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Thought Leadership for building new leaders | Tom Kolditz

Thought Leadership for building new leaders | Tom Kolditz

How thought leadership is playing a part in aiding higher education’s role in developing new leaders.

An interview with Tom Kolditz about how many Universities are failing to create new leaders and how the Dorr Institute is changing that.


 

Tom Kolditz is the author of Leadership Reckoning and Director of The Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University.  The Institute’s two-fold mission is to create a powerful and widely available leader development experience and improve the quality of leader development in higher education everywhere.

Tom shares how many universities include the development of leaders in their mission statement. However, he explains that few have any focused programs to bring about that mission. Many universities focus on what Tom calls “leadertainment” which has no lasting benefit.

We discuss Tom’s book Leadership Reckoning, which outlines the failure of higher education. In addition, Tom defines leadertainment and reveals how to measure outcomes and design programs to improve leadership development.

Tom informs us about the upcoming classification system from The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching that is compelling universities to listen to the problems being presented. Afterwards, he gives insight into how it will aid them in moving towards better programs for leadership development.

If you want to understand how universities can develop better leaders and why they are currently struggling to achieve that, you’ll want to listen to this episode!

Three Key Takeaways

  • Thought leadership needs to include methods of measuring outcomes. In addition, you should be tracking goals in order to truly understand its effectiveness.
  • Thought Leaders often have big ideas, but you have to cultivate the right conditions for the ideas to take root and grow.
  • Your thought leadership should include a system of checks to ensure that a client is progressing. These checks should also account for movement backwards.

Join the Organizational Thought Leadership Newsletter to learn more about expanding thought leadership within your organization! This monthly newsletter is full of practical information, advice, and ideas to help you reach your organization’s thought leadership goals.

And if you need help scaling organizational thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage!

Listen on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts!

 


 

Bill Sherman Hello. You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership, I’m your host, Bill Sherman. And today we’re talking about organizational thought leadership. In this episode, my guest is Tom Kolditz. He’s the executive director of the Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University. As you’ll soon hear from Tom, the Doerr Institute has a powerful but simple mission more and better leaders. I’m eager to talk with Tom about the Doerr Institute, the institute’s ambitious mission, and the measurable strategies they are using to achieve their results. Ready. Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Tom.

Tom Kolditz Yeah, Bill, thanks for inviting me.

Bill Sherman So let’s begin with setting up what is the Doerr Institute and its mission? What is your institute about and what is it trying to achieve?

Tom Kolditz Well, sure, the Doerr Institute has a twofold mission. First mission is for us to create at Rice University, which is a top 10 university, a powerful and widely available leader development experience, so not a boutique thing for selected students, but for all students and as good as executive development programs in industry. And then the second after we demonstrated that rice is to improve the quality of leader development in higher education broadly both across the U.S. and globally.

Bill Sherman Now, that’s a pretty ambitious remit. One changing how leadership is done within a university, that’s a big challenge. And then the second one that you mentioned changing how leadership education is done across all of post-secondary education. To paraphrase Jim Collins, that’s a big, hairy, audacious goal, right?

Tom Kolditz Yeah. Jim’s on our board, so I’m very familiar with that.

Bill Sherman Yes. So how did the Doerr Institute come to be? Where did this come from?

Tom Kolditz Well, John Doerr, a well-known venture capitalist put the money under Google and Amazon, and more than 240 of our successful companies was disappointed with the development he got at Rice. He’s a Rice graduate, he got a terrific education in the electrical engineering computer science, but he wanted more. And so, he gave Rice a donation, and I was hired out of the Yale School of Management to come and start the Doerr Institute. And there were a couple of things that were really done right. First of all, the Doerr Institute is not under a dean anywhere. We work for the Central Administration of the university, according to the provost, and that gives us a tremendous amount of freedom. And because we are supported by a donors endowment, we don’t compete with faculty for funding or for the attention of students. So, all on our own. And I guess lastly, our strategy was to avoid going through programs or courses or any of the academic architecture and apply straight to students. So, you’ve got an institute that’s under the senior administration that basically skips over all that middleman. And offers what we do straight to students, and that is has been tremendous help for us.

Bill Sherman So let’s talk a little bit about the state of leadership, education and higher it. What is the current state today and how would you describe it? If I’m a undergrad who is just starting, so I’m going into a class of 20 25 on average, what is my experience in terms of leadership education in the U.S.?

