April 18, 2007—The McIntire School of Commerce held its 2007 spring symposium Friday, April 13, in Old Cabell Hall. This year’s event featured Simon Robertson, Chairman of Rolls-Royce PLC, and Judith McHale, former President and CEO of Discovery Communications Inc., along with Tulane University’s Professor Douglas Brinkley, author of best-seller The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a chronicle of failures of leadership at the local, state, and federal level.

The symposium series was created to provide a forum for the discussion of the complex nature of organizational success, as well as to address the relationship of commerce to the arts, humanities, and sciences. This year’s forum also integrated themes central to the McIntire School’s LEAD initiative. The forum was co-sponsored by McIntire’s Center for Financial Innovation, Center for Growth Enterprises, and Center for the Management of Information Technology.

“With every symposium, we work to facilitate compelling, multidimensional discussions of timely and important issues,” said McIntire Dean Carl Zeithaml. “We were honored to be joined this year by such three such distinguished speakers.”

The three panelists each spoke on issues of leadership pertinent to their areas of expertise in business and research. They then answered questions from the audience in a forum moderated by Charles W. Sydnor, former President and CEO of Commonwealth Public Broadcasting Corporation.

Rolls-Royce’s Robertson led off the event with a talk titled “Long-Term Thinking, Short-Term World: Leadership Challenges in a Global Age.” In his talk, Robertson addressed the challenges of successfully dealing with global supply chains and labor forces—and, crucially, of successfully navigating today’s geopolitical and cross-cultural challenges. In today’s global business climate, Robertson said, business leaders “must fight for openness, understanding, and free markets.” Robertson warned against yielding to protectionist tendencies, warning that although protectionism might yield short-term gains, it ultimately leads to “tension and despair.” Said Robertson of business leaders’ social, political, and environmental responsibilities, “We must not be complacent.”

Robertson was followed by Discovery’s McHale, who spoke on “Doing Well by Doing Good: Perspectives on Discovery.” McHale told the audience how she’d gone about building the Discovery Channel into a global success story, with 1.4 billion subscribers in 170 countries and territories. (Discovery is composed of a wide-ranging stable of socially conscious channels, including Animal Planet, BBC America, and The Learning Channel.) She said she was able to do so, in part, by establishing an open dialogue with the governments of the countries in which Discovery has a presence and ensuring that Discovery acted as a positive force in every country. Another key to the company’s success, she said, is a commitment to its employees. Discovery, she pointed out, invested heavily in its employees, providing them with such vital services as child and eldercare, stress and fitness programs, and concierge services. Such investment, she said, yielded rich returns in employee productivity and loyalty. Said McHale, “Corporations can be forces for good in a community.”

The symposium then took a slightly different turn, with Professor Brinkley’s discussion of the “complete collapse of leadership at every level” that surrounded Hurricane Katrina. Brinkley delivered a veritable laundry list of failures, from personal squabbles leading to inaction (and loss of life), to hesitation and equivocation, to panic, to shirking of official duty, to plain-old failure to plan and then to implement plans. Brinkley’s fascinating description of the leadership vacuum exposed by Katrina provided a compelling case for the importance of good leadership. Brinkley pointed out that a number of ordinary citizens acted with selflessness and courage—although fully one-third of the New Orleans police force left the city. “Leadership is not about the uniform,” Brinkley said.

After the three presentations, the panelists answered questions from the audience on such subjects as the sky-high level of executive compensation, corporations’ recruitment of leaders, and the global political fallout from the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

“The greatest American leaders,” Brinkley said, “have been judicious, straightforward, and honest.”

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