Geeks & Geezers:How Era, Values, and Defining Moments Shape Leaders - By Warren G. Bennis & Robert J. Thomas ( 2002 )

We were drawn to thinking and then ultimately writing
about geeks and geezers from very different starting points.
Coauthoring a book isn’t quite like synchronized swimming. It’s
more like gaining perspective and depth through incongruity.
Through writing and arguing in what seemed like endless and
percussive to-and-froing, helped along by endless and percussive
e-mailing, we strove to achieve a coherent voice. But first, to honor
the differences, we thought it only appropriate to offer our indi-
vidual reflections on this project and its meaning.
From Warren Bennis:–That I would eventually write a book
on geeks and geezers will come as a surprise to no one. I have
almost always allowed personal experience to peek through in my
work, however distanced and objective the surface. When I was a
younger man, I never thought of myself as a geek. At the time, the
word did not mean a nerdy, technologically sophisticated person
in the mold of Bill Gates. A geek was a carnival performer who made his living biting the heads off live chickens—and that’s still
the only definition you’ll find in any but the most recent diction-
aries. Although I did not know I was a geek (in the current sense)
when I was one, I am acutely aware that, in the eyes of the world
at least, I am now a full-fledged geezer—born in 1925 and seasoned on the now almost mythological battlefields of World War II. I
will spare you a protracted discussion of such autumnal truths as
the fact that all of us stay 16 in our hearts and, at some point,
look into the mirror and wonder who that white-haired person is.
If you are my age, you already know that; if you are younger, you
will learn it soon enough. But I will tell you a little about how this
book came to be.
Information guru and intellectual matchmaker Richard Saul
Wurman called me several years ago and asked if I would speak at
one of his annual TED conferences. As you probably know, TED
stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. And every year
Richard gathers a group of people he finds interesting—and a
somewhat larger group of people willing to pay to be around that
core group—for three days of observation, prognostication, idea
swapping, food, drink, bombast, and schmoozing. “This year,
Warren,” Richard told me, “we’re only inviting speakers seventy
years and older and thirty years and younger.” I thought Richard was onto something here, as he usually is. A project began to coa-
lesce around the idea that geeks and geezers have valuable but dif-
ferent things to contribute to almost any discussion. Both groups
know things that all of us should know.
Much of the appeal of this project-in-the-making was the
opportunity to delve deeper into the thought world of geeks, the
cohort born around 1970 and after that has preoccupied the media,
and especially the business media, for almost a decade. Nothing
gives me greater joy than learning something new, and I realized
there was a gap in my understanding of the views and values of
these geeks and their younger brothers and sisters—the first gen-
eration, as Bob and I say in our book, to have grown up virtual,
visual, and digital.
The realization that there were holes in my understanding of
what motivated and moved the young was most vivid in the class-
room. For several years, University of Southern California presi-
dent Steve Sample and I have cotaught a course on leadership at USC. Every year, we invite Michael Dukakis to speak to our class.
As all of you who are over 30 know, Dukakis was the Democratic candidate for president in 1988 and a distinguished governor of
Massachusetts. But our students, bright as they are, tend to look
back blankly when we excitedly announce that Mike will be
speaking to them. The few who recognized his name knew it from
reruns of the “Saturday Night Live” parody of Mike’s ill-fated
campaign tank ride, in which comic Jon Lovitz impersonated him.
I know that most of our students, however bright and well
informed, tend to think of Vietnam, Watergate, and other land-
marks of the last forty years as distant, even ancient history. But I
am always a little shaken that so many have never heard of
Michael Dukakis, whose run for president seems so recent to me.
