Thought Leadership for Crisis Management | Helio Fred Gracia

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Using crisis management to help clients through the hard times.

An interview with Helio Fred Gracia about examining patterns to learn from them, planning now for the crisis of tomorrow, and the influence ancient philosophers still have today.

Today’s guest is Helio Fred Gracia, the CEO of Logos Consulting Group, a crisis management firm as well as executive director of the Logos Institute for Crisis Management & Executive Leadership. Fred teaches crisis communications and crisis management at the Stern School of Business and ethics at Columbia University.  In addition, he is the author of Reputation Management and Words on Fire. 

We start our conversation by discussing how trust is built, lost, and restored. Then, we move to how patterns that arise in these actions can be studied. These patterns help us gain predictive power in anticipating how outcomes can change when we intervene in a minor or major way.

Next, Helio discusses his work in crisis management and why we need to prepare for a disaster before it happens to ensure a proper response.

Philosophy for Influencing an Audience

Finally, we wrap up with a deeply philosophical discussion on the works of Aristotle. We examine his three essentials elements for a speaker to use  when influencing an audience. His words remain true more than a thousand years later. Also, we learn what Ethos, Pathos, and Logos are, and why they are the cornerstone and the origin of the name of Fred’s company.

Three Key Takeaways:

• Thought leaders can learn from studying the patterns that cause us to gain or lose trust.  We can make adjustments from these patterns and avoid negative outcomes in the future.
• The works of thought leaders from more than a thousand years ago are still relevant today.
• Thought leaders need to make plans to deal with disaster before they strike to avoid reacting with an emotional response instead of a well thought out one.
  

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Transcript

Bill Sherman Hello, You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m your host, Bill Sherman. We often think that thought leadership has the luxury of time and reflection, but sometimes thought leadership needs to rush to keep up with events in these moments. Words and ideas matter, but you need to speak clearly and confidently. So let’s talk about thought leadership in the crucible of the moment. Crisis Communications. I’ve asked Leo. Fred Garcia to join me on the podcast today. He teaches crisis. Communications and crisis management at the Stern School of Business at NYU. He teaches ethics at Columbia University’s Food Foundation School of Engineering. And he’s the CEO of Logo’s Consulting Group that handles crisis communication and crisis management for clients worldwide. I’m eager to talk to Fred about the intersections between crisis communications and thought leadership. And I expect we’ll talk about ethics and maybe even Aristotle before the end of the conversation. Ready?

Bill Sherman Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Fred. Thank you. Delighted to be here. So one of the areas that I want to explore and I’ve been looking forward in conversation is I know that you have not only professional practice expertise in crisis management, but also then you teach it. And I think there’s an interesting intersection between the world of thought leadership and crisis management and crisis communication. Right. And so. There’s a timeliness piece in there, but there’s also a trust piece. What Kim thought leadership and the world of thought leadership practitioners really come to appreciate better through your lens of crisis management.

Helio Fred Garcia So I spend most of my time, whether with clients or with students or in research and writing, studying the drivers of trust and the ways that trust can be built and how it can be lost and how it can be restored. And one of the things I find is that trust is an interesting combination of someone’s perception of another person’s competence, but also the perception of their integrity and the ability to demonstrate their competence in a non arrogant way that helps build common understanding. And one of the things that I love about crisis management and all of the manifestations of crisis management, including crisis response, crisis communication, crisis mitigation, crisis planning, is that it follows predictable patterns. And one of the things that I do in my scholarship and in my teaching and in my client work is I highlight those patterns so that we can see the patterns clearly when they arise and so that we can intervene in those patterns to create a different outcome. And one of the things that I find in terms of thought leadership is the ability to show those patterns and how the patterns have two different kinds of power. They have explanatory power helping us look backwards and make sense of things. But they also have predictive power helping us look forward and anticipate what could happen if we leave matters alone. What could happen if we intervene in a minor way? What could happen if we intervene in a significant way? And the discipline I teach is that we never make decisions in a crisis based on personal preference, but rather we make decisions based on what will lead to at least the less bad of the possible outcomes. And what I find in the world of thought leadership is there’s an appetite for that kind of explanatory and predictive framework.

