tom witkowski
Leadership proposal
Need: To make the case to donors for strengthening MIT’s ability to educate leaders who could successfully solve the greatest problems facing the world by creating the Center for Leadership Development at MIT.
Solution: A fundraising proposal that shared MIT’s vision for leadership development and demonstrated how MIT would educate a new generation of leaders.
My role: Interviewed staff and administrators who were proponents of the Center and authored the proposal.
I. The world looks to MIT for leaders who will solve complex problems
The need for strong and effective leadership has never been greater than it is now. The challenges we face are daunting. Reinventing the world's energy system is an obvious example: that system right now can produce some 14 trillion watts worth of power annually, and replacing it over the coming decades with cleaner systems—including clean coal—will be a gargantuan task.
So, too, will be solving the problems of climate change, poverty, and the fragility of the health care system. The nature of all of these challenges is highly complex, significantly more so than ones we overcame just a generation ago. Tackling each of these will take a powerful mix of science, technology, and leadership.
Science and technology continue to progress at dizzying rates, and the need to solve complex problems in a rapidly changing world grows increasingly more urgent. Thus, successful leadership will be based on the knowledge and skills critical to the challenge at hand, not only position. To truly address these dilemmas calls for new kinds of leaders who can play to MIT’s strengths—leaders who can understand and manage complex systems, businesses, and markets; who exhibit great clarity in facing and analyzing facts; who are able to communicate long-term visions; who are skilled working with and through others, including those holding differing opinions; who understand the importance of delegation and teamwork; who are comfortable in an international arena; who can knowledgeably operate at the intersection of science and technology to find solutions; and who have the tenacity to bring those solutions into being over the long-term.
This is a new educational era at the Institute, and the students walking the Infinite Corridor today are these future leaders. They have come to MIT for an unparalleled education in science and technology, but they also unequivocally demand leadership skills. Indeed, 93 percent of MIT students believe the Institute should offer undergraduates even more opportunities for leadership training. Often, these students see science and engineering not as an end, but as a route to a business-oriented career. A strong indication of this is the dramatic increase in the recruitment of MIT seniors by financial and management consulting firms. An assessment of today’s successful business leaders bears these trends out, as among the Fortune 500 CEOs, the most popular undergraduate major is engineering.
Almost half of MIT’s incoming first-year students this year were high school valedictorians. Nearly all, 87 percent, in fact, of this year’s incoming first-year students were leaders in a club, organization, team, the arts, or work, before coming to MIT. And 1 in 3 of this year’s incoming first-year students founded a group in one of those areas.
Students come to MIT expecting to devote a significant portion of their energies to activities that may only tangentially relate to their academic pursuits. They fill their time outside of classes and labs with volunteering, music, leadership activities, and athletics. In fact, the number of extracurricular activities at MIT has exploded over the past four decades, from 60 groups recognized by the Association of Student Activities in the 1960s to nearly 500 today.
The majority of MIT students crave these opportunities. Of the undergraduate students who were graduated in 2008, 64 percent participated in leadership activities while at MIT. And an alumni/ae survey showed 75 percent of MIT graduates viewed leadership experience as important or very important.
MIT’s charge today is to provide the curricular and hands-on experiences that will teach its students the skills they seek to be the leaders the world needs. MIT is cultivating these leaders by building on the foundation of scientific and technological rigor for which it is renowned. The complexity and pace of the world today requires that MIT graduates be able to hit the ground running and assume leadership responsibilities very early in their careers. Thus, every hour of MIT students’ days is filled with significant and numerous opportunities—academic, research-oriented, and extracurricular—that teach the leadership skills required to solve world’s most pressing problems.
To prepare our students for complex challenges, MIT continues to raise the bar academically. First-year students today must be as versed in their fields of study as graduate students were decades ago. Because the ability to articulate one’s vision is core to leadership, the Institute has changed its communications requirement from a two-part competency-based requirement to an instructionally-based four-subject program integrated into every student’s four undergraduate years. International experience will be vital for all leaders, and MIT has made it a goal that any student who wants to have an international experience will be able to do so. The Institute conveys more knowledge and experience to its students in their four undergraduate years here than it ever has before.
Today’s driven students possess a level of ambition and intellect that, combined with an MIT education, will enable them to meet intellectually exciting and analytically demanding challenges. To these young leaders, each of the seemingly insurmountable problems the world faces today represents tremendous possibility, just as the race to the moon did to another generation.
II. Giving students the tools to lead
One initiative that has captured the enthusiasm and creativity of the MIT campus—addressing global energy issues—offers many examples of student leadership. Whether it is bringing sustainable energy to Lesotho, Africa, through MIT’s Public Service Center, or creating a 200-mpg passenger automobile through the MIT-hosted Vehicle Design Summit, MIT students implement their ideas with determination and skill.
