Tuesday, February 28, 2006, "Owning Courage," Gus Lee.

MS. MacDONALD: I hope you are as eager as I to welcome Gus Lee to this marvelously optimistic and forward-thinking group of educators. When you review the presentations we've had so far at this conference, we've heard from persons of integrity. We've heard from persons who are centered. And we're going to hear from another. This is just really wonderful for us.

Gus Lee is a best-selling author of five highly praised books, and a nationally recognized ethicist and leadership consultant. He's combined both thrillers and biographies, No Physical Evidence, and a family nonfiction memoir, Chasing Hepburn.

And of course, we are all going to go and buy Courage, which is just out, and we have prepublication copies, which he will be glad to sign, if you have purchased one of those.

He's been on television with Harry Smith, on CNN with Bernard Shaw, on NPR lots and lots, and he's written for Time, advised the US Air Force's Academy Center for Character Development, and he's a keynote of West Point's National Conference on Ethics.

China Boy was a national best seller, as you know, a Literary Guild selection, the New York Times best in 1991, the American Library Association's best for the last 50 years, and is in its 15th printing.

He and Lee Mendelson co-wrote the screenplay, "Honor and Duty," which was selected by the Book of the Month Club, and Chicago Tribune's ten best novels of 1994. It's required reading at West Point, and will be a film.

Gus has been the vice president of Organizational Development for Endur, and helped set up a leadership and team culture as senior executive for the state bar of California. He managed continuing education for 140,000 lawyers, focusing on ethics and management. He was deputy director of the California District Attorney's Association, and lead trainer for the state's prosecutors. He was a supervising district attorney and an acting deputy attorney general.

His work now is very much bound up in corporations and in helping corporations and organizations, such as we have, learn to lead well.

China Boy is about courage from the student's point of view. If you have not taught Courage, it needs to be in your school curriculum. Tony was a model for us. He modeled respect, fair treatment, persistence, patience, hope, persistence, patience, affection, persistence. Courage is how the pupil practices and guides others in that quality, guides us in remaining true to our highest principles as we lead others. As we begin the morning's journey, let me just read the quote from C.S. Lewis which begins chapter one. "Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue, and it's a testing point."

Gus, thank you for coming.

MR. LEE: Thank you, Margaret. What an honor to be with you. It's an honor to speak about courage, and it's a privilege to speak about courage to people of principle. First of all, isn't that bio ridiculous? No one person could do that unless that person were my age, and even then, it can't possibly be true. In fact, there's a misstatement there. "Honor and Duty," the screenplay, the movie, just like "China Boy," the movie, just like "Tiger Tail," the movie, and "No Physical Evidence," the movie, and "Chasing Hepburn," the movie, are not active. They are all back-burnered. They're all in development and redevelopment. So this wonderful optimistic statement by Margaret that "Honor and Duty" will be a film is yet to be determined.

It's an interesting question. Why haven't these stories been able to translate into film? Think of it. When was the last time that you saw a movie, not to mention a successful movie, in which the central character is a young ethnic minority and he basically has to carry the film? That's not a common Hollywood formula, and as a consequence, it remains in development.

One of the advantages of having been in law enforcement is that even though I have turned in my badge, I still get the best stories. So I want to share one with you. Did anyone ever hear of Bob Grogan? One of the best homicide detectives in the western world. But there's someone even better than he, and when this ace, world-class number one homicide detective and his sidekick went camping in Yosemite last summer, this world-class detective found himself awakening about 2:00 in the morning.

He looked above his head and he saw the constellations. He studied them for a moment quite critically, and then he shook his sidekick, who was sleeping next to him, and he said, "Watson, Watson. Wake up."

Dr. Watson burbled into wakefulness. "What? What? What, Holmes? What?"

Holmes said, "Watson, I want you to look above and tell me what you deduce."

So Dr. Watson did that. He got his glasses on, looked above, he saw billions and billions of stars, and he said, "What do I deduce? Holmes, this is what I deduce. I see billions of stars, and I'm thinking that if only one of them were a sun as ours, it could have planets acting as satellites around it, as our own planet revolves around our sun, and it would only take one of those planets out of the billions to have sentient life. That would mean at this moment, as we are gazing upon them, beings could be gazing upon us. How's that for a deduction?"

And Holmes shakes his head and he says, "Watson, you missed the obvious. Someone has stolen our tent."

So a couple of things are obvious to us. Let's see if this is true. Isn't it true that Moses and Confucius -- whom the Chinese know as K'ung-fu-tzu, Confucius being the Latin -- and Aristotle had it right? What did they get right? What is so obvious? What if it's this? What if what they said, that intellectual achievement, intellectual acuity, intellectual giftedness without character produces tyranny, a Greek word for misery. Intellectual achievement without character produces tyranny. Tyranny in relationships. First, tyranny within the self, where high core values and principles are subordinated to need, described by achievement. Secondly, in families, where families are no longer just and fair and safe, but are run by tyrants. And third, in our organizations and, therefore, in society itself.

Is it obvious that they were right? Or as Confucius would say, that intellect without moral rectitude produces not life, but subjugation. Is that true? Is that obvious?

If that's true, then we live not in a current era in the beginning of the 21st century, but in a human era. Ever since the ancients came up with this 2,500 years ago, if not longer -- Moses was 3,500 years ago -- we live in a human era in which fear establishes the tyranny. It's not an American adventure. It's not a concoction just of this present moment. But what if fear does, in fact, inform much of what we do, however well-intentioned? Then we would have an opportunity, a courageous opportunity, to do different behaviors in an intentional way.

So I'm going to talk, if that's okay, about three things. First is to really challenge you, you who do this amazing job of education, of leading, of developing, of serving, of growing and cultivating. How can I possibly have any standing to challenge you? But I'm going to do it anyway. I'm going to challenge you in the following way. I want you to be challenged in how you think of leadership, and I want you to be challenged in the degree to which you intentionally impart courage to your students through your faculty, through your communities, through your parents, through your boards.