Bill Sherman So if I were to jump in here for a moment, what I would say is the way that I look at thought leadership, it’s around peering around the corner into the future, seeing possibilities and opportunities, doing sense making, and then bringing that information back to an audience today where it can be made actionable. And from your perspective, what you’ve been talking about, crisis management is sometimes it’s not a bright and shiny future of wonder and possibility. Sometimes you’re looking at saying, what is the least bad outcome here? What can we do to protect ourselves from risk?

Helio Fred Garcia A crisis handle well early can actually lead to a better outcome than what you had before. Most crisis management is trying to minimize the harm. One way to think about this is to think about the idea of damage control on a naval vessel. Hits the side of the ship. Your purpose is to keep the ship from sinking. It’s not to wish that a torpedo had never hit the side of the ship. And in the world of crisis management, it’s the same way. It is unlikely if the crisis is severe enough that we will be able to get any time soon to the status quo pre crisis. But what we can’t get to is the less bad outcome. Here’s an example. No airline wants one of their planes go into a river and no pilot wants to land in the river. But when Captain Chesley Sullenberger was faced with a choice. I’m losing altitude. I’m at 5000ft of altitude. I will be hitting the surface of the earth in about 2.5 minutes. Can I get safely back to LaGuardia? Probably not. Can I get safely to Teterboro? Probably not. I can get safely into the Hudson River and the worst that happens there as we all die. But at least we don’t have a massive fireball from the jet fuel on the plane. So he did the less bad outcome which is landing in the river. Turns out he did it well. So he became the hero. But that’s a good model. It’s not the outcome you would have otherwise wanted, but it’s the best outcome you can get given the cards you dealt.

Bill Sherman Well, and I think this also leads to something in thought leadership, where if you spend all of your time thinking about the future and you’re disconnected from the present, you have a danger. But if you spend no time thinking about the future and only the present, you’re not doing thought leadership. And so it’s that ability to move into the future, to prepare and then be able to execute at a moment’s notice in the present.

Helio Fred Garcia It’s funny you say that, because what I tell my clients is. We are unlikely to think as clearly as we need to in a moment of crisis. So we need to project ourselves into the future when we’re not emotionally wrought, make decisions for the future. And then come back and deposit those decisions into the present. So that we’ve already done the hard work so that when the future finally is upon us, we say, we’ve done this. Open the tab. This is what we’re supposed to do. And we started to calmly, rather than in the moment of stress because we made poor decisions under stress.

Bill Sherman Well, and that’s, I think, one of the hungers for thought leadership that ties with the crisis management is we’re living in a reactive state where the inbox is constantly filling with new information, messages are coming and we’re trying to process and sense make. And if we never raise our eyes above our feet, we lose sight of the horizon, right? Now you’ve got a fascinating story that I want to add in terms of how did you get into the world of thought leadership to begin with? And I asked this question of a lot of people, but I love your story, Fred. How did you get into the world of thought leadership? Where was the start?

Helio Fred Garcia Well, I came to appreciate leadership almost by accident. But if I can get all geeky on you, please. I did my graduate studies in ancient Greek philosophy.

Bill Sherman Which clearly leads to thought leadership and crisis management.

