They’ll Tell You: “No Math Required”

May 29, 2008 By Development

By President Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite

On Saturday, May 17th, President Thistlethwaite delivered the commencement address at Chicago Theological Seminary. These are her remarks.

Before I get into my theme for this morning, I wanted to take a moment to remember Anthony Hollins. For those of you who didn’t know Anthony, he was a CTS graduate and a member of the staff at Trinity United Church of Christ who died this year. Anthony was a very talented dancer and when he heard that I planned to step down as president, he called me up and told me, yes told me, that he would choreograph a dance for this graduation. That was wonderful, I said. But then he said that he wanted me to dance with him. I had once revealed to Anthony that I had studied with Agnes DeMille in college and minored in dance. I wasn’t convinced yet that I would have done this, but I’ll bet actually that Anthony would have been able to talk me into it. But just for a moment now, let’s imagine him here, right here, as he would have been with his arms outstretched, kicking high above his head, loving the dance and loving serving God. [Moment of silence]

I wanted to talk to you today, seriously just talk, about what leadership is actually like based on my ten years of experience as president and share whatever learnings I have gleaned from this with you. This will not be a particularly theologically lyrical address, but rather as though we were sitting down together for coffee and you were planning your own careers as leaders in church and society. What advice do you have for me, Susan?

Well, the first thing is in the title. The job is the job. When someone is recruiting you for a job, you may feel you’re not qualified in a particular area and they’ll jolly you along and say, ‘oh, no, you won’t have to do that.’ When I was being recruited to be CTS president, my final reservation was the financial analysis skills required. I don’t like math and thus am not particularly good at it. ‘Don’t worry,’ several people told me, ‘you’ll have people to do that for you.’ Well…the first summer I was president I had not renewed the contract of the CFO and had reassigned the other employees. Our finance office used to be in terrible shape and it needed to be completely redone. Now, the smartest thing I did in starting this job was to insist that I get training in being a president and I had spent the first part of the summer at the Harvard School for Presidents. The curriculum allowed you to take more modules in areas where you thought you were weak, and I skipped all the “Vision” classes because truly at CTS we are lousy with vision and didn’t really need any more—I took all the financial classes. But still, I was deluding myself that I wouldn’t really have to pay much attention to the actual math of the thing.

When I got back though I started looking at our spreadsheets with my new Haaavard knowledge and I noticed year after year we were carrying this big bad debt expense over. When I inquired, I found out that someone in the distant past had authorized a mortgage on a farm for an employee who no longer worked at CTS. This employee had defaulted on the loan. Now, this was stupid to begin with as CTS is not a bank, we’re a seminary, and then when the person defaulted we should have just collected the money. So I called up the seminary lawyer and said, “foreclose”. A couple of days later I received a call from a lawyer for the person who had defaulted on the loan. He threatened me that he would go to the newspapers with the story that the seminary had foreclosed on this farm if we didn’t back off. I just laughed at him and said, “we have very high standards for what we consider bad publicity. What is the headline going to be? Seminary collects debt? I’ll see you in court.” The next day we got another call, this time from a banker. He wanted to know IMMEDIATELY what the final principal and interest was on the mortgage so they could cut a check. I couldn’t find anyone else to do it, so I took the last reported amount, the current interest rate, got out a calculator and added it up and gave him the final total. As I was doing all this math I thought to myself, “Ha! No math?” But the next day we got a certified check for the full amount.

No matter what people tell you about a job, look at it realistically. If it looks like the thing you have reservations about is a logical part of the job, it is. And you have to decide, can I acquire this skill enough to do a credible job?

Three years ago, several faith leaders, myself included, helped to start a faith based not-for-profit called Faith in Public Life. The Center for American Progress had agreed to incubate this group and pay all the expenses. A search committee was appointed to find an executive director. I heard that they were telling candidates “you won’t have to raise money.” I was asked to help interview the finalists and I told each of them—“don’t be stupid. Of course you will have to raise money for this at some point.” I also told the search committee they had to pick the person with the best fund-raising skills. And naturally, when the presidential campaign season started, the incubation was over, the executive director has to raise all the money for the group, and she has been quite successful at it. The job is the job. No not for profit is not going to expect you to raise money. That’s just a fact.

Now, why do people hire you? They hire you because they want you to fix something. Whether a church, a faith-based not-for-profit, a social service agency or in academics, there is always a perception, many times not shared with the candidate, that something needs fixing and this leader is being hired to FIX it.

My advice is, don’t drink this koolaid. The notion of the leader as the one who fixes it, whatever it is, is a weak notion of leadership and does not fit well with how change actually occurs.

It is a good idea to try to find out what it is that people think needs to be fixed—the surface understanding and the real understanding can be quite different, even contradictory and of course each constituency thinks the primary problem lies with the other constituencies.

The most helpful book I read in this regard is Leadership Without Easy Answers by Ronald Heifetz. His theory is that of “adaptive leadership” where the role of the leader is to make clear to the community what the real problems are and give enough information and containment so that the community itself comes to discern what kinds of adaptive changes can address the problem or problems.