Second, I'm going to suggest the measurable, observable, learnable behaviors in courage that you could then choose to impart in a very intentional way.

And lastly, I want to suggest, petition you, to support each other in a very intentional way regarding this initiative, because, as you know, leading is very difficult. What do leaders do? Leaders solve moral problems. The problems that no one likes and everyone wishes to avoid, you solve every day. It's hard enough to do by yourself. When you take on a new initiative, if you choose to, which is the intentional conveyance of behaviors of courage to your faculties and to your students, I wouldn't try it alone. Courage is really an act of relationalism. Courage cannot exist in a vacuum. It's very difficult to show true moral courage without moral company, without being in the company of others.

You know why I'm here. It's not because I'm an expert in anything, because I'm really not. It's because I'm just like you. Like you, I grew up in a Chinese immigrant family, in an all-black inner city hood where, like you, I struggled to be a successful black male youth. Isn't this true? I mean, how many -- see? Where are the hands?

So what does that have to do with anything? Well, I think that because I learned cowardice very, very early, and I bowed down to cowardice and I made daily sacrifices to it from my own skin, my own heart, my own viscera, that that gave me standing to learn about courage as modeled and demonstrated by others. I became the sponge for moral courage because I was such a dramatic coward.

You know what I was really great at when I was five? I was a super-duper little Chinese kid. I knew calligraphy, I could quote some of the analects, such as Lunyu and K'ung-fu-tzu. I was a great pleasure to my mother because I was her only son. She had taken great risks to get the family out of China, my three sisters out of wartime enemy-occupied China. This very indoor woman had taken her three kids 1,500 miles to India and from India across the Pacific in wartime conditions to the United States. She was a woman of enormous courage. And she was very gratified to have a son, because she believed that the Confucian system had followed us, and that is, that of all of her children, only the son is responsible for caring for the parents when they are too old to sustain themselves. The truth, of course, if you study current Chinese sociology, is: Who are the children supporting the elders? Are they the sons? No. The daughters. Has this always been true? Yeah, pretty much. But that great fiction exists that you must take care of the first-born son and pamper him and spoil him because he's your future, when, in fact, your future is dependent upon your daughters.

In any event, my mom, my mommy, hoped that I would be this different Chinese son who would take care of her when she could no longer cook for me.

But everything changed when I was five and I went from super-duper little Chinese indoor kid to being thrust into the street of the panhandle of San Francisco, which was an African-American ghetto, not speaking English, not to mention not speaking black English, legally blind, asthmatic, tubercular, spine curved, flat-footed, and a physical incompetent. Every time a kid came up to me and tried to play sports or challenge me to a fight, I wanted to pull out my brush and show them a seven-stroke character, but that didn't seem to win many points. So I was a kid who caught baseballs with my face, screamed and started crying before a blow was landed, yelled Chinese warning words at basketballs, and could be flattened by the smallest kid -- or even by girls -- fed up by my weeping. So I was a very entertaining kid.

And one of those days, I found myself in my familiar position, prone, face down, on the concrete of McAllister Street. McAllister is where most of the best street fights occurred. And what I discovered is, if I just lay flat and played possum, that kids would still punch me and rouse me and kick me in an effort to get me to react. See, they were trying to be relational, and I didn't want to be in a relationship. And so I would give the obligatory grunt or moan or whimper.

On this particular day, I was being touched differently, and I didn't like that. I didn't like being touched at all, much less this way, but I was being touched in a different way, and I found myself being lifted to my feet. I was very myopic, and I was looking in the eyes of the toughest razor-sharp street fighter in the hood, a kid named Toussaint. And I trembled, because I knew I'd been lifted up for some horrifically evil purpose.

And he was brushing me off, I was convinced, in order to land a haymaker that would pass me into last year or last month. And he thrust his hand toward me and he said, "Shake."

And I knew then he was weird. I knew that much. So I shook. He said, "No," and he grabbed my hand and he molded his fingers around mine and squeezed it. And I winced, because I knew this was the beginning of something terrible. And then he gave me my hand back.

Later he asked me, "Do you know how to be quiet? Do you know how not to cry?"

No, I didn't know that one. So he taught me the "how" of that. Later he asked, "Do you know how to smile?"

I had forgotten that, so he showed me how. He asked me if I knew how to walk. I didn't know that, either. I figured that if I put my chin down and I hunched my body forward, that I would become invisible and, therefore, I could not be seen and could not be pounded.

And he said, "No, you want to hold your head up, roll your shoulders back."

And it actually physically hurt to do that, and now I'm bruised a bit, just because my spine had not been configured that way. And he grabbed my shoulders -- I didn't have shoulders, but where the shoulders should have been -- and he tried to roll them back. And he taught me how to walk.

So by the time I was 14, I had a street strut. I could walk like a black kid. I could play basketball like a black kid. When I ended up on an all-white basketball team, I was a starter because I knew black roundball. I learned it from Toussaint.

He also taught me how to laugh, although my efforts at laughing were never very convincing. But it would always make him laugh, and he laughed like a donkey and I laughed like a jackass, so we got along real well.

But the one thing Toussaint could not teach me was how to fight. He'd keep showing me how to hold my hands, where to put my feet, how to hold the gaze of the other kid, particularly Big Willie Mac, who was a professional bully of the neighborhood. But Big Willie would roll down on me like Judgment Day and I would take to my feet, and all that would guarantee is at the end of the running -- because Big Willie was faster than I was -- Big Willie would be angry and I'd be out of breath when I got the beating.

So I ended up in the YMCA boxing program at the age of seven, and I went to the Y the way Charles I went to his beheading. Suffice it to say, I did not use my newly acquired skills of smiling and laughing. I found myself in the gym, I was told that's the lost-and-found bin, and it took me half an hour to put on the smallest set of gym trunks and tank top with my black socks and my scuffed Buster Brown street shoes. I know that after I was dressed, I looked like a toothpick inside a tutu.