Helio Fred Garcia Certainly Columbia would have, you think. And I actually went to City University of New York to learn ancient Greek. After college, there was a Greek institute that is spectacular, mostly for graduate students who have to qualify in Greek. And then I went to Columbia and I read Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Sophocles, the Christian Testament, all in the original Greek. And I came out of graduate school. Completely unequipped for anything but teaching graduate school. But I fell into a job creating an ethics program for a discredited industry. And in the course of trying to build this ethics program, to bring this industry back into good relationship with the society, I hired a PR firm that was a specialist in doing things that are abstract and making them concrete. And a really, really smart accounting executive was on my account over coffee one day and said, I’m struggling because I have this client. It’s a management consulting firm called McKinsey, and two of their guys have written this great report and we’re trying to turn it into a book. We don’t really know what to do with it. It’s called In Search of Excellence. And I happened to be present at the creation just witnessing a really smart person trying to create a brand for this management consulting firm, using the intellectual horsepower of their consultants to help companies and leaders figure out how to be better leaders through the method that they used in the consulting firm, giving it away in book form. And as I watched her struggle with them and ultimately get a great publisher and then put the authors Peters and Waterman on a book tour, I just marveled that that someone could do that. And I sort of kept it away in the back of my mind. And then as I got more and more advanced in my career, I was 26 with a map. But as I got more and more advanced in my career and I was hired by New York University to teach communication at the graduate level, and as I realized, you know, Columbia is I’m sorry, NYU faculty publish or perish. And I tried to figure out, okay, how do I publish so that I don’t perish? I thought of my mentor and my mentor was a philosopher. He turned out to be my best friend. He had been my undergraduate advisor and he was the best man at my wedding. I was 31. He was 71. So it gives you a sense of the geographic distance. But his mentor in the 1940s had been the British philosopher Bertrand Russell. And my mentor, whose name was McLendon, used to teach me Russell’s philosophy. And Russell was a brilliant philosopher. He’s a brilliant mathematician, but he was also a man of affairs, not only romantic affairs, but also out in the world. He was a man of affairs in both senses of that word. But he had a principle. And that principle is, if it’s good enough to teach in a classroom, it’s good enough to write an article. It’s good enough to write an article. It’s good enough to bundle articles into a journal article if it’s good enough for journal articles. You can bundle all together and make a book. If it’s good enough for a book, you can go on a public lecture circuit. If you go to public lecture circuit, you can write a newspaper article. And Russell, in the 1920s, 30s, 40s was the first, in my understanding to figure out the content channels play that you can slice and dice your content in any number of ways through any number of channels. And as I began to teach while you adopted the Russell approach and that it was good enough for me to teach in a classroom, I could write an article about it. If I could write an article about it, I can bundle the articles and write a little monograph about it. I can then model the monographs and write books about it, and I’ve now written five books. I’m writing my sixth now, and 90% of the content of my books I’ve tested in the classroom. I’ve tested in journal articles, I’ve tested in popular articles. These days I’ve tested with blogs, I’ve tested on podcasts. And as I get the feedback, I improve the content and ultimately bundle into something bigger. I then take the book and use it with my clients. I use it with my students. I use it in other forms and it builds on itself. And what I sort of fell into almost by accident was the recognition that thought leadership actually leads to business. So if I can tell the story of this big unknown, the first book I ever wrote was almost by accident. And that is, I had spoken at a conference because a friend of mine who was supposed to speak there got sick and couldn’t make it. And I spoke about crisis management at an advertising industry conference. And about three months later, the advertising industry came to me and said, Hey, we’ve got this little series of small books for leaders of advertising agencies, and we think you could do a really good book for us on crisis management for advertising agencies, just like you did at the conference. So I wrote the book, but instead of making it a book on crisis management for advertising agencies, I made it a book on crisis management, with the last chapter being the application of these principles to advertising agencies. So it had a broader readership. I was sent the publisher’s proofs when it was about to be printed and I was asked to just review it to make sure it’s accurate. On the same day that I got a call from a company in the Midwest that was facing a huge crisis. So I took the book. I put it in my briefcase. I went to the airport. I flew to the Midwest. And on the plane, I would review the proofs. And then I met with the client and met with the general counsel, the CEO, the head of corporate communication. At the end of the day, as we’re about to wrap up, the head of communication leaned against the table. So let me summarize where I think we are. We literally want someone who wrote the book on crisis management. I said, funny you say that. I reached into my briefcase and said, This is the galley proof. This will be published in two weeks. And I saluted across the table. She opened it. She read it. She said, okay. How much do you charge? And we were hired. They’ve been my client for the last 21 years. And that to me said you can actually monetize this thought leadership.

