When most people think of powerful leaders, they think of someone like Bob Haas. His great-great-granduncle was Levi Strauss, the legendary businessman who first manufactured blue jeans. By the time Haas took the reins of the company, leadership of Levi Strauss & Co. had remained in family hands for at least four generations. While growing up, his father was the CEO, and the Haases vacationed every summer with the family of Robert McNamara, who would become secretary of defense. Haas told me that this early and regular exposure to people at the higher levels of society kept him from being starstruck as he ascended his own professional heights.
Certainly this sounds to most of us like a charmed life. After all, when you vacation with the secretary of defense, you doubtless also have the best health care, the finest education, and unmatched opportunities. But as it turns out, a privileged childhood is actually a poor predictor of becoming a senior leader. Bob Haas is, in fact, the exception to the rule. I found that virtually all formative experiences in the early lives of leaders are more ordinary than extraordinary.
Before great leaders reach the halls of power, they are “protoleaders,” young people with talent and opportunity but yet untested. It is still up to them to make the most of what resources they possess. Some, like Haas, are born with lots of resources. More typical, however, is the life of John Mendelsohn.
Dr. Mendelsohn, a cancer specialist, is educated and proficient on the latest medical research, can manage an enormously large institution, and can also dine with royalty and schmooze with wealthy donors. But his current high-profile life is a far cry from his childhood in Ohio. Mendelsohn's parents were squarely within the middle class; his dad worked as a retailer, and his mom was a homemaker. His early ambitions were modest—he simply wanted to do well in school, excel at tennis, and be a “good person,” as he describes it.
Mendelsohn's horizons expanded as he took advantage of opportunities that came his way early on. He did well enough in high school to be admitted to Harvard (but, he confessed to me, it was not nearly as selective back then). He began by studying physics and chemistry but switched to medicine as he embraced, in his words, “a more liberal-arts approach to life.” In medical research, he found the opportunity to combine a zeal for scientific discovery with a love for people.
Mendelsohn wanted to gain research experience, and he was tipped off that a new member of the biology faculty, James Watson, might be looking for an assistant. Mendelsohn followed the lead and landed the job. Watson was not your average new hire; in 1953, he and Francis Crick had modeled the double helix of DNA, a discovery that would go on to earn them a Nobel Prize. Not a bad start for Mendelsohn's career.
Between graduating college and starting medical school, Mendelsohn wanted to travel, so he secured a Fulbright scholarship to study biochemistry in Scotland. “I did some research and study,” he said, “but most of the time, I traveled and hitchhiked, and I read War and Peace and did all the things I didn't do while I was … in Dr. Watson's laboratory for two years.” After medical school, Mendelsohn completed his residency in Boston and obtained a research fellowship at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis. He looked well set for a successful, if unremarkable, career in medicine.1
Mendelsohn might have continued on this track had he not been willing to take a risk when he received an unexpected offer. While at Washington University, he was invited to help start a new medical school at the University of California–San Diego. He remembers his colleagues telling him, “It's going to be terrible. You're going to have to start new courses and teach, and you can't do your own research.” But the opportunity excited him, so he took the ill-advised plunge. Mendelsohn moved to California and began building a new cancer center at UCSD. While there, he sharpened his administrative acumen and developed a reputation as an academic entrepreneur. Following a stint at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, Mendelsohn was tapped for the presidency of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. A few years into his tenure, M.D. Anderson surpassed Sloan-Kettering as the world's top cancer hospital, and virtually everyone credits Mendelsohn's leadership with spurring its ascent to the top.
Like Mendelsohn, most leaders start out with fairly normal childhoods, and they come from a wide variety of racial, socioeconomic, and geographic backgrounds. White males from better-off backgrounds do, indeed, start with an advantage over others, and a college education is important. As protoleaders grow, their life stories converge in college—only a miniscule number of leaders in this study did not earn a bachelor's degree. After graduating, protoleaders' paths diverge into their different fields of engagement, but they converge again around certain high-status institutions—graduate schools, consulting firms, law offices, and large corporations—where they build up records of successful performance, invest in relationships, and prepare to take advantage of opportunities that come their way.
Hidden within the seeming normalcy of John Mendelsohn's life story are some of the first advantages he enjoyed—the benefits of race, class, gender, and a supportive family. In the United States, inequality has historically been largely about race, and the statistics show that racial and ethnic minorities are grossly underrepresented among America's leadership—91 percent of the leaders I interviewed were white, and this tracks with other quantitative examinations of the upper reaches of society. However, it is important to keep in mind that demography determines part of this. In the average birth year for the participants in this study, 1950, 87 percent of the babies born in the United States were white, while 13 percent were racial and ethnic minorities. Nonetheless, race entails a number of potential opportunities and obstacles.