I somehow found my way up to the fourth floor gym, and I knew when I got upstairs that I'd get beaten up, and I was right. And if someone sneezed on the fifth floor, the tank top would fall off, because the straps required shoulders.

Anyway, I found myself standing in front of this bearlike man. He had hair all over. He had hair on his neck and he had hair on his arms, hair on his chest. I was fascinated that hair could grow in such places. A very big man. He looked up at me, and then he looked up at me again and after a triple take he said, "Ah, crap, kid. You make me want to cry."

So I waited for his eyes to get wet, but they didn't. He said, "Look. You got to be seven to be in the program. What are you? Five?"

And not having any smarts at all at the time, I said, "No, I'm seven," trying to sound black.

And he said, "It can't be. If you're seven, then I'm the damn Pope."

So on top of being a boxing instructor, on top of being a seagoing Marine who had made landings in the Pacific in World War II, on top of once having been married and the father of a son who was my age, and having lost both wife and son because of infidelities as a professional fighter, he had also been the Pope. So this is my new boxing instructor.

He and the other members of the faculty undertook, across the next ten years, to teach me every sport I hated, which was all of them. It was boxing, wrestling, swimming, gymnastics, basketball, and weight lifting, which I experienced as bleeding and choking and spazzing and falling.

So how does a kid who is built for cowardice, built to run, learn courage? Simply by seeing it, by having it modeled in front of him, and then, as Margaret would say, by unlimited persistence, unlimited positive respect by a teacher, a teacher who would not accept the cowardice or the reluctance of a pupil, who would be absolutely implacable and undeterred in his or her commitment to maximizing the success of each student, including the worst one.

At 17, when I ended up at West Point, I was singled out by one of the most remarkable professors the Academy would see in the 20th century. He had recently returned from a year of combat. This guy stood 6'4", had a graduate degree in missile science from USC, and would go on to become internationally renowned.

He looked at the 700 members of my West Point class and he singled me out, not because I had talent, but because I lacked it. Not because I demonstrated promise, but because I was without it. Not because I demonstrated industry, but because I showed sloth. Not because I showed courage, but because I had the glimmers and the shadows of cowardice still clinging to my bones.

And that's when H. Norman Schwarzkopf said to me, "Mr. Lee, what are you doing this weekend after parade?"

Weekends at West Point were a misnomer. They went from about 2:00 in the afternoon on Saturday to about 6:00 in the morning on Sunday, but that was a weekend.

Anyway, I said, "Sir, I was just going to hit the gym and do some stuff."

Very articulate answer. And he said, "No, you're not." And the West Point expression is, "You're driving around in my quarters." He was a bachelor, BOQ, Lincoln Hall. "You're coming to my BOQ and we're going to do some AI," additional instruction. "You're going to learn the mechanics of engineering better than what you have been doing so far."

And thus began this relationship with Major Schwarzkopf that was an exact knockoff of my ten-, almost eleven-year relationship with Tony Gallo, my boxing coach.

I have to say, you're all here and you're all leaders and you are principals of principle because Tonys and Normans came into your life. I'm an author in my second language because of someone named Marjorie Marshall. When I was 17, I was a senior in high school in San Francisco. I had been, by that time, an assistant instructor in boxing for four years, and I had it in my head that I was a very tough kid, that I could teach fighting to kids who were cowards, because I was no longer a coward, or so I told myself. I didn't have one of those wonderful Austin-like families full of eccentricities. It was a busted, broken, you know, broken-back family. I thought I was on my own. I thought everything that had come my way was a product not of Tony's care, not of the YMCA faculty's care, not the gift of the Third Baptist Church, African-American Church or Zion AME, another black church that had accepted me, but I had somehow done it all by my own guts. What a terrible lie. But anyway, that's who I thought I was.

And I was like one of the toughest kids in the high school, or so I thought. So I know when Mrs. Marshall looked at me in her honors English composition class, that she saw a challenge. This is a kid who has all kinds of attitude and faces, and when he found out that we're going to read Pride and Prejudice, and Pride and Prejudice was not about boxing and racism, but it was about dating in the old days, and this Gus Lee makes this disgusted face and starts elbowing his buddies about what a loser this class is going to be, and Gus Lee, the 17-year-old immigrant kid, looks at Mrs. Marshall, because she wears extremely formal wear, and she wears very heavy makeup, and she was not thin when thin was in. And she could tell, looking in my eyes, that I had no respect for her. She was not a physical specimen who'd go three rounds in the ring. I didn't honor her. I didn't respect her. And I looked tough -- or I tried to look tough. And she would just look at me the way Toussaint looked in my eyes and would say, "Gus, are you trying on this? Are you with me right now?"

And I'd give her all my, "Back off." See the chip? See the chip? It's a sequoia tree. "Back off." People don't look in my eyes. Not unless they want trouble. Undeterred. Implacable. Courageous.

You know what she was saying to me? Not so much in direct dialogue, but what I was getting in my funny little broken heart was, "I respect you. Not because you have earned it. You haven't earned a lot. You're kind of a punk, really. God gave you some brains so you could slide through on stuff, you know, but you don't have diligence. I don't see a lot of character in you. I see a lot of brash. I see showoff. I see someone who can't wait to get into a fight so you can show off your boxing. You think you're going to impress girls that way. You are making an impression, but you're not impressing them. But I respect you despite all of your developmental challenges. I respect you. You know something else? I need you. You're my student, so I need you. And lastly, every day you show up in class and you're a little less sarcastic, there's a microsecond before you show your disdain for me, and I'm very proud of you."

She converted me. Her courage, not her intellect, not her schooling, not her knowledge of Austin, but her moral courage changed me. Isn't this true? Isn't this how we all learn courage? Because it is a learnable competence. We are not born with it.

What was interesting about me at 17, I hadn't changed that much from birth. I was still demanding, self-centered, crying, worried, and wet, demanding that somehow the world accommodate my extreme needs, thinking of myself as being heroic and smart and tough.