Most leadership theory, and most people’s desire of their leaders, is for them to reduce tension and to make problems go away. For an adaptive leader, you have to make the problems more visible and this creates tension. The challenge is, however, that you have to be very concrete and transparent about whatever the problems are—just standing around yelling “fire” actually causes a community to reject any change and circle the wagons. It just precipitates panic and causes people to move away from change, not toward it.

As Gary Gunderson, our beloved seminary friend and oft-times consultant, has said, “All real change is generational.” That means real change takes time, a long time and addresses the structural not just the surface of what needs to change. Adaptive leadership allows the whole community to see into the deep structures that are causing the problems and make informed decisions about structural not just cosmetic change.

I came slowly to the concept of adaptive leadership. I bought the whole “here’s a problem, you can fix it” notion of leadership and in retrospect I consider that a weak model of what it really means to lead.

Finally, I want to talk about leadership in the public square. The problems we face in both church and higher education are so large, so really difficult and intransigent, that they can consume all our time and attention and we never look up, look out, speak up and speak out in defense of our most deeply held convictions. But at the end of the day, the institution exists for the principles we hold—not the other way around.

There are so many reasons not to speak out—no one will force you to do that, you have to take the initiative yourself. But at the end of the day, if you take the job, and you finally get how to do the job, what are you going to do WITH the job? Many people just do their jobs without ever asking ‘couldn’t I do more with this leadership position?’

Dow says that I have regarded this presidency as a bully lectern and I have. If the general public is going to regard me as a ‘religious leader,’ then what am I going to do with that?

On the fifth anniversary of the attack on Iraq, some students and I sat and watched the Nightline town meeting in which I participated about whether we should go to war with a country that had not attacked us. It was sad and also enraging that those who today are still urging us to keep making war, five years ago were touting justifications that were false and were making predictions that this incursion would be swift and welcomed by the Iraqi people. Wrong.

I am sorry to say that I have just finished reading Joseph Stigliz and Linda J. Bilmes book The Three Trillion Dollar War. Stiglitz, of Columbia University, won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001 and Linda Bilmes of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, was chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The Iraq War is now the most expensive conflict since WWII. We have already spent close to a trillion dollars, but the long term costs of caring for Iraq veterans as well as paying the interest on this credit card bill we have run up, since the whole war is on credit, will ultimately cost three trillion and that’s only if we get out by 2012. We’ve bought this war on credit because exactly when we went into this expensive conflict, we reduced revenue by cutting taxes on the rich.

The reason this is particularly relevant for you as you graduate and take up your leadership roles in church and society is that this war is what is wrecking the American economy. From the lives of those in your churches, our capacity to fund our institutions that serve the most needy, the economics of higher education if you are going into economics—all of these economic structures are being hit and hit hard by the true cost of this war. At the beginning of the war, oil prices were at $25.00 a barrel. What are they now? Five times, nearly six times that figure and counting. This fuels our larger trade deficit, driving the value of the dollar down and increasing fuel costs even more since we import so much oil. High energy costs mean people have just that much less money to spend on consumer goods, further slowing the economy. When you add in the runaway greed of those who orchestrated the sub-prime mortgage disaster, interlocking sectors of the economy are dragging each other down and the vast majority of Americans are feeling the effects. For the poor and those who live just above the poverty line, however, this is a catastrophe. Just mailing people $600.00 checks is not going to reverse this downward trend.

It is a common myth, the authors argue, that wars are good for the economy—today no serious economist argues that wars are good for the economy. You can do the math yourself and figure out how much health care, infrastructure of roads and bridges, schools, plants, and Social Security three trillion dollars would have funded.

But this is purely monetary, of course, and the costs of this war are far reaching in terms of lives lost, families pulled apart, military personnel with long-term and severe disability, deaths and injury to the Iraqi people. The U.S. does not even keep track of the number of Iraqi soldiers killed. Before this war, cholera was virtually unknown in Iraq. Now there is a serious outbreak of cholera, first detected in Kirkuk. It has spread to nine out of eighteen provinces. This is to say nothing of the epidemic of malnutrition and attendant health crises from poor food and lack of clean drinking water.

The Iraq war has also contributed to the perception, distorted and yet inflammatory to many, of a ‘clash of civilizations.’ It fuels justifications for terrorism and for the war on terror, genuinely a match made in hell for those who wish to gain power through conflict.

As you leave here today and you move into your churches, your social service and faith-based not-for-profits, your academic lives and the lives of all of you as citizens, you take with you a CTS education. That means that you have learned to think critically about how to relate the bible and theology to the issues in the real world, not only war but racism, persistent poverty, global warming, the AIDS pandemic, and continuing discrimination against lgbtq people and multiple other issues confronting us in these times. You have the education to be able to speak to this issue of war and a host of other issues confronting the world in this time. Many of you are already engaged in this work.

What I have to say finally is, once you figure out what the job is, and how to do adaptive leadership, you need to lead with a purpose. Use your ability in critical thinking, look up, look out, speak up, speak out and encourage those with whom you work to do the same.

Today you graduate from CTS. Welcome to the fight.

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