Leaders with minority backgrounds face numerous unique challenges, especially the participants in this study, who largely grew up during the Civil Rights Movement. One African American described for me what he calls the “black tax”: “The black tax is that you have to go earlier, stay later, run twice as fast to stay even. Don't complain about it, just do it; that's the black tax.” Others recounted to me stories of shame and disgrace: teachers who believed that blacks were inherently inferior and should not strive for a profession beyond the rank of chauffeur; clubs and bars where white colleagues could enter with ease but they were not welcome. While we have today largely moved beyond such blatant discrimination, racial minorities still suffer numerous disadvantages. And we still have a long way to go in terms of equal representation in leadership positions. The college presidency, for example, is still the realm of 61-year-old married white men. Only 13 percent of college presidents are racial or ethnic minorities, and only a quarter are women.
Maryana Iskander, the COO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, immigrated to the United States from Egypt as a child but, looking back, did not consider her race to be a barrier. For her, gender was the larger challenge. After capturing a veritable triumvirate of academic accolades—a Truman Scholarship, a Rhodes Scholarship, and the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans—she entered Yale Law School.
Shortly after enrolling, Iskander found she could not get any attention from her professors. At first, she said, “I didn't associate it with gender at all. And so [a classmate and I] started this study, and I realized that … the institution had a problem, and it wasn't me.… The problem was that the faculty rewarded a set of behaviors that correlate with male behaviors.” She described a scenario to explain her point:
A woman comes to office hours. Like me, she's done all her homework, she's totally prepared, she wrote down her five questions, and she doesn't want to waste your time.… And you … tick-tick-tick answer her questions, and then she leaves. That's it. That was the interaction. A guy comes in, he hasn't read anything, he's not prepared. But he's there to talk about, I don't know what, and you're engaged. And you ask him where he went to college. And then you ask him what he's interested in.… And then 20 minutes later, he has a relationship with you. And, then he has a teaching assistant job with you, and then you recommend him to go to the Supreme Court.
A big part of the problem, according to Iskander, was the demographic makeup of the faculty. In her words, “Some of the older male faculty were uncomfortable with … being alone with female students. And so you can't build a relationship across that distance.” It is not only in law that women fall behind. Iskander was one of many women in my study who felt the inequality of treatment and opportunities. In fact, one of the few female CEOs of a Fortune 500 firm talked at length off the record about her frustration with the old boys' club. Of all the demographic skews of this group of 550 informants, the gender imbalance is proportionally the most egregious. Only 12 percent of the leaders I interviewed were female, despite the fact that they represent half of the population.2 In certain fields, the representation of women is even less. Ten percent of the business leaders I interviewed were women. In nonprofit life, the gender imbalance is not as bad (29 percent of nonprofit executives are women). Clearly, women still struggle to gain their place at the top.
The challenges that they face are manifold. Some, like the gender wage gap, are overt. The Institute for Women's Policy Research found that the wage gap is most pronounced in the highest-prestige categories—CEOs and financial managers. Female financial managers earn 66 percent of what their male counterparts do, while among CEOs, the proportion is still only 69 percent.3 Moreover, the expectation that people who rise to the top must put work ahead of family disproportionately affects women.
But not all the problems faced by female leaders receive as much press as these. Recently, psychologists studying hiring practices in academia have shown that the relatively more “communal” adjectives—“sympathetic,” “helpful,” and the like—are used more frequently in letters of recommendation for women and make women less likely to be promoted than the “agentic” adjectives—“confident,” “aggressive,” and the like—which are applied more frequently for men. The end result is that fewer equally qualified women are given the glowing reviews needed to get to the top.4
According to scholars such as Harvard professor Robert Putnam, class—not race—is the major dividing line of inequality in the United States.5 Proportionally speaking, this is true. Those like Bob Haas who were raised near the top of the social ladder are significantly overrepresented among senior leaders relative to their prevalence in the general population.6 Despite this disproportion, many more leaders in this study—59 percent of them—were drawn from the middle class, and a significant minority grew up in homes where one or both parents worked blue-collar jobs (28 percent) or were near poverty (4 percent).7 Despite their lower- and working-class backgrounds, some overcame their circumstances through the aid of generous mentors, while others benefited from athletic or academic scholarships to college. In fact, these two items—support from benefactors and institutions of higher learning—serve as key equalizers for protoleaders who grew up in disadvantaged backgrounds. In other words, generosity, at both the individual and the institutional level, makes a big difference.