Tom Kolditz Sure. So for the most part, as you go to your university, you will see that in the mission or the vision statement, they say that they’re there to develop leaders for society and for the world, the next generation of leaders. And then you will find they do almost nothing to accomplish that broadly across the university. They may they may have a leadership minor where academic courses are taught. They may do leadership research in the business school or or elsewhere. And often they have small little competitive boutique programs with, you know, a hundred or one hundred and fifty students in it for a university of ten to twenty thousand. But the reality is higher education is failing in that mission. And so what we want to do is create the conditions where they can self examine the intellectually honest about what they are not doing and then improve and we’ll help them any way we can. We share everything out of the Doerr institute instruments, business models, best practices, strategies, leader development plans. Everything we do is available to anyone who wants it.

Bill Sherman So I want to double click on something. You said that leadership education is failing. A term that I’ve heard you use is leader-tainment. What is leader-tainment and what is leadership reckoning?

Tom Kolditz OK, so leader-tainment is something that’s common across the leader development industry and what we refer to there as things that people enjoy doing that are painted as leader development or leadership related. But in fact, when you check using the proper outcome measures and metrics, it’s just entertainment. There’s no lasting benefit to it. And in many schools, there are robust programs to take students on retreats to take them the ropes, courses to have them listen to leadership, speakers and pretty much none of it works. If we’re talking about increasing their capacity to lead, some of these things are really popular. And so we wrote a book that came out in January called Leadership Reckoning. And in Leadership Reckoning, we paint this picture of excessive use of leader-tainment and the failure of higher ed, but then that’s just the first chapter the rest of the book is. Here’s how you measure outcomes. Here’s how you design programs. Here’s how you can do this at half the cost of classroom instruction. And so it really is a blueprint for colleges and universities that want to improve, and we sent three copies each to the chief academic officer and the president of the top 200 schools in the country. And so we’ve been visited by university presidents and chancellors and had a lot of interest from higher ed because the typical reaction for most people when they read leadership reckoning is they look at what’s happening in their college or university. That is this. You’re right. And so, you know, we really feel like we’re providing a service. We don’t want to embarrass anyone and we certainly are competing with anyone. If other universities get better than us at this will be deliriously happy. You know, we just want to have more and better leaders because we think and Mr. Doerr, I think, also thinks that we’ve been disappointed by leadership in the past five to 10 years in terms of what it’s doing for our country and we want to improve that.

Bill Sherman So you have talked several times about evidence and measurement and being able to prove that it works rather than that feel-good. Oh, we did a ropes course or we sent people out and into the community and they had conversations with leaders things that are fun and feel good but don’t necessarily have a measurable outcome. I know you come from a background as a psychologist and you’ve been interested in measuring outcomes. That’s something that also ties with John Doerr, doesn’t it? In measure what matters?

Tom Kolditz It does. John Doerr is a huge believer in measurement of outcomes and in tracking goals, and for us, measurement was never on the table. We work at a research university. Rice is a tier one, our one research university. So the expectation is if you’re working at Rice, you have data.

Bill Sherman Mm hmm.

Tom Kolditz And what we needed to do is to develop an objective measurement strategy. So we hired a person whose only job is to measure outcomes, and he’s a highly experienced, well trained, Ph.D. research psychologist. And he does that work for us. And it’s been very, very important to us in determining what we do that works and what we do. That does it so that we can put our resources towards what works.

Bill Sherman And one of the things that I think you’ve been very good at the institute is doing is quantifying whether something works or not. From a scientific perspective, if you learn something doesn’t work, you’ve still learned, right?

Tom Kolditz Correct. And I think everyone who works here would agree that if the measurement team tells them that their program doesn’t work, that’s not necessarily bad news. It’s just news.

Bill Sherman Mm-Hmm.

Tom Kolditz You go from there to either eliminate the program or to change it in ways that do get effects.

Bill Sherman So we’ve talked a bit about the institute. Let’s talk about your target audience, you talked about the book and reaching presidents and provost and academic officers. Tell me a little bit about what you’ve done to try and reach them. And you said they have the aha-moments you’ve mentioned the book. I know you’ve done other things as well. Let’s talk about how you’re trying to bring this issue so that they have that aha-moment to them.

Tom Kolditz Sure. Well, we work from the bottom up and from the top down, so sometimes we talk to program people and other times we talk to the president and provost should they work for. We have built a coalition that’s now 80 schools, representing almost two million students. And they are part of the consortium that were idea sharing with, and we are including them in the early development of a classification in leadership, education and development called leadership for public purpose. It’s actually a classification managed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. So we’re creating the conditions for them to not only go through self-improvement, but also to be publicly recognized for better leadership, education and development in their school.