There it is. "I respect you, regardless of what you bring to the table. You're a human being. I honor you. You are my student. You are my colleague. You are in my community. I need you. And just for showing up, I'm very proud of you."

So the challenge is this. Isn't it true, not you, but most of your peers in America today, naturally focus upon National Merit Scholar finalists, focus upon the honor students, the high achievers, the top athletes, the best artists? We reinforce efforts, diligence, and achievement, and we tend to do it within the academic scholastic realm.

What did Moses, Confucius, and Aristotle tell us? Intellectual capacity and achievement without character produces tyranny, produces misery, produces not the robust life in which we genuinely experience happiness, but one in which we're constantly turning the hamster wheel, striving for more and more and more and finding how empty it is, but now we're habituated.

Aristotle had many faults and he grew up in a time when an association like NAPSG was unimaginable. But nonetheless, he had some virtues. He realized, because he was traveling, and had known Medes, and grown up in Macedonia, and worked with Athenians, fought against Spartans, and knew people from Thrace, that all people, regardless of whence they had come, want to be happy, and in his empirical surveys of people from around the world, different cultures, he determined that if they had three things, all people thought they would be happy. What do you think those three things were? You actually know this. Money, wealth. Health? No, health didn't make it. Isn't that interesting? Power. We who have become very unhealthy recognize the importance of that. But in the classical world, it was wealth, power, and third, a very direct answer -- there's no cutting around the edge here -- physical pleasure.

So if you have wealth, you have power, and you have physical pleasure, the people of the ancient world said they'd be happy. Not only that, if they had a lot of it, they'd be delirious. Does this sound like anyone we know?

So what he did, of course, is that he interviewed those who had access to all three, and he indexed happiness according to level of discord, level of enjoyment, level of laughter, pleasure in small things, absence of conflict, and continuity of families. Honor and respect within the family.

So what did he find in the aristocrats of the ancient world who had access to all three? Were they very happy? No happier than today's wealthy are. A UN study of happiness and contentment reveals the old Aristotelian truth, the Confucian truth, the Mosaic truth, and that is: Wealth, power, and pleasure do not invite happiness. In fact, they act, serve, as deterrents.

Isn't that ironic? Yet how many of our students strive to achieve all three, thinking that then they will be happy. So how intentional should you be in focusing on that which does make people happy? Aristotle said, "Who are the happy people?" Who are the people who maintain wonderful families, what we would call functional families, where there's ample love, safety, harmony, encouragement, support, understanding, empathy, care, love? The families with virtue, with arÍte, with courageous virtue. Because as Margaret read C.S. Lewis' statement about courage, it's not merely one of the virtues. It is the sum of all virtues at the testing point.

I have worked as an executive, as an Army officer, now as a consultant, with leaders, with executives now numbering in the thousands. I said in the book Courage it was hundreds, because thousands sounds so hubristic, or it sounds so elderly. But I have worked with thousands across 50 industries from every continent of the planet. And that's a lot of experience.

What causes dysfunction within families, within organizations, within schools? See, when I started out in leadership, really at the YMCA, later at West Point, law enforcement, and then in corporations, I was convinced initially that leadership was about strength. I mean, I got fooled because Tony weighed 225 pounds, was a former light heavy, could bench 450, could run 20 miles, and this is the guy -- he became my father, so obviously, strength, physical strength, had a tremendous amount to do with being a leader. And you can't teach boxing if you don't have a certain amount of physical capacity. So I created that algorithm very quickly.

So I said, "Okay, you got to be strong. So at West Point, no one is going to out-physical me."

Of course, I didn't know how to study, I didn't know how to develop my own character, but I got that part of it. Okay. It's not physical strength.

Then I said, "You know what it is? It's really being smart. It's really about having more intelligence,so you can come up with the answer faster than anyone else."

And then I saw really smart people in my class, 100 of my classmates at West Point, cheating. Well, a lot of them were really smart, and they all got kicked out on honor. So I said, "Okay, smarts and getting good grades -- maybe that's not everything. Okay, it's communication."

This was the '60s. Carl Rogers was huge. The Army picked up on Carl Rogers. So it's really about the whole self, and understanding, and empathy. I said, "That's it."

Then I saw people who were very understanding who made lousy decisions, hired the wrong people, folded under pressure. And I said, "Okay, it's ethics. It's holding to a standard regardless of what's going on."

And the deeper I went with that, when I became an ethicist, against my will, when I became an ethicist by being a four-times whistleblower, I realized. The light went on. It's courage. Moses, Confucius, and Aristotle were right. C.S. Lewis was right. Like Churchill said, "The first, the first, of all human qualities is courage, for it alone guarantees the others". Then I got it. Because I saw people who were well-educated, who were well-meaning, who were ethical, they followed the rules, they did not cheat or lie or steal. They had experience. They wanted to produce good results. And I saw them make lousy decisions, because they were afraid.

That was a shock, because I thought I was the only one who was afraid. But the tyranny of fear has been with us, I submit, since the beginning. How good is fear as a decision-maker? Good? How many think good? You know, the NTSB, in studying airplane crashes, aircraft failures, black box work, says it's usually pilot error. And if you look at pilot error, you break it down, and you try to follow the popcorn trail from that, you'll find fear: Fear that they'll look bad, fear of a bad landing, fear of being embarrassed.

Are you kidding me? The fears that your students experience are the fears we continue to feel. Fear of abandonment, which becomes fear of isolation. Fear of being embarrassed, of not being cool. I work with CEOs who are fearful of not being cool. It's an adolescent emotion, but it takes courage to disarm it and replace it with something else. Fear of failure.

Here's what's ironic. If you think of the Skillings and the Lays and the Reguses and the Fionas and the Ebbers, the people who have splashed in the headlines in the last six years, who have brought down 3 million jobs and $3 trillion in value, they're all smart, they're all well-educated, all successful, they all had vision, communication. They're enormously "competent" people, but every one of them would fail a character filter. Every one of them failed the character filter.