Bill Sherman And it is not only just a calling card, but people are looking for an answer to the problems that they’re facing because when they’re looking for someone in crisis communications they don’t want to have to worry about, are we vetting the right person? They want the person. They want the gold standard, The person who wrote the book. Right.

Helio Fred Garcia And what I find is they build upon each other. I’m on the faculty of New York University now for 33 years. I’m in my fifth year on the faculty of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Engineering. I’m in my 21st year as a contract lecturer at the Wharton School. Each of these builds on each other. And in a high stakes situation, when the brand is at risk or the franchise is at risk and they say, well, what’s this guy ever done? Well, he’s written five books on crisis. He teaches at these prestigious universities. He has this crisis practice. It’s a lot less risky for them to buy the brand than it is for them to try to inventory the capacities they think they need.

Bill Sherman And that’s something in terms of investment that has to be done upfront, right? So you can’t frantically write a manuscript on the plane flight back from that interview. When they said that we want someone who’s written the book. You can’t do that. But you can pull out the galley copy from the briefcase if you’ve already done the upfront work. One of the things in the Bertrand Russell story that stands out to me is we often think from a marketing perspective that we’re clever, and we in the last decade or so have invented omnichannel. Right. And that we’re trying to send a consistent message across media in every touchpoint. But I think the story from Bertrand Russell points out beautifully that that has been done a long time before. And we could even argue and might even explore going back to Plato and Aristotle of how ideas circulated and spread in symposia in ancient Greece.

Helio Fred Garcia And I’ve often said that everything we do is a footnote to Plato. Yeah, but here’s something that is fascinating that most people would never think of. Aristotle never wrote a book. I’ll say it again. Aristotle never wrote a book. Aristotle had students who took notes. And those notes were edited into what became books attributed to him. And there’s another demonstration of thought leadership that he didn’t set out to write books and become a famous philosopher. He taught to the best of his ability, and his students took notes and he edited those notes. And ultimately they become serious tomes that people studied, like myself and others. And similarly, I don’t believe Russell set out to be a thought leader. Russell set out first to be a mathematician and then to be a philosopher. And then he became an anti-war activist and over one was kicked out of Britain. He had to do other things. He did the lecture circuit in the United States. The Nobel Prize that Russell received was actually for literature. It was for his repurposing content for a generalist audience. And similarly, I didn’t set out to become a thought leader. I set out to try to apply my classical training to current problems in the world. And then when I was asked to teach, I said, Well, I’m teaching the stuff that is used beyond the classroom. Let me follow Russell’s rule and try to find other ways to get it out there. I discovered that people were taking my stuff seriously and I found myself in a of leadership role. But I don’t think I or Russell or any one else that I know of in this role said, You know, I’d really like to be a thought leader. We became leaders by just practicing our crest publicly, and then people saw it and have an appetite for work.

Bill Sherman If you are enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. 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 So there’s an interesting bridge between the public intellectual who will speak on the topics of the day and matters of import and the thought leader who winds up being responsible for a narrower slice. They look at the world through a lens. But I absolutely agree that the place that those two roles are crafted are in the public square. You can attempt to do the Thoreau approach where you go off and you sit in the woods and reflect and think deliberately and deeply in that, but it doesn’t influence back until the ideas encounter others. And I think that crucible of communication, whether it’s in a crisis or when you’re sitting down for coffee one on one, do your ideas stick. That’s the question that matters.

Helio Fred Garcia And in my case, as a teacher, I always saw my purpose, whether with clients or with graduate students, to equip them to be capable in the public square. And I, for the most part, had a behind the scenes role. It’s only recently that there’s been an appetite on the part of others to go deeper than those whom I equip and to figure out where’s the whole sale of these equipment coming from? And the first books I wrote were pretty as a chair. The later books I’ve written are far more general. And I think part of part of that is, as I’ve gone from a behind the scenes role to an advocacy role, there’s been a desire for me to be more public on the part of not only my publishers, but my readers. Hence circumstances like we find yourselves today doing this podcast.

