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Wharton 125
Leadership Roundtable Marks Wharton’s
125th Anniversary
Alumni and Professors Celebrate First Day of Wharton Classes
"In our business, if you're not innovating, you're losing," said Seth Waugh, CEO
of Deutsche Bank Americas, at a roundtable discussion of business leaders and
Wharton faculty, held on September 15, 2006, to mark the 125th anniversary of
the first day of classes at Wharton on September 15, 1881.
The panel, led by Wharton Professor Michael Useem, discussed
the key elements of business leadership in an environment
of global change.
The panel offered three main pieces of advice about business
leadership:
1. Innovation Is Hard Work.
"If you're waiting for a 'Eureka!,' you're never going to
have an innovation," said Wharton Real Estate Professor
Peter Linneman. "It's all hard work, showing up every day,
moving the plans around, studying the market."
The panelists stressed the importance of innovation in a
world of technological change and global competition. "You
have to get out in front of consumer behavior," said C. Robert
Henrikson, AMP'90, chairman, president, and CEO of
MetLife, "because everyone else is chasing each other."
Yet they emphasized that a creative innovation, in the words
of Alex Gorsky, WG'96, CEO of Novartis North America, is
"not that 'aha' moment. It's a lot of repetition and redundancy."
2. Stay Flexible.
"You have to be open to the moment," explained real
estate developer Jeffrey Katz, WG'71, "because the marketplace
is extremely rapid. Unless you can react to it right away,
you'll be reading about it next week."
Business leaders therefore have to keep their organizations
flexible enough to allow creativity, even as the companies
expand and grow. "When you are a large enterprise," said
Novartis' Gorsky, "there are tremendous obstacles to getting
ideas accelerated and moved through the organization.
"You've got to be vigilant to cut through bureaucracy so
that good ideas can get through. Bigger is not necessarily
better. If you have 10 scientists in a room heading down the
wrong path, they're still heading down the wrong path."
3. Use Your Emotional Intelligence.
"Future leaders who are really outstanding are going to
have an unusually high degree of emotional intelligence," said
Connie Duckworth, WG'79, a former Managing Director
of Goldman Sachs who now works creating economic opportunities
for rural women in Afghanistan. "Businesses are
driven by client relationships, and you have to be able to
be sensitive to people that come from very different backgrounds,
not only multicultural but also multigenerational."
"Do good, do well," echoed Gorsky. "If you keep that in
the back of your mind, if you're passionate about what you
do, you will be innovative. We've got a responsibility as senior
leaders to make sure that we're actively ensuring that our organizations
are doing things in the right way."
 
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