Horace B. Deets Lecture Series

Aging: Looking to the Future
MIT AgeLab and The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc.

What Makes People Successful
Walter Bennis

December 12, 2002
10:30am - 12:00pm
MIT Faculty Club
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Warren Bennis, author (with Robert J. Thomas) of Geeks & Geezers: How Era, Values and Defining Moments Shape Leaders (2002: Harvard Business School Press), presented the second Horace B. Deets Lecture Series on Aging. The theme of this presentation was aging, business and leadership.

Geeks & Geezers is a book that discusses the differences between the generations of leaders - the 'geezers' who grew up in the shadows of the Depression and World War II and the 'geeks' who grew up in years of unparalleled prosperity and US ascension in the world. He noted that the most important difference between the two generations was how each viewed work/life balance.

Bennis discussed the ways in which people cope with challenges in their life represent the likelihood of being a good leader. Using the examples of Nelson Mandela, Jack Coleman and Sidney Rittenberg, Bennis illustrated his points.

Bennis talked about four common traits that successful people share.

• Adaptive capacity: a hearty resilience with a health expectation of success, and an appetitie for learning.

• The capacity to engage others through shared meaning: empathy and the willingness to work to connect.

• Voice: a healthy self-awareness of a clear-cut identity.

• Purpose: ambition, energy, passion and a drive for results.

Bennis closed his talk with a quote from Edith Wharton, which also closes his book:
"In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy, sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity in big things, and happy in small ways."