Bill Sherman As I think about it in terms of your evolution, because it could be it could have been easily that from a publishing parish perspective, you published for an academic audience, you wrote to an academic audience. He taught students, and that’s all the reach that you had. Let’s talk about the translation of an idea, because you’re standing with one foot in the academic world, one foot in a corporate world, and then one for a general readership. How are you taking in shaping those ideas and translating them? Going back to Russell again. Right.

Helio Fred Garcia When I published my book, The Power of Communication, which was a leadership book for big leaders or CEOs or military officers or religious leaders or NGO leaders, I got a scathing letter from one of my colleagues at the university. And he said, I really hate your book. And I’m not going to recommend it to anybody. And he was somebody I respected whom I had talked with. And I asked why. He said, anyone can read this. And I said, What do you mean? He said, It is accessible. I said, Of course it’s accessible. I wrote it to make a difference. He says, I can’t respect it because there isn’t the reader. I said, no, there’s rigor here. There’s rigor, there’s structure, there’s footnotes. There’s. There’s rigor. He then wrote a book and I read the book. I attempted to read the book. He had sentences that went on for a page and a half. He had a dozen different clauses in a single sentence. He had hyper multi syllabic words one after the other, and I would read a sentence. I really don’t know what the point is he’s making. And I’m not trying to caricature academics, but I’m but I’m, as you suggested, pointing to the difference between trying to create a conversation in the public square and doing something for the narrowest audience that shows a deep understanding of something else, whatever. And then I’ve defaulted to to the degree that to the degree that I’m here to equip others to be successful dealing with difficult situations, I want to make it as accessible as possible. So part of my job is to be the translator of complexity into the easily understandable, easily recognizable patterns. And I think there’s a tendency to over intellectualize the manner in which we share things. And it isn’t an either or. You’re either rigorous or you’re accessible. I think you can be rigorous in the formulation of the ideas, but it is even more rigorous to make it accessible to a broad, educated, literate audience.

Bill Sherman And that goes to the point of taking an idea to scale. Right. And is the idea something that needs to be understood deeply and appreciated by a select few? Or are you trying to reach a broad audience to impact how they think, how they act, etc.? You talk about the example in academia and from my background, when I was doing my graduate work, I was doing literature and I was focused on James Joyce, James Joyce and high modernism. Right. And if you were to come up with a writer who is more dense per word than Joyce, perhaps, maybe T.S. Eliot, there’s only a handful of the high modernists where a graduate reading assignment for Finnegans Wake is five pages. And that’s the toughest five pages you’ve read for a class, right? Because the footnotes alone will kill you. And so how do you take the complexity of insight? How do you translate it and recognize there’s times to be speaking to the handful, the 1 or 2 people in the world who may understand what you’re saying. And then there are many more opportunities out there to speak to people who are educated, but in less multi syllabic language so that they can lean in and say, I get what you’re talking about. It has.

Helio Fred Garcia Relevance. I go back to Russell. Russell was a brilliant mathematician, and his early work was all mathematics. And that’s pretty esoteric. There’s maybe two dozen people in the world who could actually follow his mathematics without taking notes. And then he applied that same rigor to the body of knowledge that is philosophy, including epistemology, which is how do we know what we know? And that’s pretty good stuff. And how do we.

Bill Sherman Know it’s still esoteric on its own, right? Just.

