At age 23, Tom Johnson moved his wife and newborn son to the nation's capital with a newly minted degree from Harvard Business School—and little else. Johnson, from Macon, Georgia, had humble roots and had made it this far through hard work and the goodwill of the editor-in-chief of the Macon Telegraph, Peyton Edison. Edison had taken a 14-year-old Johnson under his wing when Johnson needed work to help support his family. He had such faith in Johnson that he paid for him to attend the University of Georgia—as long as the young man would work at the Telegraph not only summers, but also during the school year (despite the two-hour drive from the university). After Johnson graduated with a degree in journalism, Edison helped him attend Harvard Business School. After living in Boston, Johnson's wife Edwina was uneager to return to Macon, so Johnson applied for a brand-new program started in 1964 by President Lyndon B. Johnson called the White House Fellowship. The fellowship would take a dozen or so young professionals and give them secondary but meaningful positions in the White House for one year with hopes to “strengthen the Fellows' abilities and desires to contribute to their communities, their professions, and their country.”1 Johnson was interested primarily because, “I felt that as a person who wished to become a leader in … journalism, there is no topic as important as government.” He had little idea what was in store for him.
One of the commissioners who made the selection during the fellowship's competitive admission process was John Oakes, the editor of the New York Times. Oakes must have seen promise in young Johnson, because he told him, “You know, Mr. Johnson, I think one day you will become the publisher of a major metropolitan newspaper.” With this recommendation, Johnson was accepted into the program, where he worked under Press Secretary Bill Moyers. During this year, Johnson formed a very close relationship with President Johnson and remained in various positions in the administration until the president left office.2
I interviewed Johnson in 2009 in his Atlanta home, where he and Edwina talked with me for hours, telling me in turn humorous and tragic stories of his life of leadership. Yes, Johnson had retired in Atlanta, only 90 miles from his hometown. But he had taken the long way back, coming by way of (among other cities) Los Angeles, where he had served as the publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times. His return to Georgia had been at the invitation of the state's favored son, Ted Turner, to serve as the president of CNN's newsgroup. In this role, Johnson had ushered America through the Persian Gulf War. CNN was the only organization providing a live newsfeed out of Baghdad; people all over the world (President Bush included) were relying on the network for up-to-the-minute information. This established CNN as a global news organization. Looking back, Johnson credited his full life to the White House Fellowship:
My perspective was that of a person who was seeing the world through a prism that was largely focused on Macon, that town right in the middle of Georgia.… The window on the world for me was opened further by my undergraduate education at University of Georgia and by my graduate education at Harvard Business School. But nothing prepared me for the type of experience I had as a White House Fellow.… I don't think there's any chance [without the fellowship] that I ever would have become the executive assistant to President Johnson, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, or chairman and chief executive of CNN. So this was an unbelievably transforming experience.
This kind of a catalytic experience is what growing companies and ambitious young people everywhere are trying to construct. Leadership development is a hot field, as organizations seek to train their next generation for oncoming challenges. But it is hard to pin down exactly what it takes to develop a leader. Most would agree that leadership is a combination of talent and training. But can leadership really be taught? Thomas Cronin, a former White House Fellow and former president of Whitman College, gives this description of leadership training: “My own belief is that students cannot usually be taught to be leaders. But students, and anyone else for that matter, can profitably be exposed to leadership, discussions of leadership skills and styles, and leadership strategies and theories.”3
By this theory, the key to any leadership development program is to give people the opportunity to experience successful leadership—up close and personal.
For Tom Johnson, this experience was found in the White House Fellowship. While the program has hurled many upwards—including Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao—it is not the only catapult available. Among the most impressive leaders I interviewed, many have had a singular experience that elevated their early leadership successes and propelled them into elite circles. For some, it has been winning a Rhodes Scholarship, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, or working on a successful presidential campaign. These transitional leadership experiences are what I call leadership catalysts. For most senior leaders, the presence of a catalyst is what takes the protoleader—an ordinary individual with a series of accumulated advantages—into a place where he can assume leadership of a major institution.
