Being a leader Being a leader (March 11, 2005)

Pleasanton's Lynne Waldera works for enlightened leadership, multicultural dialogue
by Kathy Cordova

As a child, when Lynne Waldera had a question, she would sit down with her father and together they would look in a book for the answer.

Today, the questions are bigger. Now Waldera, 41, is asking them, not with her father in their living room in Ashtabula, Ohio, but in executive boardrooms with corporate titans and government leaders of all cultures and nationalities. And she still finds answers in books.

Waldera is a moderator with the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit organization that promotes enlightened leadership and multicultural dialogue through seminars that use great philosophical and literary writings as their foundation.

Waldera, who holds a Ph.D. in organizational psychology from George Washington University, is also president and CEO of InMomentum Inc., a consulting firm that specializes in leadership development, internal branding and culture-building for companies.

The Foothill Road home she shares with her husband, Tom, is a testament to her intellectual curiosity and global passions. There are bookshelves everywhere - "thousands and thousands of books," she says - bowling balls from a market in London, a statue from Ecuador, and photographs from exotic spots all over the world. On her coffee table are a volume by Dostoevsky, a book about leadership, and Waldera's 2004 Christmas card (mailed in early 2005) featuring her and Tom standing in front of an Iceberg in Antarctica.

Recently, Waldera sat down with Pleasanton Weekly's Kathy Cordova to talk about her quest to create better world leaders, how travel has changed her life, and her journey from that small town in Ohio.
KC: How did you get involved in the Aspen Institute? LW: When I was starting my business five years ago I attended their executive seminar. It was 2000 - the heyday of the Internet bubble - and I was trying to figure out how to be a good leader.

The seminar was amazing because it challenged a lot of my thinking about what it means to be a good leader and provide a good work environment for employees. For example, the fellow sitting next to me during the week was from Belgium and he had been part of the French Resistance movement in the '60s. Now he's running an import/export business. I remember him saying that the free market isn't the best solution, and I, of course, was totally offended by that.

But in his view the fact that we could have CEOs making 140 times what the lowest paid employee makes was not a good system. That was just one of many differing perspectives I heard that week that caused me to really think about what a good business does and is. It was such a profound experience for me and I thought it would be great if I could be part of helping others have this experience as well.
KC: Who comes to these seminars, and what do they hope to get out of them? LW: There is a range of people, and they are selected from all different locations, professions and backgrounds. It's usually a mixture of people from the business world, nonprofits, government and academics. There are about 20 people in each group, and it's highly selective. They hold about 10 seminars a year and you have to apply and they pick the right group mix for each seminar.
KC: Give us some examples. LW: Once we had this executive from a company that had a manufacturing plant in South Africa. They were trying to decide whether to close down the plant because they had a corporate policy that did not allow handguns in the workplace, but in South Africa it is very common and maybe even necessary to carry a gun to be able to get to work and not be abducted.

In the last session we had the Ambassador to Malaysia and a CEO who had a manufacturing plant in Malaysia but was never fully aware of the cultural and social implications of doing business there.

Another time I was talking to a woman from Singapore about Silicon Valley and how in innovative cultures you have to speak your mind, experiment, take risks and be willing to fail. She just looked at me and said she didn't understand why that was important. It was in that moment that I could better understand how your value system could be so different if you were growing up in that environment. Yet, they are still competing on a global basis. It's those little moments where the things that you hear and read about become very real.
KC: How do you moderate these big issues with such diverse groups? LW: The departure points are the great readings. We use readings from all time frames and all cultures, but they all offer something of a commentary on basic values - what it means to have a good society or be a good person. We read ancient works like Plato, Aristotle and Confucius, and more modern writings like Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."

We use both literature and philosophy, and we spend half of the weeklong session exploring the readings and understanding what the authors were trying to say. For example, in Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics," he has a premise that there is a good life and it comes from not consuming things, but from contemplation. That leads to a discussion about how we lead our lives and the choices we make, what kinds of organizations we build, and how we donate our time.
KC: Isn't a premise like that contradictory to the corporate goals of some of the participants who work for companies that profit from consumerism? LW: It's funny because we spend a whole day on what it means to accumulate wealth and what are the responsibilities that come with that. I think that what brings a lot of the people to the table is that they know how to be successful, but they want to be significant in their leadership roles.

A lot of people are saying, "I've been successful in business, but now I want to go beyond that and be a better leader, a better spouse, a better parent, and I want to learn how to do that in the context of all of these competing demands."
KC: So, do people come to the seminars for personal or professional reasons? LW: It's a mixture of personal and corporate motivations. There are people who are coming to try to figure out how to have a better life. There was a fellow from NASA who came right after the Challenger disaster. Part of the conclusion they came to about the Challenger accident was that they had built a work environment that didn't allow for debate or dialogue or conflict. He was put in charge of helping to transform the culture at NASA, so he was coming because he thought if he could explore the different competing views of the world then he could be better at leading the organization and surfacing different ideas.

What all of us who have experienced the Aspen Institute share is a real deep desire to be in better touch with our values and better understand how to create good societies or institutions based on those values.
KC: How did you become interested in organizational psychology? LW: In high school I wrote to the American Psychological Society and got a pamphlet about careers in psychology that described all the different jobs in the field. I felt like I was pretty good at math, and pretty good with people, and that I needed to do something that combined both, and organizational psychology seemed to be a good fit. I can't imagine a better job because it is intellectual and theoretical and helping people work better together. I can use my psychologist skills to help people have better conversations and resolve conflicts, and I can also do interesting research projects.
KC: Not only do you moderate these seminars with people from all over the world, but you have traveled to some pretty exotic locations yourself. How did your wanderlust develop? LW: Even though my father only had an eighth-grade education, he was a curious person. I remember once when I was about 12 or 13 we took a car trip to Montana. After growing up in the flat, gray landscape of Midwest Ohio, seeing the Rocky Mountains rise up on the horizon made it instantly clear to me that there were other worlds to explore.
KC: How have your travels influenced you? LW: Traveling makes me recognize how united we all are. Yet our different histories and cultures shape our opinions and how we see the world.

On our cruise to Antarctica, the British captain of the ship took us to task for America's obsession for freedom above all else. He said, "I would rather have a tyranny and have control and have law and order than have chaos and freedom."

I thought that was so interesting because we (in the United States) take for granted that freedom is everything and there are a lot of places in the world that don't start from that point.

I think last year when we visited Russia it was the most profound. To get close to people and learn what it's like being in a country that hasn't had freedom or even basic respect for people. Our guide's mother was a pensioner and she's not that happy about freedom. Instead of having someone pay for her (food) and electricity, she's trying to manage on about $50 a month. They had a family dinner and they had to save up so they could split a Snickers bar for dessert.

If you haven't traveled and you don't have knowledge of other cultures, you can be pretty cavalier about our system being the best.
KC: How did you end up in Pleasanton? LW: We moved here from Chicago in 1995. The Internet was taking off and I accepted a position with a high tech public relations firm in Palo Alto. Pleasanton struck us as a small town with Midwestern values, yet it is at the epicenter of the technology explosion - the best of all worlds.
KC: Thank you so much for talking with us. I know that you'll be in Aspen moderating a seminar when this is published. LW: Yes, thank you. It was my pleasure.

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