Besides wanting to probe the minds and experiences of geeks,
I was also eager to learn more about my fellow geezers. As a life-
long student of leadership, I’ve always been fascinated both by
those who become leaders and those who don’t. Just as intriguing
as great leaders, in many ways, are those gifted people who some-
how get stuck and never manage to actualize their talents. The frustration of talent and the embitterment that usually follows is
one of the saddest phenomena I know—and one of the most
instructive. Moreover, I have always been interested in develop-
ment, even before I took up the subject of becoming a leader. In
1956, my first published paper was about group development. By
1964, I was writing about organizational development, and about
the correspondences between healthy individuals and healthy organ-
izations. Growth and change have been the major themes of my
entire professional life.
Not surprisingly, in recent years, I’ve grown ever more curious
as to why some people seem to age and others do not. We all know
people who hit 70, say, and suddenly look and act old, with all the
diminution and loss that term has traditionally implied. And yet,
thankfully, there are others who manage to stay forever young,
whatever their chronological age. To some extent, the difference
is probably genetic. But it is not only that. There is some other
quality that allows a Rudolph Serkin to dare, at the age of 80, to
master an entirely new, modern repertoire when he might so eas-ily have continued to perform more traditional music forever. Or take 76-year-old film director Robert Altman, who keeps reinvent-
ing himself with such films as his 2001 Gosford Park. People like
Serkin and Altman, or dancer Martha Graham (who transcended
the blow of being fired by her own troupe and reinvented herself as
a crowd-pleasing lecturer/performer), or Winston Churchill (who,
one of his biographers wrote, jay-walked his way through life until
he was 66), have a secret that all of us would do well to discover.
They are proof, heartening to see, that growing old does not pre-
clude living life with enormous brio.
Meanwhile, at another TED Conference, I ran into old friend
Phil Slater, the gifted sociologist and writer. I told him about the
geeks and geezers project and talked excitedly about a couple of
great geezers I had interviewed and the almost magical quality of
excitement and engagement they radiated. “Neoteny,” Phil said.
“It’s called neoteny.” Later, I asked him to elaborate, and he
answered with an autobiographical e-mail. “I often feel isolated
because so many of the people I know,” he wrote, “have ‘settled’
in some way. The world has jelled for them—closed. It no longer has the sense of possibility that it had for many of us as children.
The neoteny I was talking about has to do with the fact that some
of us have kept that sense of possibility and wonder alive. I’m not
sure what all is involved in that or why it happens, but I see it in a
lot of successful people (it’s why they’re so much more fun to talk
to about ideas than academics are), and it’s very meaningful to
me.” Much of this book is about that remarkable quality.
In the fall of 1999, I was in London, having lunch with Tom
Davenport, a partner at Accenture and author. With Tom was col-
league Bob Thomas. A Northwestern-trained sociologist and for-
mer MIT professor, Bob told me of his deep interest in the impact
that era has on leadership. It was clear that Bob and I were cover-
ing some of the same ground and moving in the same direction,
and I realized, almost at once, what a find he was and what a fine
collaborator he would be. Again and again, he sharpened my think-
ing and we pulled from each other insights neither of us would
have had working alone. He was an intellectual sparring partner
of the first order and a generous soul. The truth is that I am not sure, and don’t think Bob is either, about who came up with this
or that idea.
As the best projects always do, this one turned out to be even
more interesting than we thought it would be. You will discover
all that we did in the pages that lie ahead, but let me make one
point at the outset. It soon became clear that we were studying
not just lifetime leadership, but how people learn to live well
decade after decade. The more we talked to our geeks and geezers,
the more apparent it became that this was a story not just about
leadership development but about human development. At some
point, we realized that the two are inexplicably intertwined, that
the very factors that make a person a great leader are the ones
that make him or her a successful, healthy human being. It was a
thrilling “eureka!” moment. Want to find out how able a leader
an individual will be? Look at how he or she deals with being
imprisoned, as our geezer Sidney Rittenberg was. (Rittenberg was
imprisoned for sixteen years by the Chinese Communists.) The
leadership of a Rittenberg or a Nelson Mandela doesn’t magically
appear when the spotlight is turned upon them. It was there, wait-ing to be expressed, long before the prison doors swung open,
thanks to the qualities and almost alchemical process that we will
describe in depth in the coming chapters.