Poverty has sharpened the business acumen of a surprising number of corporate titans and financial tycoons. The private sector is often a sound choice for protoleaders in poverty. Half of the leaders I interviewed who grew up in poverty had earned a business degree, compared to only 21 percent of participants from more financially stable homes.
One thing Bob Haas, John Mendelsohn, and Maryana Iskander have in common with the majority of other leaders I interviewed is that they came from households with two loving parents. This is an especially significant finding, because over the past half-century, the number of children born into single-parent homes has skyrocketed. Between 1960 and 2000, the percentage of children living with a single parent increased from 9 to 26 percent. Between 1980 and 2008, the percentage of children born to single mothers increased from 18 percent to 41 percent. Along the same lines, children growing up without both biological parents were twice as likely to be poor, to have a child out of wedlock, not to graduate from high school, or to have behavioral and psychological problems. Other studies have shown that children growing up with both of their biological parents do better on a host of indicators than those who do not. Children born to a never-married parent fare the worst. The critical factor seems to be the amount of time that they spend with their parents, which partially explains why the Platinum Study sample group had more than its fair share of firstborns—6 in 10—as compared to just over 4 in 10 firstborns in the cohort of children born in 1950.8
Early upbringing and the ascribed characteristics of race, ethnicity, and gender help us to understand why some have an easier time ascending to professional heights, but there is much more to the story. Leaders are made, not born, and though many talk about luck or serendipity, they are quick to add, as one oil executive did, that “certainly, putting myself in the position to have that luck was an important part of it as well,” and “Once you're given that opportunity … you've got to make the most of it.” Protoleaders distinguish themselves from their peers by taking advantage of their opportunities at every step along the way.
Kevin Plank showed an entrepreneurial streak early on: “I read stories about Carnegie, Mellon, and Vanderbilt, and the industrial revolution, and I wanted to be a captain of industry,” the still-boyish Plank told me from his office in Baltimore. He had wanted to “be a part of building something greater than myself.” The youngest of five boys and a competitor from the beginning, Plank had a zest for work. Just like many other platinum leaders, Plank developed a deep reservoir of energy from a very early age that he drew from to set himself apart from his peers. He first observed this one winter morning as a seven-year-old when Plank tried to rally his friends to shovel neighborhood driveways for cash. His friends were unwilling to give up their snow day, but it was a no-brainer for Plank, “We're getting $15 for this, are you crazy? We should be doing twice as much work!” he said.
His entrepreneurial energy continued into high school, when he started selling bracelets with his brothers outside a Grateful Dead concert. He made such a profit that he realized he was “good at [reading] people, feeling them out, knowing where to go, just kind of having a sense for knowing how to sell a product.” In college, Plank ran “Cupid's Valentine,” a rose-delivery service, from his dorm room. He ended up with seven phone lines coming into his dorm room, 50 drivers, and 1,200 dozen flowers delivered. He put away $17,000, which eventually became seed money for Under Armour, his most successful venture.
Unlike John Mendelsohn, who was always in the top 5 percent of his class, or Maryana Iskander, who graduated magna cum laude, Plank never felt at home in the classroom: “I've never felt like the smartest kid in the room, but I always felt like I could overcompensate with my ability to outwork anybody.” He told me he did not apply himself in school and was kicked out of one school when he was 15 because he spent too much time partying and not enough time on his school work. He was a bit of a rebel, getting arrested several times for reasons including, in his words, “fights, jumping in a pool, driving cars before I had a license.” As he reflected on these incidents, he noted, “I have always been kind of a knucklehead.” Nothing serious seemed to come out of these indiscretions, though he told me he went to three different high schools.
His real passion in school was sports. In high school, he wrestled and played lacrosse and football. He excelled the most in football, playing on a varsity squad at Fork Union Military Academy, a high school known for developing first-rate athletes. He was disappointed when he was not recruited by the colleges he had hoped for and ended up playing as a walk-on for the University of Maryland at College Park. He was a fullback and a linebacker, and he captained the special-teams squad. He is especially proud of the fact that he never missed a practice in five years.