Bill Sherman While some organizations might think of that as certification or accreditation, this is a self-select to say not only is this something that we value here at our university. This is something that we’re working on and that they can opt in to the Carnegie Classification. Is that correct?

Tom Kolditz Precisely. It’s entirely voluntary and self assessment driven. But early indications are that universities that have developing leaders somewhere in their mission or vision. Feel compelled. To do that self-examination and to get that classification from Carnegie, because Carnegie already classifies every college and university in the United States.

Bill Sherman You mentioned the research institutions and are ones, for example. That’s a Carnegie classification, right?

Tom Kolditz Exactly. And so it’s easy for universities to go down the road of the optional classification because they know Carnegie there. They’ve already been assessed by Carnegie, and we’re just making it easy for both Carnegie and the universities. And so that’ll be available to about 4500 universities in the US by probably January of twenty twenty two.

Bill Sherman Let’s take this apart for a moment. The first thing that you you’ve been doing is trying to create the AHA. And you talked about when you sent out the book to the presidents and provost, you didn’t send just one copy. You sent three to two hundred of the top universities. And I know you’ve mentioned that some of those universities have used this part of Book Club, right, for leaders to talk. Can you tell me a story or two of when the light and the AHA has come on at a university, whether that’s a president or provost, what that story was like and how did they go through the transformation from unaware of the issue to we’ve got to change.

Tom Kolditz We know I’ll give you an example, and I’d rather not say the name of the particular university system, but the chancellor of a university system. They have five schools in it. Got the book, gave copies of it to a few of the presidents of the subordinate universities. Then they made it a book club book for the university, and they were in common agreement that it was important that they achieve the Carnegie Classification, that they review what they’re doing to develop leaders as a unique value proposition for their schools, for their universities. And. Most, most universities struggle with how do we measure leader development? What’s the best way to get the job done and. Despite the fact that they have a lot of very intelligent, well, well-trained people, they tend to be unfamiliar with cutting edge leader development and to make matters a little worse. Remember that universities are composed of faculty and faculty due to things primarily they teach classes and they do research. Mm-Hmm. And they do it very well and they exhaust themselves doing it. So when there are overtures to develop students as leaders, we see often teaching classes about leadership. We see hiring students to be research assistants, perhaps on leadership research. This is what faculty do. The problem is those two activities are far more expensive than most leader development and far less effective than the best leader development, but the kind of locked in because that’s how they view the world with teaching research. And so you’ve got the president and the board of trustees up here wanting leader development. You’ve got the students and parents who want their the leader development for their students. And in between, you have teaching and research. And so it’s been a challenge for most. So when you lay it out there for them, when you tell them exactly how to do it, when you show them, it costs less than what they’re already doing. It’s a choice. That’s all it is. And I’m sure many universities will choose not to develop students as leaders. The education mission is sufficient for them. But I think possibly most do seek to develop the next generation of leaders for our society, and they’re going to participate robustly.

Bill Sherman One of the things that you described, which stood out to me, was that. When we’re not measuring and focusing on programs, the work that we’re often graduating college students with the leadership skills of a high school senior, and so we’ve been patting ourselves on the back thinking everything was good when it really wasn’t. And that’s where I think the power of thought leadership is to make the invisible visible. And here was an issue and a problem that a lot of very skilled, knowledgeable and well-intentioned presidents, provosts and university administrators thought they were doing a good job on. But the data said something else. And so how do you call attention to that fact and create a community and a movement that sees the gap and closes it?

Tom Kolditz Right, so we brought together the consortium, published a lot, so our measured outcomes in terms of the efficacy of things like professional coaching for students and other techniques that we’ve used are now published in refereed journals that the data are so profound. We also give away our data to. Program directors in schools who want to argue for more funding are for the ability to do more work. We gave a woman in college at one large university all of our coaching data coaching outcome data with students, and that includes our allies like less trips to the counseling center and so forth. And in two weeks, she was able to pull together $2.2 million to coach three thousand students.

Bill Sherman Wow.