For the purposes of this study, a catalyst is either a program or a particular experience sponsored by a national institution that gives protoleaders the opportunity to develop a generalist mind-set, which is essential to leadership, and to connect with superior (elite) networks. Catalysts develop leaders by accelerating their comprehension of what is required to function in high-level positions and by stimulating their development. In a third of my interviews, leaders described a significant turning point—the kind that often occurs in catalysts like these. I also found that those who had mentioned turning points were more likely to have mentioned having a specific mentor or sponsor, suggesting a significant relationship between these turning points and the advisors who make them happen. In many cases, this mentor was someone the leader would not likely have met outside of the catalytic experience. And these turning points generally happen at a relatively young age; research suggests that the events and the decisions made in one's twenties and early thirties have a profound impact on the course of the rest of one's life.4
There are many programs, fellowships, and leadership development groups that claim to accomplish catalytic propulsion. Efforts by local governments and other organizations (such as the Southern California Leadership Network or the City Hall Fellows program) elevate the careers of protoleaders with varying degrees of success. A catalyst is a targeted program with a focus on propelling young people into the upper reaches of leadership. What distinguishes a catalyst (as I am qualifying it) is a very competitive admissions process, superior networks, and public recognition on a national scale. A true catalyst is not a career stepping stone; it's a career skyrocket.
While few programs command enough influence to be considered catalysts, they come in a wide variety. Catalysts are hosted within specific sectors (like business, government, or academia), but recipients do not necessarily remain in that sector over the long term. A Rhodes Scholarship, for example, is an academic catalyst in that it involves studying for a postgraduate degree at Oxford University. But Rhodes Scholars are not expected to remain in academia; the funding provides a broad and deep education through a life-changing experience. Many use the prestige of the program as an entry point to another field, because currency earned within a catalyst in one sector retains plenty of value elsewhere.
In academia, prestigious awards—like the Rhodes or Marshall Scholarship, the Fulbright Scholar Program, or National Science Foundation CAREER grants—operate as catalysts by distinguishing academics early in their careers and giving them coveted funding for travel, study, and research. Thousands of young Americans apply every year for only 32 Rhodes Scholarships, which send promising young people under the age of 25 to study for a post-graduate degree at Oxford University. Such scholars have the opportunity for an incomparable education before encountering the larger world. Not only is Rhodes a résumé pillar, but it gives young leaders a broader perspective. Alumni of the program say that at Oxford, they learn how to form good arguments and pierce through bad ones, to have “an intolerance of sloppy thought.” “Oxford enables you to go deep,” another scholar said. Army General Wesley Clark told me, “In a nutshell, the Rhodes Scholarship was, ‘how to respect people from other cultures,’ and the White House Fellowship was, ‘how to deal with government and professionals.’” After serving as a Rhodes Scholar, said another leader, “I wasn't intimidated by the larger world.”
Most professional fields also have established catalysts. This can be a top-ranked business school or a consulting or investment-banking development program. Others make the right connections through volunteering on a political campaign or serving in programs for young social entrepreneurs, like Ashoka or Echoing Green. Like a prestigious graduate program or postdoctoral program, these programs for young people offer them the opportunity to distinguish themselves from their peers.
But not all catalysts take years and significant tuition dollars to complete. For some, all it takes is a weekend. Attendance at an exclusive conference like the Aspen Institute, World Economic Forum, or Renaissance Weekends is another way young leaders gain entrée into elite networks. One of the hallmarks of these conferences is that they are hard to attain an invitation for, but once you are invited, you have easy access to attendees who, outside of the conference, would be beyond your reach. At Renaissance Weekends, for example, name tags for everyone except heads of state simply contain a first name. Even first timers can come across their idols in line for coffee and start a conversation.
One of the most exclusive conferences is the Bilderberg Group, a conference of only 100 to 140 invited guests from Western Europe and North America. In 1969, Vernon Jordan was the first African American to attend Bilderberg, and he has been a faithful attendee ever since. When he was originally invited by a professor at Harvard, Richard Neustadt, Jordan had made a career working with the NAACP and on voter education in the South. Jordan told me, “My whole concentration, my whole focus had been civil rights in the South. So Bilderberg became my window on the world.… It made me see a world that I virtually did not know existed.” Through the Bilderberg Group, Jordan had entered the global elite, and he became an elite influencer in his own right:
I took Clinton to Bilderberg in 1991. He had never been, and these Europeans were saying, “Who is this guy, and where is Arkansas?” I said, “He's going to be president.” They said, “There's no way that's going to happen.” A year and a half later, the steering committee met in March, and I had Clinton come over. They were stunned. And that has been professionally helpful.
Of course not everyone celebrates the exclusivity of these conferences (and indeed many other catalysts). Conferences like Bilderberg give power brokers the opportunity to establish policy behind closed doors, effectively cutting less privileged voices out of the process.
