way to think about any situation.
On the office of leadership:
Anthropologist James Frasier said the office of leadership begins with the poet-priest. Not with the tribal chief, not with the canniest hunter out in the field, but with the poet-priest. The person whose words could heal or poison. Poet-priests are the mentor’s mentors of leadership.
Dante in Love by Harriet Rubin
On poetry as leadership text:
If you look way back into the tunnel of time, you see that the education of leaders is in poetry. Homer’s epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, were taught to five generations of Athenian youth, our forefathers who created democracy, beauty, tragedy, comedy and the Olympics. These poems are leadership texts. We don’t read them that way anymore, yet they contain amazing secrets into the heart of leadership.
On poetry trumping strategy:
The character Homer loves best is Odysseus. He gives him the longest life. Odysseus is the sole survivor of the Trojan War. He wins the war by strategy, but the next challenge Homer sets upon Odysseus is to travel through all these treacherous byways and pathways to get home. If you read it carefully, you see that Homer is teaching Odysseus how to think like a poet. He’s teaching him how to speak beauty to power. Every time Odysseus tries to be more clever than the next guy—to be more strategic, to have more agency—he’s blown further off course. But when he can seduce people with a song or a story, he makes his path much easier.
On opportunities and new beginnings:
Homer doesn’t talk about how to solve problems. He talks about new beginnings as a way to deal with complicated matters. He talks about difficult opportunities. Grab them, he says, before you can even think about them, before you can even come up with a strategy. Opportunities are so evanescent. Forget planning, they’ll be gone.
On being lost:
Virgil is another poet who lives hundreds of years after Homer and he rewrites Homer’s tale. His Homeric character is Aeneas, who has lost the Trojan War to Odysseus. Aeneas flees his burning homeland of Troy on a ship and he doesn’t know where he’s bound. He’s lost in every sense. But Virgil shows us Aeneas finding his destiny, which is creating something without a plan or preparation. What happens is that Aeneas finds a new land that will be Rome. Here’s the beautiful trick: Rome will overcome Greece. In other words, Aeneas will get revenge on the Greeks who defeated him and burned his homeland, because Rome will become a greater power than Greece ever was.
On Virgil’s influence in America:
When our own big daddies, the Puritans, set sail from what they considered burning England, burning in sin and corruption and prejudice. When they set sail for the new land, they took with them Virgil’s Aeneid. The way they told their story about leaving was to tell of founding a new promised land, a shining city on the hill, the new Rome. And when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Indpendence, he thought long and hard about how Virgil gave language and told the story. Again, a new beginning. Not how to solve a problem, not how to fix England, but how to create a new beginning.
Sponsored by the Toyota Motor Corporation, Art Center Dialogues is the most recent manifestation of a decades-long lecture series at the College designed to catalyze creativity with criticality and community by bringing in guests that inspire discussion and broaden perspectives. This term, the series’ focus is on creative leadership, and the next guest is Dede Gardner, president of Plan B Entertainment and producer of 12 Years a Slave, Selma and The Normal Heart, who will speak Wednesday, March 11, 2015.