Although he was not a star athlete, there is no question that Plank's football career advanced his later career trajectory. Under Armour's marketing department proudly tells how the company's founder got tired of changing his sweat-soaked undershirt during football practices. He decided to invent athletic gear that would wick the moisture away rather than just absorb it. He set up headquarters in the basement of his grandmother's Georgetown townhouse and began building a business that would grow to over a billion dollars and attain worldwide reach just 15 years later.
But there is another story that does not get near as much press as Plank's sweat-soaked epiphany. The success of his company was not just dependent on his experience as a football player or his willingness to take risks. He also made very judicious use of his network of connections. When he first started Under Armour, he reached out to former college-football teammates who had entered the NFL for their help and endorsements. And he called every equipment manager in the Atlantic Coast Conference, trying to convince them to buy into his idea. His original business partners in the new venture were people he had connected with through high school or college sports. He maximized his network connections to catalyze not just his advance or the start of a company, but an entire industry of performance apparel.
Unlike most platinum leaders, Kevin Plank did not rise through a large institution. He did not go to graduate school, and he did not start at the bottom, working his way up. Instead, he gambled nearly everything for his entrepreneurial vision. Plank spent his last $500 on seven prototype microfiber fabrics. He was sleeping on his grandmother's couch and eating meals at home, because, in his words, “I was dead broke.” Still, by building a good team, having a good product, and positioning himself strategically in the market, Plank has been able to build his own institution and lead it to one of the most successful ventures in the apparel market over the past two decades. Platinum leaders know that they need institutions. Sometimes, they just make their own.
Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, remembered being under a great deal of pressure from his mother to go to business school, even as he was building eBay, because she saw that as the path to success: “Finally, I remember one day I said, ‘Mom … I have six MBAs working for me. So, that's enough. I'm not going to go to business school.’ That was the last time she said anything about [it].” Sometimes the rogues do reach the top.
Some activities—such as early employment, athletics, scouting, and student government—showed up again and again in my discussions. Working early is less common among leaders from minority backgrounds, though. Only 10 percent of minority leaders mentioned working before the age of 18, as compared to 28 percent of nonminorities. This may indicate that fewer people were willing to hire young people of minority backgrounds as these leaders were growing up, or it could simply indicate that they grew up without the expectation that they would hold a job early in life. A surprisingly large proportion of leaders were varsity athletes—41 percent in high school and 23 percent in college. There were also many Eagle Scouts in our study, and 58 percent of the leaders mentioned participating in student government in either high school or college.
While a record of early achievement is an important part of the leader's story, it comes with its own set of hazards. When leaders seem to peak very young, before their own sense of identity has fully formed, this can cause a sense of displacement and loss. Some who went to college early had depressive experiences. One said he got “too far over my skis,” lacking the maturity needed to really get the most out of college experiences.9 The Rhodes scholarship singles out promising protoleaders just out of college for a unique opportunity to study at Oxford. However, the prestige of the program and the high expectations placed on the Scholars lead many (including Maryana Iskander, who was a Rhodes Scholar before she attended Yale Law School) to have trouble at Oxford and experience failure for perhaps the first time.
Although we often assume that the most direct path to national influence goes through major academic universities (such as Ivy League schools), nearly two-thirds of the leaders I interviewed attended schools that are not considered elite institutions. Further, recent studies have revealed that attending a selective college does not make a significant difference in future earning power.10 Virtually everyone in the study graduated from some college. Only 3 percent of the leaders I interviewed did not graduate, and among this small group, most attended for some amount of time.
Even though it's not necessary to get a degree from one of the country's highest-ranking schools, there is some value in attending them. Many of the 14 percent of my informants who graduated from Ivy League institutions and the 22 percent that graduated from other elite universities lauded the intellectual training they received at these schools. But the real value of an elite education is in the social and cultural capital that students acquire while there.11 Social capital relates to the value individuals receive from their involvement in certain networks; cultural capital deals with the acquisition of assets such as dress, manners, cultural knowledge, and education. Both are essential for advancement, and universities are a key location for gaining these necessary forms of capital.12
Top-tier schools typically do a better job than others in giving students a familiarity with the unspoken expectations of elite life—something that is elusive for most aspiring leaders. The CEO of a consulting firm told me that when he first arrived at Harvard, he felt terribly out of place: “I had classmates who had been on Wall Street. I didn't know where Wall Street was. Everybody, it seemed, in class knew how to tie ties.… They were by-and-large more East Coast.” One day, a female classmate pulled him aside after class and told him that people were making fun of him for wearing white socks with dark pants. He was confused; it hadn't remotely occurred to him that his clothing mattered. He learned from that lesson, and he still looks back on his time at Harvard as an important time of socialization into leadership.