Helio Fred Garcia Just by itself? Yup. And he wrote a book called Human Knowledge. Its functions in its form. And it’s a book on a custom ology. And my mentor, who worked with him for about six years in the 1940s, took that book and said, Russell, I think you’re mistaken here. I think that this doesn’t make sense. He said, I just don’t understand. You just don’t understand. No, I really think I understand what you’re saying. I just don’t think it makes sense. And it was the kind of debate that you could only have at the fireplace in Russell’s rooms at Cambridge and get into a fistfight about it. But nobody else would care. Right. But then to his credit, Russell. Cool down. And he said, you’re right. And he rewrote the book on human knowledge. And in the foreword, he attributes it to this American graduate student who’s been working with me here at the university. And he made it more accessible. But one of the things that we find, we try to make it more accessible is we unbundle some of the complexity and see the stuff that didn’t really make sense. But because it was bundled in that complexity, we really didn’t know that it didn’t make sense. So the metaphor for that is when you bring it out into the light, you can actually see it more clearly. And then you can you can fix whatever is not right there. And as with science, you can subjected to falsifiability. And that, I think, is the big discipline is if you can make it accessible, people can then see what works and see what is not as well thought through and you can continuously improve it.

Bill Sherman And this is one of the reasons why when it comes to thought leadership, I’m a big believer in co-creation and welcoming feedback from critics and platforms such as social media and LinkedIn are great because you can put an idea out in raw form and you can see, do people get it? Do they understand it? Or do they point out something where you go, you’re right, I missed something. I think there’s. A defense mechanism that a lot of people have when they hesitate to put an idea out until it’s fully framed, fully footnoted, sewn up and perfect. But that’s sort of debating, like you said, at the fireplace in Cambridge is where ideas get sharper. That’s the forge. Were ideas really come into their own?

Helio Fred Garcia And what I found and I mentioned that I published 90% of what appears in my books in prior forms, but not verbatim. I would put it out in an article and then get feedback and say, Hey, I don’t really understand or this doesn’t make sense, and then I change it the next time around. I put it on a blog and then people react to the blog say, I don’t like this, or I don’t agree with this or I don’t understand this. And then we’d work on it. And by the time it gets into the book, by the time it gets ossified in rigid format, you can’t change it anymore. It’s already been workshop for 5 or 6 years and in many ways the book is a better work product because it has been subject to that continuous input from other people.

Bill Sherman And the book becomes the capstone rather than the start of the conversation.

Helio Fred Garcia So where is.

Bill Sherman Your journey in thought leadership taking you now? What are the next steps? What do you see going on?

Helio Fred Garcia I have a remarkably gifted team. That are a generation or two younger than me. And what I am hoping to do is to equip them and empower them to grow into their own as leaders, to be more than my students and more than mine and cheese, but to be colleagues in the whole leadership journey. My own journey continues. In the intersection between crisis and leadership and social impact. So the next book I’m working on is an extended case study of the failed United States government Covid response compared to the Covid response in Korea, which had its first diagnosis on the same day that we did, but whose mortality rate compared to ours, ours is 100 times greater than Korea’s mortality rate. And that is because Korea suffered five years earlier a massive public health failure that nearly brought down the government. And they took it seriously and wanted to learn from it and make sure we didn’t make that mistake again. And so we can actually have a laboratory experiment. Here is crisis management done right? Heroes, crisis management done wrong, starting on the very same day. It’s exactly the same crisis. And you see dramatically different outcomes based on the seriousness with which we took the risks. And the way to mitigate those risks. So that’s a crisis management book, but it’s also what matters in the public square book, and it’s also a leadership discipline book. And so what I’m doing is broadening my aperture to be able to take in more than the mechanics of crisis decision making or more than the mechanics of the drivers of trust, of reputation. But what are the consequences of failed leadership compared to diligent and thoughtful leadership not only on the crisis but on the social?

Bill Sherman And that becomes the case study that you would never intentionally create the scenarios for. But since we have the study to what can we learn from it? And going back to what you talked about earlier, we cannot go back and change the past, but we can learn from it through reflection. Right. So what are the lessons that are available from it?

Helio Fred Garcia We can do on a much bigger scale. We created five years ago with Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. And one of the things I do in all of my books, whether they’re leadership books or crisis books or reputation books, is I paint the phenomenon big. And then I show how you apply it small now in there. On completely copying Plato, who said, If you want to understand what it takes to read a just life, look at just this on the level of the state and you and you studied justice big and then you apply it small. That’s Plato’s Republic essentially using the same maneuver that I learned in philosophy school, and that is studied at the biggest level you can because you can see the nuances better and then bring it down to the manageable human level. So as we.