So this is the challenge. When you want to bring out the best in your students through your wonderful faculty, what if you took some of the energy out of the academic bucket and intentionally poured it into the character bucket, the courage bucket? Starting, of course, with yourself, because if you don't pour into your own, then no one will follow. It will just be an interesting idea. What if you did that?

I think that Moses and Aristotle and Confucius and Churchill and C.S. Lewis and J.M. Barrie and everyone else who has passed ideas on courage on to us would say, "Bravo."

See, Aristotle's Lyceum -- when he didn't get the job, when Plato retired and he gave the academy to his nephew instead of to Aristotle -- and the academy disappeared under the nephew -- the Lyceum grew into the model for the western university. Aristotle created two pillars that did not exist in the academy. The academy was about the brain. Aristotle said, "No, there are two pillars, not one. One is the brain. The other is the heart. One is intellect, the other is courage. One is thinking. The other is character."

And Aristotle was the guy who said, "Character, not brains." Character.

When Schwarzkopf saw me when I was a cadet at the Academy, he was working on only one thing, and that was my character. The road to my character was through my study habits or lack thereof. But he was about my character. And that's how, in my opinion, Norm Schwarzkopf is able to accomplish as much as he did. What is unknown outside of the Army is that General Schwarzkopf's highest achievements were not in combat. They were in his reform of an Army that was totally split by racism, drug abuse, violence, internal warfare, hatred of authority, distrust of officers, and loathing of noncommissioned officers. A split between black and white, between brown and black, between yellow and everyone, between white and everyone else; between south, east, west, middle, northeast. No one got along, and everyone had been trained to kill each other.

And using character more than brains, Norm Schwarzkopf, Colin Powell, and others reformed the Army from within. They had to fire very senior people who were long invested in the system. They had to face enormous fear. But that's what General Schwarzkopf at his best is about: Character. And I would say every time he's had a crisis in his life, it's because he figured he'd brain his way through.

He is a technical genius. West Point was very easy for him. It was like prep school for him. So was grad school. No big deal. But every time he went to his intellectual bucket in an effort to solve a moral problem, he ended up with a crisis, and then had to back out and go to the character bucket. Who knows who Warren Bennis is? Who is Warren Bennis? Who is he?

MS. BENNETT: A thinker about who's great in business.

MR. LEE: Yes, a leading thinker. In my mind, Warren Bennis is really the guru of modern leadership theory worldwide. I think he's the number one cap for that. He's a business prof at USC. Bennis says this. Of the thousands of executives with whom he's worked and the thousands of organizations, not all of which are corporate, many of which are nonprofit, which include universities and schools, include government agencies, of the thousands of organizations and executives with whom he's worked, he has not found one senior executive who has failed for lack of technical competence. All failures are failures of character.

So my challenge to you again, if you wish to prepare your students not just to succeed, not just to compete, not just to achieve -- because that's in our culture. If you tried to take it out, you couldn't. It's in our bloodstream, it's in our DNA, it throbs all the time. But if you really wish them to succeed in life, to have arÍte, so they are robustly successful and happy in their relationships, in their families, and in their organizations and their communities, then I think your intentional focus on, first, your development of the behaviors of courage, and then in your faculty, and then in your students, is the great adventure of your leadership. It's the great payoff. I'm going to suggest even it is the true cause of your calling.

You are principals and heads because of principle, not authority, because of the ability that you would wish for every one of your students and every member of your administration, and that is, to demonstrate principled conduct under pressure, to act spontaneously in the right when the easier wrong is whistling and saying, "Cut the corner. You'll look really good if you do it."

That ability to have courage within means a robust life regardless of economic, political, or sociological conditions. Martin Luther King, who did not grow up with a lot of advantages, who had the wrong-colored skin in the wrong country at that time -- or so it seemed -- said, "Cowardice is denying fear and thereby being mastered by it. Courage is facing fear." It's just facing it. "It's facing fear and thereby mastering it."

Is courage gender-specific, height-specific, background-specific, ethnicity-specific? No. It is the first of all human qualities, and without it, our ability to show compassion, empathy, diligence, breaks when we're fearful. How many of us are empathetic with our best students and our best members of faculty, and not at our best when with our worst students and our worst faculty, demonstrating unintentionally the exact thing we do not wish our students to show.

But because of fear that we have to hurry now, we don't have time, fear that we're going to look bad, fear that something will go wrong, fear that the board will not like it, whatever that fear is, fear will make things worse, fear that we can't solve this conflict, fear that we'll lose funding. We act in a precipitous manner and that's why courage is the foundation. I really believe this.

For every good behavior, for every great behavior within our human arsenal, does not happen unless we have courage. Because otherwise, we're just good when it fits us, when it's easy. When it gets bad, we're not that pleasant to be around. It takes courage to demonstrate principled conduct under pressure.

So what are those behaviors? Let's put it this way. This aisleway is a river. And I'm doing this very arbitrarily. It has nothing to do with who you are or where you're seated. But really, I'm going to suggest that humankind falls into two populations, one on this bank of the river, and the other over here. And because this is how I visualize it in my graph work, this is the near bank, and this is the far bank.

On the near bank, we find human qualities of honesty, honor, ethics, and lawfulness. It's good stuff; right? That gets us over here. Honesty means telling the truth. Honor means not lying, cheating, or stealing. An honorable person classically does not have to do anything other than avoid commissive wrongs. Okay? Ethics merely means following the rules of your organization or your profession, and lawfulness is obeying the laws.

So it's technically possible -- and it happens every day -- for us to be on this side of the river and to have no courage, because it basically just means we're not going to do anything wrong. This is the definition of a good person. And if you study academic cheating, such as the Center for Academic Integrity under Don McCabe's work -- our greeter is from Duke -- what percentage of American high school students cheat? 70? 75. 75. A horrific number. Nancy Cole. Who knows who Nancy Cole is, Dr. Cole? Former president of ETS. You know, the SAT, GRE, MCAT, LSAT. Nancy Cole says we are a nation of cheaters. Most of the money that ETS spends is in security to defeat cheating, not in testing quality. Most of it goes to security.