Another main advantage of elite universities is that their large endowments and significant research dollars generate more opportunities for students to work with leading scholars through research apprenticeships. Places like Harvard have a better track record of creating opportunity for people like John Mendelsohn, who had just decided to study premed when he knocked on the door of future Nobel Laureate James Watson to become an undergraduate research assistant in his genomics laboratory. Connections formed with classmates are important, too. The reason that Bob Haas's family vacationed with Secretary McNamara was that he and Haas's father had attended Berkeley and Harvard Business School together.
While the majority of leaders in this study did not attend a top-tier school for undergraduate life, experiences in graduate school concentrated around just a few institutions. Nearly two thirds of the leaders who received graduate degrees went to a top-10 graduate school in their field. Of those who earned a graduate degree, almost 3 in 10 earned a business degree, the most popular of the graduate degrees in the sample group. Six of the leaders in the study had graduated Harvard Business School between 1980 and 1983 alone, and eight of the current Fortune 100 CEOs also went to HBS, more than double any other business school. Twenty-two percent of those in this study had earned a law degree and nearly a quarter of the graduate degrees that the leaders interviewed had earned were doctorates.
Even at the advanced level of specialization that graduate school requires, however, it is still important to platinum leaders to live a liberal arts lifestyle. For instance, even though a quarter of the leaders had earned doctorates or PhDs, only one-sixth pursued a traditional job path as a professor. Many leveraged their graduate degrees in unorthodox ways. Instead of narrowing their areas of specialization, they deployed their credentials to expand their expertise.
For most platinum leaders, this fork in the road appeared during or soon after graduate school. They began to separate from the herd by keeping a broad, liberal arts approach to life while continuing to develop the skills related to their fields. The ability to maintain a generalist orientation—one that sees beyond the narrow scope of the specialist—while increasing mastery in a specific field distinguishes platinum leaders from mere scholars.13
The most impressive leaders I studied tried out jobs in unfamiliar fields, acquired new skills, and developed a taste for a cultural cosmopolitanism. They became increasingly knowledgeable in all divisions of the companies they worked for, not just their own departments. Sometimes this came through structured programs, like management-trainee initiatives, but often it stemmed from their own intellectual curiosity and willingness to try new things, even as they were relative newcomers themselves. Through these boundary-crossing experiences within their own respective organizations, protoleaders develop a sufficiently large stage on which to act and build a record of successful performance. They might also impress a future mentor higher up on the ladder, who would shape not just their values and dreams, but their opportunities and careers. These older elite leaders would recognize their own ambitions in the fresh faces of the energetic protoleaders and respond with a willingness to personally invest. Sometimes a protoleader makes his way up the ladder rung by rung, but sometimes, in pursuit of the liberal arts lifestyle, his career advancement will look much more scattershot. In recounting his own looping career, one executive ruefully stated, “If you're successful, people say you're a Renaissance man. If you're unsuccessful, people say you're a dilettante, and the only difference is the outcome.”
For Dan Bartlett, moving to Austin to attend the University of Texas changed his life. Bartlett had grown up in a small town in rural Texas, “where expectations weren't high.” His move to the state's capital meant that alongside his realization that he had leadership skills lay leadership opportunities. He started looking for a job, and fortuitously, he found employment at the Texas State Capitol. There, he befriended a colleague who then left to work with Karl Rove & Company, a political-consulting firm in town. His friend sent word that they needed more help, and at age 20, Bartlett decided that he would try it out, since “it paid more than what I was making at the capitol.” His work at Rove's Firm took him deeper into politics, drawing him into George W. Bush's first campaign for the Texas governorship. Eventually, he developed a close relationship with the candidate, which resulted in his becoming one of President Bush's closest confidants in the White House. Had he not moved to Austin, he would not have followed the same upward trajectory that took him to the White House.
Bartlett's experience illustrates a broader point that emerged from this study: location matters. People who grow up in large cities have a higher chance of reaching the top than those who grow up in rural areas. Fifty-seven percent of those I interviewed grew up in one of the 51 metropolitan areas with populations of over 1 million people in the 2010 census, even though these urban areas represented only 42 percent of the country's population in 1950.14 The deck is stacked in the favor of urban protoleaders; living in cultural, political, and business centers provides them with more opportunities in their rise to prominence. Rurally raised platinum leaders tended to move to the city as young adults. In fact, 34 percent of respondents had moved into one of these metropolitan areas (having been born outside of them), while only 5 percent moved out of the country's major cities.15 For people like Bartlett, moving to the city opened their eyes to bigger possibilities, which in turn enabled them to achieve more than did their siblings, many of whom were content to “get married, get a job in the mill, and make enough money to buy a car,” to echo one business executive.
