[MUSIC] My name is Sally Blount, and I'm here to welcome you to Organizational Leadership, a specialization brought to you by the faculty at Northwestern University. We're based in Chicago, and situated on the shores of Lake Michigan. Northwestern University is home to more than 20,000 of the world's best students and faculty. And their specialization represents a collaboration between four of our schools. The Kellogg School of Management, the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, and the School of Communication. In a moment, you'll be hearing from my fellow deans who represent each of these schools. Now we chose to come together to address a really important topic, that is how do we educate leaders for the 21st century market place. Leaders who can thrive while building strong organizations and creating lasting value. Now the topic of leadership has never been more important. We live in a time of profound change, when the scale and complexity of organizations is greater than ever before. And we need people who are equipped to lead these organizations. I want you to consider how different the world is today than it was just a few years ago at the start of the century. The brick countries have fundamentally shifted the global economic power balance. Moving from representing, say, roughly 5 to 7% of the world economy to almost 25% today in just 15 years. And social media and web based business like Uber, WeChat and other new technologies, they've changed how business is practiced. By reducing barriers to entry across a range of industries, undermining the stickiness of iconic brands. Creating greater transparency across employees and customers. And supplying us all with endless data and constant distraction. Navigating this complex, dynamic, global marketplace requires a special type of leadership. Now we hear people talk about leadership all the time. Everyone wants to be a leader. But what does that really mean? What is a successful leader today? At Northwestern, we answer that question by starting with the challenge of building effective organizations. Now that's because organizations have always been the drivers of progress and productivity. It's our instinct for collective action to create something bigger and more enduring than ourselves. That's deeply rooted in human nature. In business, when an entrepreneur has a really good idea, whether it's a new product or a new solution to an old problem, they build an organization to enact that idea. It could be Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in a garage with the first Apple computer. Maybe it's Jack Ma, the former English professor who created Alibaba. If an idea is a really good one, an organization grows around it. Now, it turns out that really effective organizations are hard to build. And they're also hard to maintain. We see this with entrepreneurship. Only one in ten startups survive. And throughout history, we've seen over and over that large organizations, whether they are in the government, business, the not-for-profit world, they begin to drift as they get bigger and older. They lose their focus. They lose their edge. So in our minds, great leadership's all about the people who know how to build effective, resilient organizations. Organizations that don't lose their edge. Now it's important to emphasize that being an effective leader is not about where you sit in an organization. But about how other people view you. The truth is, people determine whether you're a leader. Not your title. So, great leadership is all about motivating and inspiring other people to bold and effective action. Now, to do that, there are two things you need to focus on, and we're gonna focus on in this specialization. The first is clarity of purpose. Great leaders bring an unbelievable focus, to what they're doing at work and why they're doing it. This is because, no matter where you are in an organization, you have to know what your job is, and who benefits when you do your job well. You have to be clear about why you go to work each day. What your role is. How you can deliver on that. In a corporate setting, good ideas are those that reflect a deep understanding of customers' needs and goals. Now this is because in life, every one of us has a customer, we have to make happy. Whether it's your spouse, a parent, a child, maybe it's your best friend and at work we all have customers all the time. Even internally within our own teams. These are the people whose needs we have to consider, so the clearer we are about whose needs we're here to meet, the more focused we'll be when we're at work. Despite the endless streams of emails, information and data that come at us every day. The second theme, Effective Collaboration. One of the great parts of being a dean is that I get to talk to CEOs from all around the world. And wherever I meet these CEOs, whether it's in the finance hubs of London or New York, in the heartland of the U.S. where we actually make things. Or out in Silicon Valley. They all say that the rarest skill is the ability to solve problems by working across traditional boundaries. Now these may be the boundaries that divide us into functional silos, business units, countries, or cultures. But that ability to cross those boundaries I call a deep collaboration. It's not about being a team player or even a team builder. It's about being a bridge builder. And it's that ability to collaborate not just in your day to day workplace but across boundaries that surround you. That's critically important. So throughout this specialization we'll keep coming back to these two key themes, Clarity of Purpose and Effective Collaboration. You're gonna see these themes emerge from each of the five courses that make up the specialization. Collaboration, Storytelling, Social Influence, Marketing, Design Innovation. Each of the courses is gonna consist of three to four learning modules, and then we'll synthesize them all together in a final capstone project. It's gonna be an experiential learning exercise that's gonna help you reinforce the tools and frameworks that we've introduced you to. We're also giving you a much deeper sense of the challenges that face leaders today. So let's recap for a moment on organizations and on leadership. Organizations not individual strive human progress. When a good idea emerges, an organization is built around it. But strong organizations are hard both to create and to maintain. On leadership, it's other people, not your title that determines whether you're a leader. High impact leaders both motivate and inspire people to bold and effective action. The fundamentals of leadership, clarity of purpose and effective collaboration. Now before we get started, I'd like you to hear the perspectives of my fellow deans at Northwestern. [MUSIC]