Tom Kolditz So, data are compelling. The other the other thing that helps. Is that with the pressure of the upcoming Carnegie Classification? It’s already out there that’s compelling for universities to at least listen. If it were just an idea. I don’t think we have gotten very far. But the idea paired with some real pressure, some administrative pressure is it that’s a winning combination. It’s a winning combination. John Doerr has a saying that I probably quote once a week in some way, and that’s ideas are easy. Execution is everything. So going along with the thought leadership and having these big ideas. We also have to create the conditions for those ideas to be planted and grow. And that’s where the Carnegie Classification System comes in.

Bill Sherman And it institutionalizes the idea. It creates something that’s a standard that people can ask and say, Have you signed up to this? So I think about the agile software movement when it was starting, they created in a manifesto and they asked people to sign on to the manifesto and the values and the principles right, and then say, What are you going to do to change work on software development? Very similar here. You’re saying, Hey, there’s a problem in the current state isn’t working. What are we going to do to change? And you’re not being prescriptive. It’s saying you have to use our program. You have to do X, Y and Z. You’re just saying try better things and measure and see, do they work?

Tom Kolditz Sure. Most universities have psychologists, they have organization, behavior professors, they have, you know, a ton of people already there. Even in the student affairs realm, there are some very well-educated people who know a lot about leader development, but they have to work within the structure that they give. And so by going to presidents and trying to elevate the status of these ideas, at that point, you’re at a level in the university where structure can be changed because remember, this is all about choices. You know, it can be done at half the cost of classroom instruction, so if it’s something you’re considering cost less than something you’re already doing. That’s a choice. And so we’ve set that up. We set the thought leadership to create this opportunity to choose. And we don’t judge if someone does wants to say, no, you know what, we just we just educate physicists and poets and we don’t want to have leaders graduating. That’s up to them. But what we have done national surveys to confirm the fact that more than 65 percent of Americans assume that colleges and universities are graduating better leaders, that they’re going to a college or university will make a person a better leader. And we have a lot of data that shows that unless you do it deliberately and intentionally. That doesn’t happen, and that means 2.2 million college graduates a year. The vast majority of which are graduating with high school level leadership skills.

Bill Sherman That’s just profound. Right? And that leads so much to our future as to the next generation. If you are enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe.

Bill Sherman If you’d like to help spread the word about the podcast, please leave a five star review and share it with your friends. We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all major platforms, as well as at LeveragingThoughtLeadership.com.

Bill Sherman I want to turn and ask a question about you, Tom. How did your journey lead you here as a thought leadership practitioner? I know you have a background and a Ph.D. in psychology. You’ve taught leadership in various environments, but could you tell a little bit of your story and how you came to be here? Because when you talk about leadership development, I hear a passion and I’d like to uncover a little bit of the red thread of your life that leads you here and why this is a passion.

Tom Kolditz Well, sure. I mean, I’ll be as quick as I can with it. I I went to graduate school in psychology after I graduated from Vanderbilt and was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Army. But at the time it was the 70s and being in the military wasn’t popular. So I went straight to graduate school Ph.D. in psychology. And then my military career was a combination of leading combat units. And then my next assignment would be more cerebral in the human resource director to the Pentagon or elsewhere. And so my entire military career was back and forth. Using this lens that I got from my doctorate to look at leadership, both my own leadership and the leadership of other people. I decided it at 18 years in that I would venture away from the tactical combat army and go to West Point, where I chaired the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership and I, I learned a ton about how West Pointers were developed as leaders, where they had success, where they didn’t. And. I had a realization while I was there that. You don’t have to go to a service academy to learn to be a better leader. And I wish we would daydream about how great it would be at a private university. If there were the resources and the intent to create a leadership engine at a private, private university, and I wound up leaving West Point, going to the Yale School of Management for four years to build a program for them, and then I was then hired out of there to come to race and build the door institute. So when I came to race, I had about 20 years of experience in higher education, where later development was a prominent feature, and it enabled me to create the programs here and to build the team here in such a way that we would highly impact students at race. So class of twenty twenty one, more than 40 percent of that class had a professional leadership coach for a semester. That’s huge. Yes, 40 percent of the university gets executive quality leader development, and we have we have many other programs that students take advantage of besides the professional coaching. But I use that as an example because it’s just not seen elsewhere. And people view it as being very expensive. And I will tell you that we run a business model that makes it easily affordable for us to provide that. And we offer all of our programs, including professional coaching, to every undergraduate and graduate student in the university who wants it free of charge and without competing with anyone.

Bill Sherman And so instead of leadership development as a scarce resource that you compete for, that allows a lot of people who may be curious of can I develop my leadership skills? But they necessarily haven’t been tapped to be leaders before?