So you can be on this side, and that's remarkable, because you're a good person, you're not a cheater. And many of us feel pretty good about that. I remember when I strove to become a good person, and I declined many miles up to reach that status. But what we also know is that under pressure to produce results, good people will default to survival. They'll let other people lie, cheat, or steal. They'll let sexual harassment occur. They'll let racism exist. They'll let cooking the books become routine.

I have a classmate who demonstrated enormous physical courage in combat, and as a VP of Enron, he was sitting in a committee meeting in Houston when he first heard this creative accounting plan unroll where they would take enormous amounts of Enron debt and lay it off to wholly-owned subsidiaries offshore and pretend they didn't own those offshore entities. Later it became, Let's tap our reserve funds in order to raise the price of Enron on the street, which you can't do with reserve funds. It's contingencies, a combat readiness fund. You can't use it to pump the price as if it's revenue, because it's not revenue.

And he sat there and he said, "Okay, that's wrong." He discerned, "That's wrong." And he said, "You know, that would be wrong and that's so wrong, that would be" -- what do you call it -- "that would be SEC wrong. That would be prison-time wrong."

And a VP, one of his peers, turned to him and said, "Hey, Biff," making up a name, "I thought you were a team player."

And my classmate, good person, did not cross the river of his fears to say, "I am being a team player. You have never seen me play better team ball than right now, because this isn't two cents price per share on the table. This is the soul of the company. Let's be honest. It's your soul and it's my soul. Let's be real careful about what we do here. I want to understand everything you guys are saying because what I think I'm hearing sounds like fraud. So straighten me out. And I'm not leaving the room until I understand what you're saying."

How many times do you think my classmate rues the day that he shut up? You know what he said he was afraid of? He had committed two kids to Ivy League schools, they had bought a vacation home and a yacht. He owed money everywhere. He earned a lot of money, but most of his money was tied up in Enron stock, and if the stock fell -- he just visualized it. "Enron fraud. Stock drops." And his wife has to change her quality of life, he has to look like somebody who's failed to provide, and he, who had shown valor under fire, folded under economic fear.

That's not the way it's supposed to be. We're supposed to be telling comedies, not tragedies. But I tell Biff's story because every one of us has the opportunity to be in that room and say, "Wait a moment. I want to understand more what you're saying. I want to be real clear about this. I'm not going to let that thing, that rat, run across the table and say, 'Rat? What rat?' I want to stand out." Okay?

So what's on this side of the river? Over here is integrity, courage, and character. This is the good person. This is the courageous person. This is the person who struggles with contentment and finds much to fear in the world, in economics, in politics, war and peace.

This is the person who enjoys life, much like my mother did in a war that killed 165 million people and took every member of her family in a worldwide holocaust, but retained strength and hope and courage, not because of circumstance, but because of an internal commitment because of people who had taught her, people who had raised her.

What's integrity? Integrity is discerning right from wrong, acting for the right regardless of risk to self, and then teaching others from that act.

What's courage? Courage is having the guts to correct that which is broken within yourself. It's having the courage to respectfully address wrongs in others. And third, it's having the guts to follow through so whatever injustice occurred within me and within the other is not repeated elsewhere in the organization.

And the sum of those two things, the sum of integrity and courage, constitute my character. What are the behaviors of courage? Things that I'm challenging you to promote in a very active sense of advocacy. It's honoring all persons, so your respect is unconditional and it's positive. Even if you expel a student, fire a teacher, you do so with implacable respect. Respect is not merit. Respect is not recognition. Respect is the human condition.

Second, it's encouraging from the heart and supporting administratively with resources all people. Resources have to be based on merit, but it's also based on courage. And lastly, it is advancing courage in every decision you make. That's it.

My final point is this. If you encourage each other, if you make agreements in this room before you leave about where you're weakest, I'm weakest at encouraging people I don't particularly like. My toughest thing is respecting all persons. There are some people it's impossible for me to respect. It's having guts about conflict. That's where I'm toughest. If you can say that to someone else that you know in this wonderful association of leaders, of principled leaders, and say, "You know, I'd love you to hold me accountable for that. How can I support you?" then this will not just be a talk, but this will be a beginning point, where you intentionally commit to giving the highest educational gift to your institutions, to your faculties, administrations, and to your students.

And let's be honest, it's also a great gift to yourself. See I was supposed to be a very unhappy kid. Mother dies, you lose your sister, your first-born child dies, you love the Army because the Army accepted you as a minority and you could rise through the ranks, and your child is terminally ill, so your wife says, "You have to get out of the Army," and you don't feel safe being in any other occupation because you know your race is going to be an issue. So you don't get to do the things that you would lay out for yourself as being what you want to do.

And I don't know if you can tell, but public speaking is a fair amount of strain for me, but I really enjoy my life. I'm a very happy man. I'm wonderfully blessed with family. And that's not because of wild luck. It's because I was gifted in teachers and coaches who had courage. And every day that I strive to build my courage is an excellent day. It's a happy day.

So we know a couple of things. The first is that it's an honor to speak with courage. And it's a privilege to speak with courage to principled people. Clearly, you are respected, you are needed, and I am very proud of you. Thank you very much.

MS. LEE: Well, we are all inspired. I'm not sure we're all going to be able to go right out and do this.

MR. LEE: Of course you can.

MS. LEE: It was wonderful. I have the microphone, Bruce has the microphone. Any questions?

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: You said you were a four-time whistleblower. Is that right? Did I catch that?

MR. LEE: Yes.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: I so appreciated the Enron story about your classmate and his moral dilemma. I think these stories are so important for us to textualize the important message you have shared today. Could you share one of the four stories that surround your whistle-blowing? Because maybe those would also be stories that would help us situate what you said.