As we have talked to different audiences about geeks and
geezers, we find that certain of our key ideas excite them most.
The crucible—the transformational experience that all our lead-
ers have had—is one. Era is another. David Gergen recently asked
me to talk about the book at the Center for Public Leadership at
Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, which Gergen
heads. Afterwards, he excitedly covered the blackboard with notes
on the impact of different eras on recent history. Leaders like Tru-
man, he pointed out, were shaped by World War I, the growth of
big business, and the idea of the melting pot. Subsequent leaders such as JFK and George Herbert Walker Bush were formed in the
crucible of World War II and came of age in a nation unified by its
fight for its very survival. A distinguished commentator and advi-
sor to four presidents, Gergen then spoke movingly of his own generation. Like Gergen, former President Clinton, Vice President
Al Gore, and the younger President Bush were all children of the
1960s, who grew up in a nation divided over the Vietnam War, in
a nation of divided families. None of the presidents served in that
war. Most poignantly, Gergen contrasted their formative era of
fragmentation and national discord with that of earlier eras that
seemed to share a common purpose and simpler values. I can only
hope that all our readers respond to our study of geeks and geezers
as thoughtfully, enthusiastically, and personally as Gergen did.
From Bob Thomas:–A few years back, while watching chore-
ographer Twyla Tharp lead a class with her students at City Cen-
ter in New York, I learned something important about practice. I
am not a dancer, but I sensed that Tharp’s students were struggling
to understand what she wanted them to do with a particularly com-
plex combination of moves (or phrases, in the grammar of dance).
Marveling at the back-and-forth interrogation, the demonstration
and mimicking of physical gestures, and the quiet but earnest pleading to “do it my way” taking place between choreographer
and dancers, I realized that in that moment, the distinction between
practice and performance hardly existed at all. They were per-
forming while they practiced. I could easily imagine them onstage
a few weeks hence practicing while they performed.
Watching Twyla Tharp and her dancers, I was reminded that
business managers routinely complain that they don’t have time
to “practice” being leaders. They have to perform all the time.
Each in his or her own way genuinely wants to improve as a leader
but doesn’t know how. They enroll in leadership workshops, pay
for coaching sessions, and pack off to weekend retreats, but the
lessons just don’t seem to stick. From my perch in the balcony
that night in Manhattan, I realized that the problem wasn’t that
managers couldn’t learn to lead. What they lacked was a concept
of practice. To be more precise, they needed a way to practice
while they performed.
After creating an experimental curriculum for the Leaders for
Manufacturing Program at MIT—a curriculum that included dance lessons for engineers—I left the university to see what I could
learn about leadership practice by watching effective leaders per-
form. Along the way I had the great fortune to work with busi-
ness, union, and political leaders in the United States, Venezuela,
Jamaica, India, Germany, and Japan. And the effective ones, the
ones who truly engaged their people as what Warren calls “inti-
mate allies,” were the men and women who practiced leading
every moment of every day. They recognized no distinction
between work and life. They were the same people on the job and
off. They used every situation they encountered as a practice field
and they mined every experience for insight about themselves and
the people and the world around them. Leading is not only what
they did, it was who they were.
Which brings me to geeks and geezers. Warren and I first
talked about studying older and younger leaders only a few days
after a former student of mine called to say he was departing a
very senior position in a conventional bricks-and-mortar manu-facturing firm for the wilds of online retailing. I understood his
sense of adventure, but what I didn’t get was why he would walk
away from almost certain success. Sighing, he warned me, “White
guys in their fifties and sixties just don’t get it.” I hastened to
remind him that I wasn’t 50 yet. But, reluctantly, I had to admit
that I didn’t get it either. This project with Warren gave me the
opportunity to see if I could get it. I think now that I do.