I was introduced to the White House Fellowship (WHF) in 2008, when I served on its regional-selection panel in Washington, D.C. Impressed by the caliber of the applicants, I became increasingly curious about the scope and effect of the program. I was surprised, as a student of leadership, to have so little knowledge of it. The nonpartisan, year-long program assigns a small cohort of exceptional protoleaders to work as senior aides to top government officials such as the president, the first lady, the vice president, a cabinet secretary, or a member of the White House staff. It has operated out of the White House for nearly 50 years, and the alumni list is replete with prominent names from all fields of American life. Yet it has flown mostly under the radar every year, superbly training a new cohort of talented young people for American leadership.
As the vehicle for and goal of many ambitious men and women, the national government would seem like a natural setting for many catalysts. But because of bureaucracy and the democratic nature of American politics, there are no set pipelines to power when it comes to running for office or being appointed to a high-level position in government. In fact, catalysts themselves have relatively low success rates in placing participants into senior leadership positions. In other words, a catalyst is essential to a platinum leader's development, but not everyone who participates in a catalyst goes the distance.
The White House Fellowship, however, stands as an exception to this. Each year, approximately 30 candidates (down from 110 to 150 regional finalists) are brought in for final-round interviews. At this point, all the candidates are more-or-less equally qualified, so informal connections hold sway. According to multiple WHF commissioners I interviewed, the final selection is idiosyncratic—who connects with particular commissioners, who tells a funny joke over dinner, who is the best conversationalist. (All 30 are good enough to be selected.) From this group of national finalists, 12 to 19 are selected to become Fellows. When I studied the finalists who were not selected as Fellows, I found that 12 percent had gone on to become a CEO of a Fortune 500 firm or a similarly placed leader in another sector—a figure that demonstrates the high quality of these applicants. Astonishingly, however, when I studied the finalists who had been selected as White House Fellows, the percentage that then went on to such senior leadership positions was a much higher 32 percent.5 At one point, then, the candidates are virtually indistinguishable. After the catalytic experience, however, Fellows are two and a half times more likely to reach the pinnacle of organizational life. Clearly, there is something about that one year that helps to bend the sharp angle of these young leaders' professional trajectories. I knew that this was indeed a program worth studying.
In order to learn how the White House Fellowship develops such leaders, I conducted the first extensive study of the program in its nearly 50-year history. This included a comprehensive survey of current and former Fellows and 100 interviews with former Fellows, directors, and commissioners who have been associated with the program.6 Over the course of this study, I became more convinced that the White House Fellowship is the nation's premier leadership development program. While little known in the wider United States culture, the fellowship has been shaping the people who lead our country longer and more effectively than any other institution or program. It is an environment teeming with leadership life, giving a select few (the program has 683 alumni as of fall 2013) access to superior networks and the broad-minded perspective they need to direct a major enterprise.
The government official who supervises and (ideally) mentors a Fellow is known as the Fellow's “principal.” Often Fellows attend meetings and travel with their principal and work on special projects in the office, department, or agency where they serve. Fellows also participate in an educational program consisting of seminars twice a week—including exclusive meetings with senior leaders—and several week-long trips, to explore policy issues both domestically and abroad.
The theory behind the White House Fellowship is that leadership is better caught than taught. In short, my research found that the Fellowship really does elevate the careers of protoleaders with demonstrated potential. And as leadership development programs proliferate, it emerges as a paradigm for success. I found four essential factors that lead to its incredible benefit: significant work, broadening education, a diverse cohort of peers, and public recognition. I have seen these four elements utilized to differing extents in other catalysts, but the White House Fellowship does the best job of combining them to give protoleaders the optimal investment in their future success.
One White House Fellow described his work assignment as an opportunity “to be able to sit in the cockpit of government but maybe not pull all the levers.” Since Fellows are assigned to work for an individual cabinet officer or White House staff member, the kind and amount of work they get can vary greatly. But most Fellows I interviewed were satisfied by the challenge of their work. Jim Bostick wrote weekly activity reports and did advance work for the secretary of the Department of Agriculture. Marty Evans handled the Treasury secretary's weekly report to the president. In 1966, John Pustay spent a month in Vietnam studying anti-American sentiment. Bill Lennox helped the secretary of education develop an antidrug campaign. Wes Moore worked with USAID to consolidate U.S. foreign assistance. Peter Krogh negotiated with Vietnam protestors on behalf of the secretary of state. And in her role on the presidential transition team, Nicole Malachowski was responsible for creating an emergency plan in case of a crisis during President Obama's inauguration.