Tom Kolditz Exactly, we go about it in a way that doesn’t require a student to be in a leadership role or even want to be in a leadership role. You know, students who have only been in adulthood for the last six to eight years are in shell shock over bad leadership. Most of them don’t want to be leaders. It’s hard to find a young person who wants to be a senator, for example. Hmm. There’s been so much disappointment around personal integrity, not telling the truth and so forth. So we have to have an approach to developing students as leaders that doesn’t first require them to buy into the idea that they’re going to be in a leader role. They know they’re going to be in nonhierarchical teams, in fact companies, and they know that they want to do well and have their ideas heard and want to be thought leaders in any case. Mm hmm. So that’s the way that we structure our work is to improve the individual, but not necessarily install them in a leadership role.

Bill Sherman Or at least what are considered classic leadership roles, right? You equip them to be leaders wherever they choose to go. Let me give you a moment. Maybe you’ve got a story or two that you could help, sort of for lack of a better word, brag on some of the successes of some of the rice students who have gone through the Doerr institute and done wonderful things. I know the institute is still relatively young. I think you graduated your first full class in terms of four years through the institute this year. But let’s let’s dwell on the students. What does success look like for them and how have they been successful?

Tom Kolditz You know, I’ll tell you my favorite place, my favorite is when. I talked to a mother and father of students, parents. And they tell me that their son or daughter took part in the doors to and they asked me something like, What have you done to our child? They are so different now. Before they had no confidence, they say they were worried about making it through school, and they didn’t consider themselves to be a leader. And now they have this new identity where they want to start their own company and do these kind of things. And I wish I mean, I could tell you about a single instance of that, but I’ve had dozens of parents tell me that we’re also very proud of many of the students who came through rice. And at the time could not afford to be in a leadership role because they had to work outside of school. And for the last four years, we have provided stipends to students. That are about the equivalent of what you would make bartending in in Houston. Mm-Hmm. And it allows them to leave that job and participate in student government as a leader or to be as a leader in a student club. We’re very selective and they have to have valid financial need. But we have seen some of those students go on to really aggressively pursue leadership roles because their whole identity changes when they work with us. They come in thinking new leadership starts a little iffy. And by the time they leave, they view themselves as a leader. A leader is not a role that they would have. It’s who they are. And that has tremendous Kerry. You know, we have been looking into the alumni page to see how long our interventions last, and we have been very, very pleased by those data. Students get changed forever when they’re their own sense of identity changes once they view themselves as a capable leader. There’s no stopping them. And likewise, if they graduate without that. Really doesn’t matter how many workshops they’ve had or or what have you and what really concerns us. Is the Association of New Leader roles with privilege? Because in many of the top 10 schools. Their graduates are quite privileged. Whether they came, they’re privileged or not, and so they’re placed in leadership roles, whether they have the skills or not. And I will tell you, the Ivy League schools do not do a good job at this. They do not. And I’ve worked in them and I’ve been around them. They run a lot on reputation and networking and some mentoring. But they do not have well composed leader development strategies for undergraduates. Really not a single one. And that’s part of what we’re trying to change.

Bill Sherman Well, and that creates an opportunity for, like you said, other schools and institutions of how are you going to distinguish yourself if you can say, we know we’re helping our students become leaders. And regardless of what field they go into, whether it’s fine arts or communications, they don’t have to go into a management leadership role in a classic sense, right? But that’s going to make your alumni base so much more impactful in the world in whichever way they choose to touch the world.

Tom Kolditz Yeah, and our ally measures have shown us that our graduates who go through the Doerr institute get paid more initially, but even more importantly, they give back more to the university in donations than their peers do. And for a university president, that’s a big deal for a university board of trustees, that’s a big deal. And so we’re hoping that other elements of our ally begin to emerge that would complement that.

Bill Sherman So what’s next for the Doerr Institute? Where does the institute go from here?

Tom Kolditz So in in the short term, we’re working on the Carnegie Classification, and we’re going to make sure that that’s done in a way that Carnegie would be proud of, and we’ll get that launched. And then we’re going to be looking at other methods of putting leverage towards more and better leaders. And really, that’s the only thing we’re concerned about. How do we create more and better leaders in society through higher education? And there are a number of ways that we’re experimenting with and some of those I just want to keep secret because some are quite controversial. But we’re going to do it and we’re going to keep doing it for at least another 30 to 40 years.