Broadening one's perspective was not just a domestic affair, however. For many of these leaders, young adulthood also entailed international travel. Sixty-five percent traveled for the first time between the ages of 16 and 30.16 Bob Haas, who served in the Peace Corps in the Ivory Coast, told me that his time there made a significant impact on him: “I would say I frequently draw on the experiences I had in the Peace Corps and, even more particularly, in observing village life and activities in a small West African community, and thinking about interacting with people making difficult decisions.”
Respondents were also significantly more likely than the general public to speak a second language. This underscores the importance of an early development of global awareness.17 One university president shared with me how his international experience as a young man broadened his view on the world:
When I was in the Middle East for a year and a half, I used to go into work very early, between 4:30 and 5:00.… The people who were on the road were people who were on their way to work. There were truckloads full of [immigrants]. Usually Bangladesh, India, Philippines. Day laborers.… And what struck me … is what people will do for a job. How hard people are willing to work. And if you can see the humanity in the world that's around you, then it certainly affects your leadership style and the way to manage people.18
While protoleaders are ambitious and always looking for new opportunities, they also tend to be loyal to the institutions they work for. Over half of this study's respondents had worked in the same company for the majority of their careers, and 69 percent were insiders to their first position at the top, a statistic that goes against the idea that senior executives are typically drawn from the outside.
The trend was not as strong, however, for minority protoleaders in large institutions. While 72 percent of whites were insiders to their first position, only 54 percent of racial and ethnic minorities followed such a path to the top, being less likely to be promoted up the chain of command to their leadership position.19 Also of interest, ethnic and racial minorities were significantly more likely to mention having a specific mentor than were whites—71 percent of minorities I interviewed mentioned having a mentor, in contrast to 49 percent of whites. For leaders from minority backgrounds, who face the challenge of overcoming prejudice while establishing their reputation, investing in a relationship with a supportive mentor seems to provide the more reliable path to the top than relying on an institutional escalator.
By the time Dan Bartlett moved with President Bush to the White House as deputy assistant to advisor Karen Hughes (later to become communications director and counselor to the president), he had earned his fair share of confidence. Still, he told me that a significant challenge for him was that “most of the people who were my peers were at least a generation, if not two generations, older than I was.” He did not actively try to hide his age, but at the same time, “I wasn't offering [it], because I didn't want them to look at me differently.” Like Iskander, who became an executive at Planned Parenthood at 31, Bartlett quickly found himself far ahead of others in his age group, with people wondering whether he was up to the challenge. He told me about one interaction he had with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who was 39 years his senior:
We're all waiting outside the Oval Office, and there was some decision that there was clearly a split view of. And so it's Powell, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Hadley, myself, and Andy Card. And the president's on the phone in the Oval Office with the door closed, so we're all waiting, cooling our jets. But Rumsfeld had done his homework; he knew I was on one side, and not his. And so he turns to me, and says, “Danny”—and remember, this is the guy who was [decades earlier] the youngest chief of staff, the youngest secretary of defense ever—and he goes, “Remind me how old you are?” And I go, “Well, Mr. Secretary, I'm 34 years old.” “Good golly!” He's like, “I've got suits that are older than you, son!” It was kind of like, “Don't [mess] with me.” And I said, without missing a beat, “Yes, Mr. Secretary, and this must be one of them.” Powell was like, “Ooh, Rummy, he got you back!” So I kind of threw a brush back to him, saying, “Don't [mess] with me, either.”
Leadership is not handed down, and there is not one right path to make it to the top. Does it help to be a Harvard legacy or the godchild of a CEO? Of course, but it is not necessary. The accumulated advantages of race, class, gender, supportive parents, academic success, and extracurricular involvement all help a protoleader, but the key time in a protoleader's development is her midtwenties. This is when the unique passions, skills, or connections that protoleaders have can be turned into a career, just as Kevin Plank turned his passion for sports into a new product and John Mendelsohn used his training and spirit of adventure to launch a new medical school. The best way parents can groom their children for success is to let them develop passions and perseverance through the normal challenges and trials of childhood. They don't need a silver spoon; they need the right mix of upbringing, opportunities, grit, luck, and drive in order to prime themselves for a leadership position at the top.