The Vehicle Design Summit (VDS) provides a powerful example of bold and deliberate action, and an MIT-scale effort to solve one part of the energy problem. The formidable goal? Create four alternatively-fueled vehicle prototypes in just one summer. The Institute provided student organizers with faculty advisers, work space, and accommodations for international teammates. MIT students recruited 50 other students from universities in 21 countries to collaborate. Now the MIT leaders who founded this summit are heading an international group of students in the development of a production-ready vehicle.
Working in an international setting is paramount for MIT students. This is an era driven by globalization, and characterized by intense competition from the brightest minds in emerging economies like India and China. In order to thrive and lead in this context, our students must become even more proficient at absorbing, processing, and combining information. They must learn to understand and leverage differences, demonstrate cross-cultural adaptability, and address complex challenges in new and unfamiliar contexts. From international experience, students gain greater maturity, as well as increased self-confidence and comfort levels in working with international teams.
MIT’s vision for leadership development is to provide its students with a series of progressively challenging experiences. For example, the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), which enable students to work, communicate, and innovate across borders, begin with two years of increasing immersion in culture and language on campus, and culminate with an intensive professional internship in another country. MISTI has sent about 2,200 students abroad, and currently sends more than 300 interns annually to nine countries: China, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, and Spain. Student demand for MISTI is high. The number of internships could easily double, and for China alone could grow to 200 annually, if funding permitted. Here are some examples of the long and growing list of leadership development opportunities at MIT:
• LeaderShape: This national group organizes a six-day leadership-development and community-building experience that, since 1995, has drawn nearly 900 MIT students, and has been facilitated by top administrators and senior faculty, including a former president, two chancellors, vice presidents, and deans.
• Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Leadership Program: MIT’s School of Engineering is developing outstanding MIT students as innovators and future leaders in engineering practice through a multi-year set of leadership-oriented, hands-on engineering activities. A core aspect of the program is improvements to education at MIT for all engineering students, with a special focus on product development and project engineering. The program will also add 20 to 30 new fellows annually who will participate in an industry mentoring and practice program.
• Community Catalyst Leadership Program: Last year the program had 95 applicants for 50 openings. Students meet with professional coaches who help them create a personalized leadership development plan and consult with them during the year to make them stronger leaders in their communities, for example, the students’ living groups and athletic teams. Students attend workshops and alumni networking dinners, as well as a dinner with President Susan Hockfield, key alumni, and senior administrators.
• Venture Mentoring Service: Entrepreneurship is in MIT students’ DNA. The Venture Mentoring Service connects students who have entrepreneurial drive and ideas with mentors in the business world. The mentors teach the students the skills necessary to start and lead successful companies. In its first eight years, the VMS has served 1,054 entrepreneurs and assisted in the formation of 98 companies. Companies that have received VMS assistance have raised a collective total of $460 million.
• MIT Sloan Leadership Center: Appropriately, MIT has been at the forefront of leadership development and research before with the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Leadership Center. This Center offers courses and workshops tailored to four distinct modes of learning: practice, role models, self-assessment and reflection, and skill development. The MIT Sloan Center creates cutting-edge theory, pragmatic tools, and innovative education and research to enhance the capacity of individuals and organizations for innovative and responsible leadership.
As these examples of hands-on learning demonstrate, at MIT education is not limited to classrooms, laboratories, and studios. Certainly, academic instruction and curriculum at MIT teach basic leadership principles. MIT fosters an environment where students learn leadership through course materials; receive mentoring from faculty, graduate students, researchers, and professionals in their fields; and receive feedback from teammates and faculty. But practical experience solidifies those leadership lessons. Knowledge and experience also come in living groups, on athletic fields, and in clubs and organizations. The leadership development component of education is infused into all that students do at the Institute.
In each of these situations, MIT students use their analytical abilities to set direction. They work with teams of other students, capture others’ attention and imagination, and, importantly, motivate them to act. Key to accomplishing goals is knowing how to communicate a vision, but also listening to teammates. And, in terms of leadership development, students must also have the opportunity for feedback and self-assessment in order to gain more insight into the value of their experiences.
III. A vision for developing leaders at MIT
Fulfilling MIT’s leadership development goals ultimately calls for the worthy goal of creating a designated Center for Leadership Development on campus. Today this Center is early in its gestation, but it will eventually be the hub of leadership activities at MIT and bring these many efforts together into one overall framework. The Center will put leadership development at the forefront in every MIT student’s education, offering access to many opportunities they might never have otherwise discovered, and creating new opportunities that would otherwise have never existed.