MR. LEE: Let me reflect on that, which would be the most interesting. I guess the first one, and this occurred when my boss held a senior executive team conference. I was his lawyer, serving as general counsel, and he and I were already disagreeing with each other routinely. I was heavily relying on my skills of active listening and very, very positive respect, so he would say these really atrocious things, and I would try to understand, and say, "So you're saying this, we should kill all these people, we should destroy this, da, da, da, and let me understand that more clearly."

But we were not getting along, and increasingly, I was being disinvited from senior staff meetings because my advice was not welcome.

This was a senior leadership conference in Las Vegas, a city in which, by corporate bylaws, we're not supposed to meet in, because the company had gotten in trouble there before. And so he held this conference in Vegas and specifically disinvited me.

I got a call from one of the senior executives from Vegas saying, "The boss has just instructed us to break the law. And we have an ethics code, a corporate ethics code, so under the code, as I recall, because you're a lawyer, I can call you and tell you the problem, you give the attorney/client privilege, you can't reveal that I'm the one who called, but now you're on it, and good luck." Click.

But he had given me a breakdown of what the boss had said. So I jumped on a plane and I flew to Vegas. The boss was in a suite, and I confronted him in the suite and said, "This is the information that's come to me, and the good news is, we have a way out, because I just did a census and all the senior execs are still here in the hotel. Most of them are on the game floor, but they're here in the hotel, we have enough staff, we can scoop them up. I have re-reserved the conference room you're in. It will take five minutes for you to revoke these orders, and you are good. It will be a nontaxable event. You and I will have to talk later about how we process that further, but my guess is, we have about half an hour before the first person begins drifting out of the casino."

And what do you think the first thing he said to me was? "Who told you? What's his name?"

I said, "Boss, you know under our ethics" --

"I don't give a hoot about the ethics code." Not exactly the way he put it. "But I want his name. I want it now."

And I'd been trained to follow orders, but I also had been trained to discern. So I discerned, you know -- it took about three nanoseconds -- and I said, "I can't. It would be wrong. I will go to my grave with that person's name. You'll never get that name. The reg is very clear, my oath" --

You know, more protests about how unimportant those things are. So again I used active listening. "You really disagree with my position. You really think my position lacks merit."

And then he said, "Well, you're fired."

And I said, "Okay. I have no choice but to accept that. My question for you is: How do you help yourself? Don't think about the organization. Let's not go through the three stages of moral development, of acting out of fear that you'll get punished if you do something wrong, acting in the right because you realize you get better results when you do so, and third, acting in a principled way because it is right. I don't care where you are in that scale right now. Let's talk about how we take care of you."

And he said, "I don't need anything taken care of. I'm going to do fine. You're the one who's not going to do fine."

And I said, "Well, you know, I have to report you to the board."

He says, "You're not going to report me. Right now, you're just suspended. But if you report me to the board, first of all, they're not going to agree with you. That's a lot of hogwash. I don't think I did anything wrong. But if the board does hear about it, I'll get you disbarred."

That was an interesting threat, you know. "Because I'm your client, you're supposed to be taking care of me. Instead you're putting me in jail? You can't do that. I know that's subject to disbarment."

And I said, "I don't think it is. I know it's not. But I'm willing to take that chance."

Anyway, that was my moment of fear. I had others, but that was when I went, gosh -- I was sure he was going to agree with me. "Hey, you got caught. Put the candy back in the jar, make amends, and it didn't happen."

But instead, he said, "I get to keep the candy, plus I'm going to bash you over the head with the jar."

Okay, I hear you. So I did report him, and for seven months I was in limbo. I was relieved of my duties. I'd say, "Hey, how are you, Margaret?"

And Margaret would be the only one who would say, "Hi, Gus." Everyone else would be, (averting eyes), "How are you?"

I lost my office, I lost my staff, I got terrible performance reviews during this time. In fact, my prior performance review was rewritten to be negative. And I figured, okay, this is pretty much it.

Anyway, an inspection team arrived from the board and made it all right. So he was fired, his senior staff was relieved, because they were part of it, and most of the people in the meeting, his direct reports. Not division chiefs. And the true whistleblower, not me, the true whistleblower, never got credit because he didn't want it.

So that's when I became an ethicist. People started asking me to talk about what had happened and how hard it was for lawyers that turn in a client.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: I appreciated your thoughts on how strength doesn't always get to the right answer and intelligence doesn't always get to the right answer, and competence doesn't, and courage can get you the right answer. I'd like to push back on that in two ways.

One, especially in all of our work, we often see people with the courage of their convictions who just don't have full context. So they very passionately and on great principle drive to a conclusion that in an objective, wider sense is a disaster, is tyranny. So that's one qualification to courage not always getting the right answer.

But we also, I think, always have two people come to us on principle, and the courage of saying no to one of them when we could say no to either of them, and there's a certain process and product issue here where going through the right process of courage on ethics and values and integrity might not produce a product that anyone measurably likes.

And so I guess I challenge that courage will get you to the right answer. It might get you the right process, but the answer might actually have kick-back that hurts others.

MR. LEE: Wonderful questions. Let me take the first one. When someone operates very vehemently or very passionately based on their application of courage to the thing they're advocating or believe in, there's a study by Robert J. House, who's a Wharton business professor, a ten-year study from 1993 until 2004, called the GLOBE Study, in which they went to 65 nations, interviewed nearly 18,000 executives in over 800 organizations and asked, "Are there universal values?"

And I'm simplifying this horrifically, but the answer was yes, there are universal values across all cultures, particularly in what we admire in leaders. So the egotistical, self-centered, relationally remote and untrustworthy leader is disliked in Malaysia, in Ghana, in Uganda, and Minsk. And the opposite is also true. The trustworthy, relational, accessible, humble leader is admired across all cultures.

Why do I say this? Because I believe that the first step of integrity, the discernment -- if a person genuinely discerns his or her position and finds over advocacy, they're out of the integrity box. They're not respecting the positions of others. That's not courage. That's not brashness. It's irresponsibility, it's disrespect. It takes courage to be respectful under stress. So I'd say that's not courage.