Regardless of what exactly a Fellow does, the work is important enough that these emerging leaders can demonstrate their talents, even in projects outside of their areas of expertise. To put it another way, the WHF gives Fellows an opportunity to actually work after years of learning how to work. “Even though I had gone to the Kennedy School of Government and had gotten my degree in public policy, I really didn't understand how the sausage was managed,” one Fellow explained. As another Fellow put it, “I have come to a view that effective development of leadership has to include an experiential component.… There is no substitute for trying to do it. And the earlier you start trying to do it, the more likely you'll get good at it.” John P. Kotter, a professor of organizational behavior at the Harvard Business School, would certainly agree:
Perhaps the most typical and most important [career experience for a leader] is significant challenge early in a career. Leaders almost always have had opportunities during their twenties and thirties to actually try to lead, to take a risk, and to learn from both triumphs and failures. Such learning seems essential in developing a wide range of leadership skills and perspectives.7
Kotter goes on to say that it is equally important to protoleaders to be broadened, “to grow beyond the narrow base that characterizes most managerial careers.” The White House Fellowship achieves this through its education program. One Fellow summed up the program as “a year of extraordinary breadth and exposure and planting of questions.” Another Fellow described the experience as “living in Disney World for a year, and you have a free pass to everything.”
Twice a week, Fellows meet informally with recognized leaders from different fields. These off-the-record round-table conversations, which typically happen over lunch, cover a range of topics and are intentionally designed to introduce Fellows to issues and debates in fields ranging from architecture to zoology, from physics to filmmaking. Fellows gain access to a number of prominent leaders, including the president, Cabinet secretaries, and Supreme Court justices, and they meet with close to 100 of our nation's top leaders in fields such as business, the arts, science, media, and government. One Fellow pointed out, “It's some of the most famous people in the world from politics and business and journalism. And to talk to someone off-the-record for an hour and a half is a fantastic thing.” Another Fellow said it was “an opportunity to engage … on a very personal basis, sitting in those lunches, asking questions, hearing their story, hearing what they did as young people and how they built toward Supreme Court justice, congressman, or senator.”
Every Fellow I talked with could relate the story of at least one specific speaker, no matter how long ago their fellowship year had taken place. One Fellow described a particularly poignant conversation his class had had with a senator and his wife about the challenges of being a professional couple and raising children in Washington. The class of 1982 spent four hours with former President Nixon. One Fellow spoke about having lunch with Clarence Thomas just after his contentious appointment to the Supreme Court. Another recalled meeting with Jesse Jackson for five hours when he was running for president. Deanell Tacha recalled with wonder how New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller met with her class only days after the Attica Prison riot, which resulted in the death of 39 men as state police regained control of the prison at Rockefeller's order:
I watched a man who had power, money, influence—by all counts a leader—second-guessing himself, doing this amazing introspection about what he could have done differently at Attica.… I can still see his face; he had this great, craggy face, and it was just wild, and he clearly hadn't slept. I think anybody who was in that room that day, still to this moment, would be moved by this.
This kind of access gives Fellows an unfiltered look into what life is like as a public leader. They learn how to get there, what to look forward to, and what to look out for.
The WHF's education program (both formal and informal) gives Fellows a broader understanding of the world around them as they gain intimate knowledge of the lives of prominent leaders and of complex policy situations. While their work for their principal gives them experience with (relatively) small-scale efforts, the education places their work in a larger context. Most graduate programs take someone deep into the minutiae of one particular field, but a catalyst opens leaders to wider knowledge of the world and their place in it.
Leadership isn't only “caught” from superiors but also from colleagues. The White House Fellowship is constituted by cohorts of 12 to 20 leaders from a variety of professional fields, and according to one Fellow that makes all the difference: “The other people are really what makes the fellowship a great thing. You meet lots of really interesting people who go on to do really interesting things.… It's really your peer group that has the biggest impact on you.”