With this Center for Leadership Development, MIT will expand on what has been accomplished by MIT Sloan’s Leadership Center and, indeed, spread that work throughout the Institute by building bridges between the MIT Sloan Leadership Center and the other Schools.
As a first step, MIT has already created an online database of all the available leadership opportunities. Students can easily find for-credit classes, such as Leadership and Management; seminars and workshops, such as Dispute Resolution Skills Training; and international projects, such as Public Service Fellowships. This database is a resource for all MIT students, from those taking their first steps toward being a leader, to experienced student leaders seeking to expand their skills or put them into practice in a new arena. But this database is only a start.
The next phase will be to transform this online resource with a more robust Web presence, creating a Virtual Leadership Center. Along with the database of leadership development opportunities, the Virtual Leadership Center will provide students with self-assessment tools, online modules, curricular resources, blogs, online success stories, and links to a wide array of opportunities. With the proper tools and environment to assess themselves, students will better understand their own abilities and potential, and better choose the appropriate leadership opportunities. Having the time, space, and tools to properly reflect on an experience gives students valuable insights into their own personal leadership style and accomplishments.
The centerpiece of MIT’s plan is to build a physical center that will emphasize the importance of leadership to our students. The Center for Leadership Development will demonstrate MIT’s commitment to producing future world leaders — a centralized Institute resource offering unparalleled access to leadership development opportunities. As a nexus for MIT’s student leaders, the Center will:
• be a resource center with dedicated staff; books, videos, and experiential activities; and self-assessment tools;
• offer advisory services to students seeking to integrate leadership opportunities into their academic programs; and professional staff to consult with academic departments in the creation of tailored modules that foster creative problem-solving;
• develop a coaching/mentoring network involving alumni, staff, and upper class students; and
• work with faculty, the dean of students offices, and community partners across the Institute, such as the Careers Office and the Alumni Association, to promote the development of innovative leadership practices.
Creating a Center for Student Leadership Development at MIT is an essential step toward bringing even more intentionality to the Institute’s role in this important endeavor. Given the rigor of MIT classes, the demands on students’ time, and the large number of activities available, such a resource will ensure that students are able to make the most out of every minute they can invest in their own development as leaders. The Center will also enable students to find the opportunities that best complement their existing skills, and the opportunities that will teach them additional skills, such as strategic planning and building teams, that will help them to reach their goals.
IV. Conclusion
The need for leaders with a deep understanding of science and technology and a grasp of complex systems is great, and the demand continues to grow. Our leaders must know how science and technology can help solve the mammoth problems of energy, disease, poverty, and starvation. Our leaders’ abilities to analyze and process information must be second to none. Likewise, they must be able to perform and lead in a global arena, understanding and knowing how to leverage the differences, and to adapt to different cultures in order to successfully address the complex challenges we face.
Donald Kennedy in his insightful book Academic Duty poses a deep question. In the final chapter, he asks, “Can the universities really make a difference with respect to the Big Problems facing us?” His list of challenges ranged from arms proliferation and disarmament to ethical issues in genetic testing and counseling to utilization incentives in health-care systems. These big problems demand a new kind of student to engage them in a thoughtful way. This kind of student deeply understands science and technology, knows how to use analysis while simultaneously being aware of and capable of dealing with all the societal complexities associated with these issues. This kind of student knows how to step up to leadership in the midst of all this complexity. This is the kind of student MIT wants to produce in this new century.
MIT, in its curricula, in its activities, in its organizations, in nearly every minute of a student’s years here, is responding to its students’ calls for leadership development. The Institute provides the tools and teaches the lessons necessary to strengthen our students’ innate talents and help them develop new ones. This concentrated effort to promote leadership at MIT will enable students to develop the skills they seek, as well as provide the opportunities to exercise those skills, and, importantly, the time to reflect on leadership experiences and assess their performance. MIT must continue to prepare its graduates with the technical and scientific tools necessary to solve the world’s most pressing issues, but also the collaborative abilities necessary to effectively lead change for the common good.
We invite you to join in support of MIT’s initiative to educate the next generation of world leaders and problem-solvers with the creation of the Center for Leadership Development at MIT. Leadership development that intentionally addresses global needs must be part of MIT’s public identity and continue to be incorporated into the Institute’s educational culture. With your support, we will make this so.
Draft Budget
In the best of all circumstances endowing the program and operation of a Student Leadership Center, as well as providing for a physical environment for the center, would require $15 million in gift support. Assuming an average endowment distribution of 5 percent, support would be allocated in the following way:
General Programming (workshops, training, retreats etc.) $2M
Women’s Leadership Development $1M
Leadership Development in Learning Communities $1M
FSILG Leadership Development $2M
Self-directed web and IS&T development and support $2M
Staff Endowed support (salaries and benefits) $5M
Operations and space $2M
tom witkowski
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