Aristotle said there's this continuum in the west. In the post classical west, post modern west, we think of it's a scale of zero to ten, and zero is cowardice and 10 is courage. Aristotle was a big advocate of moderation so he said zero is cowardice. A 5 is courage, 10 is brashness and recklessness, and you want to be a 5.

So I would say, first of all, someone who comes at you without respect for your position, under the presumption, the zealous presumption, that only they are correct is not exhibiting courage. It looks like courage, but it's really not. And if we could sit down and discern in a courageous conversation some common meeting ground or meeting space could be perhaps developed. But that brashness and the demanding nature is not courage.

Secondly, I agree with you absolutely, if we follow courage, if we use courage in our relationships, in our decision-making, does that guarantee a great tactical outcome? Absolutely not. That's why most people won't use it, because we can see the immediate short-term losses. But if we are acting in the right -- see, there's a book out on courage right now that says courage is two things. One is determining cost gains, and the other is a collateral effect on all stakeholders. That's pragmatism.

I mean, every time I blew the whistle, minority guy inside white-dominated organizations, already unpopular because I'm spouting principles instead of, "Here's how you get around it," which is what they wanted out of their lawyer -- and you know, we all want to be the same, we all want to be distinct in some positive way, and my social losses from this activity were pretty grave. At least I thought they were, or they would be. Based on pragmatism, I would never blow the whistle. It's just going to cause more trouble, he's going to do what he wants anyway, I will be kicked out and then, quote, "the ethical voice" of the lawyers from the general counsel's office will not be present. I could make a good pragmatic case for keeping my mouth shut, telling the guy who called me from Vegas, "Hey, thanks a lot for that. I'll follow up on that. Appreciate it. Good luck." Click. I'd hang up on him.

So absolutely, courage does not mean playing for short-term gains or tactical outcomes. You're playing for the longest game you're in, which is doing right regardless of pressure. Regardless of if it means your job, your popularity, your financial status. In the long run, every courageous decision I have made -- so few of them -- has been something that I could celebrate. And every pragmatic decision I made -- I made lots of those -- not so proud of.

MR. GALBRAITH: We have time for one last quick question.

MS. BENNETT: You talked about a situation, the one in Las Vegas, where it seems fairly direct that doing something to line your own pockets is illegal would be generally considered wrong and courageous to stop. I mean, not a gray area, in that sense. Not a 5 on the scale. But what about the military? What about being in West Point or in an Army or other service command and having the ability with humility to question the actions, either the actions of the American government or the actions of a military operation within that, and to question whether -- or to have the discussion about whether the loss of lives and all those things are good.

Certainly courageous people could have differed about the first war in Iraq, but was there that -- what seems critical to me is that there be the discourse that would allow that kind of discussion. And my sense from probably not-very-well-written and presented drama, et cetera, is that there isn't that space for the kind of dialogue that is based in personal courage.

MR. LEE: Well, here's the irony. That first story I told about Las Vegas was the Army. I was a JAG officer. My boss was a brigadier general. He wasn't lining his own pockets. He just didn't want to fail in the mission, so he was basically providing illegal incentives.

He had gone to the Secretary of the Army, who was a multimillionaire and a friend of the incumbent president, and had gotten this Secretary of the Army to provide cash bonuses, casino stays, and brand-new cars to top performing noncommissioned officers in the command. That's completely against the law. You can't do that. So he wasn't going to make himself rich, the general. But he was going to make the command better. This is all within the military.

The inspection team that came was the Inspector General. I just put it in that, because the other three are all corporate, and I didn't want to make this -- but that's the one that changed my life.

As to the current war in Iraq, I am only an ethics advisor to West Point, so I cannot comment on what the command structure in Iraq actually is, but I can extrapolate. I was in the pre-Vietnam Army, the Vietnam Army, and post-Vietnam Army, and I have worked as an ethicist with the remade Army that Colin Powell and Norm Schwarzkopf and others put together after Vietnam.

Here's what I know. The level of dialogue within the military community today is at least as good as corporate dialogue -- which is not a real high level, but it's at least as good as corporate level, is a thousand times better than it was in the Vietnam era. Can the division commander or a battalion commander or a company commander go to his superior and say, "This doesn't work. It's a wrong mission, and we're not going to execute it." Yeah, much more easily than 40 years ago.

When Abu Ghraib hit the press, I had one question, and that was, where was the JAG officer? Where was the lawyer? Because lawyers really have a responsibility. JAGs have a responsibility in the military for carrying conscience, basically. And that's a JAG issue. They could be court-martialed. Will it happen? Probably not. Were those lawyers relieved? Yes. Are their careers over? Yeah. Peanuts? Absolutely. Right outcome? No. Because Abu Ghraib should never have happened to begin with.

This whole discussion about torture to me is a complete failure of the Judge Advocate General of the Army. There was no discussion. American Constitution. That's it. End of discussion. War brings out the worst in us. Conflict brings out the worst in us, and we're seeing it, I think in prison conditions.

MS. LEE: Thank you for an absolutely inspirational talk. I think you have added to the storehouse of courage in all our schools by sending us out feeling courageous.

MR. LEE: I'm very proud of you.

MR. GALBRAITH: Mrs. Lee thanks Dr. Lee. Dr. Lee has agreed to sign books. They're for sale out there. We have them for $20, which is a little less than they're going to sell for in stores.

The proceedings will be on the web. We no longer print them, as you know, but anybody who doesn't have access to them, contact me, please, and we can make copies of certain parts, if you're not able to get to the web.

Social announcement. There are a couple of folks playing golf, and they have two open spots this afternoon. See Doug Jennings or Brad Lyman. The Fort Sumter trip will load about five minutes after 12:00 and depart at 12:15. You can pick up a box lunch at the bell stand. You eat it on the bus while they drive you through Charleston, and then you go to the boat trip out to Fort Sumter.

Carol Lane has been recruited to be captain of that event this afternoon, and I thank her for that.

Tonight, the cocktail hour is at 6:30, dinner at 7:30. Have a good afternoon.