The WHF cohort has a unique dynamic. It is competitive and diverse—Army officers and public school administrators are placed in a cohort with investment bankers, lawyers, and artists. But it is also collegial; the Fellows become confidants during the intense year. In fact, 91 percent of Fellows surveyed described their relationships with their cohort Fellows as “friendship,” compared to only 9 percent calling it a professional acquaintance. No one described it as a rivalry. One Fellow told me she was still in close touch with her class after having gone through the “shared crucible experience” of the fellowship the year before. Another Fellow said, “Through the experiences of other Fellows, you can exchange ideas with them about what they are learning in their experience and what they have learned prior to becoming a Fellow.”
The original conception of the program envisioned a couple hundred Fellows each year. It has never grown that big, but one wonders if the small size creates an intimate setting with unique benefits. One Fellow told me she was enlightened by being in “close quarters” with different racial minorities.8 Others—especially those who served in the early years of the program—mentioned to me that they had gained a greater perspective on not just racial but gender issues. One male Fellow came from working as an engineer at a company where “everyone was like [him].” Striking to him was his new exposure to talented women among his cohort; he “met the most talented women I think I'd met in my career at that point.”
With their intense career focus, many Fellows come into the program with limited exposure to people on career paths that are similarly accelerated but on different tracks. They leave the program with a greater respect for other fields, having worked with parallel rising stars. In particular, the WHF changes its participants' perspective on the military. Thirty-seven percent of all Fellows have served in the military at some point. For many of the other Fellows, this is their first close and substantial interaction with a member of the armed services. I found that for every one additional member of a class of Fellows who had a military background, their civilian cohorts' confidence in the military grows exponentially.9
Doris Meissner came to the Fellowship in 1973 after working at the National Women's Political Caucus. She said, “One of the most valuable things about the year was to get to know career military people close up, because I would have to say, I probably never had met one.” Meissner described her perspective:
I'm not sure that I could say that I was open-minded about it. I think a lot of it was just lack of any contact, but it also was having a real attitude that was rampant during the 1960s that was a [hallmark] of the Vietnam era.… And so getting to know these people and understand how extraordinarily well-trained they were [by] the institutions that they worked in was a real eye-opener for me. And I continued to believe that if you look at, across the society, the single public institution … that invests the most in people as human capital continues to be the military.
After her fellowship year, Meissner remained in the Department of Justice and eventually became the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Meissner was in this role for seven years and dealt with several emergency immigration situations (including the placement of Elian Gonzalez) that required her to work with the Department of Defense. She was thankful for the WHF program, which “did prepare me also to have a sense of how to work with the Defense Department and how to work with the kinds of capabilities and mind-set that military people have.”
Many of the Fellows I talked with had similar stories about changing their perspectives, and it is no surprise. Numerous studies have shown that wider exposure to people who are different from you gives you more tolerance for diversity.10 While Fellows come from different sectors, they are alike in their ambition and diligence to their work. When they see similar qualities in people in different fields, from different backgrounds, and in different political parties, they gain greater respect for one another. This respect and understanding help them to make more thoughtful choices once they ascend to leadership.
As important as what the Fellows learn from their work, the education program, and one another is the confidence they gain that they are on the fast track for professional success. The prestige of the program endows Fellows with respect and special opportunities rarely afforded young leaders. This extra push of public recognition is often what it takes to propel protoleaders to higher levels of accomplishment.
Not only does the fellowship's prestige give Fellows greater confidence in their own abilities, it signals to future employers that the Fellow is a standout and furnishes for them a respect equal to many years of job performance. One Fellow told me that it “compresses 15 or 20 years of life experiences into a very brief period of time.”
For example, before becoming a White House Fellow, David Beré was the brand manager of Cap'n Crunch at Quaker Oats. He described himself as a “solid performer” but not a “superstar.” Beré was accepted into the program on his second try and was surprised and embarrassed that Quaker Oats “made a little too big of a deal,” including a press release, out of his selection. Thankful for their support, Beré returned to work at Quaker Oats at the end of his fellowship year. But now he had the attention of his superiors. Beré said that the program “kept my name in front of senior people so that it was easier to be recognized.” He went on to become the president of the breakfast division before leaving Quaker Oats and eventually becoming the president and COO of Dollar General. Sometimes a catalyst is just what a protoleader needs to catch the boss's eye.
For David Neuman, the youngest Fellow in the history of the program, participation gave him something no other 23-year-old had. After the fellowship, Neuman used the connections he had made to get a place in NBC's management-training program. “As I was looking for job opportunities, it put me in a very elite category,” Neuman explained. “People looked at me different. They returned my phone calls and letters. They paid attention to my candidacy for a job in a way that they wouldn't have before.” Neuman went on to serve as the president of Walt Disney Network Television, chief programming officer of CNN, and president of programming for Current Media.