Bill Sherman Start to wrap up, I have a question that I’m curious to hear your answer. It’s not often that we get someone who’s studied the classics as deeply as you do. But going back to the concept of rhetoric and argumentation, your firm draws on the name logos, Right?

Helio Fred Garcia And rhetorical part of rhetoric.

Bill Sherman Exactly. Exactly. Argumentation through logic. Through ethics. Through passion, logos. Pathos. Ethos. Right. How do you those three from your perspective and I know logos is a place that the sweet spot in your heart. How do logos, pathos and ethos play into how you view persuasion and thought leadership?

Helio Fred Garcia When I set out to start my own firm 20 years ago. I wanted to avoid the mistake I had seen in prior jobs where the firms name for an individual because anyone who doesn’t have that name is seen to be a second tier employee. So I wanted to to avoid that mistake. And so I decided to do an evocative name. And I chose Logo’s Consulting Group. From Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric. Now, as you rightly point out. Aristotle said that there are three elements that are essential for an effective speaker to persuade an audience. They are ethos as personal character. There is pathless, which is emotional connection, and there is logos which is reasoned argument. And. I couldn’t name the firm FS Consulting because and that would seem to be something other than crisis. I didn’t want to name it POS Consulting because that would seem to be somewhat frivolous. But logos carried some sense of seriousness. So I came up with logos as an invocation of Aristotle, but with the trinity of those three together embedded in the idea. And one of the things that we teach our clients and I teach my students is that human beings are emotional creatures first. I quote a neuroscientist at George Washington University who says that it’s a mistake to think of human beings as thinking machines. Sorry, Descartes. You were wrong. But rather to think of human beings as feeling machines that think. It’s not that we don’t think, but we don’t think first. And if you can’t connect with someone emotionally, especially in a crisis, when there are victims, you need to connect with the victim on the emotional level before you can move the victim to the intellectual. So pathos is a critical element of getting through a crisis. Well, that emotional connection. The embassy, the pathless makes it possible. Ethos is about personal character and integrity. And I’m also an ethics professor in addition to being a leadership professor. And one of the things I do, especially with my engineering students at Columbia, is point out that in the English language, the word integrity has two different meanings. One meaning is behaving with honor, but the other meaning is unbroken wholeness. And I say it’s important for us to blend those so that we bring our unbroken whole self into the work that we do. That’s Air Force. And then logos is the rational, reasonable that comes after those efforts that logos by itself will never work. But when you have that combination that Aristotle taught his students and the students put into book form, you then have the ingredients that actually move people to a better place. And all the persuasion is moving people to a place. Benign and inspired, leaders moving to a better place. Leaders moving to a workplace. But the persuasive discipline is to not assume that the facts by themselves are sufficient, which irritates the heck out of my engineering students and my Wall Street clients and my lawyer clients and my doctor clients.

Bill Sherman But the idea on its own doesn’t reach scale. Just because it’s brilliant and true doesn’t mean others will agree. Lean in or embrace it. And I think this is the piece here that is essential on that bridge in thought. Leadership is being right is sometimes less important than being able to connect and present a partial truth. I think back to George Fox, the statistician who has a wonderful quote that says all models are inherently wrong, but some are useful. Right?

Helio Fred Garcia And that’s a lesson that I teach, is we can harvest wisdom. Even from things we don’t agree with, we can harvest wisdom, even for things that are incomplete. We can harvest wisdom from a multitude of sources, and the discipline is to not reject that which is valid simply because parts of that project are not valid.

Bill Sherman Fred, I think this is a wonderful place to leave the conversation. I think we’ve given our audience a number of things to think about. And what I would challenge listeners to do would be to think about how you’re going to reach your audience, how you will connect with them, to help them see a piece of what you’re seeing. Thank you, Fred.

Helio Fred Garcia Thank you.

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