Bill Sherman And that’s something that’s remarkable, too. And I think sometimes people focus on the short term for thought leadership. What can we do this quarter? What can we do this year? What’s the idea that’s going to fuel our company’s growth or what problem are trying to solve immediately? You just said 30 to 40 years and you distilled it down to more and better leaders. That clarity and that long term time horizon really allows you to open up and have that courage to experiment and say, What can we do and how do we disrupt what isn’t working?

Tom Kolditz Right. And what we’re doing now, we view as. Pitons in a wall, you know, when a mountain climber goes up a rock wall, they put Pitons in these metal stakes so that they can’t fall back any further than they already did. Mm-Hmm. And I think that’s a really important concept for change. As you move forward, you have to put pitons in the wall so that nothing gets undone that you’ve already done. You only go further and do more. And so that’s what we’re up to right now is we’re putting people in the wall because it represents excellence. Race is really one of the few schools that can legitimately claim that it offers leader development to the majority of their students. And that’s going to be a tremendous value proposition as race competes for students with other schools, for students to understand that they can have an executive quality leadership experience at no cost when they show up to this university. It’s huge, and a student who does everything that they can do with the doors to is going to get leader development with a market value of about fifteen thousand dollars. And that’s important when parents are trying to decide where they want their child to go to school and what who they want to graduate, do they want their child to graduate as a leader and then how is that exactly going to happen? This is it’s hard questions to begin to uncover the hollowness of it all.

Bill Sherman In the end, we’ve invested as a society leadership development for a select few, often in their 30s, 40s, 50s and helping people who have already proven get incrementally better. The concept of approaching people in their early formative years, their 20s, is they’re starting out as adults. There’s a compounding effect there, which I think is fantastic.

Tom Kolditz Yeah, you know, I put a chapter in one of Marshall Goldsmith books called The Time Value of Leader Development, and it’s very similar to the time value of money. If you make early investments, they continue to pay forward and grow. So we’re very interested in keeping this focused at the college level and doing it early. The whole business solution of find the high potentials in mid-career and then try to change their habits for the better is suboptimal because it’s suboptimal approach. It’s very expensive for business. And our view is colleges and universities should take on fundamental leader development so that when businesses hire, people there at least have them. But that’s generally not what happens, and it’s inefficient. Businesses should be focused on providing services or making products. They shouldn’t have to have a giant leader development industry internal to businesses because they get young people who are still high school level leaders.

Bill Sherman And the ability to grow an organization, whether you see an opportunity as a senior leader and say we can enter a new market, we can create a new product offering, we can offer a new service. But we need the leadership talent to turn this from an idea into a viable offering or a viable business unit. If you have a talent pipeline that is stronger coming in at the entry level of the workforce, that makes the ability for organizations to grow so much easier.

Tom Kolditz Sure. You know, if if someone comes in at zero, the businesses can grow them to five. Yup. They come in at five. The business can grow them to 10. And that’s what we want to provide. Know, I mean, it’s good for businesses to provide leader development. No question about it.

Bill Sherman But that should be fine tuning rather than the basic building blocks.

Tom Kolditz Exactly.

Bill Sherman Tom, I want to thank you for taking time today to talk about the work that the Doerr Institute is doing at Rice, as well as how you’re integrating thought leadership into the mission and the execution of what you’re doing. It’s a really fantastic story. If someone wants to learn more about the Doerr Institute, where could they go or how do they get in touch with the team?

Tom Kolditz Well, you know, right now the best way is to is to buy the Leadership Reckoning book, which I see on your shelf back there. That tells the story top to bottom. But if you don’t want to fiddle with the book www.doerr.rice.edu, we are got Rice study to you. Ah, just go to the rice website and search leadership and you can find out everything. You can get copies of publications, you can get instruments that we have created and validated everything there is to be given away and shared. So we’re easy to find, easy to collaborate with and very well intentioned. We want all boats, drives everybody to succeed and we’re happy to talk to anyone and make that easier.

Bill Sherman That’s an amazing mission and the work that you’re doing is going to be so invaluable in the future. Thank you very much, Tom.

Tom Kolditz You bet. My pleasure. Thank you.

Bill Sherman Thank you very much. If you’re interested in organizational thought leadership, then I invite you to subscribe to the OrgTL Newsletter. Each month we talk about the people who create, curate and deploy thought leadership on behalf of their organizations. Go to the website orgtl.com and choose Join our newsletter. I’ll leave a link to the website as well as my LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Thanks for listening, and I look forward to hearing what you thought of the show.