When I met with Sanjay Gupta in his office at the CNN World Headquarters in Atlanta, it was easy to see how he has gained the trust of millions of Americans as CNN's chief medical correspondent. But without the White House Fellowship, the telegenic smile that is familiar in homes across America might have remained behind a surgeon's mask. Gupta started college at 16 and completed his undergraduate and medical degrees in six years. He took a year off during his neuroscience residency to take part in the WHF, expecting to go back afterwards and pick up where he had left off in his training. But the White House Fellowship, and in particular his work for his principal, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, gave him new connections and an interest in media:
I literally had [an] epiphany.… I realized that both literally and figuratively, I had been living under a microscope. In the operating room, I'm using a microscope all the time, and my worldview was pretty closed.… And as much as we fancy ourselves as sort of more Renaissance citizens, especially neurosurgeons do, the irony is that so much of our training almost beats it out of us.… All of a sudden, I got this chance to run to this notion … that we could actually be more Renaissance, learn about a lot of different things. So I [went] from the microscope to the telescope.
Gupta did go on to become a neurosurgeon; he works as the associate chief of staff at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta and serves on the faculty of the Emory University School of Medicine. But he has influenced the most people through his work outside of the operating room, reporting on medical situations in the United States and during crises abroad.
Gupta is certainly not the only one who made a “microscope to telescope” transition through the White House Fellowship. A major result of a catalyst's broadening education is that people who have spent their lives up to that point developing skills in a specific field or subset are taught how to approach their work with a more generalist orientation. A well-designed leadership development program produces people who are capable of thinking about and understanding broad issues outside of the organizations they lead. Consider the words of Fred Benson, the president of the United States–New Zealand Council:
The education program…[led me to ask] questions about a broader range of subjects than I had been exposed to.… It changed my outlook. It internationalized my thinking, and it made me much more aware of our country domestically [and] its issues and problems. Candidly, I was a fairly successful, but narrow-minded, infantry colonel when I started the program. The program changed all of that.
Many leadership commentators (including White House Fellowship founder John Gardner) bemoan the rise of the specialist as drawing “most of our young potential leaders into prestigious and lucrative nonleadership roles.”11 Young people are trained in school to know everything about one field or subfield, but many are not trained in operating as a generalist. A generalist mind-set, however, is essential for leadership, and promoting it is the mission of liberal arts schools, which seek to educate young people through interdisciplinary and adaptive learning.12
One Fellow compared leaders to jugglers; in order to lead, you have to manage to keep multiple balls in the air. Another Fellow likened the intellectual variety of the White House Fellowship to “weight training and aerobic training for the brain.”
The liberal arts emphasis of a true catalyst facilitates a leader's transition to a different sector afterward. Two out of five White House Fellows, for instance, switched fields after their fellowship year, trading on the prestige of the program to gain entrée into foreign territory. The fellowship inspired Diane Yu to make such a switch. She went into the White House Fellowship as a lawyer and was assigned to work with U.S. Trade Representative Clay Yeutter. “When I came out,” Yu said:
I had a lot more confidence that I could take on a new challenge, a new position, a new field, a new industry, a new business. And as long as I worked as hard as I could and gained an understanding of what the mission and goals of the organization were, I had a reasonably good chance of doing alright in the new setting.
Yu moved from law to academia, eventually reaching her current position as chief of staff at New York University. Steve Poizner left the field of technology and prepared to run for governor of California. Many Fellows switched to work in government—rising from 22 percent in government before the fellowship to 38 percent afterwards—and Ron Lee, a West Point grad who took part in the fellowship in its first year, was asked to stay on after his fellowship and served as the assistant postmaster general.13
The liberal arts attitude that must be adopted by senior leaders is evident in the fact that out of 51 people in the study who had two distinct positions senior enough to qualify them for this study (that is, a CEO of a Fortune 1000 company or its analog in government and the nonprofit world), 86 percent shifted not only companies, but between completely different sectors. The most gifted leaders master the ability to organize and lead—talents and abilities that are moldable, even when moving from business to government or government to nonprofit life.
Catalysts like the White House Fellowship act like social and cultural capital investment firms, bringing protoleaders in contact with existing leaders willing to build relationships with them and help them learn to interact at their own level of seniority. Unlike economic capital, social and cultural capital cannot be transferred instantaneously from one person to another.14 Building the trust that forms the basis for social capital takes time, as does building up one's base of knowledge, skills, abilities, and familiarity with valued cultural commodities.
General Wesley Clark remembers realizing this on a WHF-sponsored trip to New York: “We sat there in New York City with George Balanchine of the New York City Ballet. And see, for someone like me, to go to New York City and see George Balanchine—I mean, that's a long way from Fort Riley, Kansas.”
Many Fellows looked back and chuckled over social faux pas they had made early in the Fellowship. When one Fellow saw that the door of the lead car of her principal's entourage was being held open, she assumed it was for her. She sat down inside only to realize the courtesy had been meant for her principal. Henry Cisneros, a Fellow in 1971, would go on to become the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but he had little experience in the upper echelons of government at the time of his fellowship. Cisneros ruefully related to me his ignorance of norms:
I remember having a green suit and I thought the right thing to do was to match it up with a light green shirt and a green tie. I must have looked like the jolly green giant or something. But I had absolutely no comparison. It was a very cheap suit, too; it was something I bought and thought I had a real bargain.… But these were people who wore Brooks Brothers and had been at the highest levels of Massachusetts politics—Boston and New York. [But] after a while, you learn.
Knowing where to buy a suit and how to talk about ballet are examples of the kind of cultural capital that protoleaders need to collect in order to feel at home in top circles. For those who don't learn these finer points growing up, programs like the White House Fellowship provide an essential tutorial on the hidden curriculum of elite life in the upper echelons.15
Sixty-one percent of the Fellows told me that contacts they had made through the WHF program helped advance their career. One went so far as to reveal to me that his principal had been instrumentally involved in securing every position the Fellow had held since leaving the program. One Fellow told me that the key to catalysts was the “accumulated advantages because of networks.” A congressman described how members of his fellowship class not only supported his campaign financially but would “show me around where they knew people who could help out politically.” Even the Fellows who initially told me that the Fellowship had little impact on their careers would go on to spend the rest of the interview inadvertently describing the vital connections they had made through the fellowship.
Colin Powell's is one story of success that can be tied back to the people he met as a White House Fellow. His principal had been Frank Carlucci, who was working in the White House at the time. Later, when Carlucci was Ronald Reagan's national security advisor, he asked Powell to be his deputy. When Casper Weinberger, then the secretary of defense, resigned in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal, Carlucci took his position and, in the words of Powell, “came into the Situation Room one day with Reagan and handed me a note and said, ‘You are the new national security advisor.’” For Powell, being the national security advisor (and subsequently, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of state) would not have been possible had it not been for the relationships he had formed as a White House Fellow.
Peter Krogh tells the story of his interview for the position of dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Krogh was not only being stared down by a 15-member search committee but also a row of dour cardinals lining the wall in Georgetown's Hall of Cardinals in historic Healy Hall. The interview had been going on for quite some time, and Krogh could not tell if it was going well; the search committee was as stone-faced as the cardinals in their portraits. Then, suddenly, the interview was interrupted by a knock on the door. A secretary poked her head in, saying, “Dr. Krogh, there's a call for you.” Krogh blanched; who was calling, and how had they reached him here? Embarrassed and confused, Krogh tried to turn down the call. But the secretary insisted: “It's Secretary of State Dean Rusk.” Krogh looked around the table and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, if you'll excuse me, I think I should take this call.”
The interruption had been purely coincidental. Years earlier, Secretary Rusk had served as Krogh's principal, and the two men remained close. Needless to say, when Krogh returned to his interview from the five-minute phone call, the mood in the room had shifted. He had the job.
Krogh told me, point-blank, “I would not have become the dean of the Foreign Service School had I not been a White House Fellow, just as simple as that.”
This sort of “lifetime supply” of social capital was the norm among the many Fellows I talked with. One from the very first class of Fellows shared how he can still trace its impact:
[The White House Fellowship] just continues to reverberate 'til today. I mean it's not just an event that happened [and] then you look back on it historically. It just continues to impact and influence my life, my work, my activities yesterday, what I'm about to do today. All the interlacing. It's really a golden web, rather than a tangled web, that has developed as a result of this. Because one leads to the other.
Leaders take all kinds of paths to their eventual positions, but a catalyst like the White House Fellowship is the key gateway to this “golden web.” As ever, achieving platinum leadership requires a combination of the right opportunities and the right person to take advantage of them.